Rae Julian: Time for the Government to honour its aid promises

Pathetic and disgraceful is how rock star turned anti-poverty campaigner Sir Bob Geldof described New Zealand's aid effort last week.

Geldof swans around the globe slamming countries' aid efforts. Even if he was instrumental in mobilising millions of people and pumping billions of dollars into Africa, what does he know about our aid and what we do help poor countries?

And doesn't he know we're past being told how to run our affairs?

After all, New Zealand is respected on the world-stage; we are a responsible global citizen. We send peacekeepers to do our bit about world conflicts and we were right there with offers of assistance after the Boxing Day tsunami in South-East Asia.

All that is surely why we are occasionally able to punch above our weight on the international stage.

But one area where we don't pack much of a punch is in our level of international aid.

Geldof is right that we are near the bottom of the OECD in our level of aid. And he has a point when he says that New Zealanders' generosity and sense of fair play is not reflected by our Government's policy on international aid.

Last year the Government gave just 0.27 per cent of Gross National Income to international aid. The OECD member average was 0.42 per cent - only Japan and the United States were below us.

Even Australia, which in the past has also been criticised for its low level of aid, has allocated 0.3 per cent of GNI for 2006-07 and said that it would reach 0.36 per cent by 2010.

New Zealand is way off the agreed international target of giving 0.7 per cent in aid by 2015.

This target needs to be met in order to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals - to which New Zealand signed up. Our Government, moreover, has neither committed to a timetable to the 0.7 per cent goal nor announced any plans to significantly increase aid spending in the near future.

The 0.7 per cent target was first set in 1970. There was an initial burst of enthusiasm with a promise of reaching 1 per cent by the Labour Government in 1974. By the time it left office in 1975, the overseas aid budget had reached 0.52 per cent.

Now, with less than a decade to go to 2015, we are down to almost half of the 1974 percentage and a long way off making good even our most recent rhetoric.

In September 2000, amid great fanfare, Helen Clark joined other world leaders in committing their nations to the Millennium Declaration - a global partnership to reduce poverty, improve health and promote peace, human rights and economic sustainability.

The result was the Millennium Development Goals - a series of quantified targets for significantly reducing extreme poverty by 2015, including halving the estimated 1.2 billion people living on less than US$1 ($1.60) a day. To meet those targets, the developed countries agreed to substantially increase their level of aid.

In his June Budget, Finance Minister Michael Cullen set 0.27 per cent of GNI as the level for 2006/07, increasing to 0.28 per cent in 2007/08.

Before the 2005 election, however, the Labour Party manifesto promised to reach 0.35 per cent of GNI in aid by 2010, but the Government has so far failed to repeat this commitment.

Winston Peters, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, is clearly committed to increasing our aid levels. But the big question will be whether he can persuade the Labour-led Cabinet ministers to do so. If not, our aid levels will continue to be criticised internationally, and not just by outspoken mavericks like Geldof.

Last year, the OECD praised many aspects of our aid programme, saying it was highly effective in poor and conflict-torn countries such as the Solomon Islands, but it also questioned why the level of aid was so low.

The question wasn't that we were low compared with the countries at the top, such as Norway and Denmark, but why we were so far behind the OECD average of 0.42 per cent.

It is clear that this is the right time for the Government to start to honour its promises. The alternative is for our overseas aid effort to be increasingly seen as pathetic.

* Rae Julian is executive director of the Council for International Development.