What is an appropriate level for foreign aid budget isn't the key issue anymore. The key issue is: is our aid program effective? June Arunga, a humanitarian journalist is one of many who knows for a fact that increasing the foreign aid budget won’t help in the long run. Come on people, who wouldn’t be smiling if they’re given stuff? But that’s not real life. There are many important factors to be considered at a national level before increasing the foreign aid budget. Can we trust that these mounds of money are reaching their full potential, reaching the people? Besides, most people donate money to make themselves feel good about contributing. We can continue our current foreign aid budget but there is really no point in wasting the extra increase when many politicians just steal it. We are paying them millions of dollars to be hidden in Swiss banks or spent on mansions, lavish trips and luxury cars and for what? It’s not even being put to productive use. Even food aid gets stolen or most of the aid gets “lost on the way” So much is stolen because most countries rely primarily on governments to administer foreign aid. The bad governments and bad policies make it difficult for impoverished lands to make use of their own aid or their own property. What the aid money is doing is to subsidise the bad policies that are making people poor. If you increased aid money, how does that solve the problem of the government razing down people’s business and such? How in the world is an increased amount of foreign aid going to make any difference, when the current foreign aid budget isn’t even helping. I mean to say, in the past 40 years, Western governments have given Africa more than half a trillion dollars. Yet it is even poorer than it was before the foreign aid began. Two studies by World Bank economists say increasing foreign aid is one of the problems because "higher aid levels erode the quality of governance." Former World Bank economist William Easterly agrees that current Western efforts to cure poverty in the rest of the world have done more harm than good and will continue to unless a new approach is taken. It’s a proven economic fact that increasing foreign aid budgets won't solve any problems — especially if it's stolen. In fact, by contrast, foreign aid often just makes politicians rich but leaves their people poor.
Knowing all this we continue to give foreign aid because it helps us feel good but to increase the budget – that’s just preposterous when our own country is in such awful shape. I kid you not. If you increase the budget and give aid to people who just keep expecting more aid, the problem will NOT go away for crying out loud! We need to fix this country before we can even contemplate increasing the budget. We shouldn’t be giving more cash to these countries when the entity has the power to pull itself up, yet the fact that they can get by or get more by doing absolutely nothing causes them to continue to live in squalor. We as a slightly more-developed nation should first make sure that their own government is competent and their officials are not corrupt.
We tend to focus rich countries on plight of poor - but little is likely to happen because of discrepancies about aid and development. Some blame the poor and others blame the rich for the plight of poor. Some suggest (wrongly) that poor will thrive as soon as they have bits of paper thrown at them. Perhaps some countries benefited from this in the past but now they require a more practical medium of aid…and increasing the aid budget won’t give them that for sure. 'The one size fits all’ approach to fighting poverty won't work. Johan Norberg, author of In Defence of Global Capitalism, says that all countries started off as under-developed with low living standards. It is only by responding to dynamic creative forces that this situation was turned around.
It seems all the rage today to put up signs that say “Save Darfur, donate money”, but really what are we buying them? One more day to live? Nothing is effectively going to change by just throwing money at the problem.
Some of the strategic realities for Australia include significant problems of scale; a nation of just 20 million, we face a major challenge to maintain our standing and influence. Other big issues facing Australia pose long-term challenges, which our system of governance is incapable of solving. Serious issues include: climate change; water management; infrastructure; education and health - and are not being solved because of dysfunctional federalism, entrenched short term thinking and low monetary funds. Australia still has enormous problems of racial discrimination in its society, none greater than the ongoing mis-treatment of Indigenous Australians.
Australia has its own internal problems with poverty and other social ills. Yes, many people are better off than before, but there is still a great deal of poverty and deprivation as bad as in Africa even in Australia. So how can we even contemplate increasing the foreign aid budget now, heck, we should be thinking about introducing a nation aid budget. We should pay attention to these problems before its too late. Increasing the foreign aid budget is not the answer – not for the other countries and definitely not for us. The UN needs to have a summit on how to better the assistance offered to developing nations.
By far the best solution to the problem of eliminating poverty is surely quality education delivered by qualified well-paid professionals. Of course, why would we attempt that anywhere else when our own country doesn’t even believe in that sort of approach with its own citizens? 'If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish you feed him for a lifetime.'
Our Federal Government mouths the rhetoric of a knowledge economy, but won't spend the money to back this up. In the last federal budget, presented by Treasurer Peter Costello as an investment in the future, education and skills were again neglected. Also, according to the latest OECD report on education, Australia's expenditure on pre-primary school education is the lowest of all developed countries.Australia spends 0.1 per cent of GDP on preschool education for children aged three and over compared with an OECD average of 0.5 per cent.
Youth unemployment between the ages of 16 to 24 runs at 26 percent and is even higher in local suburbs. Statistics say that Australia's unemployment is at 8.6 per cent, or just fewer than one million people. If we disregard that one-hour's work a week classifies a person as employed, then the figure is really between 1.5 million and l.9 million unemployed. Let’s ask ourselves, with this national crisis at hand can we really afford to increase the foreign aid budget? Obviously not! If Australia is in a bloody rut it won’t do anyone any good, not now, not in the future. We are regarded as a Third World country with First World living conditions. We have one of the highest interest rates in the world, and we owe more money per capital than any other country. All we need is a nail hole in the bottom of the boat and we're sunk. And just for the record, increasing our foreign aid budget is probably the biggest nail hole you’ll find.
Market incomes of Australian workers (before taxes and transfers) are more unequally distributed than in most comparable countries - due to relatively low full-time employment and high earnings dispersion. Since mid-1990s inequalities in education, health, infrastructure so on have increased because of an increased share in foreign aid budget. We spend far too little on merit goods such as: preventative health care, education, remedial training and public transport. Can you believe some children in our own country are homeless or live in such traumatic environments, our health care system and housing system are totally corrupt, and we actually have a high percentage of unemployment. You know 25% of people who undergo surgery in Australia require a second operation to fix complications caused by infections, medical errors or the poor quality of new hip and knee prostheses. State crime figures are alarming and the biggy… clean drinking water is also at stake because we’re in a terrible drought. Seriously, with this many problems we may as well join the impoverished countries.
Australia is facing massive economic, environmental and social challenges due to the widespread and growing phenomenon of dryland salinity, according to a National Science Briefing.
Mr Alex Campbell, Chairman of Australia's National Dryland Salinity Program, told the Briefing that more than 80 regional towns and cities have costs related to salinity - and even Sydney is being affected. The costs include damage to building foundations, bridges, pipelines and roads. Up to 30% of regional roads are being affected with major highway reconstruction costing up to $1 million per kilometre. We need to explore the broader options of saline aquaculture and growing various salt tolerant pastures, crops and woody perennials…a very expensive thing. With effective funding for research and management, we could use salinised resources beneficially for both economic and environmental outcomes and eventually help other less able countries to do the same by showing them how. Australia currently has 2.5 million hectares of salt affected land and this is likely to increase six fold in the coming decades. According to Dr. Tom Hatton, CSIRO Land and Water, the costs associated with meeting these challenges are high, the costs of doing nothing incalculable.
thesis
As a nation we have no moral imperative to increase Aust. foreign budget, when the high rate of money we already send is not helping the situation in foreign countries, but could help with problems within our own border.
That Australia should increase its foreign aid budget
National individual & society
Money spent on forign aid - help us in Aust with our problems
aboriginal have a shorter life expectency
alrady have a high forign budget
it's costing us
As Senator Bartlett said, a fundamental responsibility for the Federal Government is making sure all Australians can get the health services they need, when they need them,”
REBUTTAL
Some people (like Bono) look at the world and see problems to be solved. Others (like Ann Coulter) look at the world and see problems to be exploited. That's life. Some people build bridges, other people dig ditches.
And it's easy to deny the obvious in the abstract -- smoking doesn't cause cancer, massive carbon pollution won't have any effect on the environment, ethanol won't end our addicition to foreign oil, aid won't solve poverty. But when you drill down to specifics, can John Stossel or anyone say that providing mosquito nets to the third world won't prevent malaria? Or that providing condoms won't prevent HIV transmissions? Because those things have a definite, undeniable impact -- and what's a third world strongman gonna do with ten million mosquito nets?
"Can't" seems to be a very popular way of thinking among cold-hearted people. Nothing great was ever acheived by people who's heads are perpetually filled with the thought that "it can't be done".
Yes there are corrupt governments - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't care, shouldn't try and find a way. There is plenty of food in the world to go around. If you took all the money that has been spent on military activities in Iraq and put that into humanitarian aid and had the military distributing food and medical help - it would make a big dent in the problem.
But of course that will never happen - no oil reserves in Africa.
If every non-corrupt Government in the world banded together and said - that's it - we've had enough and concentrated on the issue, we could make a start.
But of course we are all too worried about looking after our own backyards. We are not American, Australian, English, Kenyan, Iraqi, Indian, Chinese - we are all human living the same big neighborhood.
For my future grand-kids sake, I hope we all realize this before it all gets too late.
"I hope we all realize this before it all gets too late."
Too late? Human brutality has existed before recorded history. Get a grip. People will continue to be bastards.
Those who have homes, luxurious and stable lives cannot realise the miseries and misfortunes of those who are compelled to leave their homes and lands by use of force. Hence the whole world must sympathise with the asylum seekers and all refugees. I'm sure that the industrial countries can solve the problem of the worldwide dilemma of the miserable refugees.
Japan, India, Burma, Ceylon and every new African nation are fiercely anti-white and anti one another. Do we want or need any of these people here? I am one red-blooded Australian who says no and who speaks for 90% of Australians.
Well, it's not the lowest it's ever been but Australian foreign aid has declined as a proportion of GDP over the last ten years, although in dollar terms Australian foreign aid increased during the last year. There has been an increase in Australian aid in the last year in response to the Asian economic crisis and also in response to certain unforeseen disasters, not least the tsunami in Papua New Guinea. So we have seen in recent times an increase, in the last year an increase in Australian overseas aid. The level of the aid budget will be a matter for consideration by the Cabinet between new and the time of the Budget. We obviously take note of submissions made by the Australian Council for Overseas Aid.
I think we all have to accept that this is how the world works. No matter how much we contribute to anything, there will always be a percentage (small, large, or all) that will go towards corruption. I do believe that aid does some good in Africa as a whole, but if you get lots of little pockets of corruption, it can add up to counterproductivity of the main goal, which is to end poverty.
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Normative topics often require a ‘model’. A model is a specific proposal, usually to be implemented by an organisation (eg, the Government, the church, the UN, the international community) that provides more detail about the issue to be debated. Thus, in a debate about the republic, it is necessary to introduce a model of what sort of republic is being supported. A negative team should present a counter-model, although often that will just involve supporting the status quo. For example, the affirmative in a drug law reform debate might propose that, to address drug-related problems, marijuana be decriminalised. The negative can just support the current system and say they support the current emphasis on policing. Models are useful because they clarify the issue of the debate. Essentially, they are just an extension of the definition.
