Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have pleasure in responding to the member for Moreton on his motion on Australian aid. Official development assistance, or ODA, in the year 2017-18 will be $3.98 billion to AusAID. It's the 13th largest donor in the OECD. This amount will increase from $3.9128 billion to $4.018 billion in the year 2018-19, and this figure will be maintained, at minimum, to at least 2020-21. Overall, the program is set out to reduce poverty in the countries less fortunate than Australia.

We used to give aid to Thailand, but Thailand has really kicked the poverty line, and now they actually give aid to other countries in their region. Overall, our aid is there to reduce poverty and promote sustainable economic growth in those areas, and 90 per cent of our aid is spend in the Indo-Pacific region—Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands, including the Solomon Islands. We also concentrate with our aid programs on reducing the health threat in countries with tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS and those kinds of things. Tuberculosis is rife throughout New Guinea, in parts of Indonesia and in Vietnam.

I had the honour of visiting Vietnam with The Global Foundation, to which we, Australia, donate quite a considerable sum of money. We donate about $200 million a year to The Global Foundation, which is an offshoot of the United Nations. I looked at the aid we provide and the impacts and results of our aid. I visited villages in Vietnam where tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS were rife. A mosquito net, which costs about $5 in Australian money, can go a long way to reducing malaria. There are different strains of malaria, but a mosquito net will block out all strains of malaria in those areas. We visited a village that had one mosquito net for the whole village. The men who worked in the rubber plantations, in the thick timber, took that one net with them, so five men slept under one mosquito net. That's how desperate those people were. So Australian aid came to the front and supplied a total of two villages in that area—

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