Junk Explained: What’s Going To Happen At The Brisbane G20 Summit?

In two weeks time, Brisbane chef Martin Latter will be tasked with cooking dinner for 26 world leaders at the Brisbane Convention and Entertainment Centre. Given no French President has ever visited Australia before, Latter’s challenge to vindicate Australian cuisine in front of a global leadership elite will not be easy. But if it is any consolation to Martin, the task will be no smaller for the Australian Prime Minister, who is responsible for corralling the same set of leaders into writing a three-page plan to keep the world from falling apart.

The meeting is the Group of Twenty (G20) Leaders’ Summit, scheduled for the weekend of November 15-16.  And it is a big deal. Here’s why.

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The World Is Falling Apart, A Bit

Aside from being the most significant gathering of world leaders to ever take place in Australia, the summit will sit amid a swirling accumulation of critical global problems: persistently low economic growth and high unemployment throughout the G20 (particularly in the European Union), the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the threat of ISIS, humanitarian crises in Syria and Sudan, the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian saga, climate change and the state of Kim-Jong-un’s mind.

Officially, only the first of the above problems is on the summit agenda, as the G20 is primarily a forum for dealing with global economic stagnation. But the thing about bringing together world leaders, most of whom are elected politicians, is that they are not shrinking violets — when they have an issue on their mind, they will want to say something about it. Even if leaders don’t discuss a topic formally within the Summit itself, there will be lots of ‘side-meetings’ between leaders where negotiations will occur on likely all or most of the above issues (Tony Abbott and Vladimir Putin probably won’t be catching up, though).

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Who’s Coming?

Despite being called the ‘Group of Twenty’, 26 political leaders will be in attendance.  These include the 19 leaders of the individual economies within the official G20 grouping: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The ‘20’ number comes from the inclusion of the European Union. Together, these 20 economies account for about 85 percent of global income.

However, as a generous token of acknowledgement to the 177 countries that are not formal members of the G20, six invitations have also been issued to the leaders of New Zealand, Singapore, Myanmar (as representative of ASEAN), Mauritania (as Chair of the African Union), Senegal (Chair of the New Partnership for African Development) and Spain.  Spain has the odd status of ‘permanent invitee’, partly to make up for the fact it didn’t make it into the original G20 membership list despite being the 13^th largest economy in the world, but mostly because the Spaniards kept on threatening to turn up to Summits even when they weren’t invited and it just seemed easier that way (not a joke).

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Can The G20 Actually Help?

That depends on your definition of ‘help’.  The G20 is quite a high-level and informal forum, in that it has no secretariat (like a UN Secretary General to manage things in between meetings), it is not backed up by any formal treaty, and participants cannot be held formally accountable to their commitments.

However, there are numerous preparatory meetings that take place in advance of the Summit, and under Australia’s presidency these have been going on since December 2013.  All of these meetings were supposed to focus on ongoing G20 work, and on eventually proposing some ideas for the G20 leaders to take up at the Summit.

On paper this might not look like a very effective design, but the flexibility of the G20 arrangement (as opposed to, say, the UN) means that the G20 can move much more quickly when there is a crisis. This was most famously demonstrated during the Global Financial Crisis, where G20 leaders came together in London in April 2009 and signed off on a plan that saw some $5 trillion worth of stimulus money pumped into the global economy to stave off a complete collapse of the global banking system and a second Great Depression. If you are Australian, you might remember getting a cheque in the mail for $650 (unless you were earning over $100,000, which statistically, you probably weren’t).

The G20 has also made important progress in other areas relating to financial regulation and tax transparency (making it slightly harder to hide money in tax havens), and has helped to promote greater cooperation between major global bodies like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), among many others.

One of the major outcomes of the finance minister meetings held this year (chaired by Joe Hockey) was for each G20 economy to bring some policy commitments to the Brisbane Leaders’ Summit that would lift their own economic growth rate by two percentage points above trend over the next five years. Australia is planning to reach its target by pushing for a lot of infrastructure investment, among other things.

There is an emerging trope, though, that the G20’s best days are behind it, and that the world has moved on. The outcomes from the Brisbane Summit will help in figuring out how true this is. At the very least, Tony Abbott has promised to limit the leaders’ recommendations that come out of the meeting to three pages – this mightn’t sound impressive, but for anyone who suffered through the 27 pages and 114 clauses that made up last year’s Summit declaration, it’s a welcome step.

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But Can It Actually Help Me?

If you are the kind of person who uses money, keeps said money in a bank and pays tax, then the G20 could be the global economic governance forum you’ve been looking for.

While the G20’s financial regulation agenda is beyond dry (and I have spent a lot of time working on it), it is focused on trying to prevent a repeat of the 2007-9 Global Financial Crisis.  Needless to say, G20 governments did not especially want to bail out reckless banks at the time, but found the alternative of a global banking collapse even more horrifying — not least because lots of people who keep their money in banks could have lost it all (or a lot of it) if governments didn’t step in first with lots of taxpayer money.

While this might have kept your deposit account safe, though, it also meant more taxes were used to prop up ailing financial systems. In future, G20 financial reform will focus on helping bad banks shut down without causing so much collateral damage, and thereby provide greater protection to you, the taxpayer.

Whether this reform will succeed is a matter of some debate, but it is an agenda build on good intentions.

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I’m Going To The G20 To Protest

Fair enough. But most leaders will be in Australia for around twenty hours or so before they head elsewhere. The leaders’ agenda needs to balance covering important issues versus getting something done.

And while there has been a lot of pressure on the government to put topics like climate change and inequality on the agenda (I happen to think both should be), these topics will likely get on to the final meeting report (communiqué) in some way anyway.  The looming COP21 meeting in Paris next year, where the successor to the Kyoto Protocol is supposed to be negotiated, already means a number of leaders are interested in discussing climate change in Brisbane. Turkey has also made it clear, as the next president of the G20, that they will put inequality on their agenda.

While civil society representatives from a number of major NGOs will be represented  inside the Summit zone, the civil society counterpart to the G20, the C20, has acknowledged that while they will do their best to represent their various causes, they obviously cannot represent everyone, and that protests may be inevitable.

The Australian and Queensland governments are very aware of this, and have put a lot of effort into thinking about how they can avoid a repeat of the destruction and violence that accompanied the notorious 2010 G20 Summit held in Toronto. Toronto saw protestors burning property and cars within the Summit’s vicinity, detainees being held in prison cells for 17 hours without charge, and a handful of claims brought against Canadian police officers for using excessive force, one of which led to a 45-day jail term. The anarchic scenes ruined any prospect of the Toronto Summit being remembered for anything other than violence, and put a dampener on what had otherwise been a fairly successful run of G20 Summits.

There has also been a fair amount of debate about whether the security legislation passed for the period of the Brisbane Summit is appropriate. As I’m not a lawyer I’m not really qualified to comment on this, but the recent announcement that the Queensland courts will be open 24 hours during the Summit period, with all hearings streamed live, appears to suggest some lessons have been learned from Toronto.

But either way, security will be extremely tight, and organisers have made it difficult and inconvenient to get close to the Summit site for a reason — the mood of security personnel will hardly have lightened after a lone gunman’s attack on the Canadian Parliament. Whichever way that turns out, any attempt to repeat the Chaser’s Osama Bin Laden prank at APEC 2007 would be ill-advised.

And if you do happen to traipse on down to the Summit site, either to protest or just to gawk, remember to check the long and mildly confusing list of forbidden items — your pet iguana, eggs, crossbows and electronic drones will all have to stay at home.

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Hugh Jorgensen is an Erasmus Mundus Scholar, studying in the Hague/Barcelona. He has spent the best part of his youth thinking and writing about the Group of Twenty (G20), as well as banking issues and the global financial crisis. He has worked as an economist at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, and as a tutor of at the University of Queensland. He tweets @hughjorgensen.