This is a
double-barrelled policy statement.
1.
Foreign aid is required for long-term aid situations for non-urgent crises, such as creeping
drought and famine or an education program in a third world country, or a civil war, which builds in intensity over time,
or:
2. Foreign aid is also required for immediate crisis situations, such as a natural disaster in the form of hurricane,
earthquake or tsunami type disasters.
Each has a different time frame need and each is critical, but in different ways.
For Australia,
foreign aid is necessary to stabilize our region, support situations beyond the capacity of our less fortunate island neighbours
and to respond to natural disasters. In the first type of scenario, our neighbours requiring aid may be
smaller Pacific Islands or communities. These do require whatever resources, not always money, that is
necessary to enable them to regain independence, self-sufficiency or stability. It should be in the order
of whatever is required to restore them to the level they previously had, plus a margin for future development.
This is
not a dollar figure or a percentage of our GDP, but a level of respect for these communities, our neighbours.
However, neither should it be at the expense of our own industries, in the manner of exporting industries to them at
the expense of our own industries or employment situation. This type of aid would be generated from within
Australian resources only.
In the second situation, where a crisis has hit unexpectedly in the manner of a
hurricane, earthquake or tsunami, the natural disaster knows no political boundaries, so neither should the foreign aid.
This type
of disaster relief needs a global foreign aid agency to be established, non-political, which has the power, capacity and authority
to enter any and every country where a natural disaster has occurred and to deliver relief as required. This
could mean flying cargo aircraft into the nations airport, flying supplies, aid, doctors and relief crews by helicopter to
the crisis area, either with, or without the authority and support of the country’s national government.
This could mean, as in the case of the hurricane in Myanmar, where the Generals and their Junta forbid foreign aid
for two million people, flying in helicopter gunships to protect the aid workers from their own government if necessary, until
such times as those people were no longer in harms way.
Further to this, aid should not go to the government
of the country, such as with the Indonesian tsunami, where 60 million dollars vanished from donated relief aid, and thousands
of containers sat on the wharves for years, because the government would not distribute it. All aid must
go through the agency set up to handle natural disaster relief.
Should the situation be a civil
war, invasion or uprising, our defence forces should be used immediately to halt the spread of the unrest, neither taking
sides, nor backward steps, but enabling a timeframe or halt in the conflict to enable negotiations to resolve the issue.
If deadly force is required in the meantime, then we have the resources to both maintain a status quo AND defend our
troops and forces as required. This will not be a political statement, or any reflection on the sovereignty
of the state involved, but a peacekeeping or peacemaking action only.
