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Posts Tagged ‘overseas aid’

What about taking a leaf out of Hague’s book, Key?

Posted by Maryan Street on January 21st, 2011

William Hague has been here for 2 days and leaves this evening. He is the UK Foreign Affairs Secretary and he has been paying NZ the first bilateral visit of a Foreign Affairs Secretary for perhaps 30 years. He’s a clever bloke. I remember him as the incoming Leader of the Opposition in 1997 when I was in Britain and Tony Blair romped in. He got a terrible pasting from the media (as Leaders of the Opposition do….) but has turned out to be a very significant political presence in the Tory front bench in Opposition and now in the UK Cabinet.

I can’t fault his principled approach to Foreign Affairs. He has been forthright about human rights, calling it the conscience of Foreign Affairs. He has spoken out about the threatened stoning of Sakineh Ashtiani in Iran, for alleged adultery. Our government said nothing. He was quick to call the Burmese elections a charade and prompt to support Aung San Suu Kyi’s release - our government was virtually mute on these events, until pressed.

He has maintained overseas aid commitments, despite the biting impact of the recession in Britain, pledging concretely to save the lives of 50,000 mothers and a quarter of a million babies around the neediest parts of the world by 2015, in pursuit of the Millenium Development Goals.  Our government turns overseas aid into private sector gains because in their view, getting the private sector to provide economic growth is the beginning and end of development assistance. Millenium Development Goals are ignored.

Hague has also committed to getting to .7% of GDP in aid by 2013 – an extraordinary commitment in these times of government cuts. We only got half way to that in the good times at .35%. I can’t see this government prioritising it any higher.

He promotes the participation of women in peacebuilding  negotiations and reconciliation teams in regions of conflict, in line with UN resolution 1325. Our government couldn’t give a toss.

Hague sees an effective global response to climate change as the thing to underpin security and prosperity. Our government promotes an Emissions Trading Scheme which is a laughing stock.

I hope William Hague and Murray McCully had a good talk or two. They are both conservatives after all. We haven’t done what the UK tells us to for years and nor should we. But there is no harm in learning from the efforts of people with whom we have a great deal in common.

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Filed under: Foreign Affairs, human rights, overseas aid
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Morale suffers while McCully makes the cuts

Posted by Phil Twyford on September 2nd, 2010

A telling excerpt from a document released under the Official Information Act quotes Foreign Affairs CEO John Allen telling staff:

I understand the impact on morale of the challenges that staff have faced in the past year. I understand that the decisions that have been made are tough and they impact on people, on organisational identity, and on staff morale. It is legitimate for people to have strong feelings and views on these issues. Given that these decisions are unpopular and impact on morale then why have they been made? Cabinet mandated a change from a stand alone agency to closer integration with the Ministry….Allen goes on to explain the changes.

Morale is low at the aid programme formerly known as NZAID.  In what was once an energetic and innovative organisation staff now spend their time trying to stay out of the Minister’s way and repackaging work so it fits within the Minister’s narrow prescription for economic development.

They are embarrassed by his continuing campaign against the NGOs.  By all but ending the $900,000 a year funding to the NGO umbrella group Council for International Development. By changes to the funding arrangements for NGO projects made without consultation. And by the recent cut to the excellent Wellington-based Global Focus which provides information resources on development issues.

The latest casualty of the Minister’s red pen is a Pacific regional programme doing village-based disaster risk-reduction work in four countries. It helps communities reduce the impact of cyclones, floods and tsunamis through preparedness training and working with local government. It is run by the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific out of Suva.

The three-year $2.5 million effort was set up in close collaboration with NZAID, with a commitment of $500,000 a year from New Zealand. McCully has pulled the funding after one year, with no assessment of its impact.

No wonder MFAT aid staff are suffering from low morale. They are the ones who have to deliver this sort of news.

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Filed under: Foreign Affairs, international, overseas aid
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New aid board to advise McCully – a contradiction in terms?

Posted by Phil Twyford on May 20th, 2010

Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully has recruited philanthropist Sir Stephen Tindall, economist Gareth Morgan, Barry Coates of Oxfam and company director Trevor Janes as a board to advise him on aid matters. They will be joined by MFAT CEO John Allen and the new head of the international development group(formerly known as NZAID) Amanda Ellis.  Given the Minister’s notorious disregard for officials’ advice it will be interesting to see how much he listens to his new advisers.

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Filed under: Foreign Affairs, overseas aid
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Public sector reform McCully style

Posted by Phil Twyford on January 4th, 2010

Tucked away in the back of the Sunday Star-Times yesterday was a recruitment ad for a new deputy secretary development in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  This position heads up New Zealand’s half billion dollar a year taxpayer-funded overseas aid programme – the agency ‘formerly known as NZAID’. What caught my eye was the lack of NZAID branding in the ad; the latest indication that Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully is slowly and steadily dismantling NZAID’s identity as a specialist development agency. The new head of NZAID is now just another dep-sec in the MFAT structure. His or her job is to “lead the 200 person business unit within the Ministry which manages” the aid programme.

If you follow these issues you’ll remember that McCully ignored the pleas of Treasury, development experts, the NGO community, and the Oppposition in the early months of 2009 and dissolved NZAID’s semi-autonomous status.  The public debate wasn’t just about structure. NZAID’s independence was established specifically to allow it to develop specialist expertise in development, and protect the aid programme from being used as a diplomatic slush fund as an in-depth review in 2001 found that it had been. McCully on the other hand  wanted the programme brought back within his political reach, and its mandate shifted from poverty elimination to economic development.

The new regime is still in its infancy. The transition was slowed by the recruitment and settling in of the new MFAT Secretary John Allen. I don’t imagine that McCully, having bulldozed decisions through in the face of advice from officials and public opinion, will rest until he gets the changes he wants. He is hostile to the very notion of aid and development, and from what I hear he abuses and bullies his senior officials in their regular meetings.  NZAID staff are rightly proud of the innovative work the agency has done since its inception in 2002 but spend much of their time these days trying to protect it from a vindictive and nit-picking Minister who described them in a speech last year as “faceless, unelected, unaccountable, aid bureaucrats”.

The NGOs, for having had the temerity to criticise McCully’s changes to NZAID, have also received a bit of a slap from the Minister. Their umbrella group the Council for International Development has had its funding cut by 40%, and its budget discussions drawn out month after month as McCully questioned the worth of funding them. He has already signalled a zero-based negotiation for the next financial year. Woe betide the officials and sector groups that cross a Minister who has spent his career as a backroom political in-fighter.

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Filed under: Foreign Affairs, overseas aid
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Those bureaucrats

Posted by Phil Twyford on October 20th, 2009

Chris Finlayson answering questions for Murray McCully this afternoon in the House, revealed something about the National Party mindset. A recent hearing at Parliament convened by the Parliamentarians for Population and Development uncovered the appalling rate at which women in Papua New Guinea are dying in childbirth.

I asked the Minister: “How will the Government’s policy to re-orient New Zealand’s overseas aid to private sector economic development help reduce the rate at which  women in Papua New Guinea die in childbirth, which is 23 times the NZ rate, given that the recent ActionAid report put NZ second to last in the OECD on aid for social protection?”  Hon Chris Finlayson: “Unlike the Labour Party the Government doesn’t believe that bureaucracy equates to aid.”

The reason PNG is on a par with Afghanistan when it comes to mothers dying in pregnancy and childbirth is a shortage of midwives. So midwives are bureaucrats?  Why, because they are mostly employed by the state? Very revealing.

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Filed under: Foreign Affairs, overseas aid, poverty
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McCully takes revenge on aid NGOs

Posted by Phil Twyford on September 29th, 2009

Successive governments have enjoyed a good relationship with the country’s overseas aid NGOs: groups like World Vision, Oxfam, Tear Fund, Save the Children, Volunteer Service Abroad.

They have seen the aid groups as part of an NZ Inc approach: raising private donations from the public, building awareness of development issues, and often working together with the government to deliver aid in the field. As in many OECD countries this partnership between government and aid NGOs has been ramped up over the last decade, with NZAID funding the NGOs’ aid programmes to the tune of about $32 m per year.

But the partnership has just taken a hit. Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully has personally intervened to cut the funding of the NGOs’ peak body by 40%.  Last year NZAID funded the Council for International Development $900,000 to do a range of work including coordination of disaster relief efforts, capacity building and training of NGO staff, and public awareness work. That is being cut to $650,000 this year and $500,000 the next.

McCully is unlikely to admit it, and on past form he won’t leave a paper trail, but you can bet the cut is a response to the NGO community’s public criticism of his move to restructure NZAID back into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and change its mandate earlier this year. The NGOs were trenchant in their criticism and it wasn’t just the usual campaigners. Rotary, the Salvation Army and agencies like World Vision and Tear Fund who have traditionally been more circumspect in their public advocacy, made it clear to the Government they thought McCully’s plans ill-judged. Most of the NGOs backed a campaign called Don’t Corrupt Aid.

Mr McCully has never been a fan of NGOs. In his speech announcing the restructuring of NZAID he referred to

self-interested individuals from within the aid community [who think] that New Zealand’s aid budget is some kind of sacred cow that should be placed above and beyond the stewardship of the government of the day, and subject only to the attentions of so- called “development experts” who might bring their superior intellects and sensibilities to this task.

And it was hard to know if he was referring to the NGOs or NZAID when he referred to “faceless, unelected, unaccountable, aid bureaucrats”.

It is worrying Mr McCully is willing to cut funding in such a vengeful way. It is bullying from a Government that can’t take public criticism.

It is even more disturbing he is willing to to cut funding that is an investment in building the capacity of NGOs to be accountable and effective partners in the delivery of taxpayer funded overseas aid. But then this is the same Minister who ignored Treasury advice that his restructuring of NZAID would make it less accountable for the spending of taxpayer dollars.

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Filed under: Foreign Affairs, international, overseas aid
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McCully policy does little for women dying in PNG

Posted by Phil Twyford on September 21st, 2009

Women in Papua New Guinea  are dying in childbirth at 23 times the New Zealand rate. That is 1500 women dying preventable deaths every year, and 30% of them are teenagers.

It is one of the most shocking indicators of a country in crisis.  The maternal death rate  in PNG, one of our closest neighbours, is on a par with Afghanistan. And there is no sign of improvement.

PNG has its share of problems: poverty, HIV/AIDS epidemic, corruption, and appalling governance. It’s the last on that list that is the big driver. The failure of the state to provide basic health services to its citizens is what has caused the skyrocketing rates of women dying in childbirth.

PNG health workers at a parliamentary hearing today on maternal health in the Pacific testified the key factors behind the figures are the collapse of rural health services, and now a dire shortage of trained midwives.

Foreign Minister Murray McCully likes to rail against aid to Pacific nations’ public sectors but the failure of the PNG public service to train midwives over the last decade has directly caused the preventable deaths of thousands of women in childbirth and heaven knows how many children.  Submitters at today’s hearing told how the PNG government decided in 2001 to shift all midwife training into universities but failed to put a curriculum in place. Since then no midwives have been registered.

(more…)

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Filed under: international, overseas aid, poverty
22 Comments

Nats drop aid target when going gets tough

Posted by Phil Twyford on May 31st, 2009

Q: How much of a priority should it be to give overseas aid when we are in the teeth of a global recession?

A: Even more of a priority than normal…when it is predicted the same recession will drive 100 million people into extreme poverty this year.

You might think overseas aid should get cut, along with pay equity, public sector jobs, research and technology, superannuation, public transport and so much else in these straitened times. You might think that. Especially if your name is Murray McCully or Bill English. But is it right?

I say no. The poor in developing countries are far more vulnerable than we are in times of global recession because they don’t have the safety nets we do. Which is why the World Bank and IMF are urging rich countries like us to accelerate our promised increases in aid. But last Thursday’s budget has the Government slamming on the brakes, stripping $194 million out of the next three years’ of aid spending. They are still increasing the aid budget in real terms but much more slowly than the multi-year commitments made by Labour.

Why does this matter? I think it is because we have a responsibility to people in our Pacific neighborhood who are worse off than us. No matter how grim the recession is for us right now, it is nothing compared to the extreme poverty felt by people in say Papua New Guinea who have much less ability to weather the storm. In the Pacific the financial crisis could well squeeze income from remittances and tourism. On top of shrinking aid budgets that could make life very tough. The other thing is that we have made international commitments to fight extreme poverty in the poorest countries. This goes beyond the year by year ups and downs in our own national circumstances.

With these Budget cuts National has walked away from a  30 year commitment by successive New Zealand governments to the international spending target on overseas aid which is 0.7% of Gross National Income per capita.  Instead of reaching 0.35% of GNI as planned, New Zealand’s aid spending will stall at 0.31% for the next three years.  This is a setback.  New Zealand gives less as a percentage of our national income per head than almost any other developed nation. If we are going to meet our international responsibilities we must commit to staged increases year on year.

McCully professes not to pay much heed to the 0.7% target. Notes in the Budget documents confirm it is no longer a priority for this Government.

Readers may have heard Radio NZ report today that papers released under the OIA show Treasury did not think McCully had a strong case for getting rid of NZAID’s semi-autonomous status and warned of risks around the loss of transparency that would occur as a result of McCully putting the agency back into the foreign affairs ministry.  There is plenty more where that came from but I will save it for another post.

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Filed under: Budget
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