Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today around the world people are being reminded of a disease which has been called the 'forgotten plague'—tuberculosis, an illness which, although we might think of it as an affliction that was at its strongest in the nineteenth century, in fact killed 1.3 million people in 2012 alone. Today, 24 March, has been designated as World TB Day in order to raise awareness about the continuing prevalence of tuberculosis and the need for global action to combat it and assist its victims. The theme of this year is 'Reach the 3 million' who, according to the World Health Organization, remain untreated. Of the roughly nine million people ill with TB, a third fall through the cracks and are missed by health systems.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is an organisation that helps to halt the spread of disease, slowing and even reversing instances of these preventable illnesses. The global fund has helped to test and treat more than six million cases of TB and provided more than 29 million mosquito nets to protect families from malaria. In the poorest countries of our region, Timor Leste and Laos, the global fund provides the overwhelming majority of TB resources. Despite this essential work, the Abbott government has failed to properly fund the Australian contribution to this organisation—falling $175 million short of the $375 million expected from our country. We call on the Abbott government to pull its weight and fund Australia's fair share of this global effort.

This, of course, is but one of a multitude of cuts to the foreign aid budget, with $4.5 billion being lost across the range of programs and agencies. In the 2013-14 year alone, $650 million will disappear with those cuts hitting some of the most vulnerable of nations, such as the $90 million being taken from the poorest countries in Africa. Even with a declared refocusing of the aid budget on the Asia Pacific, there will be a $250 million cut to our region, with PNG aid cut by $5.3 million, Fiji by $2.8 million and Indonesia by $59.1 million.

At the turn of the millennium, Australia was one of 189 countries around the world to gather at the United Nations in New York and adopt the Millennium Declaration. Among other things, the declaration contained a solemn resolution to 'spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty.' From that declaration sprang the Millennium Development Goals, a series of practical targets and measures of progress to be tested up until 2015 when the program is scheduled to conclude.

People of enterprise and goodwill can and have worked together to overcome the most severe of circumstances. Cambodian farmers construct canals to boost their yields of rice and vegetables on tiny otherwise dry plots of land. Children make the journey to new kindergartens in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, where six out of 10 children do not go to school. And the gradual, painstaking work of building a quality healthcare network continues in Pacific islands like Tonga, where 20 nurses have just graduated with advanced diplomas. These are just some of the examples of progress being made with the support of Australia's overseas development assistance—some of many thousands of stories that cannot help but make every Australian proud of our aid program.

Australia's aid program is delivered both directly by Australians and by partner organisations from across the world. NGOs, fellow governments, volunteers, businesses and academia all have a role to play in the Australian aid program, and each partner is rigorously assessed on the effectiveness or value of the donation that Australia makes. I was visited this month by representatives of RESULTS Australia, an organisation with whom I have long had a relationship in my home state of Tasmania in their campaigns for microcredit and for empowering women. They brought my attention to a number of multilateral organisations to which this country has made contributions that have ranked highly on the Australian Multilateral Assessment undertaken in March 2012, either in the effectiveness of their work, relevance to the strategic goals Australia has set for its aid dollar, or both. I want to mention some of these programs today.

We can claim that Australian aid has assisted in wiping out polio from the Pacific and has seen more than 1.5 million children immunised against measles and polio in Papua New Guinea. We maximise our aid when we join with global multilateral organisations to multiply the impact of our funding. One of the organisations involved in immunisation is GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, which ranks as the most effective of all multilateral organisations to which Australia donates. GAVI is a public-private health partnership which operates where there are high burdens of disease. Through donor investment, it cuts the cost of vaccines but requires recipient countries to co-invest in the roll-out of vaccines to guarantee an effective and integrated national health system. It operates in countries across the world, including our near neighbours Indonesia, PNG, Laos and Myanmar. At the GAVI conference in June 2011, the Australian government announced a boost in its commitment, increasing our contribution from $60m over three years to $200m for 2011-13—a contribution that we think saved 167,000 lives. But, unfortunately, that commitment concluded in January this year.

It is essential that Australia renew its commitment and help GAVI reach the goal over immunising half a billion children by 2015. New pledges of $75 million each year in 2014 and 2015 would go a long way to doing this, and I urge the Abbott government to make this pledge and fund this important work.

Finally, I want to mention the global plan for education. Fifty-seven million children worldwide are still denied primary education; 250 million fail to acquire basic reading and numeracy skills or drop out within three years of commencing school—sometimes as a result of violence, sometimes as a result of the lack of value attributed to education, and sometimes to perform other duties for families or communities. Education currently accounts for 20 per cent of Australia's total aid, and it is a central pillar of our programs. The 2013-2014 budget provided $1.16 billion for education as part of a five-year pledge of $5 billion. That includes $270 million over four years for the GPE to support the national education plans of developing countries.

The GPE is currently seeking commitments, and I want to pass on a request from the aid sector for the government to continue to be a leading contributor to this vital effort. A pledge of $100 million per year to the GPE for the period 2015-18 would enable the GPE to assist our neighbours with their education plans—and cement the other objectives of the aid program.

Every story of Australia's aid program is a source of pride. But it must also be a source of energy. The millennium pledge was for each country to contribute 0.7 per cent of gross national income to overseas development assistance. Australia is far from reaching that pledge.

I have long been a critic of the coalition government's particular neglect of this commitment in the years immediately following Mr Howard's attendance at the General Assembly. Following in his footsteps two days before the eve of the election, the now government announced it could not commit to a time line for the achievement of a fraction of our pledge: the 0.5 per cent of GNI which has become a feature of the aid funding debate in this country.

But, while they may have aborted this time line, we can make the concrete commitments that RESULTS Australia and others in the aid sector have, time and time again, reminded me of the effectiveness and the urgency of. If we cannot reach our millennium commitment in the next year, let us chart a course, in conjunction with the partner organisations I have mentioned, to do what we can in the approaching years.