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Pakistani health worker Shahida Akram, 41, gives a polio vaccine to a child, in a neighborhood in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013.  Some Islamic militants oppose the vaccination campaign, accuse health workers of acting as spies for the U.S. and claim the polio vaccine is intended to make Muslim children sterile. Pakistan is one of the few remaining places where polio is still rampant. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
Withdrawn aid money from Australia could have helped eradicate polio and tackled infectious diseases. Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP
Withdrawn aid money from Australia could have helped eradicate polio and tackled infectious diseases. Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP

Australia: the Sweeney Todd of foreign aid

This article is more than 10 years old
Both major parties go into this election with the weakest global poverty commitments in years. What was once a source of Australian pride now is a crying shame

Last Friday, Kevin Rudd sounded the death knell for Australia’s international moral leadership and credentials as a global citizen.

The Australian government announced cuts of almost $1bn over four years to the Australian aid program in order to fund its PNG asylum seeker deal. This comes on top of the announcement a fortnight earlier that Australia would no longer accept refugees arriving by boat.

Together, the aid cuts and the refugee crackdown send a message that Australia no longer cares about the world beyond its borders.

That we have got to such a desperate place is bewildering, given where we were just six years ago. Back in 2007, then opposition leader Rudd announced a new deal on ending global poverty: foreign aid would be increased to 0.5% of Australia’s income by 2015-16. Rudd, once praised as a champion of aid, declared:

This is also an important step in the right direction towards Australia doing its fair share of the work (particularly here in our own immediate region) to truly make poverty history.

The government’s raid on the aid budget especially discredits Rudd’s own moral leadership. In an act of stark irony, Rudd, the pioneer of ending poverty, has now made it virtually impossible to meet the unprecedented aid targets he once courageously set.

The Labor government’s fetish with cutting the aid budget predates the current announcement. In 2012, Julia Gillard began what started as a haircut to the aid program but became something more befitting Sweeney Todd. 

First, the May 2012 budget delayed the target date by one year – to 2016-17. Six months later, $375m was lopped off money earmarked for poverty reduction was to be redirected to lock up asylum seekers in Australia. The final cut looked to have come in the May 2013 budget. The 0.5% deadline was pushed back to 2017-18, and the detention package made a permanent feature of Australian aid spending.

But the barber’s work was incomplete.

Less than three months after the budget announcement in May, new treasurer Chris Bowen went for the jugular – aid was to be cut yet again, to help pay for the most inhumane refugee policy a Labor government has ever produced. Don’t doubt that the cuts are real. Friday’s $1bn knifing brings the total of aid cuts to $5.8bn since 2010.

What does this all mean for the world’s poor?

That’s money that could have helped eradicate polio and tackled infectious diseases. It could have built schools and trained teachers. It could have provided clean water and better sanitation for those without it. And it could have put a hefty dent in the 1.2 billion people who continue to live on less than $2 a day.

And in plugging a hole in the government’s asylum seeker and refugee policy framework, aid could have been used to assist with conflict resolution, and support peace efforts in refugee source countries so that people don't need to get on boats to seek asylum in the first place. Our foreign aid should be addressing the root causes that push people to seek asylum, not detaining vulnerable people.

The aid budget has been marked by constant changes and cuts; this sort of pattern does little to fulfil the government’s mantra of aid effectiveness. Simply put, how can aid be effective if it is constantly misused and misdirected?

Yet if the government’s moral leadership on aid has gone AWOL, it doesn’t look like the opposition have found it. Abbott used to agree with Rudd on the 0.5% by 2015-16 promise. But Team Abbott’s response to Labor’s butchery is to ditch the deadline and renege on the bi-partisan promise once committed to in 2007.

Instead of providing an alternative position, the opposition has chosen to accept the government’s cuts and refused to put a concrete time frame on meeting our aid target of 0.5%.

Paling in comparison to the 2007 election, both major parties go into this election with the weakest global poverty commitments in years. What was once a source of Australian pride has now become a crying shame.

But we know there’s still hope. Thousands disagree with these cuts with over 60,000 Australians calling for more and better aid through this year’s Make Poverty History campaign. This strong public support for ending global poverty proves that it is indeed the public that embodies Australia’s moral leadership, not its leaders.

If our political leaders have lost their way, it's up to us to lead the way and show it to them. 

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