Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Official Development Assistance Multilateral Replenishment Obligations (Special Appropriation) Bill. Australia's aid program should make us proud to be Australians. It preserves our way of life at home and helps the most disadvantaged across the world. It's clear that the member for Jagajaga is proud of the achievements of our aid program, when it's been performing at its best and doing what it's meant to do—projecting those Australian values of compassion and fairness across the world. Australia has some of the great aid organisations that participate in so many regional and international forums—for example, Caritas, APHEDA, Save the Children, World Vision and Oxfam, where the member for Jagajaga once worked. There are so many good institutions that do so much good in the world. I will give a particular shout-out to Global Citizen, which is headed up by a few Australians, including Hugh Evans, and a good friend of mine Michael Sheldrick. Noting that this bill ensures that we can meet our commitments to organisations including the World Bank, I'll also give a shout-out to Daniel Street, who worked in this building for Channel 9. I was also very pleased to work with him on Australia's aid program in foreign minister Rudd's office. We all know that when the Micah crew come into this building, you can't miss them. They make their voice and their commitment to helping the poorest people in the world heard, loud and clear.

However, just because we have all these great organisations, it doesn't mean that we always receive the message. Sometimes, rightly or wrongly, we go down the wrong track. Some say 'negative globalism' is a danger. I think the bigger risk is actually positive isolationism—that is, making a virtue of Australia withdrawing from international organisations. To make a virtue of participating less is a complete affront to our democratic values, which say we should engage. A prime minister that is proud to have skipped a United Nations climate conference to visit an automated McDonald's drive-through is not representing the sort of Australia that we should be projecting to the rest of the world. A shrinking aid budget is something that we in this place should all be concerned about.

While many talk about a Pacific step-up, the reality is it's a Pacific 'catch-up'. We are catching up, because we cut programs to our closest neighbours. We are catching up, because other people filled that space. We are catching up, because our Pacific neighbours fell behind on their achievement of the UN sustainable development goals. And these are big problems. Some people say they're too big, they're too hard, and so we shouldn't try. 'Can't Someone Else Do It?' was Homer Simpson's campaign slogan when he ran for garbage commissioner. It shouldn't be Australia's foreign policy platform. Over six years, this government took a systematic approach to their decision to cut our aid programs. It was their plan. It went through their ERC, it went through their cabinet and it went through their party room. This was not a mistake, where they can just turn around and say, 'My God, where did all that money go? Oh, we've cut the aid budget.' It happened year after year after year. The government was warned that this would create strategic risk in our region and across the world. And guess what? It did.

No, Australia is not the richest country, but we are a wealthy country. We can use our influence to encourage others. It's what Australians have done for decades. In 1948, under Australia's presidency, the United Nations General Assembly passed the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and established the Commission of the Status of Women in 1947, and Australia was one of the largest global donors of aid to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. At our best, we do more than our fair share, and, at our best, we are proud of doing more than our fair share. But recently we've seen an approach that denies billions and billions of dollars to the poorest people in the world.

You look at just our bilateral program to Pakistan. We're going from in the 2018-19 financial year, $39.2 million a year to the people of Pakistan down to zero. That is a huge cut, and it's to just one of our friends, the people of Pakistan. I was lucky enough to visit in 2010 following some horrific floods, where Australia proudly committed $40 million to build hospitals, provide health services and prevent people dying from entirely preventable diseases that came about as a result of those floods.

I heard the member for Jagajaga speaking earlier and she talked about real changes. The reality is that, just like I saw when I travelled to Pakistan with Foreign Minister Rudd, our aid does deliver real change to people's lives. She talked about giving voice to women in our region, talked about helping farmers—something we're lectured on all the time by those opposite but we've actually got an aid program that does help our farmers. The Australian Agricultural Centre for International Agricultural Research is a great organisation that actually shares some of Australia's best farming practices with emerging economies across the world. We should be proud of that. We should talk about it more.

I was pleased on 29 October 2019 to host an aid forum with Senator Penny Wong. Some 200 people from the electorate of Perth attended that forum, talking about how we increase compassion. We had young students come up and say, 'I've got a great education. How do we make sure that every child across the world has a great education?' We had people raise concerns about climate change, making sure that we continue to invest in these multilateral funds. It was a great forum, and I want to thank Senator Wong and all of my constituents who attended.

When we talk about the amount and the quantum that we invest in aid, so many people think that we are spending unreasonable or unaffordable amounts on it. There was a statistic given to me actually by someone opposite whom I won't name—it would be very unkind to do so—that just puts this in perspective. Sadly, we spend less than $4 billion a year on direct foreign aid. Australians, according to the Pet Industry Association of Australia—and I should declare a conflict of interest here: my brother Joey is the proud owner of a pet store in the electorate of the member for Fremantle; a great small business, doing fabulous things. But if you look at the amount we spend on aid as a country, about $3.8 or $3.9 billion, Australians spend $12.2 billion a year on their pets. Everyone loves their pets, but don't tell me that we can afford to spend $12.2 billion a year on pets and we can't afford to run a big strong, growing aid program.

Under the Rudd and Gillard governments, Australia had a commitment to reach 0.5 per cent of gross national income spent on our aid program. In 2013, that budget had reached $5 billion. We are now at an historic low of just 23c in every $100 that the government receives being spent on our aid program. It is just impossible to think that we've done so much damage in just six years.

I was proud to stand at the election and be elected on the Labor platform of Australia, once again striving towards 0.5 per cent of gross national income. I think we should talk more and more to our friends in the United Kingdom about their target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income—something that is entirely reasonable over the long term. But at the moment we sit at the bottom third of OECD countries when it comes to aid spending.

On this, I think former Prime Minister Julia Gillard was 100 per cent right. We need a new bipartisan agreement on aid spending and a bipartisan plan for growth. It's the only way that we can take this debate out of these chambers and get back to where we were for many decades: bipartisan support and a bipartisan approach to growth. On that front, I'll note that in government things were different, but in opposition the shadow minister for Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop, was a very strong supporter of that bipartisan commitment.

When we look at our progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: on 32 indicators we are in need of improvement; 24 of the indicators we are in need of a breakthrough; and 32 of the indicators are off track. We are signing up to these agreements and then we are not doing the heavy lifting and the hard work to meet our obligations under those agreements.

One area where we're not meeting our commitments in the Sustainable Development Goals is climate change. The 2013-14 aid budget referenced climate change 46 times, estimating that we would be spending about $600 million of our aid program on environmental initiatives. The budget that followed in 2014-15 referenced climate change just three times, with $0 estimated expenditure. If that is not an ideological obsession seeing its way into the heart of our aid program, I don't know what is. The reality is: if you believe in climate change action, you need to believe in Australian aid programs. There are so many lectures that tell us Australia can't do it alone. I agree; Australia can't do it alone. But we should do a little bit to help out, because the reality is not every country in the world has the expertise, the intellectual property and the capacity to do what Australia is so fortunate to be able to do.

To come back, you can't talk about this program without looking at the very detail of the cuts. We remember the 2014 budget cutting many, many things, but it also cut our foreign aid budget by $700 million. It's always hard when you talk about money—what does $700 million get you? One of the things that I was lucky to once hold in my hand was what they call Plumpy'nut. It is a peanut paste like substance of 500 calories that UNICEF said, 'changed the world'. When you are dealing with malnutrition, particularly in children and babies, Plumpy'nut is the thing that saves their life. It costs about 50c a packet. That $700 million could buy 1.4 billion packets of Plumpy'nut, and at certain times this is in short supply and is desperately needed. Indeed, when there was the Horn of Africa famine in 2011, Australia funded the distribution of Plumpy'nut to literally save the lives of babies, toddlers and children.

The cuts didn't stop in 2014. In 2015, we go further. We see the commitment from the government for the aid spend to drop to 0.21 per cent of gross national income. Today, it's been cut by some 27 per cent from the 2013 levels. And, to help make sure that there was never any questioning voice in these cuts to the aid program, the government actually closed the agency that was supposed to be the voice for aid within the bureaucracy. They shut AusAID, getting rid of hundreds and hundreds of long-standing professional staff and closing the doors on our aid agency. And, it does make a difference. I understand that the government will say they merged it with DFAT and there were foreign policy benefits of doing so, but the reality is rather than two agencies, both who would take different perspectives on and both who would provide their input into the development of government policy, you now just have the voice of DFAT. No disrespect to DFAT, but they can't be the foreign policy voice to government and the voice for an effective, strong and growing aid program.

The Lowy Institute notes:

Australia’s aid program has been the disproportionate victim of the Coalition government budget savings measures since forming government in 2013.

Every time we see the back-in-black surplus mug dragged out, you've got to remember that was off the back of $11 billion in cuts to the aid program. And, while the mantle of being the progressive former Prime Minister is currently one that Malcolm Turnbull would love to hold, the reality is a large amount of the cuts happened on his watch, and that can never be avoided. But the current Prime Minister—who was the Treasurer, who helped enact so many of Prime Minister Turnbull's cuts—in his first speech to this place, on Valentine's Day on 14 February 2008, said:

As global citizens, we must also recognise that our freedom will always be diminished by the denial of those same freedoms elsewhere, whether in Australia or overseas.

He quoted Bono!—saying that we should increase our aid to Africa. In fact, sometimes we hear quotes about the great moral challenges of our time. Well, the Prime Minister said:

Africa, though, is a humanitarian tragedy on an unimaginable scale. It is a true moral crisis that eclipses all others.

That's right, the Prime Minister said that what we do in Africa is the moral crisis that eclipses all others. So I couldn't believe it when I looked at the numbers. What has this government actually done when it comes to funding Africa and the Middle East in our aid program? When they came to office, they had $388 million in aid being spent there. But, by 2019-20, they have proudly gotten down to $199 million. That's a 48.5 per cent cut by this government. If that's how the Prime Minister treats something he thinks is a moral challenge, we're in trouble.

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