Year 10: Australian Aid

1. Summarize the article in dot points on your blog and then write a paragraph stating your view on what the author is presenting.

• In the past five years Australia's overseas aid budget has doubled. In the next five years it will double again.
  
• Kevin Rudd announced a review of Australia's overseas aid program last year.
• The report is full of good sense about how to allocate and administer all the extra money.
  
• However the report doesn't give an answer to the bigger underlying questions of the aid program and why it's growing so fast
• Relief after massive disasters such as a tsunami definitely helps, however this only accounts for 7 percent of today's foreign aid program. Spending money in ways that makes no difference is a complete waste of money.
• A vast bulk of our aid is supposed to overcome long term poverty, however extreme poverty by 2005 has already fallen to 25% and by 2015 it is said that extreme poverty will only be in 15% of the world
• Also, poverty is not being removed because of aid, it is being removed because of economic growth. For example China's economic growth has lifted half a billion people out of poverty since 1990.
• Economic growth requires a remarkable confluence of factors - social, political and technological - to start whole populations moving from semi-subsistence farming to paid work.
  
• As some of the world's poorest countries start to grow economically of their own accord, we can see more clearly how aid does not make much difference.
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1. Why do you think Australia is giving more Aid? What would be the benefits of such a policy? What would be the negatives?