Rumours are rife that the Government's projected aid budget increases will be cut in the forthcoming Federal Budget to ensure a surplus. Until now Australia had been on track to achieve its pledged aid target of 0.5 per cent of GNI by 2015, a pledge endorsed by Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and, presumably, current Foreign Minister Bob Carr, and which had also received rare bipartisan support from the Coalition.
Aid is not generally a vote winner. There are notable exceptions, such as in those Scandinavian nations where popular support for aid policies has seen them achieve an aid budget of over 0.7 per cent of GNI.
In Australia though aid is not popular, due largely to the many myths surrounding it; a heady mixture of racial prejudice, the afterglow of colonialism and the chipping away at the social justice agenda by neo-cons whose 'trickle down' economics from the rich to the poor was discredited long ago.
Horst Köhler, former head of the IMF, was asked when he was President of Germany if he regretted some of the IMF's policies, such as aggressive structural adjustment to force poor countries to cut social expenditure to pay back debts from loans given too easily by Western banks and governments. His reply was that they had pushed ahead with economic theories without taking into account the effect of those theories on people's lives. Quite.
Of course, some aid doesn't work. I was horrified as a young aid worker in the '80s being told that an open sewer in an Addis Ababa slum was a World Bank project. The 'donors' did not consult the local community, let alone allow them to participate in the design to bring sanitation to the slum. Never admitting failure when logistical difficulties arose, they returned to their hotels and no doubt the next 'aid' project.
That is the big lesson for successful aid projects — the participation of the local community is vital. They should not be the 'beneficiaries' but rather, in the words of Nobel-prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, should be the 'doers and judges' of any aid project.
One of the simplest and most successful aid projects I was involved in was with a group of women in Kenya. They had been abandoned by their husbands and had taken to prostitution to feed their children. Through Freirean methodologies, a local NGO organised them to discuss their problems and come to their own solutions.
With some seed money from the 'donor', they were able to buy land as a cooperative, grow crops and sell them in the markets — thus giving up their old habits — and to survive and prosper sustainably through efficient organisation and working together. One of them said: 'The best thing is I can hold my head up high in church.' Her dignity had been restored. That is key to aid being effective in the long term.
Aid is obviously not enough to eradicate dehumanising poverty, but it works if targeted (especially towards women), if owned by the people it was meant for, if there are adequate training components, if it doesn't encourage dependency, if it is channelled through local community-based organisations and if, in a world where violence simmers under the surface of many societies, it fosters peace.
It should, of course, be a genuine gift from the rich to the poor and not tied to purchasing Australia's goods and services. That's called 'trade'.
Unlike the mining industry, which can spend millions of dollars on advertising campaigns telling us not to tax them more (when it costs just $3 to immunise a child against preventable diseases), the poor of Oceania, Asia and Africa have no voice here other than that of Australian voters willing to make aid an election issue.
Good aid gets rid of poverty, gives people dignity, promotes sustainability and fosters peace. Not a bad return on investing 0.5 per cent of the gross national income in people's lives. Wayne Swan, please take note.
Duncan MacLaren lectures in international development studies at Australian Catholic University and is a former Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis whose members aid about 24 million poor people a year.