Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Will Durant, the Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote in Heroes of History:

Human history is a fragment of biology. Man is one of countless millions of species, and, like all the rest, is subject to the struggle for existence and the competitive survival of the fittest to survive. All psychology, philosophy, statesmanship and utopias must make their peace with these biological laws. Man can be traced to about a million years before Christ. Agriculture can be traced no farther back than to 25,000 B.C. Man has lived forty times longer as a hunter than as a tiller of the soil in a settled life. In those 975,000 years his basic nature was formed, and remains to challenge civilization every day.

The tillers and the hunters in the most civilized of communities have developed an economic and social system that allows them to feed their own and to look to a future that is sustainable. There are hunters and tillers in other civilizations in our world who are unable to develop an economic and social system that allows them to feed themselves and to sustain their future.

The millennium goals are an attempt by developed countries, along with undeveloped countries, to seek goals and targets that will allow all communities to have a social and economic life that is both sustainable and enables individuals to lead a fulfilling life. We would do well to remember those goals: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV-AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. They are the goals, and each of those contains targets.

In our world today we have experienced and continue to experience food crises, the financial crisis, a climate crisis and trade crises, but the same countries and communities experience poverty and hunger and want and pestilence and war and terror while the most developed countries, in comparative terms, do not. What the millennium goals seek to do is to share the good fortune, the wealth, the knowledge, the experience and the expertise of those that have with those that have not. Yet, as a world we try to do this but fail poorly.

Australia is part and parcel of both a cause and a solution. We need to do our bit, and it does not hurt to remind ourselves in comparative and relative terms what real poverty is, what real hunger is, what climate change can really do in the world, what poor mental and physical health can do to people, what a lack of education and of basic resources like water can do to communities. I think we in this place ought to seriously remind ourselves of that when we get carried away with some of the debates we have. We ought to remember how lucky we are and remember the responsibilities we have, not just to our own nation but to the world.

There are almost 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty in our world. That means they live on less than US$1.25, which is insufficient to meet their most basic needs. They are hungry, susceptible to disease and lack access to things we take for granted such as clean water, decent sanitation and access to health care. I think we all know we could do a lot more. I thank the member for Parramatta for raising this issue and I hope we keep giving it a comparable relationship to the things we talk about it in this place.

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