Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. Last month, on 14 April, more than 300 girls were abducted in the middle of the night from the safety of their beds by armed men. Exactly six weeks have now passed and 276 of these children remain in captivity. The whole world has watched with great concern, hoping with each passing day for news of the girls' safe return. As the member for Brisbane said, any parent who has been watching this can imagine their own daughter in the place of those girls. We can only imagine the depth of the girls' terror and the parents' grief.

Michelle Obama captured the sentiment of many parents watching on Mother's Day when she said:

In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters. We see their hopes, their dreams … These girls embody the best hope for the future of our world ... and we are committed to standing up for them not just in times of tragedy or crisis, but for the long haul.

That long haul includes a commitment from wealthy countries like Australia to play our role in the global community and that means a robust aid program—the first step towards standing up for these girls. Aid makes a very real and measurable difference in the world's ability to educate girls. The member for Brisbane spoke very properly about investment in counter-terrorism measures in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and that is, of course, very important. But aid does something else: it builds safer and more equal societies that counteract movements like Boko Haram. Frankly, it builds the schools for these girls to attend.

Prior to these aid cuts, for example, in 2012-13, the Australian aid program in Africa increased the provision of basic sanitation for 12,000 schoolchildren. It provided over 5.6 million vulnerable people with life-saving assistance in conflict and crisis situations. It resulted in an increased income for 94,000 people, including 31,000 women, and it provided more than 100,000 women with increased access to safe water. Aid matters.

Unfortunately last December Ms Gambaro, the member for Brisbane, was complaining about Australian aid in Africa. She said:

I specifically stated that the coalition was really concerned about the large amount of funding going to the Middle East and Africa.

And:

… an enormous amount of money was skewed. Between 2007 and 2008, there was also a 251 per cent increase in spending in Africa, from $111 million-$354 million.

To be, on the one hand, worried about these girls and, on the other hand, to undermine our ability as a country to build the schools that the girls attend and to lift people out of poverty! It is poverty that drives these organisations; poverty is a recruitment drive for organisations like Boko Haram. This motion states that a strong commitment 'to empowering women and girls socially, politically and economically' is important; but you cannot talk about that in the abstract and then cut the means of delivering that empowerment.

Australian aid has seen seven million extra children and over three million girls go to school in Afghanistan. Australian aid built or extended 2,000 schools in Indonesia, creating around 330,000 extra school places. Australian aid made schools free for the first three grades of school in Papua New Guinea, which enabled more than 535,000 children to access free education. We know, when families are making a decision about whether to educate their daughters or their sons, they always prioritise their sons. Think about the girls who are going to school because of this investment in free schooling.

Under Labor the aid program was on track to reach 0.5 per cent of gross national income. That target was set during the Howard government years. Overseas aid increased every year under the federal Labor government, almost doubling under our time in government; yet in this budget the coalition has cut $7.6 billion from aid, stripped the program of transparency and removed long-term targets. The $7.6 billion cut would pay for 25 million people to learn to read and write; it would pay for 1.5 billion life-saving malaria treatments; it would pay for antiretroviral treatment for 10 million people with HIV AIDS; or it would train three million new midwives. The Australian aid cut to Africa is one of the most devastating. This financial year alone more than $90 million has been cut from sub-Saharan African aid programs. Our aid dollars go a very long way in Africa. Aid in Africa builds better and safer lives for women and girls. Aid ensures that girls can go to school, stay in school and feel safe in school.

As our government is pulling back from a robust aid program and slashing aid to Africa, the rest of the world is becoming increasingly optimistic about what we can achieve when we make a commitment to ending poverty in developing countries. Last year, the development committee of the World Bank set the goal of ending extreme poverty by the year 2030. More recently, the United Nations General Assembly working group on global goals concluded that:

Eradicating extreme poverty in a generation is an ambitious but feasible goal.

The world has a historic opportunity to end extreme poverty in a generation. The UN Secretary-General's Special Adviser on the Millennium Development Goals, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who I met last week, firmly believes that aid can end poverty and he argues that:

Only through global cooperation can individual nations overcome the crisis of extreme poverty, economic instability, social inequality and environmental degradation.

The MDGs have been an essential step towards ending poverty. They have been the most effective global poverty alleviation projects in the history of humanity. The next development agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals, will be adopted at a world summit at the UN in September 2015. These will be important progress in the continued commitment that all of us should share to ending extreme poverty. Africa will continue to be a major focus of the world's fight against poverty. Since the 1950s, Africa's population has increased from fewer than 230 million people to over one billion. Today over 70 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa still lives on less than US$2 a day and, as estimated by Robert Rotberg, half of all the people in the world born from now until 2050 will be African.

Despite the persistence of poverty and the daunting continued population growth, many conditions and development indicators in Africa have improved in recent decades. Child mortality in Africa has declined from 229 per 1,000 births in 1970 to 146 per 1,000 births in 2007. Indeed, worldwide 14,000 fewer children died in 2011 than in 1990. So, despite the growth in the world population, 14,000 fewer people died in 2011 compared to in 1990. Adult literacy in Africa has increased from around 27 per cent in 1970 to around 62 per cent in 2007. Primary school net enrolments have increased from around 53 per cent in 1991 to around 70 per cent in 2007. So aid is working and the economic development that has come with aid has lifted millions out of extreme poverty.

While the aid we have already given has made a difference, the need is still great and aid still needs to be more targeted. Professor Sachs explained:

… the record shows that Africa has long been struggling with rural poverty, tropical diseases, illiteracy, and lack of infrastructure, the right solution is to help address these critical needs through transparent and targeted public and private investments. This includes both more aid and more market financing.

It is in that vein that I call on the government to reverse the cuts to Australian aid. We are a prosperous and a generous nation. Our national identity and our place in the world are defined by many things. Our willingness to contribute generously to aid is one of those. On top of that our aid program is also in our national interest. Countries like China and South Korea that used to receive Australian aid dollars are now major trading partners.

I have to finish by saying that every one of us in this place is concerned beyond words for the interests of these girls who have been kidnapped by Boko Haram. When we refuse to invest in education in Africa and prevent girls just like them from getting safe schooling and when we prevent girls just like them from accessing health care and midwives then we are able to be accused very easily of being easy with the empty words but very short on follow-through.

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