Comments

Thanks for this article. It is great and a very fascinating read.

If you go to the <a href="http://www.acfid.asn.au/resources-publications/publications/community-support" rel="nofollow">ACFID website</a> there is a table of number of NGO donors/supporters per Federal seat, an interesting set of variations bewteen outer and inner city seats among others. In some inner city seats nearly half the electorate supports an NGO/s.

What is particularly interesting is that if you look at NGO aid spending from their public donations (excluding govt funding) it has been around 0.03%-0.04% of GDP since the 1970 (see Lissner 1977 "Politics of Altruism" for the early figures), a remarkably stable figure, and an interesting observation on public altruism for overseas aid.

Hi Robin, Thanks for this analysis. I am surprised to see no comments but I guess everyone is a bit shell-shocked by the announcement and/or was waiting for the election to happen before (trying) to respond. As I imagine all of devpolicy's readers, I have lots of thoughts and reactions and I am not quite ready to formulate them for public consumption. So we are all indebted to your analysis for getting started. Aid has become an easy target for cuts - not just in Australia but elsewhere as Ben Day's blog notes. Perhaps to some degree we do need to look inward as a development community and realise that we have not sold our story well enough. Much of the community continues to use the poverty reduction paradigm that gained so much voice through the MDGs and Make Poverty History campaigns. And perhaps - after a decade - that does not resonate sufficiently with the wider community. I am loath to exclusively frame aid as an instrument of foreign policy and security interests, but perhaps we as a development community need to do more thinking in that area. I was interested to see that Bob Carr's first reaction was that the aid cut would "weaken Australia's security." I will stop there as I am not sure how much space blog replies are allowed! Given that these cuts are going to happen, perhaps it is time for a devpolicy.org series on "How I would cut $4.5b from aid" so that your readers can outline where they would make cuts. It might be cathartic for some to find lots of savings in items such as returning the $375m per year from immigration to AusAID (as you suggest) and cutting all aid to any country with a GDP per capita above US$3000 (including Indonesia and Vanuatu which would save A$700m per year).

Scott - what your USP student told you was inaccurate. Rabuka's party, the Soqosoqo Vakavulewa ni Taukei (SVT) did not demand to be granted a majority in cabinet but the party did make a series of rather extravagant demands as the price for inclusion in the cabinet that the Supreme Court later in 1999 judged to amount to a refusal to participate. The true story is told in the Supreme Court judgment on the case that was later brought by SVT party leader Inoke Kubuabola - see http://www.paclii.org/fj/cases/FJSC/1999/8.html. Also if you look at some of the later court judgments on breaches of the power-sharing provisions, they at one point revisited that decision and suggested that the court might better have ruled otherwise.

The results of this survey are going be more interesting in the light of the proposed cuts by the coalition following the election. I felt the speed of the increase in recent years was perhaps too rapid to be manageable and effectively implemented. However, such cuts actually causes more volatility to the aid program, reduced efficiency and effectiveness in country by country delivery, and limited effects on the MDGs. Lets see the results soon. thank you John Whittle

Nowadays, very controversial, sad and interesting issues especially the conflicts and the political instability in our region is a boiling topic. Iam from Solomon Islands and would like to learn more about the conflicts especially in this region. As a young Solomon Islander, i want to see the young generation to seek a new pathway for a better future as we all take the leadership role from our colonial era-politicians, learn from our pasts and move forward. Hope to learn from your very informative articles in this blog site. Many thanks.

I found your article good reading. Information is power, how it is used requires responsible management, many journalists have failed to do this and in the pursuit of a "good story" have failed check, research, investigate leads, information sources and credibility to establish FACTS. No one wants to have to digest lies and rumor and baseless statements. Even those told by those claiming to be experts, academics and supposedly learned persons. Thanks, Gary Juffa

Really useful article Sophie. Thanks for posting. What struck me was the relatively small size of the Red Cross. Less than four percent!

Love the title - if you stretch Kevin's face along the vertical axis he would look a bit like Abbott. From the Pacific perspective the Liberals have been making more assuring noises about re-focussing aid priorities to Australia's nearest region. But then again folk have been promising that and not delivering for some time. To re-engage the endlessly dull PACER Plus debate would be a shame but it seems neither side has the imagination or will to think creatively about trade.

A couple of points. Carnival is basically the only operator in the cruise ship market in the sub-region. There are a couple of big round-the-worlders but if folk want to develop this industry along sensible lines then you have to work with Carnival. This industry in terms of growth and impact dwarfs air passengers. Secondly, there was some fabulous work done by Monash Uni on the positive and negative impacts of tourism - folk should look at that for a balanced view of the tourism industry in the region. By and large the cruise ships tend to be better in a development sense and in a spending sense than the air passengers. But - I think the key point in the article (for me anyway) was not that AusAID may have erred in terms of working with Carnival - but perhaps they erred in not giving the ECF program a chance to prove itself. As a deep sceptic of the ECF program I was surprised by how well the first attempt worked - this is posibly a better model of engaging the private sector. Nevertheless, it might be good to see how this relationship between AusAID and Carnival develops before coming to a firm conclusion.

Interesting observation although I don't see that the issue of aid is 'major' in this election, despite efforts to get it into the discourse by DevPolicy and others. Also, the way the question is phrased implies a presumption that the respondent already knows how much Australia spends on foreign aid and I have seen other items that indicate quite clearly that the general public (a) don't know how much is spent on aid and (b) generally overestimate the spend when asked to guess