Why We Give Money To Foreign Aid

In 2010 David Cameron, the Conservative British Prime Minister, embarked upon a policy of savage austerity that fundamentally altered the size and scope of the UK's government and continues to be a defining reason why Britain remains in recession today. The cuts that Cameron made utterly dwarf anything that Joe Hockey could imagine, let alone politically enact, yet he refused to cut the budget of two department, the National Health Service and foreign aid.

Let me be very clear, there is very little that I agree with David Cameron about and refusing to cut foreign aid was indeed a condition of his coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats, but Cameron has consistently defended the decision, saying that the foreign aid budget makes him "proud to be British". He has suffered a political price for it too, the far-right UKIP party has exploited it many times claiming that Cameron is spending money in 'Bongo-bongo-land' rather than in the UK.

Meanwhile, in Australia, the LNP has announced that they will cut $4.5 billion from foreign aid that they will instead invest in roads. Considering that the current AusAid budget is $5.2 billion this is a devastating result for Australia's commitment to foreign aid.

The saddest thing is that the LNP will not lose a single vote for this. The people who are concerned about these cuts were never going to vote for Tony Abbott in the first place, the swinging voters in marginal seats will probably celebrate it as an act of fiscal responsibility. You don't win votes by funding foreign aid, there is certainly not the electoral price of cutting from other areas such as health and education. But we are a crueller, dumber and more insular nation for these cuts.

Which brings me around to answer the question that I started with, why do we fund foreign aid? If it is electorally unimportant why does it even exist in the first place?

By far one of the most odious arguments to this end is that foreign aid is in 'Australia's strategic interests' which, while being very true, is a repellent justification for our current aid budget - it is equivalent to John Howard's opposition to the death penalty being based purely on the fact that victims might be found innocent. It actually is in Australia's strategic interest to give aid, for one thing it gives us a gigantic amount of leverage over our neighbours which makes policies like the PNG solution possible. It's also true in a broader sense, for example funding secular schools in Indonesia prevents the spread of fundamentalist Islam.

But saying that aid is a strategic decision is precisely the kind of thinking that allows it to be cut, for who is to say that the Coalition won't create a new way of gaining leverage over our Pacific neighbours? The 'aid as strategy' line is also what justified pork-barreling repressive dictators in the Cold War, a practice that threatens the legitimacy of all international development projects. Aid programs should be developed with a huge degree of strategic thinking involved, and the current allocation of aid reflects that, but it isn't why we do it.

On the other end of the spectrum is the idea that foreign aid is 'nice'. Much like taking your neighbour's rubbish bins out for them on a sunny suburban morning, as a nation it is a nice thing to do to try and support the countries around us by combatting poverty. This line of reasoning equates Australia giving foreign aid to private citizens donating to charity, as if foreign aid is a big national Project Compassion box to which the spare change can go so that nice things can be done for the poor.

This argument is far closer to the truth of the matter than the strategy argument, but again it can be used to justify these cuts. Make no mistake, senior Liberals will come out on the news and say that these cuts are regrettable. They will wail and gnash their teeth about how hard it was to come to the decision to cut these 'nice' things, about how Tony Abbott houses orphans in his house and can barely do a push-up without entering a charity fun-run/bike-ride/gang-bang. But we are in a budget 'emergency' and sometimes we can't afford 'nice' things so we are turning down eye contact with the Salvation Army guy at the train station and are instead going ahead with our day.

The truth is that foreign aid should be untouchable like it clearly was in Britain under austerity. Foreign aid is not about being 'strategic' or 'nice' it is about justifying the preposterous wealth (both economic and otherwise) of the society that we live in. Australians enjoy an incredibly high standard of living, with a relative abundance of wealth particularly when compared to our geographic neighbours. The idea that we cannot afford to spend a fraction of this wealth improving the lives of the poor is utter nonsense.

More importantly we live in a democratic society that is centred around protecting the rights of its citizens through all of its institutions. And as a free and democratic society we have an obligation to be concerned with the dignity of other human beings; an obligation that extends beyond 'strategy' and 'niceness' and that is instead an application of the values that actually bind us together as a polity. Foreign aid is the logical outcome of our prosperous and democratic culture and to threaten foreign aid is to quietly begin to bring into question the humanism that underpins that culture.

I want to be part of an Australia that values itself by how it contributes to the world, not by its ability to reproduce an anachronistic and parochial vision of itself. It is a sad day for that Australia.