Peter Andren (Calare, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the day set aside in 1993 by the United Nations to try to unite the world on the need for all people on this planet to enjoy the most basic of rights, the right to sufficient food and water. Yet for all the good intentions, for all the endeavours by people and governments of goodwill and good intent, two billion people today have less than $2 a day to live on and, in the past 12 months, 10 million more people have moved from barely sufficient to insufficient food and sustenance.

The millennium goal of halving poverty by 2015 is in danger of faltering unless a massive recommitment is made by all well-endowed countries, Australia in particular. Tonight as I speak, the sun is high in the sky and it is about mid-afternoon on the African continent, where so much poverty and starvation abound, driven often by drought, of course, but more often by the internecine warfare between factions within and across borders drawn by former colonial masters who can rightly bear most of the blame for the misery, poverty and starvation that the warfare brings.

While Australia has recently contributed more to foreign aid, it is an aid largely predicated on desired political outcomes. It is not unconditional aid. In the week that Muhammad Yunus has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace on the back of his revolutionary Grameen Bank and microcredit initiative, Australia stands accused of largely ignoring this important strategy of lifting the poor from the clutches of dependence into self-sufficiency. Australia will spend but $14 million of its $2.95 billion aid budget on microfinance, yet the millions of micro loans made to poor Bangladeshis have helped rescue 100 million people from extreme poverty.

As the world focuses attention on poverty abroad, let us not forget the poverty afflicting our own Indigenous communities. Recently I was one of the handful of MPs who attended a meeting in this parliament organised by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ecumenical Commission of the National Council of Churches in Australia. The commission has set down eight goals to make Indigenous poverty history in this country by 2015. The goals include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal education with proper respect for the Indigenous cultures; promoting gender equality at all levels of education and participation; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating chronic and communicable disease; ensuring environmental sustainability, including that mining agreements and land use agreements are formed with free and prior informed consent of traditional owners; and developing a national partnership for development, including the re-establishment of an elected representative body. There should be truth in funding processes, acknowledging the wrongs of the past by way of a formal apology to the stolen generation, payment of reparations, establishment of a treaty and full land rights, and reparation of stolen wages in full.

The Council of Churches Social Justice Statement 2006 makes the telling observation: that, while the plight of Australia’s Indigenous people is well documented, there is little progress in addressing that. Rather, there is a misguided regression to a paternalistic model, the dismantling of representative bodies and a dramatic watering down of land rights. Global health statistics place Indigenous Australians below Bangladesh where Muhammad Yunus is doing his great work. The Council of Churches observes:

To ‘Make Indigenous Poverty History’, we believe that Indigenous Australia deserves the equivalent of the world’s Millennium Development Goals to provide a real framework of change. At the bedrock must be genuine self-determination ... and funding commensurate with the size of the problems.

To help achieve that, the 10-point Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health plan devised by Professor Ian Ring of Wollongong University and endorsed by the National Council of Churches must be the starting point. Professor Ring says that such a plan could reduce Indigenous mortality rates by 30 per cent in the next 10 years, as has happened much earlier with the New Zealand Maoris, the first nation people of Canada and the US and Alaskan first peoples. As with minority Indigenous people all over the world, poverty follows in the shadow of dispossession and devaluation of culture. The downward spiritual spiral created by such disrespect and abuse often leads to chronic despair, loss of self-esteem and the diseases of so-called development—a development that more often than not is achieved by exploitation of the poorest nations and peoples and causes obscene riches for some and the extremes of real and spiritual poverty for so many others.