Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was, member for Kingsford Smith, maybe one of your mates, Bono, who over the years has been a good leftist who recently said:

Aid is just a stop-gap.

You may like to write that down—

Commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.

And that is very true. That is what makes the biggest difference to people in poverty in the world. Down the track, if they open up their economies and take advantage of entrepreneurial capitalism that will lift more people out of poverty than any particular handout.

When it comes to what we can do for people in the Third World suffering from poverty, one of the great problems these people face, at the moment, is the issue of indoor air pollution. In fact, we are often told about indoor air pollution. This is where people living in the Third World simply do not have reliable and cost-effective electricity, so they are forced to burn dung, wood and twigs to cook and heat their homes. That causes millions of deaths every year.

In fact, the World Health Organization has said that there are 500,031 children—that is, over half a million children—under the age of five, the majority being girls, that die from indoor air pollution because they do not have access to low-cost electricity. Yet some of the policies that we have that are preventing people in the Third World from getting access to low-cost electricity are directly responsible for those hundreds of thousands of deaths.

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