Australia sees security benefits in increased foreign aid budget

Kevin Rudd. Photo / Greg Bowker

Australia has blended altruism with national security in a record foreign aid budget that will focus heavily on the neighbouring region and efforts to control terrorism, people smuggling and the drug trade.

Key elements of the A$4.8 billion ($6.1 billion) spend announced in this week's Budget target strategies to lift people out of poverty, boost education, and by extension reduce the appeal of crime and terror.

"Reducing poverty is in our national security and national economic interest," Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said. "Poverty breeds instability and extremism in our region and globally, and creates conditions that lead to more refugees, as people flee from violence or hardship."

Rudd said two-thirds of the world's poor lived in Australia's region, with 18 of its 20 closest neighbours developing countries.

Many are also important trading partners: Australia exports about A$90 billion in goods and services to countries that receive its aid. Almost a quarter of the about A$50 million to be spent outside the bulk administered by the aid agency AusAid will finance operations by the Federal Police, mainly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, East Timor and the Pacific. These include Australia's large training programmes in the Solomons and other island states.

Collectively, the Pacific - mainly Papua New Guinea and the island states - will receive total aid of A$1.14 billion in 2011-12, eclipsed only by East Asia, dominated by the huge, A$558 million allocated to Indonesia.

In Afghanistan the aid budget has risen by about A$24 million to A$165 million, placing it with Indonesia, PNG, Solomon Islands and Vietnam among the top five aid recipients.

Australia's commitment includes about 50 civilians working on reconstruction and development, including a Federal Police team training Afghan colleagues and targeting serious crime in Uruzgan Province. Federal Police agents also work against narcotics production and trafficking.

In neighbouring Pakistan, which will receive A$92.8 million in aid, the Federal Police have been working with local counterparts and British, Canadian and American agencies against terrorism, transnational crime and people smuggling.

But Australia's main aid focus remains on poverty, education, health and hygiene and its wider commitment to the United Nations' accelerated millennium goals. Rudd said Australian programmes had helped to immunise 900,000 children in PNG against measles and other diseases in the past two years and helped to halve malaria rates in the Solomons. In Indonesia, Australian aid had created places at school for 330,000 children and would create a further 300,000 over the next five years. Safe water had been provided to 600,000 people in Indonesia, East Timor, Vietnam and the Solomons.

But Rudd said more than 1 billion people still lived in extreme poverty. "Every day, 22,000 children under the age of 5 die from preventable or treatable conditions that have largely been overcome in Australia and almost 1000 women and girls die in pregnancy and childbirth," he said. "Today, some 67 million children don't ... attend primary school. "

Rudd said about half of the coming year's aid budget would be spent on health, education and economic growth, including agriculture and rural development, transport, energy and communications.

Funding would also be increased for climate change and environment programmes, and an extra A$124.5 million ($158.8 million) would be spent over four years to boost education in the Pacific.

This would aim at lifting primary school attendance and completion rates, improve literacy and numeracy, and improve young people's chances of finding work.

Key targets included the upgrading of 500 schools across the region, strengthening early childhood education for at least 25,000 students a year, and developing more than 7500 teachers.

"We want to save as many lives, educate as many children and lift as many people out of poverty as we can," Rudd said.