Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Not at all. He does sit next to me, so I can understand the confusion. The member for Perth is devilishly handsome as well, so I'm happy to be mistaken for him! We are speaking about the Official Development Assistance Multilateral Replenishment Obligations (Special Appropriation) Bill 2019, and of course Labor, as the previous speakers have mentioned, will not be opposing this bill and support this bill. The key point of the contribution I want to make with regard to this piece of legislation is that there is a big difference between what this bill sets out to achieve and what we are seeing more broadly from the government with regard to foreign aid, with regard to Australia's place in the region and with regard to how we see ourselves as Australians.

Australians have always punched above our weight. We've always seen ourselves as positive partners, as positive players, in both our region and in the world, and I think Australians would be proud of much of the work that we do internationally, of which I'm going to talk a bit about today. But some of the comments by the Prime Minister, as the previous speaker, Ms Kearney, pointed out, have been small-minded, and they are also against our national interest. That is what I will be speaking about.

The Prime Minister stood in this place and said that we, as a country, need to move away from negative globalism, which stands in so much contrast to what we, as a country, have been about, to what we have achieved as part of the international community and to what we should be striving for in order to deal with the challenges that face not only us as Australians but also people in our region and across the world. But we cannot achieve and reach for solutions, and we cannot reach for better, if we are going to rip $1.8 billion out of the foreign aid budget. We cannot help those in our region if we cut education aid by 41 per cent and health assistance by 32 per cent.

When this government came into power in 2013, Australia's official development assistance was just over $5 billion. Right now, annually, it's $4.04 billion, down by almost $1 billion, which is around $1.5 billion a year in real terms. That's $1.5 billion being ripped out of our foreign aid budget because this government is afraid of what the Prime Minister calls 'negative globalism'. That's $1.5 billion that could be there to pursue our national interest and to assist our partners in the region. I note that the minister, Minister Hawke, is here. I know he shares all of our passion and concern for the Pacific as a region, but that is $1.5 billion that isn't being spent where it's needed.

Last year, as one of the first things I did when becoming a member of parliament, I was fortunate enough to go to our closest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, and I saw firsthand the incredible work that Australians do and the role that Australia plays in small Papua New Guinean communities. We landed in Port Moresby, took a flight up to Goroka, got in a car for about three hours, headed in past all sorts of local and really remote communities and ended up in the small town of Kainantu, where we were told that they'd never been visited by a Papua New Guinean MP let alone six Australian MPs. We were greeted with quite the reception. It was something I'll never forget. In the small village of Kainantu we saw a school being supported by the Australian government and we saw a health facility being supported by the Australian government. It is changing lives in this small town, lives which otherwise wouldn't have running water, wouldn't have access to proper medical care and wouldn't have access to classrooms, books or education.

The role that Australia is playing in that small town is connecting these young people not only to Australia but to the world. The ratio of people who leave that school and go on to work in industries even within Papua New Guinea is quite low, but even one person in a class or a family of tens can support their family back in the village. It was inspiring to see the lives that are changed by Australia. There was genuine appreciation from the Papua New Guineans that Australians weren't there to dictate to them what they should be doing; they were there to work with them, to partner with them and to work together as equals, friends and allies. That is prevalent not just in Papua New Guinea but right across the Pacific, right across South-East Asia, yet the government is taking that money away from those communities.

This is not just an argument about what feels good and what we should be doing to help people who need our help. I absolutely understand that there are people inside Australia who also need our help. It is against our national interest to be cutting off ties with these countries, especially countries like Papua New Guinea and others in the Pacific. In the region, China is trying to exercise influence. It's trying to increase its influence especially in Papua New Guinea, as I've been speaking about, but also in other areas of the Pacific. They are doing it in ways where we can't compete. They have far bigger budgets and a far bigger capacity to build infrastructure. To be frank, we don't need to compete with China on that. What we need to be doing is continuing to partner with the people.

As Australians we are very good at governance and helping communities set up governance processes, but we are even better at setting up education processes, education institutions and healthcare institutions. That's how we connect with people in our region. That's how we exercise influence over people in our region. That's how we as Australians are able to ensure our place as a key player in our region, not by cutting funding but by partnering with people on the ground, by partnering with communities, and by acknowledging that we as Australians can do more. We do not need to compete with China, because people, especially in the Pacific and other parts of South-East Asia, value Australians for partnering with them. They know that the best thing that we can do as friends is to support them. That's why it is absolutely staggering to see that the government has systematically reduced funding and reduced our footprint and impact in the region and across the world.

The other point to make about it is that it is short-sighted. In a lot of these countries, especially in the Pacific, there are a range of health challenges that are absolutely in our national interest to ensure that we are providing healthcare services for in these communities and not when they ventures overseas. I don't think that it's too much to say that with the coronavirus we are seeing the devastating economic impact of what an infectious disease can do across multiple economies and countries. But in Papua New Guinea, as one example, and other parts of the Pacific HIV is at much higher rates. Diseases like tuberculosis are thankfully not really prevalent in Australia, but drug resistance to tuberculosis is more and more prevalent in Papua New Guinea. That is not something that we would want to be able to jump ship across to Australia. We need to make sure that we are supporting these communities to deal with the what must seem at times insurmountable health challenges in their communities. And we cannot be cutting education services and education funding by $430 million or health services by $26.8 million, not just because it hurts those communities but because it hurts us as Australians. It is not in our national interest to be saying to the region and to be saying to our friends in South-East Asia and in the Pacific that we want to reverse our influence, we want to back track our influence and we want to reduce our influence as Australians.

The message that we should be saying to these people and what we should be saying to our friends is that we understand that you have challenges and it is Australia that will help you overcome them, it is Australia that has always been your friend and it is Australia that wants to see you achieve the things that you need. That's why, only a few weeks ago in a very memorable meeting here in this parliament, we saw the President of Indonesia come here and express a friendship that is so wonderful between our two countries. And yet we are cutting our foreign aid from the Indonesians almost in half, from $610 million in 2014-15 to now less than $300 million. Vietnam has seen a cut by half. The Philippines, who at a time like this, when the Filipino people absolutely need the support of Australians, has seen over $20 million cut. Laos has seen 40 per cent cuts. Cambodia has seen 33 per cent cuts. And it's not just the big figures. In Indonesia, the cuts weren't made to infrastructure; they were made to health, education and humanitarian assistance. We are not just hurting our friends with the way in which we are dealing with foreign aid, we are hurting ourselves and we are hurting our place in the region and across our part of the world.

I want to read out the final figures before I finish my contribution. The Prime Minister talks about the Pacific Islands. In fact, I've even seen the minister do some impressive dance moves on his visits to the Pacific. The minister is nodding his head quietly—very impressive dance movements! But I would plead to the government that taking money away from the Cook Islands is devastating for those small communities. Taking over $5 million away from Samoa, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Fiji—that's tens of millions of dollars from our closest neighbours, from the countries that we so desperately need to remain as our closest partners and our closest allies. Australia should see itself as a nation that helps bring others forward, as a nation that plays a positive part in our region and as a nation that looks outwardly in the world and embraces our neighbours and those around us. We should not have this small-minded small aim of wanting to retreat and cower in the corner. We should be looking at our multilateral organisations and looking at our friends in the Pacific and working with them as partners.

The final thing I'll say is that when you compound the cuts made to these small Pacific islands, with the fact that the Prime Minister ignored the requests, the pleas, from the Prime Minister of Fiji, among others, to do more to tackle climate change, it has a devastating impact on that precious relationship that has been built up for so long. For these neighbours, climate change is not a sport, like the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction sometimes likes to think it is. It's not just getting through the media cycle of the day. For these countries, climate change poses an existential threat—the water is rising on their very toes—and to compound the fact that we are taking much-needed Australian funds away from these communities, with a Prime Minister who at times seems to be tone deaf to the very needs of these communities, hurts the very good name that Australia has worked hard to achieve for our friends over a long period of time. So we do not stand in the way of this bill. This bill is about working with our partners and working with multilateral organisations. This bill is not about negative globalism, which the Prime Minister likes to spout in his Trumpian style. This bill is about reaching out, working with other communities, working with other organisations and working to improve the lives of people in our region. It's also to act in Australia's national interest to ensure that our region has stability and that Australia's place in the region is increased and not decreased.

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