What the - foreign aid ? New Zealand and Australia talk up good governance with their Pacific Island neighbours but fall far behind their responsibilities as global citizens. graphic | www.poverty.com
NEWS
New Zealand and Australia are among six "developed" countries yet to set a timeline for achieving global aid targets.
Both lag behind 11 countries from OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that have already set timelines.
Developing, third-world countries have been promised a minimum of 70 cents in foreign aid for every us$100 spent in developed, first-world countries by 2015.
PARIS 2005
New Zealand and Australia were among 22 governments that promised to boost aid spending in what is now known as the 2005 Paris Declaration.
The declaration has triggered a decade long scramble to raise $195 billion annually, an amount estimated as minimum to end global poverty.
Thirty thousand people die, every day, due to poverty, disease and starvation on a planet bursting with food and resources.
PACIFIC ISLANDS
In the Pacific Islands as many as one million people face death from AIDS by 2050 as well as other effects of grinding poverty as the region continues trying to adjust to centuries of globalisation.
Aid assistance is supposed to be the main way of ending that poverty, according to the United Nations.
Eleven countries that set timelines start with Belgium, next earliest in 2010, with ten others reaching agreed targets in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.
CRITICS
OECD itself leads criticism of New Zealand and Australia, stating that reasons for increasing aid spending were "inescapable."
Others are more scathing, suggesting incompetence by foreign affairs ministries on both sides of the Tasman Sea.
Or, worse, high-level, institutionalised corruption between political parties, elected governments and corporate donors intent on keeping the Pacific Islands weak and in disunity as project after project gets pushed through to extract natural resources and steer regional politics towards big business.
"DIRTY HALF DOZEN"
Exposure of the six countries through websites like www.poverty.com inevitably leads to comments about the "dirty half dozen."
A word-play on an old war movie called "The Dirty Dozen" this label has been applied to name and shame governments in the past, including for issues like tax havens, money laundering, organised crime and terrorism.
Most of the naming and shaming has been by first world countries pointing fingers at third world governments - now those fingers are changing direction.
SCANDANAVIAN
No countries are scheduled to meet aid targets in 2011, with New Zealand and Australia two of only six countries lagging behind.
Five Scandanavian countries, regarded as good governance leaders globally, have "already" reached their 2015 goals - and passed them.
Global leader Sweden spends $1.03 cents on foreign aid, more than 50 per cent higher than target levels.
UNITED STATES
At the other end of the aid spectrum, fading superpower United States is second to last, spending just 17 cents of each $100 it lavishes on itself.
Only Greece ranks lower, spending 16 cents.
New Zealanders spend 27 cents on aid for every us$100, while the much wealthier economy of Australia scrapes up 30 cents.
aid levels put nz, oz in dirty half dozen
| pmcf | ausaid media update
NEWS RELEASE A news update released on the website of the Pacific Media and Communication Facility, a three year ausAID project drawing to a close. Media organisations are invited to send news from the Pacific Islands. Questions? Leave a comment below. ...........................................................................................................................
play it again uncle sam
OPINION | EDITORIAL American officials advising president George Bush would have us believe the Pacific Islands are a soft spot for money laundering operations by organised criminals and terrorists. Well, um, no. America itself churns more money through offshore banks in a day than the Pacific Islands can dream of for a year. SIDESHOW This week's pronouncement from BINL, the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, makes the usual simpering suggestions and finger wagging scolds. In reality, however, BINL comments amount to little more than a sideshow. Their continued scrutiny of wayward islands offshore may cast credit on business-as-usual at the bureau. But it cannot help but evoke images of the band playing on as the entire, vast, right-wing conspiracy, a quasi-military, self-elected junta tears itself open against the chill, hard iceberg of popular opinion. Play it again Uncle Sam? CONTEMPT Let's be blunt. It is not about how much contempt the Bush administration is held in around the rest of the world, fast being joined by a home audience. No, the real damage lies in the fact that the America faces the prospect of another backlash against the right. Maybe as much as the assassination of Martin Luther King, when America was coloured Democrat red from sea to shining sea, with just the lone star state, Texas, to fly the Republican flag, kinda. However big the loss, one fact reminds. Democrat domination of both US houses led to deep and bitter disillusionment among revolutionary youth around the world. SAME, SAME Stages are being set the world over for exactly the same thing to happen all over again. Utter rout of the Republican right will lead to a sweeping and triumphant return of the left under Obama or Clinton, or maybe both. And that is when America will rediscover the parliamentary truism that any government is only as strong as its opposition. KIWIS New Zealanders know that already. They've watched a gamine prime minister morph slowly into a heavy breathing Darth Vader, lifting opposition leaders off their feet and strangling them slowly in front of their trembling colleagues. Don Brash may have spiked in the polls with his racist drivel in Orewa, but even rednecks are tired of the same old Maori bashing - it was the good doctor gone by lunchtime, not the country's anti-nuclear policy. JOHN KEY National 2.0 features an amicable, smiley newcomer, just 45, who had the good grace to look awkward chaperoning a 12 year old Maori girl around parliament. John Key may implode spectacularly like his predecessors. He's certainly the most interesting so far, fronting up to residents of a street he had dissed as being backward. The girl had no idea who he was, or what parliament was about. So Key took her to Wellington. COMPELLING Her look of disconnection from his earnest efforts and wide eyed expression of complete overload made for excruciating if compelling viewing, one of the realest moments in politics for a long time. This was not just a photo op too good to miss. Things really are changing. Don's brash departure and John's fresh arrival is key to understanding a seismic shift about to take place across the conservative spectrum. Just as Labour crabbed sideways to occupy middle economies previously espoused by National, so too is National sliding nonchalantly left, positioning itself closer to emerging global warming consensus, eyes out on stalks in being in new, unfamiliar territory. VACUUM Similarly, in the United States, Republicans are already being sucked left by the vacuum opening up under their watered-down version of Rogernomics, named Reaganomics. Tariff and subsidy protection for their farmers will collapse as the US is forced to confront corruption of natural resources on a global scale. Free trade will become a reality, but not by sending 400 ton ships through the sky, spewing gases into the upper atmospheres. EMPTY DRUM Against this background, continued Bush-style posturing will only seem increasingly desperate, no matter how loudly he and other flunkies bang their kettle drums. Republicans have been fed enough rope to hang themselves several times over in recent years, and that thudding sound will be the old right wing falling through a political trapdoor, voter noose tight around the neck of their thrashing corpse. In the past, all this has meant is more-of-the-same but better under the Democrats, big business switching sides for awhile to maintain the illusion that voting matters. This time, however, voters are once again unplugging from the military industrial matrix in revolutionary numbers.
kiwi aid “static” say funding partners
NEWS
AID LEVELS
This falls well behind averages for OECD members of .42 per cent, approaching half a percent.
NZAID funding is even further behind global targets of 0.7 per cent, about two thirds of one percent, with “no change” in 2006 putting additional pressure on government to meet the 2010 target.
CHALLENGE
Part of the problem is that
NZAID appears to have forgotten or is ignoring an OECD review from 2005 that suggests
“
AMBITIONS
“But we believe that
NZAID was encouraged to reduce the number of its core bilateral partner countries, particularly in Asia where “
DAC recommended New Zealand maintain focus on the Pacific where it has an “especially important role and impact,” said Manning, noting its input to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands was of “particular interest,” with the Kiwi role in RAMSI mission being “successful and innovative.”
“DISESTABLISHMENT”
Two years later, and
Earlier, in late February, Foreign Affairs minister Winston Peters announced the “disestablishment” of IDAC, the International Development Advisory Committee.
LONG TERM
“Government has not adopted a medium-term expenditure framework
The same site makes no mention of DAC criticisms, nor any long term plans for increasing funding.
As close as NZAID comes is by referring to DAC “Principles for the Evaluation of Development Assistance” as being used as the “foundation” for developing new NZAID “evaluation policy and guidelines.”