Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to talk about one of Australia's proudest and most important contributions to the world: the Australian overseas aid and assistance program. The Australian aid budget for this financial year is expected to reach $5.2 billion. As a sum of money it is an impressive figure, but when it is described in human times its true contribution can really begin to be understood.

Over the next four years, Australian aid will enable four million people to enrol in school, an invaluable contribution to the millennium development goal closest to its target: to provide universal primary education to the world's girls and boys. It will help to vaccinate 10 million children and reduce preventable disease in inching the whole world closer to the eradication of measles and of polio, just as Australian aid has substantially contributed to the eradication of polio throughout the Pacific.

And it will provide access to safe drinking water for about 8.5 million people, and build sanitation and hygiene solutions with communities, just as Australian aid has already done for nearly 500,000 people in Tanzania, South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Since 2007 the Australian overseas assistance budget has increased from 0.3 per cent of GNI to 0.35 per cent, resulting in a rapid expansion of capacity in the aid program. Making sure that money is directed to its best possible use and that projects are worthwhile, the best value for money and delivered in a rigorous and accountable way, it is important in making sure aid gets to where it is needed.

In November 2010 the government commissioned an independent review of aid effectiveness, eventually resulting in a new model of aid effectiveness that guides the comprehensive aid policy framework released in May last year. Only last month my colleague Minister Bob Carr released the 2011-12 Annual review of aid effectiveness, which makes clear the extraordinary achievements over the course of that year, underpinned by strengthened auditing and evaluation measures. Australia's aid program is still robust and flexible, able to respond to humanitarian crises quickly, as in the case of the Horn of Africa in recent years. But it also remains focused on the priority areas. Those priority areas go to 10 particular development objectives, the first and most fundamental of which is, of course, saving lives. Along with other priorities, from promoting opportunities for all to supporting sustainable economic development, Australia's aid targets are consistent with the Millennium Development Goals and contribute towards their targets. We are now less than two years away from the deadline from the achievement of these targets, and although considerable progress has definitely been made it is clearer than ever before that there is still very much more to be done. All indications are that not one fragile and conflict affected country, including those which received substantial assistance from Australia such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Papua New Guinea, is likely to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Development objectives are often correlated. The achievement of gender equality and inclusion tends to result in better and more universal education, which results in a more productive and equitable work force and economy and to a subsequent improvement in health. Where conflict or social inclusion hampers any of these steps, development tends to slow or halt across the board. But, while the delivery of aid in these often dangerous and tenuous circumstances is a fraught process, it is amongst the most important work that Australia can do in terms of development, humanitarian support and nation building. It is a long-term goal involving support for cultural and systemic change that is needed.

However, it is not only particularly fragile countries that are in need of Australia's assistance. India is now the largest democracy in the world and has made huge leaps both economically and socially. In just the past week, India celebrated the second year without a case of polio reported throughout the country—an achievement that can only be considered an extraordinary success, and one partially attributable to Australia's considerable donations to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. And yet still around 40 per cent of the country's population lives in poverty, and water, sanitation and hygiene issues continue to fundamentally limit the capacity of communities to develop. Until recently, AusAID maintained an office in India's capital, New Delhi. Owing to a number of circumstances, including a hesitance by India itself to receive aid, that office and country program are now ending. I hope that India's cooperation, including sharing in the deep experience and expertise of Australia's development coordinators, with Australia will not totally cease as a result of that decision.

Better cooperation between international communities is part of a development agenda, and there is no clearer example than the work going on within the AusAID BRIDGE program. Supported by the Asia Education Foundation, the Building Relations through Intercultural Dialogue and Growing Engagement, BRIDGE, program gives schools in Australia and Indonesia the opportunity to participate in comprehensive teacher exchanges, sharing experiences and culture as well as language and teaching skills. Many schools, including some such as one in my home state of Tasmania, Taroona High School, have used the BRIDGE program as one part of a strategy to develop Asian literacy and language programs for their students. I have no doubt that the BRIDGE program is a sign of things to come as development becomes an objective shared not only by governments and NGOs but also by communities.

While the Australian community have a commendable history of generosity as donors and givers, our government still has a moral obligation to lead with respect to overseas development assistance. In the year 2000, then Prime Minister John Howard pledged Australia to the international target of aid spending of 0.7 per cent of GNI by 2015. As I mentioned earlier, under Mr Howard's government that level fell to 0.24 per cent, rising to 0.3 per cent at the change of government. I am pleased that the coalition has now matched Labor's commitment to reaching 0.5 per cent of GNI, a commitment to increase the aid budget that remains bipartisan even while the aid budgets of many nations around the world have contracted. But the delay in reaching this figure—only now expected to be reached by the years 2016-17—and the shortfall between the 0.7 per cent aspiration at the dawn of the new millennium and the reality of a new 0.5 per cent target, I have to say, is still disappointing. Inevitably, it is the case that overseas development assistance is an investment in a more prosperous world, and I remain convinced that this aid target and the outcomes it is designed to achieve will one day soon, I hope, be reached.

It is also important to acknowledge that the challenges to the way in which Australia has had to deal with asylum seekers and refugees also resulted in a reprioritisation of aspects of the aid program late last year. Some of the aid program will now be directed to providing food, shelter and essential items for asylum seekers in Australia. While in international terms such an allocation is not unusual under the OECD reporting directives, I acknowledge that it has caused some angst for many aid, refugee and asylum advocates in the community whose expectations of the aid budget are different.

Australia is able to achieve what it does because of the work of very committed people, here and abroad, working through AusAID and other agencies in Australia—through the 30 AusAID offices located all across the world, through the 43 community based organisations funded through the AusAID NGO Cooperation Program, ANCP, and through local organisations and change makers on the ground. As I described in my first speech in this place, our aid achievements are truly a thousand quiet hopes delivered by a thousand quiet heroes, and I want to commend the Australian aid program and all that it does achieve.