Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There's no better way to strengthen security, stability and regional prosperity than through properly designed, delivered development assistance, which of course depends on a skilful and properly supported Australian aid program. Dollar for dollar, we achieve more in building peace and avoiding conflict, in promoting good government and fair trade through development assistance, than by any other means.

Every sensible person knows that. There was a quite unsensible person who just left this place. That's why it's so welcome that the Albanese government is returning Australia to its historical role as a focused and supportive development partner after a decade in which that role and responsibility were stupidly and callously abandoned.

The former coalition government started its life by inflicting the most savage and senseless funding cuts to Australia's aid program in living memory. One of their first acts was to dissolve our standalone development assistance agency, which, as anyone could imagine, had a seriously negative impact on the expertise, knowledge and culture that had accumulated over years and which had been the basis of an aid program that was independently rated as world-leading. At the outset, the coalition cut $1 billion, or approximately 20 per cent, from our ODA program. The 2015-16 budget saw the largest cut to Australia's aid program in our history. Over the life of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, $11.8 billion was scandalously pulled out of development assistance. For a government that ran up a trillion dollars in debt and was incapable of prudence or restraint, the billions they ripped out of our aid program remains one of the largest spending cuts they achieved.

In 2010, while a conservative Cameron government in the UK made it clear that they wouldn't seek to balance the books on the backs of the poorest people, the former coalition government delivered a sequence of deficits and a mountain of debt while also inflicting deeply harmful cuts on the poorest people in our region and the robodebt debacle on the poorest and most vulnerable Australians. And what did those cuts mean? They meant that fewer lives were saved. They meant that hundreds of thousands of people suffered aching poverty that could have been alleviated, including poverty in the form of disease, dirty water and malnutrition, which have a particularly acute and lasting impact on the lives of children and young mothers. They meant that our standing in our Pacific and South-East Asian region suffered as neighbours saw us withdraw support and heard the coalition government denying and even joking about the impacts of climate change.

For all those reasons, it was no surprise that, by the end of the Morrison government, we'd begun to face the consequences of that deterioration in Australia's regional standing. It was no surprise that Australia was no longer seen as the reliable and responsive partner of choice. We shouldn't have been surprised when there was preparedness by countries that face acute development challenges to consider support from other places, including through agreements with China that would have seriously compromised the open and self-determining character of the Pacific.

Australia can and should be an influential middle power not just in our region but especially in our region. The Albanese government sees that clearly. The government and the minister, who is here with us tonight, recognise that our national interests and our national values should be projected through all the features of our engagement with the wider world, through diplomacy, defence, development assistance and fair trade. That's why the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Wong; the assistant minister, the member for Gellibrand; and the Minister for International Development and the Pacific, the member for Shortland—in addition to, of course, the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister—have turned themselves inside out to re-engage with our regional neighbours and to re-engage with the wider world.

That's why this first budget of the Albanese Labor government is providing the single biggest increase to the development assistance budget since 2011-12. It's because we know there needs to be a long-term rebuild of our aid program. We're committed to year-on-year growth in the ODA budget. We're investing $37 million in expanding DFAT's capability to provide an ambitious, effective, targeted and responsible development program. We are increasing funding to the Pacific and to South-East Asia, and we're making sure there is a strong focus on climate change, on women, on people with disability and on regional and global health.

Why do we do this? We do this because it's absolutely in our national interest. It will make Australia safer. It will contribute to a more stable and more prosperous region. But it's also the right thing to do. It's an expression of our values as a nation—that we'll always look to lift up those who face tough circumstances and who face aching disadvantage.

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