We should all be pursuing a lasting victory over world want

Nothing we did to solve the long economic crisis really worked – or not enough. Some expedients – balancing budgets and cutting public expenditures, for example – served only to dig the depression deeper.

However, some policies did lighten the dark clouds. They were projects of public investment mostly forced on unwilling governments in order to give some relief, however inadequate, to the armies of unemployed.

Britain had its public housing projects. In the United States, the famous Tennessee Valley Authority showed what public enterprise could do to help private enterprise get back on its feet. In Australia, parts of our cities were sewered for the first time by relief workers toiling with pick and shovel for a day or two each week, earning 75 cents a day.

In the last twenty years, public investment has gone out of fashion, but we must be clear that it is not the enemy of private investment and enterprise. On the contrary, and especially when times are tough, public investment is, for the private sector, a close, stalwart and indispensable friend.

So we have a need to re-launch the world economy back to prosperity and a simultaneous long-term, global need to lift the quality of life and meet the aspirations of billions of our fellow human beings.

Those are the imperatives that Victory Over Want is designed to meet. Can we meet them? Do we have the resources?

President Clinton was confident last month that we do. For the cost of the "cheap war" in Afghanistan, costing $12 billion a year, the United States can meet its share of the cost of abolishing poverty, he said, and still have "money left over."

Even more recently, on 30 January 2002, he told an international audience in Dubai that "technology can accelerate by a generation" victory over want everywhere.

Our crime is that we waste our resources. We throw them away. It has been estimated that, between September and November last year alone, the rise in unemployment from about four to nearly six per cent cost the American economy about $350 billion. Just consider how that cost compares with the total Australian gross national product. Consider the contribution elimination of this waste could make to the abolition of poverty, homelessness, disease, environmental pollution and the rest, not only in the United States but around the world.

We must bear in mind that the rise in unemployment in the major economies might be far from over. We might be only at the start. The recent dip in the United States workless rate might be only a return to the downward trend intensified by the shock of September the Eleventh. Will the United States rate reach 8 or even 10 per cent? In Germany, the workless now number more than 4 million. In Japan, unemployment is at record post-war highs and threatens to go higher still.

If governments won't act to stop this waste and turn our resources into productive channels, then private individuals – exercising their right to direct democracy - must act or force them to act in ways that they, the people, direct. That is what VOW proposes.

VOW envisages a process whereby people of all races, religions and secular beliefs will work together for the common good – to accelerate, as President Clinton suggested, our reaching the goal of freedom from want "by a generation" – and perhaps more.