Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Science and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Too often for privileged people like us, the horrors of poverty seem to be a natural, inevitable part of the geopolitical landscape. But poverty is not inevitable. We have the knowledge and the resources to overcome it and, with the combination of goodwill, creative thinking and courage, we can make that happen. The responsibility belongs to all of us, and we can approach this challenge on more than one front.

One such front is the Make Poverty History campaign. This is a coalition of charities, campaigning groups, faith communities, trade unions and high profile individuals who have united to tackle global poverty. Their representatives have been among us this week, because this is Make Poverty History Week. The campaign is devoted to achieving the eight Millennium Development Goals. In 2000, 189 united nations, including Australia, signed a declaration that aimed to halve the world’s poverty by 2015. Now, five years later, we need to ask ourselves: what are we doing to keep our word? Tackling unfair global trade rules, cancelling the debts of the poorest countries and increasing the quality and amount of aid given to developing countries require political will from the highest levels and on an international scale. At the other end of the spectrum, these goals also require hands-on help from individuals who are willing to do what they can.

Eradicating extreme hunger, improving maternal health, ensuring justice in trades practices, enabling all children to have a primary school education and giving everyone access to clean drinking water are not just simply ways of improving human dignity and increasing our feel-good factor—though they do achieve these ends—they are also a way of making a safer and more humane world, because poverty is a major obstacle to promoting peace and justice. So it was heartening to hear that Muhammad Yunus, who established the Grameen Bank, was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. This award reminds us all that we do have the power to bring about change and encourages us to realise that millions of small changes, when put together, can amount to extraordinary change.

All around us there are inspirational stories of people making such changes happen. I have previously spoken here of the work done in Africa by Jacinta Conroy, a young music teacher from my home town of Goulburn. Another young resident from Goulburn who is determined to make a difference is Sally Elliott, who has just returned home after spending six months working as a volunteer with the i-to-i organisation in Kenya and South America. Sally does not conform to anyone’s cliched image of a do-gooder—she is an animated, vibrant young woman with a love of the good life and a flair for graphic design—but the simple awareness that she could make a difference was enough to send her to help out in the Melon orphanage in Nakuru.

There are currently 125 children attending Melon for education and for a meal—usually their only meal of the day. The place can only operate because individuals are prepared to contribute. The four teachers there are volunteers, and there are three Kenyan youngsters who turn up every day—again, on a voluntary basis—to sit in hot rooms preparing beans and rice for the children’s only meal. These are street kids who have to go home at night to all kinds of hovels and tiny homes destitute of any kind of furnishings or conditions. It is quite extraordinary.

Sally herself contributed in a variety of ways. She taught the little ones. She helped with food preparation. She painted murals on all the classrooms. She shared ideas about making Melon’s work known and fundraising and so on—just a local girl from Goulburn but one who was prepared to move from the good feeling of dropping a few coins in a box to doing the more demanding and challenging action of doing something to help. I am very proud of her and the fact that she has helped to make the world a better and safer place.

Then there is Susan Nakawuki. She is a 22-year-old woman from Uganda. She is an orphan who was raised in a Wototo home. I met her this week when she visited Canberra to promote her work in Kampala and to raise funds. As a teenager, Susan decided that to live surrounded by poverty and injustice and not to do anything about it was not an option. At her young age she has already become a member of the Ugandan parliament and has made huge personal steps to help her people. Following the example of Muhammad Yunus, she has set up a bank to help the poor, lending money to small groups for local projects to help them become independent and to break out of the poverty and dependence cycle. I would like to tell you about her delightful project. She calls it the miracle of the three little pigs. She gives a poor family three pigs for six months, in which time the pigs reproduce. The family keep the original pigs plus two of the piglets, so now they have five pigs and a means of making money. They hand back the remaining piglets in the litter, usually about 10, which Susan can then give to other families. And the process continues. It is like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, translated to a Ugandan setting.

So individuals can make a difference, and the beauty of it is that we do not have to travel or to change our lifestyles to make a difference. On an individual basis, or by combining our efforts to achieve greater power, we can change the world. The miracle of the three little pigs reminds us of the truth in Paul Kelly’s lyric, ‘From little things, big things grow.’ This brings me back to Australia, because it is not just in far-flung lands that this kind of commitment can make a difference. It is also important close to home; we need to make poverty history in our own country as well. We think of UNIFEM’s work in the Northern Territory or the social entrepreneurs network which encourages collaborative innovation across community, public and private spheres and supports individuals to use their initiative and enterprise to strengthen their community. We think of the work of people in Indigenous communities, such as Noel Pearson. The core to reform of welfare dependency is the empowering of communities to change their social conditions.

The great achievement of Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, of Susan Nakawuki in Uganda, of Sally Elliott and Jacinta Conroy in Kenya, and of all the other people we know who are doing their bit to alleviate poverty of millions of individuals, is that they teach us, or remind us, to look on the poor and the marginalised in a new light. Instead of thinking of them as victims and survivors we see them as agents of change, in charge of their own destinies, empowered. And while political leaders in the developed world profess their commitment to poverty eradication, all too often we are not prepared to address the systemic causes of poverty. It is true but sad to remember that the political and corporate elites at the helm of the world economy have a powerful interest in maintaining the economic status quo.

So we need to turn our best minds and our best efforts to solving the problem of poverty. We need to rethink our attitudes to ‘growth’ as a solution. Growth does not necessarily alleviate poverty; it may, in fact, exacerbate it. As long as systemic economic and social policies continue to favour the rich, global poverty will remain a stark reality for the majority of people in the world. By dogmatically pursuing globalisation at the expense of the poor we are marching along the path to ever greater upheaval and are only perpetuating the vicious cycle of poverty, displacement and conflict. As Irene Khan, the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, explains:

... poverty is both a cause and a consequence of the failure to respect human rights: both economic, social and cultural as well as political and civil. It is driven by human rights violations and perpetuates further abuses.

As part of the debate, we should be looking at the final report of the UN Millennium Project, Investing in development, which lays out a comprehensive strategy for combating global poverty, hunger and disease. Billions more people could enjoy the fruits of the global economy. Tens of millions of lives can be saved. The practical solutions exist—but we have to act right now.