I feel very honoured to take the floor here today. I feel honoured because of everything that the United Nation stands for.  I am thinking about freedom, justice and peace,  I am thinking about the Sustainable Development Goals.  About fundamental rights and Gender Equality. about stability, prosperity.

Just to mention a few. 

“[Disregarding them has] resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind” I quote from the Declaration of Human Rights.

But for a state without fiscal capacity, these values will be empty words;
fulfilling these commitments depends on the ability of the state to mobilize the necessary resources.

Today we have a global tax system that makes these values hard to uphold for many countries – and almost impossible to uphold for some. 

Austerity within public services makes itself felt even in my home country, Sweden, where the members of my trade union see big cuts in education, health care, social work and environmental protection

For some states in the Global South, compounding the legacy of colonialism, this funding has been eroded for decades and more, making it impossible for these countries to provide the public services that are taken for granted in high income countries.

I would therefore like to add one word to all of the above mentioned values,
and that word is predictability.

We heard it many times yesterday, but that was predictability for companies –
and predictability for the return of assets and wealth.

The ultimate predictability, I must insist, is that for every human being and of the sort that only the well functioning and properly funded state can provide:

clean water to drink, a living wage, working hospitals and a school for your kids, the protection of democratic liberties and a planet to live upon.

We need a convention that supports this predictability.

And that explicitly acknowledges the role of tax in financing sustainable development across its three pillars: Economic, Social and Environmental. 

Delegates, let’s make the tax system predictable again.