Comments

Stewart, Thank you for the excellent article, and sorry to have missed your talk (I was overseas). Australia's failure to condemn the worsening situation in Nauru, although not surprising, has been disappointing. The whole affair has served to damage Australia's reputation in the region, and that damage extends to the aid program. There is a photo of Mathew Batsiua being arrested (for his peaceful protest) that shows him being bundled into a police car emblazoned with the "Australian Aid" logo, red kangaroo and all. It's an image that will not go unnoticed in a region where Australia portrays itself as promoting 'good governance'.

Michael, I don't think your assessment of education aid as universally ineffective stands up to scrutiny. Also why did you not mention the halving of child and maternal deaths since 1990, or the turning around of the HIV epidemic? Are these also examples of aid ineffectiveness in your eyes?

Hi Carmen, Thanks you so much for sharing many information about PNG and Port Moresby. Regards

This is really great it helps me in my research to strengthen relationship between PNG and Russia, Awsome!!!!

Thank you for sharing this piece. I enjoyed reading it. I suppose the tricky thing about existing systems for temporary migration is that they are agreed on by the leaders of PICs involved. For them, the availability of some form of employment opportunity for unemployed PI citizens is better than nothing at all. And we know that with such kinds of mechanistic rationale driving policy, the migrant labourer more than often ends up being exploited and having to experience problems associated with dysfunctional systems.. Your call to broaden the discourse on temp migration is timely. PI leaders need to hear and understand what that means to propose fairer mechanisms to NZ and Australia.

Obviously if you don't think aid is on average effective, then you should support aid cuts. Of course, effectiveness matters. But if aid can be effective, as you seem to suggest, then it is hard to argue that quantity is irrelevant. Would we be happy with a $1 aid program, very well spent by sending it to, say, the Red Cross? Most of my research has been around aid effectiveness, but given the unprecedented aid cuts it would be odd not to focus on them. My own judgement is that there are plenty of opportunities to spend more aid well.

MSF has on numerous occasions spoken to state actors - often in tandem with other NGOs. As recently as 2 weeks ago at the UN, engaging them to pass a resolution to protect medical workers and their space. These issues have been repeatedly discussed on a number of stages so attending a summit will not make much of a difference, particularly in light of how outspoken MSF has been on the issue of bombings. By suggesting that the organization owes it to the community at large to come up with alternative means of providing aid sounds like a work around to the core issue: that facilities are being targeted and rules of war are not being respected.

Good analysis of the various conditions underlying corruption. Most of those conditions underlay corruption in other countries too. Does PNG have a Corruption Eradication Commission? This has had a small impact in limiting corruption in Indonesia and Timor-Leste (that is why corrupt elements attacked Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission last year). Are provincial governors elected by parties or directly? In Indonesia, governors are directly elected by the people, a system which occasionally allows honest politicians like Jokowi (before he became president) and Ahok to be elected as governors, based on their popular reputation rather than their influence (wealth) in a party. Indonesia and Timor-Leste are far, far from perfect but they may still offer some lessons.

Thanks, James, for adding your reflections on the report. I think you hit the nail on the head where you note that the report provides 'glimpses' into the key questions and issues, but fails to actually engage with them in a meaningful way.

Camilla Thanks for your review of this report. My sense, though, is that you've been too diplomatic in your assessment. To be sure, the report was rushed out in the shadow of an election announcement and one has to have sympathy for those tasked with putting it together in those circumstances; even so, it’s a disappointing piece of work. The quality of submissions was clearly highly variable but rather than attempting to exercise some critical judgements, the report seems to want to give everyone a guernsey. Even setting aside the dissenting report and additional comments from the Coalition and Greens members respectively, the end result simply doesn’t hold water. The report provides glimpses of some of the key debates and issues for the aid program in PNG: should it focus on strengthening the state (and use advisers) or on working directly with the poorest and most vulnerable (and use NGOs)? Is it about leveraging PNG resources or about direct service delivery and plugging gaps? (Can it be both?) Can it focus on economic growth without an explicit pro-poor strategy? How does it balance the pursuit of Australian national interests with PNG Government demands to influence the allocation of the aid dollar more directly? Unfortunately, the Committee never really comes to grips with these key questions. At one point, the report notes that the Committee ‘has previously identified a lack of strategic clarity in the Australian Government’s approach to foreign aid’. Ironically, the Committee’s report is guilty of the same sin. The text is replete with broad and untested (and uncosted) claims about what’s needed in PNG and how the Australian aid program might be spent in response. I lost count of the number of times I wrote ‘So what?’ in the margins of the report in response to such statements. Many of these claims are repackaged as recommendations without critical analysis or discussion. So the recommendations range from the sensible through the dubious to the downright quirky. (I’m glad to see that I wasn’t the only one to be left scratching my head over the gushing endorsement given to the work of YWAM.) Even the dissenting Coalition members of the Committee appear to support a range of additional spending measures – but without identifying areas where Australia might stop spending aid. The report is, in this sense, almost a microcosm of the way Australia’s aid program to PNG has been subjected to a range of conflicting pressures and imperatives from many sides over the years. Given this, the wonder is not that the aid program hasn’t been as successful as it might have been, rather it’s that the aid program has managed to maintain a semblance of coherence at all. It’s striking that the Committee appears to have reached a consensus that ‘performance benchmarks have limited utility in the context of the PNG aid program’, although prudence perhaps suggested that this wasn’t translated into a recommendation. Even so, this would seem to undercut one of the pillars of the 'new aid paradigm' and it sits oddly in a report tasked with assessing not only the delivery but also the effectiveness of Australia’s aid program to PNG. Given the amount of time and resources that went into the conduct of this enquiry, the public is entitled to ask whether this report is the best we can hope for from this sort of exercise. One can only pity the poor DFAT staff who are now obliged to prepare a point-by-point response to the report’s recommendations. You pose the right question in asking whether much will change in the delivery of Australian aid as a consequence of this enquiry. I’m confident in predicting that the answer will be: nothing.

The combination of the Performance of Australian Aid report and the specific country performance reports and their timely publication is certainly welcome and moves ODA reporting in the right direction. However, as you imply Stephen, the reporting of the fairly vague process quality scores and benchmark scores does not leave the reader, inside or outside DFAT, with a clear picture of what the aid program is achieving and what needs to be done to further improve performance. I think that the next steps required to enhance the Performance of Australian Aid report are: - a summary of qualitative and quantitative OUTCOMES (eg how many children educated, change in child mortality rate, change in export sales) against each of the country and multilateral program objectives and their targets and a whole of program table which sums up the quantitative outcomes of the program (as in Appendix 5 of the 2013-14 DFAT Annual Report). Readers need to know what the program is achieving, not just the quality of its processes. - a plain text summary of outcomes, challenges and plans for the ten biggest country or multilateral programs so readers come away with more of a feel for the program and DFAT is in a better position to explain the aid program. - bringing the publication date forward by a month so that informed external feedback can be incorporated into the development of the next year's aid budget.

As economist like to say, correlation isn't causation. Permanent workers are not necessarily being restricted in favour of temporary labour - part of that massive growth must in part reflect the fact that no seasonal work stream existed before 2005 and represents an increase in opportunity, not a shift in approach away from permanency. The decline elsewhere may reflect overall trends and increased restrictions due to global conditions. This would benefit from a compare and contrast with overall migration outcome statistics.