New Zealand could be a world leader in exporting emergency rescue systems to places like Haiti
At the risk of sounding like an old hippy, imagine a world where as much money and effort was spent on making peace as on war.
Here we are, two weeks after the devastating Haiti earthquake, and still, within the shadow of the richest, most technologically advanced country in
the world, hundreds of thousands of victims continue to cry out for adequate food and basic medical aid.
At least with the perennial hellhole of Somalia, the rest of mankind can plead the old, out-of-sight, out-of-mind, excuse.
But Haiti is so close to Miami, that cruise ships continue tripping to the island after the quake, a Royal Caribbean Cruises spokeswoman saying their plush private resort north of the devastation had not been damaged.
It's been a different story getting aid in. There's plenty of goods pouring in from generous donors from around the the world.
It's just a problem of getting it to the island nation, and of distributing it once there. The United Nations has handed that side over the the United States, at the latter's insistence.
Given the US government's inability to bring timely help to its own citizens of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the slowness getting help into Haiti should not surprise us.
But when you're talking of a nation with the technical ability to fire missiles into remote villages of Afghanistan and Iraq, from pilotless drone flying machines, controlled from a Nevada Desert airbase 12,000km away, you have to wonder why they can't organise a disaster relief effort a little better.
A week after the quake, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon was talking the exercise up, pointing to the UN food agency having distributed rations to nearly 200,000. But as an Associated Press report noted, this was "a small percentage of the 3 million to 3.5 million the UN says have been affected".
Pulling no punches, the editorial in the latest issue of prestigious British medical journal The Lancet really lets fly. "International organisations, national governments and non-governmental organisations are rightly mobilising, but also jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the most for earthquake survivors.
Some agencies even claim that they are 'spearheading' the relief effort. In fact, as we only too clearly see, the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating and anything but co-ordinated."
The Lancet adds this latest aid calamity to a universal "decline of humanitarianism", referring to previous disasters like the dismal international response to the catastrophic Pakistan earthquake five years ago and the withdrawal of all international aid agencies from Somalia recently, despite hundreds of thousands of people being displaced by the latest fighting.
Another obvious example is the slow response to the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
Defending the Haiti aid efforts, UN aid chief Sir John Holmes told the Wall Street Journal "every disaster is chaos because that's what disasters produce. So it doesn't work perfectly the first few days, but we get it working as well as we can as quickly as we can."
There's an air of fatalism here that you might expect to hear in a church, but not from the lips of the UN's aid supremo.
Living in a country nicknamed The Shaky Isles, and as far as Aucklanders are concerned, in a city built atop a field of live volcanoes, the way the international community comes to the aid of the suffering in times of natural disaster is more than of academic interest to we Kiwis. Or should be.
Just reading the Auckland Region Civil Defence Emergency Management Group Plan makes me nervous. Its "vision" is for "a resilient Auckland ... a prepared community that bounces back quickly after an emergency".
It goes on to admit that as far as planning is concerned, "we're not there yet ..." Along with this goes the usual advice about preparing a survival kit with a three days' supplies of water, food, toilet paper, battery-powered radio, first aid kit and so on.
Looking at the devastation in Haiti, it could take three days to even find your emergency pack, come the big one.
The Haiti calamity does remind us that we could be next, and for that selfish reason, if for no other, we should be seizing the moment to lobby the world community of the collective need to improve our game in this area.
If Auckland can have a civil defence emergency management plan, then why not an international blueprint for rushing medical and food relief to natural disaster zones within days, rather than weeks and months? As Haiti has shown, it doesn't seem to be a shortage of medical and rescue volunteers that's the problem, or even money - the generosity of individuals worldwide has been amazing.
The real stumbling block has been logistics. Getting the help to those in need.
With former prime minister Helen Clark now head of the United Nations Development Programme, what better time for New Zealand to take a lead? We could show we meant business by committing serious cash to the project.
This year alone, the Government is spending $41.5 million on maintaining a military presence in Bamiyan province, Afghanistan, along with another $40 million to support celebrity corporal Willie Apiata and his SAS colleagues battle against the Taleban in Kabul. All of it money wasted on a war that even the Americans admit can't be won.
Imagine those funds being used as seed money for a new international emergency taskforce instead, with Corporal Apiata and his mates performing heroic rescues instead of doing whatever it is they presently do.
