Bob McMullan (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Federal/State Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I understand it would have been difficult for the minister to give a detailed specific response to that question at short notice, but I will proceed on the very generalised response that he has given me and pursue the matter subsequently. The government has announced with some fanfare some propositions with regard to climate change. Let us disaggregate the figures and look at them in the context of the aid budget—leaving aside the context including funding outside AusAID, most but not all of which will count in the aid budget with regard to the Global Initiative on Forests and Climate, the adaptation to climate change and, within that, the contribution to Least Developed Countries Fund of the GEF. Certainly, I agree with that last $7.5 million contribution. It is not that I think we should not be making it. To the contrary, I think that is the sort of area to which we should be making a more substantial contribution.

Peeling away the fanfare, I ask the minister to confirm the simple arithmetic. Over the forward estimates period the commitments with regard to the aid budget, both that from AusAID and that from associated departments on the Global Initiative on Forests and Climate, come to between one and 1.3 per cent of the aid budget. It seems to me that there is no question that, for many of the countries in our region, the capacity to develop a sustainable response to poverty alleviation depends upon a capacity to respond to climate change. I am a big fan of ACIAR—I welcome the fact that it is looking at some of these issues—but let us be realistic. This is a very tiny contribution, and in fact the funding in the budget on adaptation to climate change—the separate fund apart from the deforestation—comes to 1.02 per cent of the aid budget.

My point is that we have rhetorically had statements of commitment that have been dressed up as very substantial amounts. But within the aid budget it is a totally inadequate response to the character of the challenge. I welcome the fact that the government has made a commitment to increase the aid budget; I said that and I do not retract that support. We all know that what has really happened is that, having made substantial cuts to the aid budget in terms of percentage gross national income, the increase simply gets us almost back to where we started from—but not quite. But at least it is better than not having that increase. I ask the minister whether he can confirm that the percentage of the aid budget for deforestation and the percentage of the aid budget going to the initiative on the adaptation to climate change, even assuming that it is annual—which the figures do not show—rather than one off, is in the order of, in each case, about one per cent of the aid budget.

How can we see, going forward, this tiny proportion of the aid budget going to these climate change initiatives, irrespective of debate about their merits—and a lot of people have questions about some parts of that; I certainly support at least the part going to the Least Developed Countries Fund. I think that is an appropriate place to be spending the money. How can you say this is an adequate response to the challenge of climate change for our neighbours?

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