Giving a better deal
p. 23 · Read in the full issue
IT would be wrong to say that the level of overseas aid, or official
development assistance (ODA) in
today’s politically correct jargon, was
a prominent issue in last month’s New Zealand general election campaign. It wasn’t.
But it was there in the background, stirred along by a group of New Zealanders with a conscience about this country’s embarrassingly low aid effort and keen to stimulate public debate on increasing it. Despite the National Party government’s commitment to raising the aid level to the United Nations recom mended benchmark of 0.7 per cent of gross national product reaffirmed at last year’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro it hovers at around 0.2 per cent.
Only two countries in the OECD’s 20-nation Development Assistance Committee do worse Ireland and the United States. In dollar terms, of course, the US ranks with Japan as the world’s biggest aid donors but it has never accepted the 0.7 per cent target.
“New Zealand is one of the most miserly among the affluent countries when it comes to helping the world’s poor,” says Phil Twyford, executive director of Oxfam. The reason, said National’s foreign affairs minister Don McKinnon, was that over the past 20 years, the New Zealand economy had been one of the weakest in the developed world.
His message was simply “You can’t give what you haven’t got.”
Now the extraordinary thing about this is that if the New Zealand government is “miserly”, New Zealanders are amazingly generous especially when it comes to disaster appeals, as many in the Pacific well know. Two years ago, when Cyclone Val devastated Western Samoa, New Zealanders pledged $1 million for emergency relief in a hurriedly arranged TVNZ telethon. They gave another $700,000 to a separate appeal launched by the ANZ Bank.
And this, remember, was just before Christmas when people have plenty of demands on their money. A few years earlier, a group set out to raise SI million in just two weeks to send a ship loaded with relief supplies to famine-stricken Ethiopia. They ended up with SLS million. “It is a matter of record that we are the world’s largest givers per head of population to such appeals,” says Twyford.
“So all we’re really asking is that the politicians catch up with the public,” New Zealand governments were not always so far behind public sentiment. In 1975, spurred by the personal conviction of Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk, aid spending reached an impressive 0.52 per cent of GNP. (Chris Laidlaw, then a diplomat, recalls being sent to Fiji at the time to administer New Zealand’s aid program and wondering how on earth he was going to spend all the money
that had been committed.) Then came the first oil shock and a series of international and domestic events that turned economies around the world upside down. As the years passed, it became obvious that successive governments were unable or unwilling to exempt the aid vote
from budgetary cutbacks imposed
on all areas of government spend
ing.
In fact, the aid programme be came something of a soft target for treasury razor gangs. McKinnon was in recent years struggling to stop them hacking the level below the “relatively poor” 9.2 per cent which he decided was the minimum
acceptable.
(By adding S2O million worth of contributions to international agencies, as well as disaster relief
and spending on fisheries maritime surveillance in the Pacific, to his ministry’s ODA vote of 5157 million, McKinnon said the 1993-94 level is actually 0.26 per cent, not so far removed from the OECD average of 0.33 per cent.) But this is by the by. The real question canvassed as a backdrop to the election campaign was how the level could be increased to something more respectable especially for a country that now sits on the United Nations Security Council, with all the responsibilities that involves.
No party abandoned the 0.7 per cent target but only the minority five-party NZ Alliance made a specific commitment to achieve it, setting a 10-year timetable. National and Labour both talked about expanding aid as the economy grew vital if the level is not to fall below 0.2 per cent, as the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee pointed out when it reviewed New Zealand’s effort a year ago.
The committee urged that the aid budget be exempted from further cost-cutting measures and called on the government to “progressively restore the erosion in aid volume which has occurred over the years”. During the campaign, Labour suggested a novel approach to take the level of ODA off the political agenda and reach a bipartisan accord.
This would agree a target over the next five to 10 years which all parties would adhere to, whichever was in power.
Although aid has never been a political football in New Zealand, a bipartisan approach would, Labour said, underpin the restoration of the country’s assistance pro gramme. The volume of aid helps determine New Zealand’s international credibility as well as helping the less fortunate in a world where the gap between the richest and the poorest 20 per cent of people has doubled in the past seven years.
Now the election is over, we’ll wait to see if the political parties will give it a go. For as Twyford says “It is degrading to argue that our affluence is insufficient to do our bit. We may deny our responsibility but we cannot escape it.” □