Aid First

My last positive act to eliminate the world of poverty was a pathetic attempt to complete the '40 hour famine' was I was 11. I ate three packs of barley sugars (the only sustenance you are allowed to have) in the first two hours, was violently ill and spent the rest of the weekend recovering and eating my left-over Easter Eggs. I still made my Grandmother give me the $5 dollar sponsorhip, however, but I think I spent a dollar of it on a can of Fanta. Charges of hypocrisy, with respect to anything I say on the subject of foreign aid are therefore wholly justified. But at least I can claim to have done it on wholly altruistic grounds. That's more than can be said about the new aid policy of the New Zealand government.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Murray McCully, a man whose name would not look out of place in a book by Lynley Dodd, recently announced a review of the governments aid policy and the structure of the government's aid dispensing body NZAID. That's all well and good, ministers newly settled into portfolios that they have coveted for the better part of a decade are want to produce a report that shows just how rubbish the last minister, and their political rival, was at doing their job. But, McCully's 'review' goes deeper than merely seeing whether aid money has been spent effectively - in fact McCully will not be satisfied unless he has changed the very definition of 'effectiveness'. He appears poised to take away the autonomous status of NZAID and subsuming this organisation with the umbrella of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, on the grounds that NZAID's stated goal of 'poverty elimination' has become too broad, and that aid dispensation should be directed to greater enhance New Zealand's foreign policy aims. In other words, New Zealand's aid money isn't 'effective' if it is helping some of the most destitute people on the planet drag themselves out of dire poverty, its only 'effective' if it in some way strengthens New Zealand's position on the world stage. For two reasons, McCully's policy is an unmitigated disaster.

The first reason is that judging aid on the criterion of 'poverty elimination' has a strong basis in morality. New Zealand currently gives aid money because it has determined that it has obligations as a good international citizen to improve the standard of living of those who are unfortunate enough to live in states less awesome than New Zealand, without an abundance of natural resources and a stable political system. (C'mon, the most important news story of the first three months of 2009 was the Prime Minister falling down the stairs).And, given that New Zealand's $480 million dollar aid budget is mostly directed towards Pacific micro-states that have almost been completely forgotten about by the international community in its scramble to save Africa, our country's aid money makes real difference in people's lives. McCully, in his role as Opposition spokesman for Foreign Affairs, expressed outrage that despite this large sum of money allocated towards our neighbours every year, Japan was able to make many of these states alter their stance on whaling (from wanting to save the whales to wanting Japan to eat the whales) through offering aid assistance, but making it conditional on this policy flip-flop. Furthermore, McCully believes that withholding aid from Fiji while it labours under the authoritarian command of Frank Banimarama would help speed up its return to democracy. He's probably right to be angry, and he's probably right that withholding aid would in the long-run return Fiji back to democratic status. But this doesn't make it ok to tie provision of aid to 'what's in the best interests of New Zealand'. Poverty eradication and improving lives must be the first,second and third priorities for aid - and it abhorrent that those most deserving could be denied the opportunity to meet their most basic needs solely because their state does not offer New Zealand key diplomatic, security or economic opportunities.

Even if you disagree with me on the 'moral basis' for aid, and think I'm some sort of liberal sociology-studying pansy who should get a job so he can afford to patch up his bleeding heart, tying aid to NZ's foreign policy goals is not only immoral - it is intransparent and inefficient. McCully came up with a pathetic and widely-derided example that the practice of throwing money out of a helicopter would be enough to satisfy NZAID's sole goal of 'poverty elimination' under the current regime. He followed this up with the tired old hobby-horse of the New Zealand conservative movement, that it was time aid was a 'hand-up not a hand-out'. While aid agencies are infinitely smarter than the money-throwing hippies McCully would desperately like to portray them as, maybe there is truth in the idea that NZAID's budget could be better used. But the big problem with McCully's strategy is that when aid programmes are focused not just on poverty eradication, but also on other goals - such as fostering commercial opportunities for New Zealand businesses, it becomes wholly impossible to assess how sucessful an aid programme was at satisfying any of its aims. The problem is that when aid becomes just another tool in the kit for satisying some inscrutable goal of NZ foreign policy the focus of aid distribution becomes too focused on creating programmes that make New Zealand appear a committed and legitimate donor, rather than focusing on programmes that are actually effective and get on with the core business of improving lives.

NZ's aid policy is in dire need of review. Despite our obligations to the UN's Millenium Development Goals that state we must set aside 0.8% of our GDP for foreign aid, New Zealand contributes a shameful 0.35% (and even this is a high-water mark, and vast improvement on previous years). And too often, New Zealand contributes only to short term projects, allowing aid-recieving governments to see aid as a one-off sweetener to their domestic budget rather than a long-term source of income that they can use to make extensive and badly needed infrastructural reforms. But despite this, NZAID has over the last decade transformed itself into an organisation that is adept at providing aid with is effective, humanitarian and easily harmonised into indigenous policy-making. That's why it is a shame that the stated goal of McCully's review is to reinvent the wheel, and demand that the only good aid is aid that advances NZ's economic, diplomatic and security agenda. It represents a step backward for New Zealand's international reputation as a good moral international citizen. And it represents a giant leap backward for the lives of the South Pacific's most poorest people. It must be abandoned.

Alex