With all the hype about “budget repair” I had made the assumption that government spending was going down. Turns out I am wrong. At the same time that our government is demanding we slash and burn things like foreign aid, it is planning on spending $14 billion dollars more next year...
All that campaigning and the aid program is still savaged. Did we achieve anything?
Having spent more than a decade of my life campaigning for increases in both the quantity and the quality of the Australian aid program, it has been devastating to see the aid budget slashed by more than 20%, the greatest single decrease in the history of the program. I have travelled to a number...
Are we the world’s stingiest nation?
Never before has an Australian government made cuts to the international aid program like those made by the Abbott government. The argument goes that we can’t afford to borrow money in order to give it away. We first need to deal with our debt crisis, and then we can afford to give more. A...
Julie Bishop’s tortuous logic on foreign aid
Tony Abbott, Aid and the National Interest
The Greens are currently running a campaign that declares “Tony Abbott has removed poverty reduction from the goals of the aid budget.” My politics lean more toward the Greens than the Coalition, but this campaign is outrageously misleading. This was the stated objective of...
Selling Out the Poor for a Few Kilometres of Bitumen
Good on you Joe, you have traded the opportunity to end extreme poverty for millions for a few extra kilometres of bitumen.