Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

How does the shadow parliamentary secretary explain to the Australian people that he is to borrow another $16 billion for the aid budget? Where is the money coming from, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary?

Mr Thistlethwaite interjecting—

I know all about Labor's budget. In fact, what happened is Labor announced an additional $5.7 billion for the aid budget and then took the money away. There is no way that the Labor Party was ever going to meet its target of 0.5 per cent of GNI. In order to do so, it would have had to increase funding by $3.5 billion in 2017, in one year alone. The shadow parliamentary secretary at the table knows that Labor never had any such intention. The misleading way that Labor had been announcing funding for the aid budget and then pulling it away to cover blow-outs in the rest of its budget is nothing short of a disgrace. In fact, the Australian Council for International Development welcomed our decision to stop diverting the money out of the aid budget to onshore immigration costs, as Labor had done.

The shadow parliamentary secretary ought to get his facts right. He mentioned Vanuatu. Funding to Vanuatu is increasing under this budget. Funding to Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, PNG, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma—it is all increasing.

Labor's trajectory, which they were never going to deliver on, was irresponsible, unaffordable and unsustainable. We have put the aid program on a $5 billion a year funding basis. It is responsible, affordable and sustainable. We are the 10th largest donor in the OECD, the second largest donor in our region after Japan. I am particularly concerned to ensure that the funding goes where we can make the biggest difference. Instead of spreading the aid funding around the world to try and buy a seat on the UN Security Council, what we are doing is focusing our aid on the region where we can make the biggest difference.

The shadow parliamentary secretary raised the issue of the Marshall Islands. Perhaps he cannot understand this, so I will help him out. The Marshall Islands comes under North Pacific. The North Pacific funding is increasing this year. The North Pacific funding goes from $4.8 million to $5 million this year. It is an increase on what Labor delivered for the North Pacific. We have also increased our funding, as I said, for humanitarian programs by 28 per cent. This includes an increase to the emergency fund of 33 per cent.

I have to tell you about this emergency fund. This was so that we could respond to natural disasters. Yet it was out of this emergency fund that Labor ripped $740 million to fill a hole in the immigration budget for onshore processing—not for offshore processing but for onshore processing. This made the Labor government itself the third largest recipient of Australian government aid. That kind of reckless, scandalous behaviour will not continue. Tomorrow I am announcing the new aid policy under this government. It is responsible, it is affordable and it is sustainable.

We are also increasing the funding for scholarships. I am pleased to say that next financial year there will be about 4,500 recipients of scholarships under Australian aid. Also, we are providing a record level of funding for the Palestinian territories. It is a total of $56 million, which is the largest amount ever provided by the Australian government in any one year. Our aid will be used to build governance and economic support in the Palestinian territories.

Our funding for the Australian NGO Cooperation Program has increased by more than $3 million in the budget to a total of $134 million. That is a record level. The NGOs of course play an important role in delivering aid and under our new performance benchmarks, which I will announce tomorrow, I envisage that higher-performing organisations—including NGOs—will receive a greater share of the aid budget should they meet those benchmarks.

What you are seeing here is a government prepared to take the tough decisions to repair Labor's budget disgrace—the debt and deficit disaster left by Labor, where they were borrowing from overseas to send money back overseas as aid. As the predecessor in foreign affairs, Bob Carr, said:

… you can't run aid on borrowings.

Perhaps the shadow parliamentary secretary ought to think twice before he breaches bipartisan confidences, as he did on our visit to Vanuatu. I invited him in to have conversations with the prime minister and ministers and then the shadow parliamentary secretary broke the confidences of those meetings.

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