Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would just like to pick up a few points raised by the member for Gellibrand—firstly, the claim that the coalition has somehow drastically cut Australia's foreign aid. Let's just go through a few of the facts. In the 15 months prior to the 2013 election, the former Labor government actually cut $7.5 billion from the aid budget. You also diverted $750 million from the aid budget to pay for your border protection blow-out, so the third largest recipient of Australia's aid was actually the Gillard government. So for members of the Labor Party to come in here and lecture us, saying we should spend more on aid, is really a step too far.

Even Bob Carr, the former foreign minister, has made it very clear that you cannot run an aid budget on borrowings, and that is what the previous Labor government did. They borrowed all this money to generously give it away. And do you know what? They borrowed most of the money from overseas, so the Labor government's idea of a foreign aid project was to borrow money from overseas to then give it away overseas. And we wonder why we had to come in and make some sensible decisions. As Bob Carr said, we cannot run a foreign aid budget on borrowed money. We have to get our budget back into balance before we can do anything towards increasing our foreign aid.

When it comes to talking about our foreign aid expenditure, one thing I think we need to look at is to reclassify some of our defence expenditure. We have our new landing helicopter docks, HMASCanberra and HMAS Adelaide. Although all that expenditure is classified as defence, effectively these vessels will work in foreign aid and emergency situations, exactly as we recently saw in Fiji. The costs to pay for those vessels are coming out of the pockets of the Australian taxpayer, and those vessels are an enormous boost to providing foreign aid when there is a natural disaster.

There is another thing that we need to make sure is very clear about aid. The member for Hindmarsh's motion notes:

… nations that were once aid recipients such as China and South Korea now have fewer people living in extreme poverty and are now major economies and trading partners for Australia …

That may be true, but they did not become successful because we were giving them foreign aid. They became successful and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty because they went down the track of free markets and a free-enterprise system.

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