Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about two active community organisations that I recently met: WaterAid and the Canterbury Girls' Secondary College's World Vision VGen group led by Maeve Erlington—to discuss the valuable work these groups do assisting people around the world affected by poverty.

WaterAid is a community organisation that seeks to promote the importance of worldwide access to WASH—water, sanitation and hygiene. WaterAid has projects in 27 countries, including some of our closest neighbours such as Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and Cambodia. One initiative WaterAid promotes was marked yesterday, 19 November, as World Toilet Day—an event acknowledged by the UN—which draws attention to the level of global sanitation.

VGen is World Vision Australia's youth arm, building a movement to end global poverty and injustice. VGen works with our local schools and universities to create a network of young people across Australia to act as a single advocate for those living in poverty. These organisations work alongside other important community organisations such as the Global Poverty Project and the Oaktree Foundation, Australia's largest youth volunteer organisation, which has its main office in the electorate of Kooyong.

The benefits of Australia's aid program, which is around $5 billion a year, are quite substantial. Most recently, in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, Australia established a field hospital capable of running around the clock and treating up to 200 patients a day. In 2012 Australia's aid programs supported the immunisation of over 500,000 children in PNG for measles and polio and over 1.2 million women for tetanus.

We continue to support the Millennium Development Goals, which have been very successful, including trying to affect and reduce the number of people living in poverty. This has been done, substantially cutting by half those at a global level to around 700 million people fewer than those who were living in extreme poverty in 1990. Over two billion people have gained access to improved sources of drinking water, with 89 per cent of the world's population now using such water. But there is much still to do. With 2015 just around the corner the international community is working to design a new global development framework.

Community organisations like WaterAid and VGen play an important role in raising awareness of the plight of those still living in poverty and will play an important role in ensuring that the world is able to continue to pursue the elimination of global poverty beyond 2015.