Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Will the minister advise the House of steps the government has taken to ensure Australia has a more sustainable, effective and efficient aid program?

Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mitchell for his question. I can assure him that the Australian government is delivering a more effective, more efficient and sustainable aid budget and one that is affordable—one that the Australian taxpayers can afford. Our focus, of course, is on improving lives of the people in our region, and we need to broaden and deepen the impact of our aid spend.

On Monday, I launched innovationXchange, which is a new idea for bringing together entrepreneurs, businesses, creative thinkers and aid organisations to develop and scale up practical solutions to some of the most intractable aid problems facing our region. Our partnership that we announced with Bloomberg Philanthropies is a great example. We will be using the latest technologies to gather vital health data on births and deaths and causes of death deaths, so that we can have evidence based health outcomes. This is how we can make our aid dollar go further.

While we are thinking of smarter and more creative ways to deliver aid, Labor is doing the exact opposite. Labor's typical approach is to take taxpayers' money—billions of it—throw it at a problem and cross their fingers. Yesterday, the shadow minister for foreign affairs asked me a question on aid, and I have to admire her chutzpah for asking us a question about aid given the state of the budget that we inherited. Nevertheless, this question gave me an opportunity to remind the Australian people that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition has committed Labor to increasing the aid budget by $11 billion. Colleagues are shocked and appalled that she would recklessly commit Labor to $11 billion, but overnight I was reminded that her fecklessness was in fact underestimated, because she has actually committed Labor to increasing the aid budget by $18 billion. Here it is—there times in the one media release, $18 billion.

I believe that the shadow minister owes it to the Australian people to say where in the budget she is going to find $18 billion. Is it a cut to pensions? Is it a cut to infrastructure, to health, to education of $18 billion? I suspect that what will happen is that Labor will once more just add to the record debt—they will just borrow more. What Labor does is they borrow overseas to send back overseas. If they had not squandered billions of dollars on pink batts and school halls they would have some credibility. It is time they took responsibility for their fabulous failure in aid.