Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I concur with the comments of the member for Fremantle and I too thank the member for Lyne for bringing this matter to the attention of the House. I think it is worth going back and looking at the history of where these initiatives stemmed from, with the creation of the HIPC initiative in 1996 by the IMF and the World Bank. As both the previous speakers have touched on, we should be looking at taking all avenues possible to try to assist poor countries not only to get out of the burden of debt they are under but also to develop their economies so that they are able to compete on the world stage.

That brings me to my primary concern, which is that vulture funds impede the ability of those countries to undertake those activities. But, more importantly, there is a failure to deal with the underlying issue that creates this problem for these countries in the first place—that is, a lack of free and equitable access to the world economy. That is driven by the activities of Western developed nations in terms of tariffs and market restriction. In particular in this case I am going to single out the Europeans and the Americans. I think we in Australia have done a tremendous amount over the past 30 years to try to free up access to our economy and to compete effectively and efficiently in the world market and create opportunities for others to do so.

The member for Lyne touched on a really interesting point in terms of agricultural productivity and I certainly agree with his comments in that regard. How do we grow the agricultural productivity of these nations? I think in this case China provides us with a very instructive example. Forty years ago, with very poor agricultural resources, it was barely able to provide for itself. It made some very significant changes in its agricultural policies, including, firstly, allowing farmers to sell some of their produce, then allowing farmers to move that produce to different towns within the county and ultimately allowing farmers to own their own farms. One of the recurring problems in underdeveloped countries is the lack of clear and well-defined property ownership, and we see that here in Australia too, in the Indigenous community. I think that is a huge issue for the Indigenous community. In that international marketplace, it is actually property ownership, with clearly defined boundaries for who owns what, that creates the economic incentive for people to take risk, maybe obtain microfinance to start to grow their own small businesses and lift themselves out of poverty.

We as a nation, I think, are very generous in our aid, both from a government perspective and from an individual perspective. I certainly concur with the sentiments of the member for Lyne and the member for Fremantle that we want to ensure and we need to ensure that our Australian aid dollars are spent effectively and that it is not going to corrupt governments or to the arms dealers that like to foment conflict in many of these nations, which turns the money into an international money-go-round: we provide aid funding to these countries, the leaders of those countries then misuse those funds to purchase arms to continue the conflict and the population at large suffers as a result.

We as the coalition have said that we do not believe that this initiative will provide an effective remedy and, as we have flagged, we will oppose this motion.

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