Poverty - our moral failure

Yet even with the 2005 announcement by Prime Minister John Howard that the government would almost double our overseas aid budget - it will only take us to 0.36 per cent of GNI.

The funding shortfall is tragic because we know increased aid can strike a blow against poverty. Eminent economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued that if the world’s richest nations took overseas aid spending to even 0.5 per cent of GNI by 2010 it would halve the one billion people who are “living” on less than $US1 a day.

In 2005 the world gave $US106.8 billion in aid when $140 billion is needed to make extreme poverty history. To put this in perspective the US has spent $180 billion a year for the last three years in Iraq.

Over the last year we have seen global warming shoot to the top of this nation’s political agenda. This is because it is a clear moral challenge and an issue we can and must address. Indeed we know that climate change will have disastrous implications for the world’s poorest communities.

Yet the commitment required to eradicate global poverty is modest compared to the cost we will have to endure in combating climate change. In 20 years time I suspect that we will be shocked at how modest the request of 0.7 per cent is from the poorest trying to survive and keep their children alive. In requesting 0.7 per cent they did not ask us to give up our second cars or coal fired power stations, holiday homes and consumer excesses but just show a little charity that we could easily afford.

We are making progress in the war against chronic poverty. In the late 1950s poverty killed up to 50,000 children a day - today it kills 30,000. And now this generation has the capacity and the resources to end chronic poverty in our time.

World Vision will continue to work with the Australian public to fight the causes of poverty in our world. But we will also highlight that it was not the public or aid organisations that signed up to the commitment to boost aid to 0.7 per cent. It was our government and our failure to act on this continues to be a moral failure for our nation.