There is a recommendation in the Commission of Audit document about what amounts to a substantial reduction in foreign aid given by Australia. (For the non-Australians, the document which was commissioned by our shitty government is essentially neocon jerk-off material.) As Greg Jericho rightly said, “The Commission of Audit is a rare example of a government attaching itself to a document that appears to hate Australia.”
There is however an interesting response in the Guardian by Leslie Cannold. Cannold is the ambassador for this year’s Live Below The Line campaign, which invites Australians to eat on $2 a day for 5 days to raise awareness of poverty and get sponsored for the charities the campaign supports.
Cannold’s argument is that although it would be great if the government decides not to reduce the foreign aid budget, we as citizens can still do something about it. She calls on for the Australian public to increase their charitable donations to developing countries through initiatives like Live Below the Line and others. On the surface, it sounds reasonable and I do agree. So what’s the problem?
The first problem is that her op-ed’s treats the government not with kid gloves but with fetus or even blastula gloves. Well sure, “it would be wonderful” for governments to keep their promises around foreign aid. How about a nice dose of “fuck you” to the reduction of what amounts to a tiny spend to the people whose need for the money is probably much greater than the average Australian citizen’s need for most given government services? How bout a “fuck off” to the idea of deliberately turning back even further from the Millennium Development Goals in order to fulfill some disproven neocon ideologies?
Her article is right in that it’s an easy cut to make because people aren’t lobbying for it en masse. The comments are full of the usual “but it all goes to dictators!” crap that happens to justify doing nothing. Yes, foreign aid can be extremely wasteful but that’s a reason to improve the program not cut it. The poor people will still be there. This shit wouldn’t fly with any other government spending (trains are inefficient so let’s disband the train network!). Of course the idea of inefficiency is heartily tied up with othering stereotypes of “third world” countries. To the point where the average person in the US thinks their government spends 28% of the budget on foreign aid. The xenophobic misconceptions we all have about foreign aid are a reason for Cannold to be more vocal about any cuts, not less.
There are bigger problems with the article though. By talking about private donations picking up “the slack”, Cannold is normalising the privatisation of giving. This lets the government say that it wasn’t a necessary part of public funds, since individuals just increased donations. This is exactly what happened when the government abolished the Climate Council, which still managed to keep going because of private donations. (HT Pop Culture and the Third World for this insight.) See, we didn’t really need to fund any of that pinko crap, right??
The whole framing of charity and development as for the private individual is a systemic part of the problem. It makes not giving the baseline so that anyone who gives can pat themselves on the back for doing an act of generosity. This is done while participating in an economy that takes from these countries a fuckload more than it ever gives. See for example this article about how it’s the poor countries which are developing the rich ones.
Individual action is not getting us out of our many environmental, humanitarian or poverty crises fast enough. In fact, the overemphasis on the individual is tied up with the problem — perhaps a case of secular Protestant values run amok…Even the positive actions of someone taking the Live Below the Line challenge can become negative in placing emphasis on a supposed empathy with the world’s poor, and on a person deciding to do something about it.
The reason government foreign aid is important is the same reason we should have opt-out organ donations. Defaults matter. When a government engages in foreign aid, the default is to give. And lordy should the changes in the amount of aid be going in the other direction.
Finally, though I’m probably the least enamoured of Judaism than anyone I know. One aspect though has always stuck with me. The closest word Biblical Hebrew has for charity is tzedakah. But the word comes from the word for “justice”. Tzedakah is not something that we do out of the goodness of our hearts because we’re so fucking generous. Instead it’s seen as an act of restoring justice; returning the world to the state that it’s supposed to be in. To achieve this, giving must be the default that we engage in as a community. And with enough caring about the results to make it more beneficial than it has been.
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