By Melissa Parke, Federal Labor MP, Fremantle
When this country responds to natural disasters, there are always a small number of people who call for Australia to cut our foreign aid contributions in order to allocate that money to solving our own troubles. It would be interesting to see a broad profile of people who feel strongly in that way. I suspect they would be people who don’t see much value in foreign aid at all.
Maybe in some cases they are misled to believe that our assistance to other countries is a one-way street. Or that aid assistance is a kind of inessential largesse; as opposed to being, literally, the difference between life and death.Or, worst of all, that we don’t have the capacity to fund our response to disasters without cutting aid.
This week the Leader of the Opposition announced that his proposal for funding the disaster reconstruction involved cutting $448 million from aid Australia provides to Indonesia for building schools through a very successful program that commenced under the Howard government. It was earlier reported that foreign aid to Africa would be cut.
The switch from Africa to Indonesia is interesting. The increase in aid to Africa is a project of this government and it follows from our commitment to increase Australia’s aid to 0.5% of GNI by 2015-16, and our decision to ensure that more aid is directed beyond our region to those places where it is needed most.
Under this government, Australia is giving more support to Africa because Africa is the place of greatest need. 33 of the world’s 49 least developed countries are in Africa. 1 in 8 children in sub-Saharan Africa die before their 5th birthday. 1 in 3 African people suffer from chronic hunger.
Some in the Coalition clearly understand this, including the Opposition’s spokesperson for Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop.
Once the switch was made, Mr Abbott justified his decision to cut the Indonesian school program with some carefully chosen language. The line he deployed was the age-worn cliché that “charity begins at home” (previously discussed on this blog here). He also said that Australians must come first and that there were schools in Australia that needed to be rebuilt. This directly feeds the misapprehension that without cutting aid to Indonesian schools, people in Queensland will miss out.
That is absolutely wrong.
Above anything else, let us acknowledge that the issue of aid is not about choosing between Australians in need and our fellow human beings in other parts of the world whose lives are characterised by aching poverty, preventable disease, and death.
What has not been closely examined so far is the political consideration behind the Coalition’s decision to propose cutting foreign aid. It is hard not to believe that the whole point of the announcement and its coded line was to strike a tone that resonates with those people who take the ill-informed view I outlined above. It has subsequently emerged that the line (‘charity begins at home’), the schools link (‘we need to rebuild Queensland schools before building schools elsewhere’), and the specific aid expenditure item (AusAid’s $448M to Indonesian schools) were all part of a focused email campaign in recent weeks by One Nation (QLD).
I am not for a moment suggesting that anyone who questions the amounts or the objects or the effectiveness of Australia’s foreign aid is insular or xenophobic. It is important that such questions are raised and discussed. But it is something else altogether when one deliberately plays to an audience that wrongly believes that Australia’s foreign aid comes at the expense of the support and welfare of Australians.
There is nothing wrong with a debate about how to fund disaster reconstruction, but the debate is not always as wide-ranging and forensic as it should be. There is nothing wrong with an Opposition putting forward an alternative approach to budget management, but it is pretty poor when that approach seeks a political benefit through the reinforcement of public misunderstanding and prejudice.
Greg Sheridan’s analysis in The Australian on Wednesday, 9 February, of the Coalition’s announcement included the claim that Australia’s foreign aid program had a:
“wholly fraudulent sacred cow status that puts it beyond sensible scrutiny”
It’s strange that Sheridan would ignore the fact that a high-level independent inquiry into aid effectiveness is currently underway. Indeed, on Tuesday this week, as Chair of the UN and UNICEF Parliamentary Associations, I helped organise and host a roundtable discussion between the inquiry’s board, chaired by Sandy Holloway (chair of the aid review), and interested parliamentarians which was well attended, robust, and informative.
In any case, while I don’t agree with Sheridan’s overly simplistic recipe for addressing poverty alleviation in Africa (more embassies and more trade), he is spot on when he says that scrapping the Indonesian schools assistance is a bad idea.
In an excellently detailed article by The Sydney Morning Herald’s Tom Allard on 10 February, Jacqui DeLacy, head of AusAID in Indonesia, is quoted saying that the program has:
‘‘transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian children...Education is the best way to break the cycle of poverty. It gives people the possibility of a productive life. It increases incomes, makes people healthier, reduces early marriage...It’s been a great investment in the stability and prosperity of Indonesia and generated enormous goodwill between our two countries.’’
But what would we achieve if we were to renege on our commitment to help build schools in Indonesia? It would mean that hundred of thousands of under-privileged children would miss an education that stands to hugely improve their economic and health prospects. As a result, more would die and more would endure lives of poverty and deprivation. Apart from being a terrible loss for those kids and their families, it would do nothing for regional stability or economic development, or, as the Foreign Minister has pointed out, efforts to address the root causes of terrorism. It would not be well received by the government of Indonesia. It would be a promise to them that we will have broken, and in that sense, it would be a mark against our own character and honour.
In the end, this is the key point: we can do both. We can rebuild and recover in Australia at the same time as we continue to help reduce child mortality and malnutrition in developing countries; as we continue to provide clean water and education; as we continue to support economic self-sufficiency.
I don’t believe that Australians earning $60,000-70,000 would rather have an extra 20 cents in their pocket each week than know that a poor child in Indonesia can attend school for the first time. I don’t think that’s what Australians are about.
I can’t imagine that an Australian family that sponsors a child through World Vision and is then affected by floods in Queensland or the fires in Western Australia would call up the next day to cancel their support for that child. I can’t imagine anyone calling up in those circumstances and saying, “Sorry, but you know what they say – charity begins at home.”
The reality is that in addition to being the right thing to do from a humanitarian perspective, our provision of aid is also in the larger national interest, contributing to global and regional peace and security, and fostering economic development and self-sufficiency, which in turn expands our own export and economic opportunities.
We are dealing with tough times here in Australia, and we’re going to confront that challenge together. But we shouldn’t confront those difficulties by playing politics with our aid commitments, when we know that those commitments go to men, women, and children whose lives are on the line; whose health and futures go from being extremely bleak to being significantly improved through the assistance we provide.
There is no danger that the government or the opposition – or the Australian public for that matter – will neglect to ensure that we recover from a summer of uncommonly catastrophic disasters. We will rebuild Queensland and Victoria and the affected parts of WA, and we will achieve that together, at the same time as we continue to do our part in reducing global and regional poverty and disadvantage, and in promoting peace, security, and economic development.
This post was first published here on 14 February in the Wangle - a website & blog that looks at the world from a WA angle. This blog was re-published with permission from Wangle.
Image by flickr user satguru.