Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hindmarsh for moving this important motion. We should start all debates of this kind by saying clearly that Australian aid matters. It is not a luxury product. It is not a feel-good optional extra for our country. Australian aid is literally a life-or-death issue for the children who are born in medically supervised environments, immunised from life-threatening diseases and given sanitised water as a result of Australian funded projects. Australian aid is literally life changing for the children who are able to go to school and the women and girls who are able to take control of their sexual health and their family planning and the women who are able to gain financial agency through village microcredit programs as a result of Australian funded projects.

Australian aid matters to the millions of people in our region and around the world whose lives have been saved or whose futures have been transformed. But Australian aid also matters to Australians and to the Australian national identity. At the strategic level, it matters to the stability of our region. We rightly invest billions of dollars in the Australian Defence Force—$32 billion a year—to ensure that Australia's interests can be protected from international threats. We should surely invest a tiny fraction of this in Australian aid to prevent the emergence of these threats in the first place. It is in all of our interests that a nation like Papua New Guinea, a rapidly growing nation of eight million people and our nearest northern neighbour, develops a strong government and a stable economy. People in Far North Queensland understand the implications of living within swimming distance of a nation on the verge of an epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis. It is in all of our interests that the Australian aid program assists the PNG authorities to head off this epidemic, just as we assisted them to head off an imminent epidemic of HIV-AIDS over the past decade.

It is in our national interest for Australian aid to support the work of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to provide the support services for asylum seekers and resettlement channels for refugees necessary to prevent the irregular mass movement of people through our region. And it is in our national interest, as a smaller nation, to support the rules based international order. Foreign aid, development aid, is in many ways the price of entry for being a good global citizen in the multilateral forums that Australia relies on to advance its national interests on the international stage.

A world in which every country looks out only for itself would not be a favourable world for Australia, and this is the real nub of the debate about Australian aid. It is a debate about the kind of world we want to live in and the kind of country that we want to be. Do any among us really want to live in a nation that tells our children that they must only look after themselves? Well may people say that charity begins at home, but nobody said that it should end at home—not for the country of the fair go, not for a nation founded on egalitarian values and not when it is within our control to save and transform the lives of millions of children who are no different in human dignity to our own.

Unfortunately, funding for Australian aid has not matched our values in recent years. While the previous Labor government substantially increased Australian aid spending during its six years of government, billions of dollars have been cut from Australian aid—$11 billion—under the Abbott-Turnbull government. This has brought Australian aid levels not only below the OECD average but also to the lowest levels since records began in the 1970s. The 2016-17 Turnbull government budget spent just 23c in every $100 of our national income on foreign aid, and on the current trajectory our aid program will continue to fall over the next decade, to just 0.17 per cent of gross national income. It is not good enough. These are life-or-death cuts that will have life-and-death consequences for real people around the world. We need to do better, for their sake and for our own. I have seen Australian aid at work in countries like Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea and Cambodia, and I can attest that Australian aid is a projection beyond our borders of the values that we have within our home. It is a projection of the kind of nation that we want to be and the kind of world that we want to shape.

At the moment, there is an emerging crisis on the African continent that calls on us to be particularly engaged, and this is the emerging famine situation in South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia, where 3.9 million people urgently need food assistance. So I call on the Australian government, and I call on all Australians in a private capacity, to contribute generously to avert this imminent crisis. We risk having a generation of young people in these countries wiped out by this famine, a famine the scale of which we have not seen for some decades. Consider the impact this will have on the development of these countries. Consider where it will leave these countries in future years. As I say, I call on the current government—including the foreign minister, Julie Bishop—and on Australians in their private capacity to give generously to avert this emerging crisis.

See this speech in context