John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Kingsford Smith on this motion. It is appalling that poverty is an issue today, as it was decades ago. Sadly, tens of thousands of children continue to die from poverty related causes which are entirely preventable. We in this chamber have a duty to bring to the public consciousness the plight of men, women and children world wide and to find solutions. While Australia became a signatory to the UN Millennium Development Goals with epochal determination to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, many of my constituents in Lowe have questioned the quantum and nature of Australia’s foreign aid commitments. I have previously raised my concerns with the Minister for Foreign Affairs that too large an emphasis has been placed on governance programs, rather than on basic poverty reduction, in developing countries. This much was reflected in a recent survey by the US think tank the Centre for Global Development, which ranked Australia 15th out of 21 of the world’s richest countries for the proportion of national income dedicated to foreign aid.

The size of Australia’s aid program, as well as that of many other developed countries, has led many to rightly question whether the laudable Millennium Development Goals are slowly slipping out of reach. It is difficult to remain optimistic when we know that tens of thousands of children are still dying from poverty related causes and billions have little or no access to basic health care and nutrition. To the minister’s credit, under the aid white paper we have seen a welcome increase in Australia’s aid program from 0.28 per cent of gross national income to 0.36 per cent by 2010. Nevertheless, the Labor Party believes Australia’s contributions should be greater. There is no logical reason why we cannot join, hand in hand, with the many other OECD countries that have committed 0.7 per cent of their gross national income to change the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our global community. However, this is a debate for another day.

Despite the current government’s increase in Australia’s aid budget, concerns still arise as to how this aid will be spent. There can be no doubt that the quality of aid contribution is just as important as aid volume. It is in this light that I wish to speak in glowing terms about microcredit financing. Microcredit promotes the use of small, collateral-free loans to help impoverished families set up small business ventures and to assist with self-employment. In some of the poorest villages in the world’s poorest countries, we have seen millions of families use these loans to build businesses and futures for their communities. Brett Kuhnell, from World Vision Australia, provided an example of this last year: a sandal maker in Burma who borrowed $40 developed a business which now hires eight locals to sell 80 pairs of sandals a day. Such examples are by no means unique. An eight-year World Bank study in Bangladesh found that 48 per cent of the poorest households with access to microcredit loans rose above the poverty line. In The End of Poverty, Jeffery D. Sachs said:

At the most basic level, the key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung.

This is the very boost that microcredit provides, such is the potential for microcredit to empower the poor and facilitate a way for them to rebuild their own lives. We cannot allow the concept to expand at a snail’s pace. We must do all we can to broaden access to microcredit loans. Yet the pool of money available for microcredit lending is not large enough and must increase. That is why this motion is so important. As the member for Kingsford Smith said a moment ago, the Howard government must do everything it can to increase the proportion of money it allocates to microcredit to 1.25 per cent of the aid budget.

While it would be a noble thing to increase Australia’s aid and microcredit budgets in their own rights, the Howard government would need not think it were doing so purely for altruistic reasons. There are common-sense arguments to suggest that achieving national security is not entirely possible without taking real action to eliminate poverty. While I do not suggest that poverty and terrorism are inexorably linked, the Howard government cannot continue to preoccupy itself with a narrow and one-dimensional approach to national security. We cannot deny that poverty, combined with the absence of education, has fuelled the capacity of terrorist organisations to recruit people to their cause. It cannot be denied that Australia’s fate is inexorably linked with the fate of the majority of the world’s people, including those in our region, who live in countries that are struggling with poverty. We cannot leave the door open for extremists to recruit from the poor and marginalised, no matter how remote this proposition may seem to some.

In an era of economic prosperity, Australia cannot continue to ignore the growing disparity of wealth between rich and poor nations. It is in Australia’s interest to do more to fight global poverty. Fighting the scourge of global poverty is certainly not a panacea for the scourge of terrorism. However, it would be appalling in the extreme if, with the benefit of hindsight, we came to realise that the most effective antiterrorism strategy could have been a $40 loan to a man or woman who was simply looking to feed his or her family. (Time expired)

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