Global village may fall apart as bad times hit

People don't want spin, they want the truth, no matter its awfulness.

THE MOST satisfying moment in the movie The Devil Wears Prada, which screened on Ten on Monday night, is the lecture Meryl Streep gives Anne Hathaway about the provenance of Hathaway's "lumpy blue sweater". Streep's character, the bloodless magazine editor Miranda Priestly, appalled by the disdain for fashion shown by her assistant, Hathaway's Andrea Sachs, charts the recent journey of the colour cerulean from the high fashion design houses of Oscar de la Renta and Yves St Laurent to the suburban bargain bin where Sachs presumably bought her sweater.

"That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs," Priestly tells Sachs, "and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room." The dialogue works so well because it contains the shock of recognition. You watch it and you know that at some level what's being said contains some truth.

The process of interconnection is not confined to fashion and culture. Most of us now understand just how connected the world is economically and politically. If there has been one great change in contemporary society, it's this understanding. The intense and often overwhelming fascination with Barack Obama in Australia and pretty much everywhere else on the globe is, of course, a result of his novelty as the first African American US president and his status as a celebrity in the true sense of that word.

But it's also because of the practical reality of his role: what he does as President is highly likely to affect you and me, at least when it comes to economic policy. It's been like this for quite a while now; in 1992, senior members of the Kirner government were convinced that if then-president George Herbert Walker Bush had focused more on getting the American economy up and running, the recession in Victoria might not have been so severe and Labor's defeat at that year's state election might not have been so catastrophic. Bush's mishandling of the economy was the key reason behind his defeat by Bill Clinton in the presidential election only weeks after the Victorian poll.

The difference is that in 2009 it's not just politicians and policymakers who get it, it's just about everyone. The global village forecast by Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s has come to pass, courtesy of the internet and digital communications technology.

The political implications of this development are substantial and they can be seen in the plight of the Federal Opposition. Consider the situation: federal revenues, mirroring the private business sector, have fallen off a cliff; jobs are being shed; credit and investment are drying up. Every set of projections for the economy and the fiscal outlook are quickly overtaken by events.

When the Government outlined its first stimulus package in October, it believed it had bought up to eight months' breathing space in fighting the downturn. Less than four months later, it's had to up the ante and plunge the federal budget deep into deficit. That's how slippery the economic slope has turned out to be.

And yet, has the Opposition been able to make any political gains on the Government? Not that I can see. This is because few outside the hard rump of Coalition supporters genuinely believe that the downturn can be sheeted home to the Rudd Government. That's at this stage, anyway.

For a while, the Government will be able to remain unaccountable for the economic carnage. Just doing something and ensuring that voters can see that it's doing something will suffice. Eventually, however, the Government will be called to account. When that happens, we will see what stuff Rudd Labor is really made of.