Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The debate on the International Fund for Agricultural Development Amendment Bill 2012 should be straightforward. It should be one of those no-brainers where we will gladly agree yes, let us put some of our aid funding back into the agricultural development fund. Most caring Australians would hope to see faith in the performance of the fund restored to the point where we could recommit funds to some of the world's poorest countries so they can move towards self-sufficiency, food self-sufficiency in particular.

It has been nearly 10 years since we withdrew Australian aid dollars from the International Fund for Agriculture. We quite sensibly had a good hard look at whether progress had been made over those 10 years in a number of committee hearings recently. We wanted to see progress with accountability and real evidence of value for Australian taxpayer funds. In particular, in 2004, the Howard government found that the fund had limited relevance to the Australian aid program's priority countries in South-east Asia and in the Pacific. It also found that there was a lack of comparative advantage and focus and that other organisations were more strongly involved in rural development in our region, so we withdrew the funding in 2004.

The recent coalition members' minority report to the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade stated that while there has been some progress and improvement in the management of this fund, it still does not deliver best value for some of our aid money at this time. We recommended that the bill be delayed until the concerns of the Howard government are fully addressed and the impact of the reform program commenced by the organisation's new management is better-known and properly assessed. We think that is only sensible and we know that there are other very significant and worthy projects in line for our aid funding, and we need to make sure that funds to this particular agricultural development enterprise really are best value for money.

Over the last few years, as part of my parliamentary duties, I have travelled to a number of African and Asian countries that are recipients of Australian aid in the form of cash for food and cash for infrastructure or for the delivery of projects that aim to build human capacity or to strengthen these countries' chances of feeding themselves. We have, of course, a particular skill and advantage in transferring best agricultural practice in both irrigation and dryland farming and it is very important that we pass that information on to countries that can then have a better chance of surviving floods, famine and drought. I have gone with delegations of parliamentarians to these countries with the key object of evaluating the efficacy of our foreign aid on the ground.

Per capita, Australia is a generous donor, but I have seen again and again that our contributions are invisible in the countries that are the beneficiaries of our support. Presumably, to save administration and oversight costs to our country, we are often content to make a contribution via a larger multinational agency like Save the Children or the WHO. We go off in partnership with other nations' aid providers. When this happens we can quickly lose the capacity to direct funds to projects in the places where we are most concerned—for example, in our neighbouring regions. We are also, as I said before, often invisible. It is quite amusing sometimes to see the sticky label put on the pump, the groundwater bore or the major piece of spinning or weaving infrastructure that we have donated. We see that sticker peeling off as we try to photograph it—it having just been placed on that piece of equipment that morning as our vehicle arrives. We, of course, also lose the opportunity to closely monitor or quality control the outcomes of our aid when we are not the direct administrators of the donation itself. I think we need to be much more hands-on in our approach to decisions about exactly where our funds should go, who in fact delivers the training or the building of the infrastructure, and who in fact makes sure the cash we donate goes to proper food supplies and that food is properly delivered.

Over the time I have been observing, and as the member for Murray, I now have a fundamentally different attitude to how we should deliver food aid in crises like famines, floods and droughts. Sadly, we are seeing more of those emergencies, particularly in African countries and also in other parts of the world where there has been strife, such as in Syria where there are so many people now in refugee camps and who are literally starving.

We typically offer cash and we are generous. For example, we have just given $10 million to the Mali conflict—$5 million for particular aid and another $5 million for special support to try and make peace. We are a generous nation. But, when it comes to food aid, I think there is a better way to do it than cash for food—cash which is spent by someone else in some other place and that, we hope, eventually ends up as food in the hungry mouths. New Zealand does it more cleverly; the USA does it more cleverly. What they do is send food. They do not send cash which disappears into corrupt pockets. They do not send cash which may be spent on something else besides food. Take New Zealand: they have magnificent dairy production—as we do in Australia—so Fonterra, the major dairy manufacturing cooperative in that country, is charged by their government to make very healthy, nutritious milk powder biscuits. These are virtually compressed milk powder and they form a very delicious and nutritious product to be sent into countries where they can be eaten by adults and children. They can also be put into liquids to help make a milk-type drink. So you have employment in New Zealand, you have a use of their dairy production, which is in a state of oversupply from time to time—an oversupply of product that cannot be sent off to their markets. It is an all-round win-win scenario.

As I speak, there are about 1,500 tonnes of apricots about to rot on the ground in the Goulburn Valley. Just yesterday I spoke to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Bob Carr, and I said to him, 'Why can't we have that product—not just the apricots but also the thousands of tonnes of unwanted pears, peaches and manufactured tomato products—actually sent to those countries as our aid donation rather than sending cash?' As I said before, when you look at what actual volume and quality of product finally gets to the starving and needy families, there is a significant difference between what is sent and what arrives on the ground in the form of real food. In the United States they send food aid all the time, depending on what the needs are of the country in distress but also depending on what they have available in their own country, which of course supports their own farm sector. Shock horror that we should support our farm sector in this country! I know it is anathema to many in this place, particularly on the other side, because that sounds like perhaps, heaven forbid, a subsidy. No, no, no! We can do special support measures for the automotive industry, and we all hear about that regularly. We can do special deals to make sure Virgin Airlines gets itself up and away as an international carrier between here and the United States. But, when it comes to looking at something sensible which is a win-win outcome for our agricultural food producers, the manufacturing sector and those who need food aid around the globe, it too often comes down to saying something like, 'That's a bit of a bother.' If we took all of the product currently being rejected by Coca-Cola Amatil in the SPC Ardmona food factory in Shepparton and if we as a government paid for that to be manufactured and sent as food aid directly into those camps in Turkey, Syria, Jordan and the other places that we currently have refugees fleeing to from conflict, wouldn't that be a better outcome? Wouldn't that be a much more sensible way to go instead of having good food rot on the ground in Australia while cash is sent from the taxpayers of Australia where we really do not see dollar-for-dollar food outcomes in the places where it is needed?

I am very pleased that Senator Carr, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, was quite sympathetic to what I was putting to him yesterday and is going to explore the possibilities. I just think that, again and again in Australia, all we tend to do is take the easy way out. We just say that we will send a cheque in the mail; we will send it via some other agency, whether it is a very reputable United Nations agency of long standing or not. We tend to do that and say the job has been done. I am saying that with our aid in the future we need a much more hands-on approach. We need to be better assured that Australian providers of information and education have the best chance of providing those capacity-building services in those other countries rather than see our foreign aid being spent, very regularly, on other countries' service providers.

Take for example the $285 million in aid given to China last year for education and training. Perhaps it would have been smarter for us, instead of doing that, to have those funds spent in scholarships or support for Chinese students to come to Australia. Perhaps, instead of calling it 'aid', we could make it a part of our intereducational exchange. Calling it 'aid' seems to me rather remarkable when China is amongst the top five economies of the world.

We make a very substantial per capita contribution to foreign aid. I think we should be proud of that. However, I think we can do it much better than the way we currently spend our foreign aid budget. It is not just a problem for this government. I think that for a very long time we have failed to see how we could make our aid also work for us, for some of the most needy in our nation—for example, our impoverished farmers, many of whom, as I speak, are wondering if they can feed their own families. If we could have a better system in Australia of using our own magnificent food production as our foreign food aid and if we could take a more hands-on approach to quality control, including better badging or identification of our aid in these countries, our own taxpayers could be assured of where their hard-earned dollars have gone. If we can make sure that our aid money is always spent in our own places of priority, then we will be much better off as a nation.

That is why we as a coalition have troubles with this particular bill. We do not think that the International Fund for Agricultural Development, as yet, has got itself to a state where it can be seen to be fully accountable, where it is the best value for money or where its money is best spent in our interests—which, in our case, is amongst our nearest neighbours. For those reasons, I feel that we should delay the contribution from Australia to the re-funding of this agricultural development enterprise until it has had a longer period of time to become more effective.

Certainly, when it comes to agricultural support for needy nations, Australia has so much to give. Not only do we have expertise in dryland production—we are one of the world's most efficient producers of low-rainfall cereals; that is indisputable—but also we often fail to peddle the fact that we are one of the world's greatest and most efficient irrigators. I was in one of our African recipient nations recently. They were very grateful for our helping them to increase their goat herding and therefore their milk and meat production from goats in desert type environments. That was very commendable work that we were doing. At the same time, though, they wondered out loud if we could help them with building an irrigation system on their massive underdeveloped water resources, their huge lakes and waterways. It occurred to me that, if you are talking about value for dollars and, dollar by dollar, the amount of food production and security which could have come out of helping them develop irrigated agriculture compared to additional protein from a few extra goats in a desert environment, perhaps we should have been thinking more carefully about irrigation projects at least having the same priority as projects delivered into desert regions.

I certainly feel that Australia needs to be proud of the aid that we deliver to needy places at times of great distress or simply as ongoing aid to help other countries develop, but I think we can administer our aid much more cleverly. We could make use of our own Australian fruit, meat, vegetable and cereal overproduction or spare production in a much more sensible way—that is, in the donation of direct food aid, in some cases deliberately manufactured foods, which can then be sent directly to the places most in need. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.

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