Opinion & Commentary
Aid no place for preaching pop stars
Young people are understandably concerned that 50 years into the most rapid improvements in living standards that the world has ever known there are still desperately poor people in Africa and many with scarcely improved lives in Latin America, the Middle East, western Asia and the South Pacific.
Genocide is raging in Darfur. The population is fleeing horrors in Zimbabwe. Congo is worse off than 200 years ago. Women in the Middle East are back in the Middle Ages. Even Tonga, sick and tired of its kleptocratic monarchy and barons, has torched a few buildings.
The Group of 20 Finance Ministers met at the weekend to discuss ways to maintain global prosperity so that China, India and the other Asian countries that are developing can trade their way out of backwardness and poverty. The emphasis was on what could actually be done to maintain monetary stability.
Is this a reason for bullying workers in banks or the Defence Department? Or for ageing rock stars who have run out of musical inspiration to attack Australia's foreign policy? A policy, remember, that does much more to help developing countries get on their feet than pouring buckets of money into the maws of corrupt "Big Men" who not only keep their countries poor but murder their own citizens by the hundreds of thousands can ever do.
The evidence that aid has failed to help poor people or turn corrupt politicians toward growth is now mountainous. Has Bono become deaf listening to his own music?
Governments that have been forgiven debt have incurred more and larger debts to fund their obscene lifestyles. Mercedes' most lucrative market is for their armoured limousines in Africa and the Middle East. Aid was used to buy a jet plane so that an African potentate with 30 wives could fly around the world begging for food aid.
Non-government aid workers and the World Food Program are being kept out of Darfur and other African hot spots. They are asked for huge bribes when they are given access. A great deal of food aid, despite aid workers' best endeavours, finishes up being sold in souks.
When Prime Minister John Howard announced to the UN General Assembly that Australia would substantially increase its aid after the G8/Bob Geldof "Make Poverty History" campaign, he promised that he would not waste his taxpayers' hard earned money by giving aid to corrupt governments. He is trying to keep that promise, but that condition makes it hard.
Governments that were determined to bring their people to modern living standards, notably colonial Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand, did not beg for aid and do not need it now. China and India are so large that aid is derisory. India is aware that aid has inherent economic costs similar to those associated with resource booms. It did not ask for aid after the tsunami in 2004.
Where donors want to be silly, China cheerfully uses the fungibility of aid funds for its space and other military programs. Excruciating negotiations were undertaken to ensure that Australian aid helped Indonesia after the tsunami. Even so, timber house components ordered from New Zealand by non-government aid organisations to speed up house rebuilding took jobs from Indonesian workers.
Channeling aid to the South Pacific -- Australia's principal international responsibility -- is particularly difficult. The Pacific receives more aid -- dominantly Australian -- per capita than any other region. But aid is not going to the 85 per cent of people who still live in villages.
In Papua New Guinea, HIV/AIDS is reaching African levels because there is no education or healthcare. In the South Pacific as a whole after 30 years of aid there are 1.5 million, mostly male, unemployed or underemployed. There has been no growth. People are not starving because women work in gardens and orchards, but gangs of youths are roaming the streets of Port Moresby and Lae and spreading to other Pacific centers. Port Moresby repeatedly features among the most unliveable cities in the world. The government elites that absorb the aid live behind barbed wire and send their children to Australia to be educated.
Rockeconomics is no path to development. Compassionate Australians must take the trouble to understand why aid is not a panacea and often not even a help. We know that trade is more effective than aid and must avoid harming people in developing countries through aid.
Professor Helen Hughes, a former senior director of the economic analysis department at the World Bank, is a senior fellow at the The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.
