Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I met recently with Jenny Dundas, a local constituent of mine, and her colleagues from the Baptist World Aid program, Catalyst. Catalyst is a program that empowers small community groups to speak up on behalf of the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised and enact real change on global issues. That was exactly why Jenny came to meet with me earlier this year. She is particularly concerned about the number of people in the world living without access to safe drinking water and adequate levels of sanitation. She is not alone in her concern. The United Nations have attempted to halve the proportion of people who live without safe drinking water and basic sanitation in their seventh millennium development goal of ensuring environmental sustainability by 2015.

However, of all the goals, this target is the one most off track. There are things we can do as a nation and as a parliament. We can make a timetabled commitment to lift our international aid budget to 0.7 per cent of GNI by 2020. We can increase our aid allocation to water, sanitation and hygiene to $50 million annually by 2015, and we can join the international Sanitation and Water for All partnership.

These are small actions that have the real potential to provide an additional 8.8 million people with access to safe drinking water and sanitation and save the lives of more than two million children by drastically minimising the global incidence of diarrhoea and water and hygiene related malnutrition. (Time expired)