Nine years ago, Scott Morrison gave his maiden speech to Parliament expressing many noble ideals, none of which have been displayed by Mr Morrison in the ensuing years.
His remarks on foreign aid belie his government’s actions.
“The Howard government increased annual spending on foreign aid to $3.2 billion. The new government has committed to continue to increase this investment and I commend it for doing so. However, we still must go further. If we doubt the need, let us note that in 2007 the total world budget for global aid accounted for only one-third of basic global needs in areas such as education, general health, HIV-AIDS, water treatment and sanitation. This leaves a sizeable gap. The need is not diminishing, nor can our support. It is the Australian thing to do.”
Mr Morrison’s predecessor, Joe Hockey, slashed $11 billion from the aid budget during his tenure with Morrison cutting another $224 million in his first budget. That will reduce Australia’s foreign aid, as a proportion of gross national income, to a record low of just 0.22 per cent.
The International Monetary Fund estimated that, on national income per citizen, Australia ranked seventh among OECD donor countries in 2015 in US dollar terms, and eighth in terms of purchasing power. These cuts will take us to 17th in terms of aid as a share of national income. Australia’s prosperity ranking now far outstrips its ranking as an aid donor.
When Donald Trump announced that he would strip foreign aid funding from any health organisation that even mentioned the word abortion, Julie Bishop responded by pledging $9.5 million over three years for a partnership with Planned Parenthood.
What she didn’t mention was the many women’s programs which had been defunded in their previous budgets.
One example of a cut program was training midwives under an $83 million project to cut the high rate of death for mothers in childbirth and improve infant welfare in Indonesian village health clinics and hospitals. A similar program to improve maternal and child health in Burma was also axed.
This morning Fairfax reported that our new Ambassador for Women and Girls, the latest ex-politician to join the double-dipping gravy train, Sharman Stone attended a conference in Brussels which was convened to address the estimated shortfall in funding caused by Trump’s ‘global gag rule’ on abortion.
It is estimated it will leave aid organisations short of $US600 million (or around $790 million), which campaigners say will put millions of women’s lives at risk.
Ministers from Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark organised today’s pledging conference. Canada pledged $26 million, as did the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One anonymous donor contributed $66 million. It raised €181 million or around $251 million. Australia gave nothing.
Ms Stone reannounced the same $9.5 million that was announced over 6 weeks ago by Julie Bishop as she told the crowd that “Empowering women and girls is a central objective of our foreign policy focus.”
Strange then that they would axe funding for the Empowering Indonesian Women for Poverty Reduction Program. They also axed funding for training Bangladeshi primary school teachers and providing textbooks.
Why send someone, with staff no doubt, all the way from Australia to contribute nothing? Then again, that’s what we did at all the climate change conferences too.
Nice trip on the taxpayer’s purse I spose.
But please, we are not in any position to be pretending we give a shit.
