Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In January I had the privilege of travelling with parliamentary colleagues to Indonesia as part of the Australian Regional Leadership Initiative. The purpose of the ARLI program, which is delivered by Save the Children and funded by the Gates foundation, is to enable Australian parliamentarians to see a range of development assistance projects in action. Those projects are inevitably life-saving and life changing. They are also both a defining theme and a binding thread of our bilateral and regional relationships. Needless to say, there's no more important relationship in our region than the bond of friendship and cooperation that exists between us and Indonesia. The development partnership we share has enormous benefits that flow in both directions, and it dovetails with our work in trade, diplomacy and defence.

As I will always say, there should be no question about the profound and far-reaching positive impact of Australia's aid program. There should be no question about our commitment to saving lives and reducing disadvantage as an expression of our national character and our values, and I'll always argue that development assistance is absolutely the best dollar-for-dollar investment in regional peace and security.

I don't want this to be a partisan speech, but, at a time when the ABC Nemesis program has reminded us all of the 2014 budget, it should be remembered that, while some of the madly punitive aspects of that plan were mercifully resisted, the sharp and self-defeating cuts to Australia's aid program were delivered in full. Nearly $8 billion was cut over the first five years, the largest cuts of this kind in Australia's history, and to this day we're still repairing the regional and institutional damage that occurred.

But, being temperamentally inclined to dwell on the positive, let me talk a little bit about some of the projects we were able to see in action. In Jakarta, we had the privilege of meeting with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Indonesia and we heard about the new initiative to form an association of women judges and magistrates as part of efforts to drive greater female participation in Indonesia's judiciary. In Lombok, we visited a village that is involved with the drought anticipatory action program and a madrassa that has incorporated more effective and differentiated teaching methods through the INOVASI program. In Desa Sukarara, we saw the transformative community-mapping exercise that was occurring under Oxfam's Indonesian Women in Leadership project and met the amazingly joyous and grateful recipients of cataract procedures through the Fred Hollows Foundation. I can tell you we all had an eye-cleansing moment when we saw local grandmother Bu Iye embrace and refuse to let go of Nola Marino. In Bali, we met children who had received life-saving treatment through a rabies prevention and response program, and we visited the crisis management centre of the provincial disaster agency, whose equipment and procedures have been improved through the Australia-Indonesia Partnership in Disaster Risk Management.

I want to acknowledge the effort, teamwork, collegiality and good humour that characterised our visit across three of Indonesia's remarkable islands. Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 16,000 islands. We only got to visit three, but they were remarkable, and we did that in the course of a packed five-day program. My fellow ARLI participants included Senators Marielle Smith, Bridget McKenzie and David Shoebridge and my colleagues in this place the members for Forrest and Cowper. As has always been my experience on similar delegations, the six of us from around the country and from different parties worked together to learn as much as we could to provide a common perspective on Australia's friendship with Indonesia and to emphasise our shared gratitude for the hospitality we received. The member for Forrest and Senators McKenzie and Smith did some particularly good work engaging with local women leaders when you consider how important it is that our development assistance program as a whole rightly includes an overlying focus on gender equality and the rights of women and girls.

I want to thank the excellent folk from the Australian embassy in Jakarta, especially Sophie Roden and Madeleine Moss, who accompanied us for some of the way. I pay special tribute to the Save the Children team—Mat Tinkler, Sarah Carter, Marion Stanton and board member Justin Hanney—for the outstanding variety and quality of the program. We got to do so much, so smoothly in such a short time and in good spirit. But most of all I want to thank the project delivery folk, Indonesians and Australians alike, who do such incredible work—work that is creative, challenging ever-changing and, by turns, uplifting and heartbreaking, as will always be the case when human beings seek to help their fellow sisters and brothers to deal with health crises or natural disasters and to overcome injustice and disadvantage. Those challenges are everywhere. We face them too. The only way to overcome those challenges is through commitment, compassion and cooperation.