Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the importance of providing efficient and effective aid to our Pacific neighbours, and our role in maintaining order and prosperity within our region. At the last election, Australians saw the need to return to a proper, responsible and prudent government to put the nation's books back in order. Against that background, we can scrutinise our foreign aid system. It is time that we redefine how we measure the impact of Australia's foreign aid.

Instead of foreign aid being judged merely by the number of dollars spent, the key indicator of a project's success should be what is actually achieved on the ground. While there is no way of waving a magic wand and suddenly making all foreign aid more efficient and effective, there are a number of ways aid recipients, donors, workers, governments and the private sector can work together to improve the efficiency of our system. On occasions, the cost of aid delivery appears to outweigh the aid itself. While it is quite proper to try to protect the integrity of our aid system, we burden ourselves with the bureaucracy and inflexibility that can overwhelm the good intentions.

However, there are a number of effective partnership relationships to improve aid delivery, ranging from public-private partnerships to the whole question of social entrepreneurship. At least 80 per cent of today's assistance comes from non-public sources. This is up 30 per cent from 40 years ago, according to USAID's assistant administrator for global health. It is estimated that from an initial investment of $2.1 billion in public funds, USAID was able to leverage an additional $5.8 billion in private funds and contributions. From my discussions with Abt JTA, a private aid consulting firm doing some great work in Papua New Guinea, they believe that this point about leverage is crucial. There has been little effort in the past to use our aid program to leverage funds from others and develop collaborative partnerships, yet there is considerable potential to do so. William Easterly, a professor of economics at NYU, believes that it is important, especially for Western nations, to identify that development happens mainly through home-grown efforts. Easterly believes that the developed nations provide foreign aid and development programs through the lens of Western culture, with a focus on significant bureaucracy. He panned approaches that do not involve the people the services aim to benefit.

While I was in Papua New Guinea at the end of last year with the Australian Defence Force, I was inspired to some extent by a discussion with Sir Peter Barter and Father Jan Czuba, the president of Divine Word University, about the benefits of institution-to-institution support as an effective method of aid delivery. Father Jan has focused programs within the university to be primarily health and education based so that Papua New Guinean graduates contribute back to their community and fill areas where they are needed the most. Father Jan has focused primarily in these areas. Another example of a great success story is the PNG LNG project. This is not just as an infrastructure project. With companies such as Oil Search and other partners in that project, they are delivering aid in important areas such as TB awareness, HIV-AIDS awareness, and the crucial one of maternal mortality to the villages as the project passes through them. We have seen some significant improvements in health care delivery occurring in the PNG LNG project villages.

There are many avenues the Australian government can take to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our foreign aid. At the end of the day, value for our taxpayers' dollars is what it is about, and value for the beneficiaries of our aid.

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