Pim Opinion

Foreign aid is given for humanitarian reasons, but it is not charity. It is designed to alleviate poverty through economic and social development and thus must be given, and used in conjunction with wise and constructive policies within the recipient nations. As the Jackson Report, covered in this issue, makes plain, aid is pointless, and may even be damaging, if it does not produce growth and development.

Over the 40 years or so in which aid has been given, a great deal of money has been wasted, and some has been used for their own support and pleasure by the rulers of a variety of rotten regimes (remember the gold bed of Ghana, among a plethora of examples?). Fortunately the Pacific generally enjoys rather nice and responsibile leaders to whom such excesses would be anathema.

Thus, in these days of cyclical recession and economic difficulty in industrialised donor countries, government expenditure comes under much closer scrutiny than was once the case. Reports, or even rumors, of waste produce outrage and questions designed to embarrass governments.

Aid must therefore be subject to review in the interests of its most efficient and effective use. This does not mean that a donor country has the right to pry into the affairs of a recipient, but rather that both governments must acknowledge, and abide by the principle that aid is intended for the good of people generally and must be treated with the same responsibility and care as any other form of revenue given into the hands of officialdom.

The report of the Jackson Committee is therefore to be

welcomed by all who work with, benefit from, or have an interest in the $BOO million or so which Australia pays every year in foreign aid.

It is an embracing and practical document intended to brief the Australian foreign minister and the tax-paying public of Australia on how aid money is spent, what its effectiveness has been, and should be. In the process of this review it has taken a sympathetic, but very businesslike, view of the Pacific island countries which, the committee says, must be the focus of the main thrust of Australian aid for the foreseeable future. Provided this scrutiny is received in the constructive way in which it was made, little but good can come of the report.

Early leakage of some less than exact early drafts of the report produced irritation among some leaders, notably those of Papua New Guinea, for whom the $3OO million given in budgetary support is vital, and likely to remain so for many years, Whether or not passages of the report were rewritten at the last-minute as a result of these sharply-expressed views does not matter and has not been made public. If they were amended, then the value of a free press, and a responsive committee, has been demonstrated.

Australian policy in the past has been to tie no strings, or at least very few, to its aid. If the Jackson Reprt is acted upon by the Australian government, and there is ample reason to expect that it will pretty much become Mr Hayden’s creed in the aid area, then accountability in the use of aid by donor countries, and scrutiny of the management of aid agencies in Australia are likely to become much more rigorous.