Sadly, the Australian AID organisation AusAID was killed off by the short-sighted austerity-holes in the Liberal party just shy of its 40th anniversary.
Won’t be seeing this on many packages bound for impoverished nations any more..
I’ve previously posted up about the massive amount of good that they have done: Infographic on Australian aid and the good it does. Some tiny part of that effort I saw in action in the highlands of PNG in the form of a vaccination clinic for children/mothers. For less than the cost of one high-income mother’s baby under Abbott’s wealthy paid parental leave scheme – you could stave off deaths, defects and misery for an entire community for some number of years with the infrastructure put in place by AusAID.
This tight-arse move to rip $4.5B from our foreign aid comes at the same time as they borrowed $8.8B to give to the RBA to sit in a bank account “just in case”. Foreign aid is the most useful way to help remove, at the source, many of the causes of people having to flee their countries (if “stop the boats” is so important after all). Poverty in our region is not good for anyone – that’s where AusAID came in to help up societies suffering from it.
Such a pity we elected these social vandals in to destroy what was one of the best examples of Australian global mateship for nearly four decades. A pathetic and shameful act by people without shame or empathy.
Here’s an info-graphic reminder on the good that AusAID does (have hosted this on my server as the original may disappear under the Abbott’s slash and burn scorched earth policy toward various agencies):
AusAID – thanks for 40 years of doing good!