Comments

Great and punchy post, Ashlee. This is exactly what I thought after scanning the document from my twitter feed. Interesting how the first big point was all about accountability (holding the Government to account to taxpayers), but then increased flexibility, funding and cutting 'red-tape' for the NGO sector, under the axiom that the accreditation and code of conduct is enough accountability and checks and balances to ensure that effective aid is delivered. By definition, holding the Government to account also means the Government holding every organisation it provides public funding to also to account, and while flexibility, innovation, and dynamism with less bureaucracy is great in theory, there is an absolute dearth across the board of sound, public and transparent impact evaluation evidence which would need to accompany it in practice. Slight tangent, but definitely a useful way to view this 'what organisations and programs should aid money fund?' question, is this ongoing discussion that poverty reduction programs, whether delivered by private contractors, NGO contractors, the public service itself or others, should be bench-marked against just giving cash instead. It's hard to conceptualise in case of emergency assistance, humanitarian, rights-based and human security related aid (which I'd personally contrast to human development aid, the former being a precondition for the dynamic process of the latter) which most NGOs focus on, but still a useful framing for thinking about this, I think. These are a few juicy articles which I really enjoyed on this: http://chrisblattman.com/2013/08/19/is-it-nuts-to-give-money-to-the-poor/ http://international.cgdev.org/blog/new-documents-reveal-cost-%E2%80%9Cending-poverty%E2%80%9D-millennium-village-least-12000-household http://www.millenniumvillages.org/field-notes/the-costs-and-benefits-of-the-millennium-villages-correcting-the-center-for-global-development

Hi Jonathan, Many thanks for your informative blog. My company, <a href="http://www.developingmarkets.com/" rel="nofollow">Developing Markets Associates</a> (DMA) manages the <a href="http://www.sendmoneypacific.org/" rel="nofollow">SendMoneyPacific</a> and <a href="www.sendmoneyasia.org" rel="nofollow">SendMoneyAsia</a> websites that you have referenced in your article. I thought I'd add a couple of points about the positive impact that government and donor supported impartial websites can have. Thank you for highlighting the role played by migrant focused remittance comparison websites. SendMoneyPacific has been online now for nearly 5 years. Over that period we have recorded a fall in remittance costs levied by Money Transfer Operators in some of the more competitive remittance corridors of over 50% (e.g. MTO costs from Australia to Samoa are down by 58%). SendMoneyPacific has been able to help to reduce remittance costs, increase transparency and thus take up of formal channels as a consequence of the strong government support that AusAID and New Zealand's MFAT New Zealand Aid Programme have been able to provide. This support has helped to make the website a household name in many Pacific communities in Australia and New Zealand, and now the USA, as well as across the Pacific islands. Over 66,000 Pacific people follow SendMoneyPacific on Facebook and regular interaction with migrants at community events, on radio shows and in many other ways, has helped to encourage use of lower cost products and new remittance technologies. AusAID recently provided funding for the launch of a sister website, SendMoneyAsia, which is now helping Asian migrants to make informed choices for remittances when sending money home from Australia to Asia. SendMoneyPacific has benefitted from increasingly proactive regulators who have helped to pave the way for new low cost remittance products and technologies (mobile, online, prepaid card) to be launched and adopted by migrants. Which in turn, is helping to generate competition with the more established banks and MTOs in the region.

The Coalition hasn't said the aid minister would be in Cabinet. Most likely they would do as Labor has done, appointing a minister within the foreign affairs and trade portfolio but locating them in the outer ministry. By the way, the Coalition has now indicated they would also appoint a separate minister for trade (currently one of Julie Bishop's hats), which is unsurprising. The trade minister would presumably be in Cabinet, with the foreign minister, which makes it all the less likely that an aid minister would be. Not to mention that the small business minister will be occupying one of those scarce chairs! On your other two questions, I doubt there's anything about the way aid procurement is done that would be regarded as disadvantageous to small business, but I can't be sure. And no, we haven't seen any analysis of the Vote Compass results in relation to foreign aid but we're on the case.

Thanks Michael for your comment. It would seem to me that there are two ways to look at the Carnival Agreement. One is that it is a backward step because of its bilateral nature. The other is that it is nevertheless a step forward along the private sector engagement road. If the latter is correct, then it is a modest step since there is no agreement in place involving a financial commitment. We thought that was worth highlighting. I allow for both possibilities in the concluding sentence of the post, but the heading indicates that I come down on the side of it being a backward step for the reasons given in the body of the post. I don't think it's fair to say I'm inconsistent. In that Canberra Times article you mention, Michael, I talk about the ECF in that same paragraph you quote from saying that "It, or something like it, would be a good candidate for adoption..." I'm all for private sector engagement, but I'm sure you'd agree that how you go about it is also important.

The main purpose of the policy brief, and the above blog post, is to compare and contrast the policies of the two parties that are viable in this basic sense: one of them is likely to be able to form a government and control the aid program. However, as you note, the brief covers the Greens' policies in some detail and also makes the point that, unlike the two major parties, the Greens have sought to articulate a clear aid and development policy framework for the coming term, and deserve credit for that. The brief also notes that the Greens 'will have a critical role to play in the next parliament in ensuring effective scrutiny of the aid program and also ensuring that it does not easily fall prey to commercial or other sectional interests'.

Thanks for the comprehensive overview Robin. I think a crucial question is will the Minister for International Development be a member of Cabinet under the Coalition - have they made a commitment to this? Should the Coalition be elected, the Cabinet discussions around budgets ('waste'), restructuring and implementation of stated policy will be fierce ahead of the Coalition's first budget which one would expect to be fairly harsh - how would International Development fair without a seat at the table? For example the Coalition has stated the Minister with responsibility for small business will be in Cabinet under the Department of Treasury. One of the stated small business policies is that all Departments will use "tender procedures and procurement processes that do disadvantage small business participation and instead actively encourage it". What are the implications for aid delivery and growth in aid in light of this? One more question, have you seen (or discussed with the ABC) the results from the "Vote Compass" foreign aid question?

Stephen - Interesting post. I wonder about the balance and consistency of your remarks both in the article and over time. In your Canberra Times article of 2 April 2013, you criticise AusAID - “Despite a strategy committing it to work much more with the private sector, AusAID has done little more in recent years than talk to business.” Yet in response to a judicious next step, an MOU with a major corporate in the region, your criticism increases, rather than abates. Then you criticise the agreement because “no dollars have been attached”. Yet in the following paragraph you criticise the bilateral approach. How much more strident would your criticism have been in this para if there were dollars attached?

The detailed paper is all very well, but why doesn't this summary cover the Greens as a viable choice for people concerned about foreign aid? The detailed paper mentions Greens policies such as the "safer pathways" proposal and criticism of fake aid such as mining industry support. At least a paragraph or two on Greens policies would be appropriate in this article. This is unfair and hobbled election commentary as it stands.

I think a healthy degree of scepticism is more than warranted. Other questions that arise in this regard are: which employment laws govern those ni-Vanuatu people who are employed by Carnival - are they covered by the Vanuatu labour laws or something else? Also, Carnival predominantly employs ni-Vanuatu people in 'hospitality' areas creating a demand for graduates from the APTC campus here in Port Vila which is funded through AusAID - whilst there is a certain synchronicity here it is not clear what Carnival is contributing and again there is no dollar amount attached. I have written previously that in small Pacific island economies the private sector with which AusAID needs to engage (whether by way of challenge funding or otherwise) is the private sector that is there already not the bit of it that operates on a SISO (sail in sail out) basis. An agreement of this type satisfies a need to work 'to scale' and reduces the number of reporting lines I guess but not much more. I look forward to having my scepticism disproved!

Stephen, thanks for the post and for drawing attention to this odd paper by ASPI. I read the paper and I'm afraid it just gets more mystifying. See this perplexing passage from Peter Jennings's chapter: "A government that wants to promote a mature and broad foreign policy would divert about $100 million a year from AusAID to DFAT (less than the cost of a wing on a new Super Hornet, 12 of which were bought on a whim for around $2.9 billion in the 2013 Budget)." So a poor decision by Defence is a reason for cutting AusAID? How can that be? Should AusAID be cut every time some other part of government makes a mistake? Is this what passes for 'strategic' commentary in Australia?

Thanks Jonathan. It’s a relief to respond to a less belligerent post. And good also to have issues raised that are not based on wild conjecture, but are susceptible to clear evidence or analysis: you can get answers to both of your key questions just by looking at the antics of the government itself. There’s no question that the Bainimarama government lacks legitimacy, …. and knows it. After all, it has always claimed to be following a roadmap towards elections, and thus itself sees elections as the route to ‘legitimacy’. That’s always been the odd thing about Fiji since 2006: these are the anti-coup coup-makers, the insurrectionists who describe their own coup as a ‘coup to end all coups’. If by ‘legitimacy’ you mean popular support, no one is really sure about the extent of backing for the Bainimarama-led government, though there are many extravagant claimants of certainty on both sides. The Bainimarama government hasn’t itself bothered to test the water, for e.g. through municipal council elections. No one is sure which ordinary person-on-the-street statements can be accepted at face value, particularly since the 2009 clampdown. The Fijian expression ‘liu muri’ (dishonest/deceptive/ backstabber) has become widely used. What was once an open and frank society (no pun intended), at least compared to the rest of Melanesia, has become much less easy to read. As to the Lowy poll carried out by market research company Tebbutt Research, I’ve published what I think of that here [copied below]. For my own part, I reckon Bainimarama has accumulated considerable personal support, and a great deal of pragmatic acquiescence, but – whatever the truth - that Lowy poll was scandalously shoddily conducted and conceived, and the Lowy Institute has never bothered to respond to those widely aired criticisms. Second, you question my claim that Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed Khaiyum has no electoral base, but this is a statement of fact not conjecture. He did – I believe - have some loose links with Ratu Epeli Ganilau’s National Alliance Party of Fiji, a party which obtained only 2.9% of the national vote in 2006. Ratu Epeli did join Bainimarama’s cabinet after the coup, but – like many of the military commander’s allies – has since fallen by the wayside. And why do you think that the government’s draft constitution made more explicit (than did the 1997 constitution) the scope for appointing a non-elected person as Attorney-General? [(s.95(3)-(4)]. That was hardly an expression of confidence in Mr Sayed-Khaiyum’s ability to secure election. Not only does the A-G have no popular base, he also faces considerable hostility within the upper echelons of the regime itself. They key point I was trying to make in that blog post was to get us away from the ridiculous hard/soft policy debate which dominates discussion about Australian/New Zealand foreign policy towards Fiji – and to think rather in terms of a longer- rather than shorter-term outlook. The fixation with Fiji’s overseas relations, which seems to unite both supporters and many critics of the Fiji interim government, is often an alternative to saying anything at all – let alone anything sensible – about the domestic situation. Excerpt from Review of Fiji 2011 on <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_pacific/v024/24.2.fraenkel.html" rel="nofollow">The Lowy Fiji Poll</a>: <blockquote> At the Auckland PIF meeting, the Lowy Institute released an opinion poll conducted within Fiji by market research firm Tebbutt Research and funded by Fiji-born businessman Mark Johnson (Hayward-Jones 2011). This was based on interviews with 1,032 adults in urban areas of Fiji's largest island, Viti Levu, in August 2011. It found that Bainimarama had a 66 percent approval rating and was used to reinforce pressure both from the Lowy Institute and the ANZ Bank for a policy switch toward Fiji. The poll was much criticized by civil society activists within Fiji, who pointed to the prevailing climate of fear and intimidation and asked how Tebbutt had gained permission to carry out its poll (ABC Pacific Beat, 7 Sept 2011). Former Fiji Times editor Russell Hunter had been responsible for commissioning occasional opinion polls from Tebbutt Research until he was deported by Bainimarama in 2008. He said that, "When the Tebbutt-Times poll was still operating, Caz [Tebbutt] several times declined to conduct a poll on contentious issues, fearing that the powers that be would shoot the messenger" (Lal and Hunter 2011). Standard practice for polling organizations is to initially conduct pilot surveys, so Tebbutt would have known the likely findings before carrying out the poll. Others criticized the poll on the grounds that the sample was too small and pointed to the urban bias, claiming that opposition to Bainimarama would have been stronger in rural Fiji (Narsey 2011). Yet, internationally, approval ratings surveys are regularly conducted with similarly small samples, and there was no good reason to think that the opposition would be weaker in urban Fiji. There were stronger reasons for questioning the Tebbutt methodology. A Fiji Times-Tebbutt survey conducted in February 2009 had asked respondents the open-ended question as to whom they preferred as prime minister: 31 percent had favored deposed Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase, and 27 percent Bainimarama (see Fraenkel 2010). The 2011 poll asked instead a highly loaded question: "How good a job do you personally think Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama is doing as Prime Minister?" Not only was the full military title used, but the more normal polling formulation would have been to ask "how good or bad" a job Bainimarama was doing. That the survey designers were possibly aware of this unbalanced phrasing was suggested by another question, which did use the positive and negative options: "Do you think Fiji is moving in the right or wrong direction?" To this question, 65 percent of respondents responded "the right direction," but the exact meaning of "right" or "wrong" in this context was highly uncertain. Even coup critics might reasonably hope that Fiji was moving in the right direction. The Tebbutt poll was used brazenly by the Fiji government to blow its trumpet throughout the rest of 2011, with the Ministry of Information's Sharon Smith-Johns crowing that Bainimarama was "almost three times more popular with the people of Fiji than the Prime Minister Gillard is with the people of Australia" (Fiji Government 2011). More broadly, approval ratings may be reasonably indicative of shifts in popular sentiment in the mass industrial democracies, but they are of questionable value in a country like Fiji, particularly in a climate of severe censorship and intimidation.</blockquote>

Thanks Stephen, great post. The DLP ads are quite baffling. As you said, the DLP support aid. But they've created an ad that clearly taps into the kind of sentiments that you hear from those advocating for aid cuts. Is the ad a work of political strategy (i.e. are they trying to have their cake and eat it too by having a pro-aid policy while trying to pick up anti-aid votes through the ad)? Or is it just a really confusing piece of communications (i.e. they don't realise it has strong potential to fuel the crusade of those calling for aid cuts, including to countries they support such as Timor-Leste)? It's bizarre. To make it even stranger, there is also <a href="http://mumbrella.com.au/rudd-impersonator-fronts-eye-wear-retailers-tv-campaign-172767" rel="nofollow">another cut of the same ad</a> that promotes an eyewear store. The ads were bankrolled by Ian Melrose, who has been a long-time Timor-Leste and West Papua independence supporter. The ads seem counterproductive to the DLP's goals in many ways. Not least that cutting aid to Indonesia would affect Indonesian people living in poverty--including those in Papua and Papua Barat provinces--a lot more than it would impact on the Indonesian government.