By Mike Moore

Former Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Former Director General of the World Trade Organisation.

Adjunct Professor, La Trobe University, Australia

This October, my new book, "Saving Globalisation", was published. This book explains that we have created more wealth in the past 60 years than all of previous history put together, and how hundreds of millions of people have been lifted from extreme poverty.

I examine the big ideas that created our more successful societies; democracy, human rights, independent courts, freedom of and freedom from religion, property rights, social mobility, equality as an economic virtue, the genius of the limited liability company, a professional public service, an active civil society, and free trade. It’s a remarkable story from pre-Greeks to post-Geeks.

I was struck, during my research and work in the fields in places as diverse as Nigeria, the Ukraine and Timor Leste, how the evidence piles up on what works and what doesn’t.

I have a short chapter in the book about moral and oral leaders.

These leaders trusted the people and knew society could not be changed or saved by merely replacing one wet-fingered politician with another. You cannot change society by the changing winds of opinion polls.

The Athenian statesman, Pericles, in his great funeral oration in 431 BC, while honouring those who had fallen in defence of this new thing called a ‘democratic state’, explaining;

"We all enjoy the same general equality.... the public administration is not confined to one particular family...poverty is not a hindrance, since whoever is able to serve his country meets with no obstacle to preferment from his first obscurity."

Pericles spoke of the stake the people had in society saying, "A confession of poverty is no disgrace to no man, no effort to avoid it is a disgrace indeed."

Shakespeare’s speech through Henry V at Agincourt spoke to this patriotism and noble sacrifice:

"From this day to the end of the world,

But we shall be remembered—

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed, they were not here

And hold their manhood cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day."

These stirring words were echoed by Winston Churchill in Britain’s and our darkest days.

He said, "These are not dark days, these are the greatest days our nation has ever lived; and we must thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race."

He treated the parliament and the people with respect and candour. When congratulated about Dunkirk he growled, "Wars are not won by evacuations."

Senator Robert Kennedy, on the night of the murder of Martin Luther King, Jnr. when his advisors thought that passions, indeed the city, may be ablaze, ignored them. To a crowd of ordinary people he gave an off-the-cuff speech; words that combined sympathy, empathy and respect. Quoting the poet Aeschylus, he said:

"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls, drop by drop, upon the human heart, until our own despair, against our own will, comes the awful grace of God..... Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentler the life of this world." The crowd, which could have become a mob, subsided. He wouldn’t have risked the crowd and the media if his pollsters had their way.

Leaders throughout history have had the ability to hold nations accountable to the ideals of their own civilisations and appealed to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." Martin Luther King, Jnr. challenged Americans to stand up to their own constitutional principles, "Let freedom ring," was mirrored by Nelson Mandela in court when he proclaimed democracy as an ideal that he "hoped to live for... but if needs be... an ideal he was prepared to die for." The arguments for women’s rights, gay rights land rights, find their home in this model.

These arguments work quickest if the society which they are addressed to has some understanding of the lessons of the enlightenment and democracy, thus they worked in Alabama, Soweto and India, but would have not had much influence on Stalin or Hitler. Eventually however, the powerful must surrender to reason; by doing so they save themselves as well as the persecuted.

Democracy is the best form of societal management because it’s not only morally right, it’s also good economics, it allows change to be implemented peacefully. No two democracies have ever gone to war, there has never been a famine in a democracy.

Leadership in a democracy is not just responding to the will of the people. Explaining why things, especially difficult things, should be done is never easy, especially if it means change. Willing a view o others who have the power to say no is a real test of democratic leadership.