Waves of humanity
The
Chief Executive of World Vision Australia, Tim Costello, added an ethical
layer to the notion of globalisation in the first public lecture in a
series, Focus on Rights, to be staged by UniSA’s Hawke Centre over the next
few months.
Just back from a tour of possibly one of the most devastating natural disasters the world has seen in centuries, the Boxing Day tsunami, Costello says the human tragedy was almost indescribable.
“Television captures only a fraction of the scale and sense of any disaster,” he said. “Journalist after journalist commented that nothing had prepared them for the scale of the tragedy.”
Costello said he found it hard to conceive how Australians and the world community could respond in any way comparable to the need on the ground.
But they did – with billions of dollars – something Costello believes was a profoundly ethical response.
And Costello believes that despite (if not almost because of) the rise of individualism as linked to globalised capitalism, a very strong concern for social capital is emerging.
“According to the United Nations, civil society groups have grown 40-fold since the turn of the last century,” he said.
“Around 300,000 Australians now make regular monthly contributions to World Vision’s work around the world and remarkably, more than 100,000 or 40 per cent of these people made their commitment to do so in the two years following the September 11 attacks in 2001.”
Costello says in responding so generously to the tsunami appeal the Australian public have invested their compassion with the aid community.
“With such trust invested in Australia’s response to this current disaster, if we get things wrong we will forfeit this tide of goodwill and squander a precious opportunity and we can’t forget that those who will suffer most will be the world’s poor,” he said.
Costello noted that while death from global poverty continued to be every bit as extraordinary as the toll from the tsunami, surveys of Australians between 2000 and 2004 showed they were 26 per cent more likely to agree with statements such as “everyday people like me can change the lives of poor people overseas”.
He said our challenge was to move the sympathy we have shown for the tsunami victims to a neighbourly solidarity.
Costello said anyone studying the kinds of movements throughout history that have changed the lives of the poor and persecuted, will see there has been a ‘transformation of the heart’.
“Personal or inner change, and social or outer change are inseparably linked,” he said.
The full address from Tim Costello, Human Rights: The ethical underpinning of globalisation?, is available from UniSA’s Hawke Centre website at www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au/events/lectures/costello.htm