Push for better sanitation on World Toilet Day

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LINDA MOTTRAM: Australian children's entertainers The Wiggles perform their Hand Wash Song. Last month, they donated the song to the UN children's organisation, UNICEF, at the same time as they were appointed Good Will Ambassadors for the organisation. The song's message is simple because, as experts have said for many a long year now, hand washing can reduce deaths from diarrhoeal diseases by almost half. But still, around the world every day, 5,000 children will die from such diseases. And so to the One Hundred Toilet Exhibition in Brisbane, designed to illustrate the global sanitation crisis. It's the brainchild of a determined campaigner, Rowan Barber, an Australian engineer, self-confessed expert in all things excrement, and an organiser with the group, Engineers Without Borders.

ROWAN BARBER: We've got fish and we've got sea scenes, and we've got a bright white toilet with a red cross and a siren on it - the crisis and emergency aspect of it. We've got a toilet that's covered, inside and out, with thumbtacks to talk about the danger and the hazards that are associated. There's all these really sharp visual images.

LINDA MOTTRAM: Rowan Barber also stresses that many of the people with the worst sanitation are in Australia's neighbourhood.

ROWAN BARBER: And it is, like a child dies every 20 seconds with a water-borne disease that's completely preventable. With that said, a lot of those people are in the Asia-Pacific, they're on our doorstep, and there's 2.6 billion people who don't have access to a sustainable designated place to poo. And, again, a billion of those are on our doorstep and in our region.

LINDA MOTTRAM: And even in this, the 21st Century, Rowan Barber, who offers the practical skills of an engineer on sanitation issues, sees the central problem as education.

ROWAN BARBER: I think there's an education deficit at all levels of society. And people in developing communities don't necessarily know themselves of the poverty trap that lack of sanitation causes.

LINDA MOTTRAM: Australia's Government this year quadrupled its aid funding for sanitation. But, on his way to open the One Hundred Toilet exhibition, Australia's Parliamentary Secretary for Development Assistance, Bob McMullan, conveyed something of the enormity of the task.

BOB MCMULLAN: The back-log of what needs to be done is just enormous and heartbreaking and we are determined to start. But, globally, the challenge to get kids, families but particularly women and children, with safe sanitation so that it does more for their health, so that families are prepared to send children to school. Because if you're not certain that your daughter is going to have safe sanitation, people tend not to send their girls to school.

LINDA MOTTRAM: There are some successes in the Asia Pacific region and not just from aid projects. Bob McMullan again.

BOB MCMULLAN: The governments there are trying to focus on it - if you got to Indonesia the government there has devolved responsibility to the cities. They're trying to - local government level. They are making a genuine effort. It's not as if Australia has to turn up and say, "Why don't you do something about this?" The governments are trying very hard but there's so much more to do.

LINDA MOTTRAM: But sanitation is unglamorous and taboos are obstacles, while politicians almost anywhere would rather be seen opening a water treatment plant than a toilet. The One Hundred Toilet Exhibition is a cry to overcome all that. And the Wiggles are doing their bit with the children.