Ben’s Blog

Here’s a little graph showing the trend for Australia’s aid budget as a proportion of our Gross National Income (Australia, along with all other developed country donors, has repeatedly committed to increasing its aid budget to 0.7% of GNI)

• The solid blue line shows the actual budgeted amounts during the last term of the Keating Government, the Howard years, and now the first aid budget for the Rudd Labor Government.
• The dotted blue line shows the expenditure the Government projects over the next three budgets (bringing aid to 0.38% GNI in the 2010/11 budget)
• The dotted red line shows the trajectory that would have to be followed by whoever is elected in 2010 or 2011 in order to meet Rudd’s commitment to reach 0.5% GNI by 2015
• The dotted green line shows a straight line trajectory to reach 0.7% GNI by 2015, with increases kicking in next budget

A few things I notice:

Backloading

The forward estimates to 2010 propose a tailing off in the rate of increase for the aid budget. This is simply because the new Government decided to make no new aid commitments in the life of this Parliament and simply match Howard’s plan to get to roughly $4.3 billion by 2010. They may do a bit better than this, but they are clearly not pushing the envelope.

This has consequences for whoever is elected after 2010, and consequences for our development partners and the poor in our region. By “backloading” most of the aid increase for the period 2010–2015, this Government is leaving most of the heavy lifting for a new Goverment – whether a returned Labor Government, or a newly elected Coalition one. The trend they are establishing will not reach 0.5% GNI by 2015 if it is continued, so a more rapid scale-up will be required after 2010. But the later these new investments are left the more room there is for the Government to find them politically or financially too difficult.

Backloading also reduces the contribution these planned increases can make to Millennium Development Goal progress by 2015. Money invested in 2011, 2012 and beyond will still have a positive development outcome if it is used well, but it will have little influence on progress against the 2015 MDG timeline. Although the Rudd Government has promised major new focus on the MDGs, and 2008 has been nominated as the critical year for action to accelerate progress, there is no new investment beyond that planned by the previous Government until after 2010.

Global leadership?

With European donor commitments to lift their aid budgets to 0.51% GNI by 2010 and 0.7% by 2015, the Government’s own timetable will still leave Australia 15th of 22 OECD donors, measuring aid as a proportion of GNI. Even the planned increase leaves us in the bottom third of donors. The 0.7% trajectory I’ve mapped in is ambitious can be achieved and the money used effectively if we have more substantial engagement within our region and beyond (particularly increasing our commitment to Mekong and South Asian countries) and with multilateral bodies such as UNAIDS, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria and the Education For All Fast Track Initiative, for example.

The budget has been handed down – an expression, incidentally, that I love. It’s a bit Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments really. Well, if Moses had begun each commandment with “Mister Speaker, in order to support working families…”

I’ll leave it for others to opine on how Swan and/or the Rudd Government have passed their “first big test” with the budget overall. I don’t do tax cuts or infrastructure funds or baby bonuses, just the aid budget… In a nutshell:

• Aid increases to $3.66 billion in 2008/09 – up $505 million from the 2007/08 budget (an increase of 9% in real terms)
• $238 million of this increase is accounted for by the Government cancelling the final tranche of debt owed to us by Iraq
• So, not counting Iraq debt, the real increase is 4.9% on last year’s budget
• Aid will reach 0.32% of Gross National Income (a level it was last at in 1995/96) – up from 0.3% GNI last year, but still less than half the internationally-agreed aid target of 0.7% GNI Australia has committed to
• The budget begins to deliver on the Government’s pre-election commitments to increase funding to water and sanitation ($300 million over 3 years), eliminating avoidable blindness in the region ($45 million over 2 years), and establishing Pacific partnerships for development ($127 million over 4 years for a regional infrastructure facility and $54 million over 4 years for a Pacific Land Program to address land reform challenges)
• There are some further, modest increases in funding for UN agencies and other multilateral bodies

My first response is that this is quite underwhelming. Is the aid program getting bigger? Yes, but sloooowly. Is it getting better? Yes, but sloooowly. And any of the fresh thinking or new leadership focused on the urgent task of accelerating progress towards the MDGs will have to wait.

I recognise that the Government must have faced serious challenges developing the budget while still to a large extent developing the policy and planning the programs it wants to invest in. But anyone who heard the Prime Minister say:

Today I announced that Australia would be signing on to Prime Minister Brown’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Call to Action.
We support its aim of working for accelerated progress towards the MDGs.

could justifiably be disappointed.

More shortly.

So tonight is the Australian economy’s night of nights, the budget! I’m in Canberra ready and waiting for the AusAID budget lockup. Phones are confiscated, wireless-enabled laptops disallowed, so that AusAID officials can brief us on the wonders of the aid budget with no chance of leaks before Wayne Swan has delivered the full budget speech.

Of course, it’s always difficult to actually find reporting on the aid program in any budget coverage, but I’m sure there’s a good reason for all the secrecy.

Expectations are low for this budget, because although the new Government seems to have a stronger commitment to the Millennium Development Goals, and has committed to increase the aid program to 0.5% of Gross National Income by 2015 (should we elect them again, and then once more), they made no additional aid commitments for this budget year. And in the context of a “responsible budget that looks after working families” there’s not likely to be much beyond maintaining the increase trajectory set by the previous Government, and possibly beginning the process of reallocating funds to their new priority programs of water and sanitation and basic education.

Of course, an additional increase should be considered for this and future budgets to lift our aid spending to the internationally-agreed aid target of 0.7% GNI by 2015. Our aid spending has languished for so long, our partners and multilateral bodies have the capacity to manage the increase, and its the level we need to reach if Australia is to contribute its fair share to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

And the nice thing is that additional spending through the aid program is – as well as the right thing to do! – both an investment in the human and economic development of our neighbours and non-inflationary to boot!

So, I say:

This time the tunes that got me down the mighty Hume and the Federal Highway were: Arvo Pärt’s Fratres for piano and cello as well as his Lamentate. The piano and percussion in this piece, coupled with the strings, range from delicate and haunting to very forceful, stirring and almost strident. It’s great driving music actually.

I also played not one, but two, Eels albums: Beautiful Freak and Daisies of the Galaxy. I really like the Eels’ quirky sensibility, the offbeat narratives of loss and exclusion that sit back to back with upbeat celebrations of the rich weirdness of life. E’s voice, too, just works brilliantly well with the music he sings – a combination of gruff ordinariness and fragility.

Just when I thought the actions of the Burmese authorities couldn’t get any worse. Not only have they delayed the delivery and distribution of emergency relief supplies. Not only have generals ensured that their own names are plastered all over the relief shipments when they are delivered. Not only have they carried on with a constitutional referendum in most of the countries despite the devastation of Cyclone Nargis. They’re also continuing to export rice in spite of some of the country’s most productive land being destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people facing starvation and disease in the aftermath.

It does seem that the delivery of food to Burma is not the most pressing issue, but assistance with effective delivery of food within Burma to the worst-hit areas almost certainly is, along with disease prevention, provision of shelter, and other aspects of saving lives and managing the disaster. And these are the things that the authorities continue to block.

Gareth Evans, for the International Crisis Group, has written a very interesting article exploring the case for invoking the principle that all Governments have a “responsibility to protect” civilian populations and where they are unable or unwilling to do so, then other governments have an obligation to intervene. He rightly points up the ambiguities here, noting that humanitarian intervention without the support of the regime, or worse with its active hostility, will be ineffective and potentially dangerous. But he makes a more significant point about responsibility to protect, a principle only recently gaining acceptance in the international community as a response to genocide and mass atrocities, and the failure of the principle of State sovereignty which simply shields such crimes.

If it comes to be thought that R2P, and in particular the sharp military end of the doctrine, is capable of being invoked in anything other than a context of mass atrocity crimes, then such consensus as there is in favour of the new norm will simply evaporate in the global south. And that means that when the next case of genocide or ethnic cleansing comes along we will be back to the same old depressing arguments about the primacy of sovereignty that led us into the horrors of inaction in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990s.   

Which leaves the world continuing to wrestle with how to respond to the Burmese junta’s evident unwillingness and incapacity to take all available measures and resources to respond to Cyclone Nargis.

While we obviously can’t respond to the full scale of the destruction, TEAR’s partnership with World Concern Burma means that we can support their on the ground relief efforts. Their work will make a life-saving difference for potentially tens of thousands of people. Please consider whether you can support such efforts through TEAR or any other organisation responding to the disaster.

John Howard spoke at a Liberal Party fundraiser last night.

Rage against opposition. Work as hard as you can to get out of opposition as soon as you can.

“Opposition is a dismal position in politics. I had my share of opposition, I had 13 years of it, and I hated every year of it, I hated every week of it.

He also opined sagely that a Federal Coalition Government would “come again”, which sounds almost Messianic, but is really just a trite observation about Australian political reality. How long it will take might be an interesting question, but that it will happen sometime is unarguable.

Even within the confines of a short – and selectively-quoting – news story, though, this strikes me as appalling. How about, “Opposition is a hard, bitter, but absolutely critical role in a functioning democracy? What we are after is not the power of Government for its own sake, but the best policy outcomes, and the best provision of Government services, for the Australian community. I may not have enjoyed Opposition, but I relished every opportunity to hold the Government accountable for its actions. The Australian people expected no less, and they will expect no less of us now.”

Which may be what he meant. But certainly doesn’t appear to be what he said. It’s not about the policy. It’s not about accountability. It’s all about the power.

Gerard Henderson goes all populist in his rant denying that past Australian Government policy and actions towards Indigenous Australians might ever have amounted to genocide. Because the “person on the street” understands genocide as mass murder, and because mass murder didn’t take place, therefore Australian Governments can’t possibly have committed genocide against Indigenous Australians.

He knows, of course, but glibly dismisses – “legalisms and academic debates aside” – that the real definition of genocide in international law is something quite different.

Genocide is the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, through acts including murder, inflicting life conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction of the group, preventing births within the group, and forcibly transferring children away from the group.

Past Government policy towards Indigenous Australians has definitely included some of these acts. Whether this amounted to genocide depends on whether or not they were conducted with the intent to destroy, or hasten the demise of, Indigenous Australians as a group. In a mature democracy, committed to learning from our history, and creating a prosperous future for all Australians, that’s a discussion we should have, and historians who raise the question are doing us a service, whatever position you ultimately come to on the question. Henderson is wrong to dismiss the discussion out of hand.

Henderson uses the Holocaust as the benchmark of genocide, and its true that in the popular imagination, genocide is indelibly linked with images of Nazi death camps and gas chambers. However, on Henderson’s populist account, the Nazi crime of genocide only begins when the gas chambers and execution squads begin their work.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, though, allows earlier identification (as well as hopefully earlier prevention and punishment – though that is a separate question) of the crime of genocide. Nazi laws imposing economic, social and physical restrictions on German Jews were conducted with genocidal intent. Creation of ghettos and forcible relocation of German Jews were crimes that would be characterised as genocide under the 1948 Convention. Mass murder is generally not the benchmark of genocide, but the culmination of genocidal policies and incitement, as it was in Nazi Germany, as it was in Bosnia, in Rwanda, and as it is in Sudan.

Under the Convention, genocide can begin long before the mass murderers start their work. And it this broader – though inherently more ambiguous – definition of genocide that means Australia should at least be prepared to ask the question, “Was genocide practiced against Indigenous Australians?”

If you’re after further reading, Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell, is an excellent account of the development of the Genocide convention, and American responses both to the convention and the crime of genocide in the 20th Century.

I’ve always had a bit of a fascination for abandoned and underground spaces. So, this is a dream website for me, and is currently fuelling all my fantasy holidays…

Right now, I’m thinking of visiting Gunkanjima (”Ghost Island”) Japan…

on my way to an abandoned oceanic fortress in Vladivostok…

and finishing up beneath Budapest, Hungary.

For more abandoned and underground goodness, I love:

7 underground wonders of the world
7 more underground wonders of the world
7 abandoned wonders of the former Soviet Union

And there’s a lot more to check out on weburbanist.

I really love working for TEAR. And I’m glad that I’ve been around long enough to see this guy, and this guy get jobs with the organisation.

This is awesome cool – seven years of ALP poll numbers as rollercoaster ride.

But whether the vertiginous climbs and dizzying descents make you throw up in your mouth or scream with excitement depends, I guess, on your political perspective. Also, I don’t know if the roller-coaster wreck at the end is meant to signify anything.