Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House welcomes the news of recent progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in particular:

(1)

recognises there has been a substantial decline in the proportion of people living on less than US$1 dollar a day and a substantial increase in the proportion of people with access to clean water;

(2)

acknowledges that despite some progress, a number of MDGs are off track and that a business as usual approach will mean the MDGs will not be met globally by 2015;

(3)

notes its concern that in a world of plenty there are still unacceptably high child and maternal mortality rates in the developing world;

(4)

recognises that progress toward the MDGs is being hampered by the global financial crisis, the global food crisis and the global effects of climate change;

(5)

welcomes Australia’s progress on developing a global partnership for development while recognising that our progress falls short of the aspirations we expressed when joining with the nations of the world to set the MDGs; and

(6)

acknowledges Australia needs to turn its aspirations into actions that draw us closer to achieving the MDGs by 2015.

The Millennium Declaration set 2015 as the target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, which established quantitative benchmarks to halve extreme poverty in all its forms. With less than six years to go the world finds itself dealing with the worst financial crisis in more than 75 years. The GFC means that the MDGs are now threatened by sluggish or negative economic growth, diminished resources and fewer trade opportunities for developing countries. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals Report 2009 provides a snapshot of global progress towards achieving these goals. It confirms that while progress has been made the international community must redouble efforts to ensure the goals are achieved by 2015.

The report estimates that the global recession will lead to 90 million more people falling into extreme poverty and threatens to slow or halt progress in developing countries towards achieving their MDG targets. Despite the global economic crisis the target for reducing income poverty remains within reach at the global level, based on current growth projections. The goals for gender parity in primary and secondary education and for access to safe water have also seen relatively good progress and are expected to be met at the global level by 2015.

Of greatest concern are the non-income human development goals. Based on a business-as-usual approach, most human development MDGs—especially for child and maternal mortality, but also for primary school completion, nutrition and sanitation—are unlikely to be met at the global level. On 11 September, UNICEF announced the results of a tracking study by the World Health Organization, World Bank and UNICEF. Their study shows that the number of children dying from hunger and disease has fallen 28 per cent since 1990. In 2008, 8.8 million children died—down from 12.5 million in 1990. This is 10,000 fewer children dying every day, but that still leaves more than 20,000 children dying each day.

A key to this reduction in child deaths has been immunisation for measles, use of insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria and vitamin A supplements to prevent blindness and to fight infection. Despite such progress more still needs to be done to help countries reach the MDG target of cutting child deaths by two-thirds by 2015. The Rudd government recognises that our efforts must be redoubled and has put accelerating progress towards the MDGs at the centre of Australia’s aid program. Australia is making greater investments in the key MDG sectors, such as education, health and environmental sustainability, and we are directing resources to support economic growth and infrastructure development, which in the long term also helps address poverty.

We are working with developing countries to support achievement of the MDGs through assistance at country, regional and global levels. Following the Prime Minister’s 2008 Port Moresby declaration, Australia is establishing partnerships for development to achieve better development outcomes in the Pacific, including more rapid progress towards MDG targets. The Cairns compact adopted by Pacific Islands Forum leaders in August 2009 provides a vital platform to improve government effectiveness and better coordinate development resources to advance the MDGs. Australia is also broadening and deepening our engagement in Africa, with increased development assistance to support Africa’s progress towards the MDGs.

In 2009-10 Australia will provide an estimated $3.8 billion in official development assistance, comprising 0.34 per cent of gross national income, on track to the government’s on-going commitment to increase official development assistance to 0.5 per cent of GNI by 2015-16.

The Pacific Partnerships for Development will be a mechanism to provide better development outcomes for the Pacific island nations and to accelerate progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Partnerships have been signed with Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Tonga and Nauru. Australia’s estimated official development assistance to Africa in 2009-10 is $163.9 million to support Africa’s achievement of the MDGs and to contribute to humanitarian assistance and support in Zimbabwe.

In 2009-10, Australia will continue to implement the 2008-09 budget measure, UN partnerships for the MDGs, which provides $200 million over four years in core contributions to key UN agencies to support the MDGs. It was my privilege, on 14 September, as co-convenor of the Parliamentary Friends of the Millennium Goals to welcome delegates from the 2009-10 Micah Challenge Voices for Justice conference. Thank you.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and I commend the member for Parramatta on her moving of it. The global financial crisis highlights more than ever the central role that economic development and economic growth have in our fight against poverty. The recent report of the World Bank on the Millennium Development Goals and our progress towards them makes this point crystal clear:

The impact of the global financial crisis on developing countries is reflected in sharp reductions in their projected GDP growth to rates that are the lowest since the 1990s. Average projected GDP growth in developing countries in 2009 is now only about a quarter of what was expected before the financial turmoil intensified into a full-blown crisis in the latter half of 2008 and a fifth of that achieved in the period of strong growth up to 2007. For developing countries as a whole, growth is now projected to fall to 1.6 percent in 2009, from an average of 8.1 percent in 2006–07. Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to slow to 1.7 percent in 2009, from 6.7 percent in 2006–07, breaking the momentum of the region’s very promising growth revival of recent years.

When you add to this the issue of what is happening with food prices, the report states:

The sharp slowdown in growth can seriously set back progress on poverty reduction and other MDGs. Food price increases between 2005 and 2008 pushed around 200 million more people into extreme poverty, and about half of them will remain trapped in poverty in 2009 even as food prices recede from their peaks.

The truth here is that, as we see these economic events unravel and while we have been incredibly fortunate here in this country for many reasons which we have debated in this place, for those not in this place and not in this country the situation is very desperate. I refer to the impact on the lives of individuals who will be lost as a result. I quote the report again:

Experience suggests that growth collapses are costly for human development outcomes … Countries that suffered economic contractions of 10 percent or more between 1980 and 2004 experienced more than 1 million additional infant deaths. It is estimated that the sharply slower economic growth resulting from the current financial crisis may cause as many as 200,000 to 400,000 more infant deaths per year on average between 2009 and the MDG target year of 2015, which translates into 1.4 million to 2.8 million additional infant deaths during the period.

These figures are extremely disturbing and, as I said at the outset, I think they highlight just how important economic growth is to releasing people from poverty. It has been the process of economic reforms, the growth of trade, the growth of our economies and the pursuit of policies that have pursued growth that have lifted literally hundreds of millions of people out of poverty like nothing else. It is these policies that we must once again rely on to ensure these people have a future, because we can do all we can through our own efforts, but if their economies do not grow and the jobs do not come then children will die. That is the absolute lesson of history when it comes to these matters. Failure of their economies will lead to a drastic failure in human outcomes, which can be translated into nothing other than the deaths of children at the most extreme level.

A few weeks ago youth representatives of the Micah Challenge came to visit me here in Parliament House. As we know, the Micah Challenge is a church based campaign that promotes action on global poverty and in particular on the Millennium Development Goals. I think one of the great achievements of movements like the Micah Challenge is that they have raised global awareness of this issue. While there will be debates in this place about the need to do what we are doing or not do what we are doing, and on what the government is doing in terms of expenditure, one thing that I am pleased has not become a debate in this place is whether we should be rolling back our aid commitments to overseas countries. I think it is a proud statement for all in this chamber that we have been able to commit ourselves continuously to the support we provide to others in other places.

Poverty, when we are exposed to it, should horrify us. It should cause us great grief and we should not seek to walk away from that or try to suppress it because it has a purpose; a purpose which should prompt us towards action. I commend the government on the actions they have taken in this area, and with the support of the coalition we will continue to support these countries, but the question remains for each of us: we can look at countries and we can look at governments and ask what they should do, but what we should do? There are many things we can do in our own right. (Time expired)

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Will Durant, the Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote in Heroes of History:

Human history is a fragment of biology. Man is one of countless millions of species, and, like all the rest, is subject to the struggle for existence and the competitive survival of the fittest to survive. All psychology, philosophy, statesmanship and utopias must make their peace with these biological laws. Man can be traced to about a million years before Christ. Agriculture can be traced no farther back than to 25,000 B.C. Man has lived forty times longer as a hunter than as a tiller of the soil in a settled life. In those 975,000 years his basic nature was formed, and remains to challenge civilization every day.

The tillers and the hunters in the most civilized of communities have developed an economic and social system that allows them to feed their own and to look to a future that is sustainable. There are hunters and tillers in other civilizations in our world who are unable to develop an economic and social system that allows them to feed themselves and to sustain their future.

The millennium goals are an attempt by developed countries, along with undeveloped countries, to seek goals and targets that will allow all communities to have a social and economic life that is both sustainable and enables individuals to lead a fulfilling life. We would do well to remember those goals: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV-AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. They are the goals, and each of those contains targets.

In our world today we have experienced and continue to experience food crises, the financial crisis, a climate crisis and trade crises, but the same countries and communities experience poverty and hunger and want and pestilence and war and terror while the most developed countries, in comparative terms, do not. What the millennium goals seek to do is to share the good fortune, the wealth, the knowledge, the experience and the expertise of those that have with those that have not. Yet, as a world we try to do this but fail poorly.

Australia is part and parcel of both a cause and a solution. We need to do our bit, and it does not hurt to remind ourselves in comparative and relative terms what real poverty is, what real hunger is, what climate change can really do in the world, what poor mental and physical health can do to people, what a lack of education and of basic resources like water can do to communities. I think we in this place ought to seriously remind ourselves of that when we get carried away with some of the debates we have. We ought to remember how lucky we are and remember the responsibilities we have, not just to our own nation but to the world.

There are almost 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty in our world. That means they live on less than US$1.25, which is insufficient to meet their most basic needs. They are hungry, susceptible to disease and lack access to things we take for granted such as clean water, decent sanitation and access to health care. I think we all know we could do a lot more. I thank the member for Parramatta for raising this issue and I hope we keep giving it a comparable relationship to the things we talk about it in this place.

Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I commend the member for Parramatta for raising the issue of the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs, in the House this evening. I will start by saying that the statement of the parliaments of the world on actions for the MDGs was most definitely ambitious but, sadly, the outcomes have not been so impressive, particularly in our Asia-Pacific region. It is and should be of grave concern to this parliament of Australia that the report in August this year from AusAID titled Tracking development and governance in the Pacific has outlined that the progress in the Millennium Development Goals in three nations we have very close contact with and responsibilities towards is of grave concern. On every millennium development goal, Papua New Guinea is sadly off track. The Solomon Islands is having difficulty with many of the Millennium Development Goals. Fiji is most definitely off track and Timor-Leste is significantly off track in MDG outcomes. I speak specifically about progress on MDG 6 which is causing me major concern, and that is to do with the issues of HIV. PNG is off track on MDG 6 and so is Timor-Leste. This is a significant concern.

It is essential that members of parliament understand that they have a role and responsibility in actively delivering the MDGs. I question the way in which the reporting is done on MDGs. I do not know how many parliamentarians on both sides of the House, in the government and in the opposition, are acquainted with the reporting of the MDGs through the department. How is the parliament involved in this reporting process? How is the parliament apprised of the reporting process? It was statements of the parliaments that were to outline the actions to be taken to meet the MDGs. Instead, we have little involvement. That must change. Parliamentarians must engage themselves in the debate and engage themselves in actively understanding how the MDGs are reported and exactly how we are meeting the tasks.

In relation to MDG 6, it is essential that members of parliament understand that they have a role and responsibility to actively ensure the delivery of rights and the dignity of those who are living with HIV, including reducing stigma and discrimination; but that is not what is happening. Stigma, discrimination and marginalisation are still happening in every corner of the world, particularly on issues covered by MDG 6. It should be mandatory for departments to brief relevant parliamentary committees and actively interested members and senators on the MDG reporting procedures and progress statements. It is very important that parliamentarians become involved in how the MDGs are delivered. I speak specifically of areas that are of grave concern to me in the way in which some of our funding is being delivered, particularly in Asia-Pacific nations, in Timor-Leste, PNG and the Solomon Islands. We must start to do more than just put together capacity statements. We must enable delivery on the ground. We must engage with those countries that are preventing delivery on the ground to meet the targets of significant development goals. I again speak about MDG 6. I look at all the outposts that have been closed in areas like PNG and I wonder how we are engaging with Papua New Guinea to see that those health outposts are reopened so that people can get access to diagnosis, testing and treatment. There is so much we can do was parliamentarians. There is so much we should be doing as parliamentarians. We must engage ourselves in delivering outcomes because unless parliamentarians get involved in this delivery process and reporting process we are going to see a continuing demise of the MDG outcomes.

Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Parramatta for her motion concerning the Millennium Development Goals, which are the means chosen by 189 member states of the United Nations to tackle global poverty. There are many causes of poverty in the world, but in part they can be traced to two key themes—indifference and injustice. Today I want to talk particularly about indifference and injustice towards women. In my view we will not end poverty until we prioritise the needs and voices of women.

Of all the MDGs, it is goal 5, on maternal health, where the least progress has been made. More than 500,000 women die each year as a result of complications during pregnancy. Half of these maternal deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and another third occur in southern Asia. Together, these two regions account for 85 per cent of all maternal deaths. We know that more than half of all births in these regions take place without the assistance of trained personnel. Most of the deaths could be prevented with good quality reproductive health services, antenatal care, the provision of appropriately skilled birth assistance and access to emergency obstetric care. In this context I am happy to note that both the United States and Australia have this year dispensed with the harmful restrictions that previously stopped the provision of aid for family planning and reproductive health.

Of course, all the MDGs are linked and intertwined. Improvements in maternal health would positively impact upon the chances of a child reaching his or her fifth birthday, reduce the number of orphans and keep more young women alive. The Australian government has committed to doing more in child and maternal health and is looking at ways to build up the skills of health workforces in Africa and in the Asia-Pacific region, including by training midwives.

Clean water and sanitation is another fundamental pillar of development that has been demonstrated to lead to better health and welfare all round. The Australian government has committed to helping improve the delivery of water and sanitation services to local communities. This will directly benefit women, to whom the task of fetching and carrying water generally falls. Research in sub-Saharan Africa suggests that women spend some 40 billion hours a year collecting water. The recent UNIFEM report on the progress of the world’s women 2008-09—entitled ‘Who Answers to Women?’—cites an example in Nazlet Fargallah, in Egypt, of women gathering water up to four times a day and using sewage-contaminated water for washing. Without proper latrines, these women would commonly wait until dark to relieve themselves, leaving them ill and also vulnerable to attack. The situation changed when a local government water and sanitation project introduced female health visitors and enabled women to participate in community and household decisions about how to improve health and livelihoods. The 700 households now each have two taps and a latrine, and those women spend less time gathering water and have gained dignity and security.

MDG 3, which seeks to promote gender equality and empower women, is one of the most important of the MDGs because it directly impacts upon women’s and children’s access to services, their voice in decision-making and their vulnerability to violence. Indeed, women are agents of change but they largely operate outside the formal political systems of their nations. Grassroots volunteerism in NGOs is the starting point for many women and, in the international community, NGOs are playing an increasingly important role.

I was in Bangladesh in January and visited some projects being run by the incredible development organisation BRAC in a rural area outside of Dhaka. BRAC has a holistic approach to poverty alleviation and the empowerment of the poor through health, education and microfinance programs. It has so far disbursed US$5.27 billion in small loans, with a 99.3 per cent recovery rate. The women told me how the loans had helped them to transform their lives, given them their dignity back and empowered them within their own families and community. The efforts of Bangladeshi women are transforming Bangladesh from the ground up, and NGOs like BRAC and UN agencies like UNICEF have had a lot to do with it because they target their programs towards women.

There is obviously a long way to go to ensure that all the world’s people have the basic conditions for a stable life. These include freedom from violence; freedom from poverty; access to health care and, specifically, reproductive and maternal health care; access to education; and access to employment. The MDGs are our signposts to tell us how close we are—or how far away we are—to achieving these goals by the target date of 2015.

As I have noted, one of the most effective ways to get there is through the empowerment of women. By focusing on the MDGs relating to maternal and child health, water and sanitation and gender equality, we will help poor women everywhere to help their communities and to make poverty history for themselves. In the words of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who became Liberia’s and Africa’s first elected woman president three years ago: ‘Women can overcome old barriers, can seize new opportunities, can aspire to leadership and can lift their families, communities and economies’.

I thank the member for Parramatta for her motion.

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I commend the member for Parramatta’s motion. I also acknowledge our guests who have been in Canberra in recent days for the Micah Challenge. I was invited to participate in the TEAR advocacy panel at their workshop in early October with Kelvin Thomson. I also acknowledge the VGen activity that Vision has been running in Melbourne and the young people’s commitment to highlighting the need for the MDGs and also their work to achieve them.

The motion before us today recognises some of the challenges, but a cartoon that was shown at the TEAR advocacy conference at Phillip Island captured it well. It shows a young person from the developing world standing on a globe out in space. There is a soccer goal and the young person has to kick the ball through space to that goal. It captured what the MDGs are—clear goals to focus our efforts but not a prescription for how to get there. As a nation and a donor community, we need to turn our minds to what the pathway is to achieve these goals. While we see some encouraging signs and spotty progress against a number of the targets, we also see some worrying signs about what is happening where growth is impacting in a very vicious way on the opportunities for developing countries and concern about the ongoing support of ODA from developed countries.

So I would be saying to those who are really committed to the MDGs: let’s not fall into the habit that some in the corporate world fell into. In this place we have debated about people running finance companies, banks and investment institutions who target their efforts specifically to meet KPIs but ignore the long-term health, durability and sustainability of the organisations that they are overseeing. We have highlighted how that can diminish the effort and devalue the organisation.

We need to be mindful of that risk with the MDGs. We can transfer wealth from developed countries to developing countries, specifically aimed at targeting the MDGs, and we can be comforted that progress is being made, but are we actually enhancing the opportunity for those developing countries to support and sustain their own living standards, to determine their own directions as a nation and to be free of the ailments, the pain, the suffering and the mortality of poverty that are captured in the MDGs? That is a more difficult question but one we need to turn to.

We also need to make sure we are mindful of what we are doing. Too often these campaigns are run out of offices in Europe and the United Kingdom and sometimes the United States. They can be very Africa focused. I am not here to say that Africa does not face its challenges, but two-thirds of the world’s poor live in our neighbourhood. Half a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in our region during my adult life. Seven-hundred million people are still living in poverty in our region, yet so much of the focus is on Africa. We need to be very mindful that in our own backyard are the biggest challenges of poverty alleviation and not see our efforts diluted. It worries some, me included, that the Rudd government’s efforts to secure a temporary UN Security Council seat may see money that many argue, me included, should be increased, in terms of our funding for overseas development assistance, being even further diluted as we try and put resources into regions of the world that the Europeans, the Americans and others see as their priority, leaving our own neighbourhood, where two-thirds of the world’s poor live, disadvantaged as that aid money is spread too thin.

Let me give you some examples. About 37 per cent of the population of least developed countries live in our region, the Asia-Pacific, yet least developed countries in our area receive 20 per cent of overseas development assistance. Let me put it more simply: two in five people living in least developed countries live in the Asia-Pacific region, yet one in five of the dollars available for overseas development assistance is put into that effort. In terms of debt relief, we have seen the Asia-Pacific least developed countries miss out again. So we need to be absolutely focused on our region because there is much work to be done.

It also provides us with a template for how to achieve poverty alleviation. There is only one proven, durable formula, and that is economic growth. There is no example in human history where poverty has been alleviated on a sustainable basis by simply transferring wealth from one country to another. The only remedy is economic growth. In our region we see example after example where countries have had national strategies and have taken on board the challenges of poverty within their countries, embracing aid, support, technical assistance, know-how and the goodwill of hundreds of Australians who share their expertise and have mapped a way out. They are to be congratulated for it. So in our region we have a huge challenge, but we have wonderful experience to draw from. I urge people, when they are considering MDGs, to think about MDGs in the Asia-Pacific region first.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I would like to thank the members of the House who have spoken so passionately on this motion. Global poverty is an issue that should be of concern to us all. I am co-convenor, with Senator Guy Barnett, of the Parliamentary Friends of the Millennium Development Goals, and it is gratifying to both of us to see so much interest on this very serious issue. But the interest is not just within parliament. There are many people out there in the community who have been working very hard for a long time to raise the profile of this issue. We met quite a few of them a couple of weeks ago, on 14 September, when around 300 delegates of the Micah Challenge Voices for Justice descended on Parliament House and made sure that we were all well and truly aware of how concerned they were and how much work there was to be done. I would particularly like to thank John Beckett, who is the director for Micah Challenge, and Carlyn Chen, the coordinator for Voices for Justice, for the incredible amount of work they did in organising that event and for the wonderful ways they found to express their concern.

The MDG speed dating event was particularly successful, where each of us got to spend a few minutes with a group of incredibly passionate people and were grilled about our views on various things. One of the best ideas that I heard at the speed dating event was that one of the communities had imposed a toilet tax to remind people that many people in the world do not have toilets. So every time you use a public toilet in that community you are charged a fee, known as the toilet tax. It sounds quite frivolous, but of course it is not. There is education, for example. There are 75 million children still not in school—most of those girls. If you build a school without a toilet, only the boys go. You realise how important it is when you visit villages, as I did, in Cambodia and the Philippines, that have no toilets. You realise that for women in particular it leads to other medical issues—bladder infections et cetera—which are quite dangerous. It sounds frivolous, but I think the toilet tax was quite an interesting way for one of our communities to raise the profile of a very serious issue.

I also attended a wonderful function a couple of weeks ago, where a group of young soccer players and representatives of the Socceroos and the Matildas launched One Goal in Australia—a particularly good idea that uses the World Cup in Africa in 2010, one of the greatest and most well-known sporting events in the world—to focus attention on education. Again, as I said, there are 75 million children in the world who are not in school, and around half of those are in Africa. Football, as it is now called—I still call it soccer, I am afraid—is played all over the world. It is played in city stadiums but it is also played in the dust in small villages and refugee camps. It is played everywhere. The World Cup is an event which well and truly attracts the attention of the world. What an extraordinary idea to use that event to promote the need for education around the world.

One has to ask why so many people are so passionate about this. The answer is very simple: the story of poverty in the world is truly appalling. Because of the global financial crisis, between 200,000 and 400,000 additional children will die each year in the next five or six years before we reach the 2015 target. These are appalling figures: 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty. It is gratifying to see—and I know that every member of parliament would agree with me—that our communities, particularly young people, do not let us forget it.