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PrintForeign aid: from both sides
In the countdown to the Federal election, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs Greg Hunt and Shadow Minister for International Development Assistance Bob McMullan share their visions for Australia's foreign aid program.
Shadow Minister for International Development Assistance Bob McMullan. Photo: Martin Wurt/OxfamAUS.
Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs Greg Hunt. Photo: Martin Wurt/OxfamAUS.
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
Bob McMullan: “For the first time in Australia’s history [we have made] a commitment to lift Australia’s international development assistance performance to hit the intermediate UN (United Nations) target of 0.5% Gross National Income (GNI) by 2015. [This] is a measured and responsible financial commitment which can transform the fight against poverty in our region and save billions in future by avoiding the need for massive crisis response expenses in the coming years.” Greg Hunt: “Australia will provide $3.1555 billion in development assistance in 2007–2008; this is a $21 million increase to Australia’s total aid budget and brings our overseas development assistance GNI ratio to 0.3%. We’ve set out a pathway which will take us in the coming years under the budget to $3.5 billion, then up to $3.8 billion and then up to $4.3 billion by 2010, which is in excess of the Prime Minister’s promise when he was at the United Nations summit in 2005.”
CLIMATE CHANGE AND POVERTY
Greg Hunt: “One of the consequences of the Kyoto mechanism…is the idea there are credits for reforestation if you are planting palm oil, but there are no demerit points if you are slashing rainforests in order to clear it and then gain reforestation credits…The result is that we have allocated a $200 million down-payment towards a global forests and climate initiative…At a carbon price of about $5 a tonne for new forests being planted in the rainforest areas, this is likely to represent about 40 million tonnes of CO2 which we can capture, which we can pull out of the skies, and also to work on preventing or avoiding deforestation. Now I think that’s a pretty exciting initiative and we want to take that to the rest of the world.”
Bob McMullan: “The current commitments to climate change essentially continue to have climate change as a peripheral add on to the aid budget and it needs to be a central element. It needs to be central to our planning of projects that don’t explicitly relate to climate change…and we need to do much more about assisting the countries in our region, particularly, to develop and implement adaptation plans to climate change. Because we’re heading towards a situation where those who have contributed least to the problem of climate change are going to pay the highest price, and that will not be acceptable to us.”
EDUCATION AID
Bob McMullan: “Education is, as they say, the key that opens two doors — the doors to economic success and the doors to social opportunity. All the data says that the education spending that does best is basic education — preschool and primary school. Data from the parliamentary library suggests that we are getting our priorities wrong; that over the last three years the percentage of our education [aid] budget that’s going to basic education has fallen by 10%; that the percentage we spend on basic education is almost paralleled by the amount we spend on higher education; and substantial amounts have gone on… improving education systems and governance… I’m not against those, but in terms of priority, they are not as important as investing in basic education. Going forward…we will ensure that basic education has a higher priority in the spending of our education budget.”
Greg Hunt: “The most important thing, arguably, in the entire forward program, is 10 million new places at primary school level for children, many of whom are girls… and with that is improved education for about 50 million primary students over the four years… In Indonesia, there [are] the 2,000 junior secondary colleges which we are helping to construct… The second element of the people side is the national skills building…the scholarships and leadership program, all up is aiming over the coming four years to deliver about 19,000 scholarships. I think that this idea of training people and giving them a chance to go back to their countries with different skills or doing exchanges whether they are shorter term or longer term, is fundamental.
LINKS BETWEEN TRADE AND AID
Greg Hunt: “Where possible, we have been working along the fronts of ‘Let’s see what we can do on opening markets multilaterally and then we’ll work through the different bilateral agreements throughout the region’. Trying to crack open those agricultural markets for those farmers who are being denied access from the developing world, I think is the single biggest thing we could do.”
Bob McMullan: “The problem with these so-called bilateral free trade agreements is that they’re not actually free, they’re preferential trade agreements… This is essentially a network of sophisticated countries having trade agreements with each other to the exclusion of everybody else and it’s one of the reasons why they are such an inferior product to the idea of a global free trade agreement. One thing I think the so-called critics of globalisation miss is that global trade laws restrain the strong and help the weak… If there are no rules, the strongest people win and they do just what they like. That’s why we should have strong global trade law.
HEALTH AID
Bob McMullan: “We will offer to swap $75 million of Indonesia’s debt to Australia for Indonesian health programs to fight tuberculosis (TB). Subject to Indonesia’s agreement with this proposal, $37.5 million of this debt would be invested in health programs to fight TB through the Global Fund [to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria] and the remaining $37.5 million would be forgiven by Australia. It is something that we can only do if the government of Indonesia agrees.”
Greg Hunt: “We’re trying to expand significantly the maternal healthcare that we are working on and HIV and AIDS is a fundamental component of that…The most important thing we are doing is the $600 million that we are putting towards HIV. “The second element is in relation to infrastructure — it’s just over $500 million for new infrastructure projects…that’s a combination of roads, water supply, water sanitation and other forms of infrastructure which are critical to either direct health and human implications or, in addition to that, building the economic capacity of the countries to help bring people out of poverty.”
These comments are taken from presentations Mr Hunt and Mr McMullan made to an Australian Council for International Development forum in Melbourne in June 2007 and from subsequent media statements.