Accusations aid to Pacific does more harm than good
Updated
There have been criticisms about the high wages paid to Australian consultants working in the Pacific. Many earn around half a million dollars a year, which is more than the Australian Prime Minister. Emeritus professor Helen Hughes, a senior fellow of the Centre for Independent Studies, is completing a book on how aid has failed the Pacific and says she doesn't believe aid from Australia and New Zealand is yielding positive results and should be stopped.
Presenter: Geraldine Coutts
Speaker: Helen Hughes, Emeritus Professor and Senior Fellow, Centre for Independent Studies
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HUGHES: It can do a lot of harm and the whole attitude that 30 years after independence I see advertisements for advisors for example in the health area there was one this week for Papua New Guinea and it said it's a long term prospect. In other words this was not an advisor to teach Papua New Guinea how to deal with the situation, it was really to take over the situation.
COUTTS: We also hear the flip side of that don't we, Professor Hughes, that the criticism is leveled at aid agencies, that they send in people for 12 months or so and people on the ground who are working and living there say it's too short, it needs to be longer. So is there a mid ground here?
HUGHES: No, no, it's an attitude. The attitude is that 30 years after independence there are about at least 600 senior "advisors" in the Pacific who are doing the job of Pacific Islanders. We have trained Pacific Islanders, I mean I'm an economics teacher, I have trained PhDs who can't work in the Pacific because their jobs are taking by advisors. And they haven't been trained on the job. No this is an appalling situation where aid is actually preventing Pacific Islanders from taking over their own destiny. I mean you don't see this in successful developing countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand.
COUTTS: Well what is the successful formula then?
HUGHES: Well the successful formula is for countries to concentrate on developing their country, their own growth. I mean it is simply appalling that Papua New Guinea that has had enormous mineral income that the majority of the people should be living so badly that it has a cholera epidemic. I mean it is just unconscionable that that is what the advisors have wrought.
COUTTS: How are they responsible for cholera in Papua New Guinea?
HUGHES: They're responsible because the Papua New Guineans themselves have such a low standard of living and have no response capacity so that they have to bring in foreigners to try and do something about it. The only way to deal with cholera is to get people into productive jobs so that they can live a normal life, have hygiene, have potable water that doesn't carry cholera. You know the whole Sepik River is an area which by now should have a middle-level income, instead of which it has a subsistence income, there's no infrastructure. What have the advisors been doing?
COUTTS: Who is going to hold them accountable? Is there accountability?
HUGHES: Well as long we pour aid into Papua New Guinea without accountability, which is what we've doing …
COUTTS: Well what is that accountability that we haven't been applying?
HUGHES: Well towards the end of the time when he was Minister for Foreign Affairs Mr Downer got so fed up with Papua New Guinea for not using aid properly that he withdraw at the margin a small amount of aid, I forget now it was 50 million or something, and the Papua New Guineans were very annoyed because they said this is our right to have aid and you have no right to tell us what to do with it. When Mr Rudd came in the first thing he did was went up to Papua New Guinea, saw Mr Somare and said you can have all that aid back. There is no conditionality on Australian aid in the Pacific.
COUTTS: Well why do they persist with that because, I've been working in the Pacific for a while now, and almost the first day on the job I was told by a well-placed indigenous person in Solomon Islands, and he was vehement about it, aid has never worked. So why is it persisting? In that instance that you've just given with Alexander Downer and then being turned around, why is that happening?
HUGHES: Because Australian voters don't care, Australian voters, we're generous people, we want to help people in the Pacific, we're really too lazy to work out whether aid is doing any good or not and to hold our government to account. That's why I'm writing this book. We haven't held our government to account. The situation in Papua New Guinea is just appalling and you have people living at Australian living standards, I mean there are people living in Port Moresby as we do in Sydney but behind razor wire because the population is seething. I mean that's why you have this terrible crime. There are two million men not working in the Pacific. They're just doing nothing. The women produce enough food so people don't starve, it's not like Africa or bad parts of India. People are eating because the Pacific is such a lovely benign place, but the men just lie about chewing betel nut, smoking pot and getting drunk whenever there's some cash.
COUTTS: Well that's hardly the aid donor's fault. I mean that's more a fault of the government?
HUGHES: We have put in billions of dollars of aid, within about 400 to 500 million dollars a year of Australian dollars a year for 30 years and we have never demanded any accountability. And we have allowed all that aid and all the mineral income in Papua New Guinea to go to a small elite, while the majority of the people have nothing.
COUTTS: Well in your book do you in terms of accountability and what should be done in terms of aid, we can't just ignore because there are needs?
HUGHES: Well what are the needs, what are the needs? Look we've poured in millions of dollars into education and the literacy rate throughout the Pacific is about 25 per cent. The schools are not delivering education. This is Australia and New Zealand's fault because we have designed the education programs and we have advisors, new half a million dollar job as an advisor for education in Nauru. You know Nauru after all these years and all the money, we have an Australian running the education? I mean this is ridiculous. This is the attitude that you heard expressed in the gentleman who was just being interviewed on cholera, that bureaucrats can somehow have meetings and organisations and talk, now you actually have to do something. You have to build a health system. In Papua New Guinea the health system stops in Moresby. It doesn't go out. Women are dying in childbirth, one or two hours walk away from Moresby because there is no health system. The health system is worse than it was in 1970.
COUTTS: Well I ask again if you had an audience with Kevin Rudd for instance, what would you be telling him about aid?
HUGHES: I would be telling him what I've been telling him since I was on the Jackson Committee's review of aid some time in the 80s, that the only way to help countries to develop they have to have economic growth, people have to have jobs, the country has to earn its living and that means that the locals have to do the work. Our attitude all along has been we can send in some Australian bureaucrats and they can fix it. It's just not possible, Australian voters have paid a lot of money.
COUTTS: Well who do you send in? Who do you send in, because a lot of the programs that you're talking about do need injections of funds?
HUGHES: Don't send in anybody.
COUTTS: So just send in the money?
HUGHES: No you say unless your policies change and you start to implement a health system now to fix the cholera we are not going to give you any aid. You would really have to, you know what we're creating in Papua New Guinea is our Haiti, right on our doorstep. That's what happened in Haiti. In Haiti the UN ran Haiti for ten years and after ten years when an earthquake hit they had six fire engines for a population of eight million.
