Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledges Australia's important role in building a fairer and more equal world through its contribution to international aid;

(2) notes that:

(a) while the global community is making progress towards ending poverty, hunger and the worst epidemics, global inequality remains a problem with many millions still living in extreme poverty;

(b) challenges such as the threat of global unrest and conflict, human slavery, refugees, terrorism and radicalisation, mass migration, humanitarian crises and climate change, all require global solutions and cooperation;

(c) Australian aid makes a significant contribution to addressing the root causes of conflict, helps prevent the factors that drive people to seek asylum and helps create stronger democracies, stable states and strengthen communities and economies; and

(d) 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; and

(3) acknowledges the continuing need for Australian aid to increase to advance our common goal to eliminate poverty around the world in line with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals signed by former Prime Minister John Howard in 2000, and reconfirmed by the Minister for Foreign Affairs through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015.

I am a firm believer that societies are judged on the way they treat their most vulnerable members, and this can be applied just as much to our national community as to the global community we are all part of. Foreign aid plays a vital role in creating long-term global political and economic stability. Australia's aid program is an important tool in tackling the root causes of global challenges such as disease, poverty, climate change and environmental degradation. It builds collaboration and empowers other nations to lead their own development and address local issues including extreme poverty and inequality. No-one can deny the benefits that aid has generated globally, from the elimination of, for example, smallpox— an achievement that has saved well over 200 million lives—to improved health services for women and children, halving the mortality rates for children under five years of age and for pregnant women since 1990. These are big achievements.

Since the end of the Cold War, aid has helped promote the democratisation of nations and helped strengthen fledging democracies around the world. But it is not only recipient countries that benefit from foreign aid. Australian aid contributes to stability amongst Australia's close neighbours, including the Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in PNG. These countries have experienced periods of conflict, instability and at times illnesses and diseases et cetera, the elimination of which we take for granted. Our aid helps keep stability in these countries, some of the nations closest to us, and therefore stability in our region. A lack of stability could be both costly and dangerous. Australian aid also helps control the spread of disease, as I said earlier, such as stemming the spread of TB, which is a problem in PNG, one of our closest neighbours. In the Solomon Islands Australia has worked with the World Health Organization to assist the Solomon Islands government in its attempts to reduce malaria, bringing about significant declines in malaria incidences in the country.

Of course, there are many arguments that people use to diminish the effectiveness of aid, and corruption is just one example that we hear often. It is easy to dismiss the effectiveness of aid, because problems persist in so many countries around the world. Sometimes it can feel like a drop in the ocean. But that should not stop us from continuing to explore new ways of helping those in need. The data shows that aid does work. It is working where we are assisting. For example, the proportion of the world's population living under the World Bank's lowest global poverty line fell from 42 per cent in 1981 to just 11 per cent in 2013.

Here in Australia we are known for our sense of fairness and equality, and we can be proud of the significant achievements of the aid programs we have delivered throughout the world and our region. Our aid effort is slightly above average and we remain a significant donor, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. However, given the problems faced around the world and the benefits foreign aid can have on Australia, directly and indirectly, we must remain vigilant. We must not allow it to decline, as it has been now for some time. Our aid contribution is now at its lowest level in Australia's history, at 0.23 per cent of gross national income. When most Australians hear these figures, they often report saying that we should be increasing our foreign aid. This shows that we are a compassionate nation. When you sit down and actually explain those figures to people, the majority response that I normally get is that we should increase it.

We are a compassionate nation, and I understand that there are also many people in need right here—in our backyard. We have the real responsibility to help these people, but I suppose that it does not have to be a question of either/or. Most Australians recognise that help needs to go where it is needed and that in doing so we all benefit.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Chris Crewther (Dunkley, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rose before, in a 90-second statement, to speak on aid and modern slavery, and I will expand upon those statements now. As chair of the Foreign Affairs and Aid Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, this area of aid is of great interest to me. Many different areas of policy currently face increased scrutiny, and international aid is one of the most critiqued areas of the law. The globalisation movements of decades gone past are now being questioned and foreign policies are being evaluated with the same degree of scrutiny, if not more, than domestic policies.

It is not often, however, that the full scope of our international involvement is considered. Australia, for example supports the work of organisations such as the Red Cross, Save the Children and the UN Population Fund in the critical humanitarian work they do around the world, and supports the UNHCR as well. Our aid program works with the intent of countering local instability in the country where it occurs, and aims to prevent the displacement of even more people around the world. We strive to prevent regional instability and conflict by addressing humanitarian concerns at their origin. We cannot exist in isolation in a world that grows progressively more interconnected. That said, aid that we currently give and that we might give in the future must be sustainable aid. That is, it should ensure growth of the local communities. One example that I used before is that of mosquito nets. If you ship mosquito nets into a community in a country in Africa instead of using the local mosquito net manufacturer, you can put that person out of business.

We must also promote the benefits, including promotion of regional security as well as diplomatic relations and the influence those provide, not only in our region but around the world. If we do so, we have the potential to enhance and perhaps even to expand our aid program.

I experienced this in Kosovo, where I formerly worked through the UN as an international lawyer at the Kosovo Property Agency, resolving property claims for people who lost possession of their properties due to the conflict—whether they were farms, homes or businesses. The Kosovo Property Agency was an independent agency, but it relied on donors—essentially, aid—from around the world to exist. Its existence was important because it ensured that private property rights could be given back to the people who owned those homes. They could return to those places, they could sell those places or they could rent those places. It also ensured that the country could ensure that the right person who owned the property was on the books, and that then promotes international investment.

Let's look at Dunkley. Dunkley is an important community in terms of our contribution to international aid as well. For example, the Australian Council for International Development notes that we have 149 corporate sponsors in Dunkley, as well as 64 church and community groups, 401 locum returned overseas volunteers, 10,802 individual supporters and 38 schools, including Kananook Primary School, Mount Eliza Secondary College, St Macartan's Parish Primary School and more.

Australia's aid program, as the Australian Council for International Development sets out, is an important tool in tackling the root causes of global challenges. We live in an international environment where non-state based actors and issues at the global level are threatening stability and prosperity. Australia's aid program builds collaborations and coalitions which empower other nations to lead their own development and make progress against pressing common challenges such as extreme property and inequality.

I mentioned before my work as part of the Foreign Affairs and Aid Subcommittee, looking into modern-day slavery legislation in Australia. I would like to expand upon this further. Part of our aid program does go towards combating important issues such as sexual slavery and labour slavery, particularly in our region. Our committee is inquiring into whether Australia should adopt national legislation to combat modern slavery comparable to the United Kingdom's Modern Slavery Act 2015 and hopefully even improving on that legislation.

According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, an estimated 45.8 million people around the world are in some form of modern slavery, including over 4,000 in Australia. This describes a range of exploitative practices, including human trafficking, forced labour, wage exploitation, forced marriage and debt bondage. The Attorney-General's important action in approving this important topic initiated by the subcommittee provides us with the opportunity to explore whether Australia's laws can be improved to prevent modern slavery, both in Australia and in the supply chains of businesses and organisations that operate in Australia and overseas. I was very pleased to launch, on 17 February, this inquiry, and I look forward to working to enhance both our work in the aid program and our work around modern slavery legislation in Australia.

Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hindmarsh for moving this important motion. We should start all debates of this kind by saying clearly that Australian aid matters. It is not a luxury product. It is not a feel-good optional extra for our country. Australian aid is literally a life-or-death issue for the children who are born in medically supervised environments, immunised from life-threatening diseases and given sanitised water as a result of Australian funded projects. Australian aid is literally life changing for the children who are able to go to school and the women and girls who are able to take control of their sexual health and their family planning and the women who are able to gain financial agency through village microcredit programs as a result of Australian funded projects.

Australian aid matters to the millions of people in our region and around the world whose lives have been saved or whose futures have been transformed. But Australian aid also matters to Australians and to the Australian national identity. At the strategic level, it matters to the stability of our region. We rightly invest billions of dollars in the Australian Defence Force—$32 billion a year—to ensure that Australia's interests can be protected from international threats. We should surely invest a tiny fraction of this in Australian aid to prevent the emergence of these threats in the first place. It is in all of our interests that a nation like Papua New Guinea, a rapidly growing nation of eight million people and our nearest northern neighbour, develops a strong government and a stable economy. People in Far North Queensland understand the implications of living within swimming distance of a nation on the verge of an epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis. It is in all of our interests that the Australian aid program assists the PNG authorities to head off this epidemic, just as we assisted them to head off an imminent epidemic of HIV-AIDS over the past decade.

It is in our national interest for Australian aid to support the work of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to provide the support services for asylum seekers and resettlement channels for refugees necessary to prevent the irregular mass movement of people through our region. And it is in our national interest, as a smaller nation, to support the rules based international order. Foreign aid, development aid, is in many ways the price of entry for being a good global citizen in the multilateral forums that Australia relies on to advance its national interests on the international stage.

A world in which every country looks out only for itself would not be a favourable world for Australia, and this is the real nub of the debate about Australian aid. It is a debate about the kind of world we want to live in and the kind of country that we want to be. Do any among us really want to live in a nation that tells our children that they must only look after themselves? Well may people say that charity begins at home, but nobody said that it should end at home—not for the country of the fair go, not for a nation founded on egalitarian values and not when it is within our control to save and transform the lives of millions of children who are no different in human dignity to our own.

Unfortunately, funding for Australian aid has not matched our values in recent years. While the previous Labor government substantially increased Australian aid spending during its six years of government, billions of dollars have been cut from Australian aid—$11 billion—under the Abbott-Turnbull government. This has brought Australian aid levels not only below the OECD average but also to the lowest levels since records began in the 1970s. The 2016-17 Turnbull government budget spent just 23c in every $100 of our national income on foreign aid, and on the current trajectory our aid program will continue to fall over the next decade, to just 0.17 per cent of gross national income. It is not good enough. These are life-or-death cuts that will have life-and-death consequences for real people around the world. We need to do better, for their sake and for our own. I have seen Australian aid at work in countries like Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea and Cambodia, and I can attest that Australian aid is a projection beyond our borders of the values that we have within our home. It is a projection of the kind of nation that we want to be and the kind of world that we want to shape.

At the moment, there is an emerging crisis on the African continent that calls on us to be particularly engaged, and this is the emerging famine situation in South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia, where 3.9 million people urgently need food assistance. So I call on the Australian government, and I call on all Australians in a private capacity, to contribute generously to avert this imminent crisis. We risk having a generation of young people in these countries wiped out by this famine, a famine the scale of which we have not seen for some decades. Consider the impact this will have on the development of these countries. Consider where it will leave these countries in future years. As I say, I call on the current government—including the foreign minister, Julie Bishop—and on Australians in their private capacity to give generously to avert this emerging crisis.

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting—

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

It was, member for Kingsford Smith, maybe one of your mates, Bono, who over the years has been a good leftist who recently said:

Aid is just a stop-gap.

You may like to write that down—

Commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.

And that is very true. That is what makes the biggest difference to people in poverty in the world. Down the track, if they open up their economies and take advantage of entrepreneurial capitalism that will lift more people out of poverty than any particular handout.

When it comes to what we can do for people in the Third World suffering from poverty, one of the great problems these people face, at the moment, is the issue of indoor air pollution. In fact, we are often told about indoor air pollution. This is where people living in the Third World simply do not have reliable and cost-effective electricity, so they are forced to burn dung, wood and twigs to cook and heat their homes. That causes millions of deaths every year.

In fact, the World Health Organization has said that there are 500,031 children—that is, over half a million children—under the age of five, the majority being girls, that die from indoor air pollution because they do not have access to low-cost electricity. Yet some of the policies that we have that are preventing people in the Third World from getting access to low-cost electricity are directly responsible for those hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to support this motion. I congratulate and thank the member for Hindmarsh for moving it. Earlier this year, Oxfam revealed in a report that eight men, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world's population. The report entitled An economy for the 99 percentfound that the income of the poorest 10 per cent of people raised less than $3 a year between 1988 and 2011. Global inequality continues to be an intractable problem and one that is testing the mettle with world leaders tasked with turning around the dire circumstances of many.

To do our bit, when Labor was in government, Australia's overseas foreign aid budget increased from 28c in every $100 to 37c in every $100 by 2013-14. Today, unfortunately, thanks to the cuts, in particular, of the Abbott government but continued by the Turnbull government, Australia spends just 23c per $100 on overseas aid. Our overseas aid budget, at the moment, is the lowest it has ever been in our nation's history after the foreign minister allowed not one, not two but three cuts to the foreign aid budget—three cuts to her portfolio—valued in total at $11 billion.

This government removed—can you believe this?—as one of the goals of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and our overseas aid budget, 'alleviating poverty'. They removed that as a goal for our aid budget and replaced it with something to do with international business. We have seen cuts to eye health programs in Vietnam and cuts to sexually transmitted disease health programs in Africa. There is little doubt that this quite 'madness of endless aid cuts', as described by World Vision CEO Tim Costello, has damaged our reputation as a responsible global citizen while cutting public health, education, infrastructure and biosecurity projects.

Australia has a particular responsibility to assist its neighbours, particularly in the Pacific region, to bring them out of poverty, to provide infrastructure to grow their economies and, importantly, to help them tackle the devastating effects of climate change. I have often said that the small populations of the Pacific Islands contribute next to zero to climate change but they feel the effects greater than any other nation in the world. Australia as the largest economy and largest emitter per head of population in our region has a responsibility to assist those nations make a transition and reduce the effects of global warming and climate change on their economies.

In government, Labor established the Australian community based climate change action grants to provide practical on-the-ground support for climate change resilience, and the former government invested $34 million in this program. We know that the Abbott-Turnbull government has done its best to destroy the renewable energy industry in Australia, through its attacks on the renewable energy target. Labor accepts, overwhelmingly, the science of climate change and that human activity is causing increased temperatures and making it much worse for Pacific nations.

There was $11.3 billion cut from the aid budget for development assistance. We all know that we are dealing with tight fiscal circumstances but it is important to remember that in addition to alleviating poverty and global inequality Australian aid is aimed at ensuring the development of economies and achieving a world that is more secure. These goals remain as important as ever.

In my previous role as parliamentary secretary for the Pacific Islands I saw the difference that Australian foreign aid can make on the ground. I visited the bridges and roads that were funded by the previous AusAID, that have connected communities and provided communities—for the first time—the ability to interconnect, to trade with each other and to grow their incomes. I visited hospitals like the tuberculosis clinic that I opened in Daru, in the west of Papua New Guinea, and saw the difference it has made to the lives of people who suffer tuberculosis, a growing affliction in the Pacific, particularly in Papua New Guinea.

Australian aid makes a difference and this government should feel shame for cutting the aid budget by $11 billion.

Debate adjourned.