Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I want to thank Sandra Hough and the many others who have written to me through the Voices for Justice program. Sandra writes:

Keep the Promise—Global Day for the Eradication of Poverty

I am writing to you as a member of your electorate.

As you may know, 17 October is the Global Day for the Eradication of Poverty. I am writing to ask you to help Australia "Keep the Promise" to the world's poor.

In 2000, Australia, along with all countries in the world, signed on to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—a global promise to halve extreme poverty by 2015. This critical date is now just over 3 years away.

Much progress has been made towards the MDGs, such as a significant improvement in child mortality rates.

However, each day 21,000 children still die from preventable causes.

While Australia has increased its Official Development Assistance (ODA) significantly since 2000, it is still only around half of the global promise of 0.7% of GNI.

I urge you to help ensure Australia continues its bipartisan commitment of scaling up ODA to 0.5% of GNI by 2015, and puts forward a timetable for reaching the global goal of 0.7%. This is vital to us playing our part in achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon states in the 2011 MDG Report, "Between now and 2015, we must make sure that promises made become promises kept". Please help ensure Australia keeps our promise.

I am standing up for the Voices for Justice to ensure we do keep our promise.

The Micah Challenge is very relevant in my electorate. Many participants are involved in the Millennium Development Goals, and I commend them for keeping this issue alive. So many people campaign and come and see you and advocate about an issue and once they have done it, it is gone. But this is a group that has kept going since 2000. They have kept up the pressure. So many times people come to see you in your office and they tell you all about their issue and you say, 'What do you want me to do as your member of parliament?' They look at you, stunned, as if they are thinking, 'Oh, we can actually ask what we want you to do.'

The people with the Micah Challenge know exactly what they want. They want to see the eradication of poverty. They want to see countries commit to achieving 0.07 per cent of GDP across the board so that we can ensure that the almost 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty—and that means on less than US$1.25 a day—get more than that and that they have their basic needs met and are not going hungry. We are in an incredibly wealthy world and we should be able to do more. As the Micah Challenge briefing note says:

In the year 2000, the world's leaders including Australia's, came together at the Millennium Summit in New York and declared that they 'will spare no effort to free [their] fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty'.

We need to keep that promise. We need to keep working towards it.

I want to commend all of those people who came up to see me recently when we all stood outside near the giant toilet. There were so many people waiting outside without a loo. I see the Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs at the table. He was very gracious on that day but, like I did, he decided not to sit on the giant loo! We were happy to stand behind it and recognise that there are millions around the world literally waiting for sanitation. We can joke about it but this is tragic. So many children die needlessly from disease that can be eradicated if they have access to clean water and sanitation.

The Voices for Justice participants who came to see individually were Piers Hartley, Margaret Hartley, Leanne Palmer, Anushka Wijesooriya and Simon Moyle. Many of these people are from my electorate. They are very involved in their local church groups through the Syndal Baptist, through Crossways and through many of the uniting churches in my area. World Vision's headquarters also falls in my new redistribution area. This is a very active group, and I really want to thank them for not just thinking about themselves. So many people nowadays just look inwardly and do not think about others.

This is a group who may never meet these poor people. Some of them have, remarkably, gone and been involved in aid programs overseas. These people are keeping alive this promise and making sure we as wealthy nations keep our promises. We are reaching many of the aid development targets but many we are not. We are falling behind, particularly in the area of sanitation. More needs to be done. We are doing well in the area of water, but in that area of wash we need to be doing more. Perhaps we just do not want to talk about having plumbing in your backyard.

One of the other areas of interest to the Millennium Development Goals is the impact of climate change on the poorest of the poor, and I think that one of the things that we have done today, passing the clean energy bills, will have a global impact upon those people who are the most vulnerable in our community.

In the last seconds I have remaining I want to recognise Professor Ezio Rizzardo, who is a winner tonight of one of the Prime Minister's Prizes for Science. He works in my electorate at the CSIRO at Clayton and he is an amazing part of a scientific endeavour. (Time expired)