Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In July I visited Jordan with the Australian Aid and Parliament Project MP learning tour. I am grateful to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Save The Children for making this trip possible. What I saw confirms the importance and the urgency of boosting Australian aid programs, and I want to talk about that tonight.

The civil war in Syria has created a human tragedy with enormous impact on children. In 2015, the world reeled at the image of the drowned Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach. In 2016, we were shocked and saddened by the ash-and-blood-covered five-year-old, Omran Daqneesh, sitting in mute trauma in the back of an ambulance after an Aleppo air strike. I feel very grateful that in 2017 my memory of a Syrian child will be one of hope: a 14-year-old girl called Marwa, who is a refugee in Jordan.

All these children deserve more from us. We have the ability to help and we know that aid makes a huge difference to their lives and to their futures. Everything I saw, both inside and outside refugee camps, indicates the positive results of humanitarian projects. It makes me proud that Labor is committed to increasing Australia's international aid.

We visited the Zaatari camp in Jordan. It currently holds 80,000 refugees, and 44,000 of those refugees are children. It is in the desert. The residents are housed in a mix of tents, corrugated iron structures and housing made from shipping containers. It is in a grid system of dirt roads. In the desert the temperature reaches 40 degrees routinely, although I can tell you that it feels a lot hotter. Above these improvised homes, large plastic water tanks and powerlines bring essential services to support the 80,000 people who are living there. It is a place where you see the enormous scale of the Syrian tragedy. Many of the little children who live here were born here. They have known no other home. The number of children born in Zaatari is now 7,000. It is a powerful statistic which shows how long this crisis has gone on.

This camp is now five years old. I met a group of little boys in the camp—little boys actually about the same age as my eldest child. Instead of being in school, these children worked to help to support their families. They worked as labourers, they delivered groceries. But in the afternoon, the boys attend a literacy and numeracy program that is run by UNICEF and Save The Children, and it is designed for children who need to work. I asked them how many of them expected to return to school, and just one put up his hand. The others all explained to me that it is difficult; it is difficult because work makes it hard to get to school.

In this context, it's important that the program run by UNICEF does not just teach them literacy and numeracy, but educates them on their basic human rights and teaches them skills that might allow them to move away from dangerous work, such as labouring or working with agricultural equipment, towards safer forms of work. So the children are learning how to fix mobile phones; they're learning how to work in hairdressers or barber shops and to find other safer forms of employment.

There is a real threat that the severe interruption to education experienced by these very young children will leave a whole generation in permanent poverty. These boys, and children like them, are often referred to as 'the lost generation', but the education programs we saw delivered by amazing professionals, amazing volunteers, seek to ensure that these children are not excluded from economic opportunity. They really do seek to ensure they can build a future.

Last week UNICEF provided an update on the Syrian crisis and its enormous impact on Syria's children. Of the five million Syrian refugees, almost half are children. Six million children remain inside Syria with its ongoing civil war. There are three million Syrian refugees in Turkey, and almost half of those refugees are children. That is almost 1.5 million children. There are 660,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan; half of them are children. There are 100,000 children under five years of age. There are 209,000 Syrian refugees in Egypt, and most of them are children—over 170,000 of them—and 3,000 of those children are unaccompanied. These millions of displaced children create a huge demand for resources and funding for child protection, health and hygiene and, of course, for education.

In the midst of these overwhelming statistics, I had the pleasure of meeting a young girl called Marwar, who lives in Jordan's capital, Amman. Like many children, Marwar needs to work to help her family. Her father was badly injured in the Syrian civil war. She cleans and makes drinks for customers in a beauty salon. For two years, because of her family's circumstances, while she was very young, she had to stop going to school. With financial support from Care International—support from international aid—she has been able to return to education. She is now in year 8 and she is like most of the other year 8 kids we might meet in our electorates. She tells us she's happy to be back at school. She thinks she might like to be a lawyer or an engineer when she grows up. She is a beautiful, strong young woman—the kind of young woman that would make any parent proud. With the assistance that she's receiving from the program she's enrolled in, the hope is she will reach her educational and personal potential.

The number of displaced adults and children around the world is at record levels. The UNHCR reports 65.6 million people around the world have been forced from home. The figure has almost doubled in 20 years. Of these displaced people, nearly 22.5 million are refugees, and more than half are children. Often the countries that are absorbing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people fleeing conflict have received few extra resources and they have a limited capacity to support them. In Jordan, we only saw a small part of the impact of this, of the largest displacement of people since the Second World War. We saw that these adults and these children had experienced great trauma, great loss and hardship, and they require substantial assistance. We saw aid projects that are effective and are making a difference; we saw that international involvement is helping host nations to adopt better laws, such as Jordan's vote last week to finally abolish a law that absolves rapists who marry their victims.

In this context, the cuts to Australia's aid budget are unconscionable. We need to shoulder our share of the responsibility to help. Aid matters. But this government has cut the aid budget to the Middle East and Africa by 83 per cent since taking office. This is not a position that Labor supports. We went to the last election with a commitment to reversing the government's $224 million cut to the aid budget and to providing an additional $40 million each year. We also committed to an additional $450 million over three years to support humanitarian projects through the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In this time of crisis, with more people than ever displaced from their homes, Labor proposes to almost double Australia's annual humanitarian intake.

The impact on countries near war zones and humanitarian crises, such as Jordan and Turkey, is acute. They are straining to care for millions of extra people. We need to increase our efforts to assist them to meet this challenge. I feel very grateful that my memory of a Syrian child in 2017 will be Marwar. Her story of escape can give us hope as we admire her determination to go to school in the face of overwhelming loss, trauma and uncertainty. Our job is to help Marwar and the millions of others like her.