Four billion dollars is a lot of money. This is the amount Australia hopes to give annually in foreign aid by 2010, doubling the present $2 billion, according to the white paper of foreign aid issued this week.
Doubling our aid is in line with the Millennium Project under which Europe promised to double aid to Africa by 2010 and in line with the recent European Union pledge to increase aid to 0.56 per cent of GNI by 2010.
But let’s not get too self-congratulatory. A few comparisons will put the amount into perspective.
We now give 0.25 per cent of gross national income in foreign aid – that is just 25 cents in each $100 we earn. It is just $150 out of an average income of $60,000. But that $150 can make such a big impact — five months’ income for some of the poorest people in Asia.
Meanwhile, Australian households waste $10.5 billion a year in goods bought and not used, according to an Australia Institute-Roy Morgan Research study last year. Of that, $5.3 billion is in wasted food. We waste more than five times what the government gives in foreign aid.
Individual Australians give about $400 million in foreign aid, about $20 a head. We waste 13 times that in food alone.
Here’s another comparison. Obesity-related illnesses kill about 17,000 Australians a year. Sixty per cent of Australian men are overweight. Obesity in children in Australia and the US is so bad that the next generation might be the first since the Black Death that has a lower lifespan than its parents.
Weight-related problems cost taxpayers an estimated $3 billion a year – one and half times the foreign aid budget.
It is literally a sickening inequality. We stuff ourselves to health-destroying obesity while people in neighbouring countries go hungry and more than 10,000 die of starvation in Africa every day.
Why is it going to take Australia four years to double its pitiful foreign aid budget? It took Austria just one year.
Of the 22 OECD countries, only Greece, on 0.24 per cent of GNI, Portugal on 0.21, and the US on 0.22 give at a lower rate. Greece and Portugal can be excused because they have lower incomes per head of population. So Australia is the second stingiest rich country on earth. Only the US is stingier. The US gets away with it because it is the richest country on earth and therefore gives the most in absolute terms.
Our political leaders often talk of Australia as a tolerant compassionate society. But so often, the much-touted national characteristics belie the exact opposite. The dour Dutch, for example, give 0.82 per cent of GNI in foreign aid – more than three times as generous as Australia. The cold Norwegians give 0.93 per cent. Even the miserable, whingeing Poms give at more than double our rate.
We really are a selfish lot.
The proposed doubling of our rate, by the way, is not some sudden-found altruism. A lot of it is pure self-interest. If we do nothing while Papua New Guinea or the Solomons, for example, fail as states we will get an exodus of refugees. We could import a huge HIV/AIDS problem from Papua New Guinea. The lion’s share of the new money is to be spent in our own region, more as a prophylactic than an act of generosity.
A lot of the money will be spent at Australian educational institutions.
Even the new measure to abandon giving Australian companies preference in aid contracts is tinged with selfishness. A condition of Australian companies being able to compete for contracts in the much larger European aid pie is that Australia does not give preference in its aid program.
A lot of aid is associated with the war on terror. At the end of the Cold War the aid level dipped as the super-powers no longer felt the need to prop up friendly governments. It has risen again since the attacks on the World Trade Centre.
But take away the war on terror and the unusual impact of the tsunami, aid levels for development to lift people out of hunger and misery for its own sake have remained static.
For 36 years, the rich countries have failed to make good a promise they made under the 1970 UN General Assembly resolution to bring aid up to 0.7 per cent of GNI.
Last year only five countries met the target: Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark.
Issuing the White Paper, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said, “And it’s not as if increasing the aid budget is something new – since the Government came to office the annual overseas aid budget has increased by almost $1 billion.”
But in that time Australia’s national income has doubled, too. We have gone nowhere. The immoral gap between rich and poor on the planet remains as wide, if not wider than ever.
The White Paper contained many good points about making aid more effective, the aim to reduce poverty and concentrate of health and education, and to improve governance.
But even if we reach the $4 billion target we will move from near the bottom to just under the middle of the OECD table, assuming other countries keep their aid at the same rate. It is not enough for a country blessed with the riches of Australia – riches we enjoy not through any especial merit, but more by the accidents of birth and history.
Any of us could have equally be born in some Third World hellhole.