WATCHING AID

Many justice groups like the Loreto JPIC and NGO platforms are watching Australia’s international aid commitment with some dismay!  In a country with a recent massive Federal Government Budget surplus of $10.6 billion dollar there is little joy in it for our neighbours outside our shores.

While the government has honoured its commitment to lift the overall aid budget to $4 billion by 2010, this is well below what Australia should be contributing towards alleviating global poverty.  Australia is only giving 30 cents in every $100 to aid delivery and this is less than half the agreed target of 0.7% of GNP. Meanwhile The Netherlands, a country of similar size and standard of living, gives three times the amount of aid that Australia does.

A detailed analysis of Australia’s poor aid record is set out in the NGO AidWatch’s paper entitled “Fighting Poverty or Fantasy Figures?”  ( www.aidwatch.org.au ) . Here an analysis of aid reveals that not only is quantity of aid an issue but also the actual nature, or quality, of the aid granted.

Nearly one billion dollars is spent on ‘aid’ which does not target the poverty alleviation objectives of the Millennium Development Goals that Australia, along with 186 other countries, signed on to in September, 2000.  This ‘aid’ includes the funding of Iraqi debt relief, the Australian Federal Police commitments such as Timor and The Solomons, the Department of Immigration and other agencies and the expensive full fee costs of foreign scholarships to study in Australia.  Indeed, when one also includes the private Australian contractors involved in the delivery of programmes then much of our ‘aid’ is “boomerang aid’!  Australians, it must be said, benefit considerably from their overseas aid budget!

[Australian soldier in Solomons] 

It ought to be noted that AidWatch has had, in these past few weeks, its charity status removed by the Federal Government and thus its funding considerably endangered.In a Federal Election year there are many pressure points on the major political parties. In solidarity with our neighbours who are entitled to share in common wealth of our Creator, many of us won’t be letting this selfishness go unnoticed among the rhetoric of political life in this country!

Allen Sherry fms [member Loreto JPIC Committee]

The leaders of Religious Congregations in Western Australia gathered together in 2005 to explore ways we could come together in partnership around a common project.  We met regularly to pray, reflect and discuss possible projects which would assist poor people in the city of Perth.

We visited places that already provide support to the poor of Perth – soup kitchens, advocacy centres, a night shelter for Aboriginal women - and consulted with social workers and the police. The decision was made to provide a night shelter for women operating from 8pm to 8am.

The State Government was supportive of the venture and provided $50,000 for the rent. St Patrick’s Parish, Fremantle, a parish already heavily involved in providing a range of outreach services to disadvantaged people, offered a house together with insurance, staff training and mentoring.

The shelter, named The Sisters’ Place, is managed by Sisters of St Joseph and supported by sisters from the various congregations. It is a small start, however we hope that it will provide a space and a place of safety and hospitality for some of the poor women of Fremantle.

 Marg Finlay IBVM

 
Indigenous Issues

Jeff McMullen, Address to Australian Catholic University Sydney

Monday 25th June 2007.

Australia’s Aboriginal people are facing the greatest threat to their culture since the arrival of European illnesses and viruses over two centuries ago. A Black Death, a plague of chronic illness, has been cutting the heart out of several generations of Indigenous people. 

We have had an emergency in the heartland of this country for over twenty years. Syndrome X, the doctors call it. This cluster of chronic illnesses, diabetes, renal disease, strokes, hypertension, cancer and heart disease, has reduced the life expectancy of Aboriginal people to seventeen years less than the rest of us. In the remote communities I have worked closely with over many years I rarely meet an Aboriginal man close to my age. Most of the people I knew there twenty years ago are gone. They are dying of totally preventable and treatable lifestyle illnesses, because the life to which they have been sentenced at birth is barely a life at all. This is our Great Australian Emergency.

Aboriginal babies die at two to three times the rate of white infants. In the remote communities around the country thousands of children fail to thrive and are malnourished. Many are damaged from birth through foetal alcohol syndrome, and contract diseases of poverty like scabies and anaemia and acute rhematic heart fever.

It is worse than in most Third World countries. It is infuriating to all the medical staff struggling against the odds on the front lines of this emergency because everyone knows now that this Black Death is preventable. This doesn’t have to happen in a nation as rich as ours.

The cause of Syndrome X is in most cases the appalling poor health, nutrition, living conditions and lifestyle of the young mothers.

This is the path that carries Aboriginal people towards a premature grave. But along the way there are many other terrible dangers, most of which can also destroy them.  In an overcrowded house with 15 or more people crammed together there is great risk of illness and abuse. It happens like this everywhere I have seen severe disadvantage. In Australia as a whole as many as one in four girls and one in seven boys experience some episode of sexual abuse. In disadvantaged families the abuse rate climbs alarmingly. Who do they turn to? Mother and father may well be lost in alcoholism.  Women and children crying for help know that no one really has been listening to them for a very long time.

Numerous Government inquiries, Royal Commissions, States, Territory, and Commonwealth agreements, anguished cries from Magistrates, angry authors, endless investigations, PHD studies and shocking media reports have told us for decades that many of this nation’s children go hungry, wandering away from school to look for a scrap of damper or junk food to fill their rumbling bellies, stumbling around with addled brains from petrol sniffing and dope smoking, losing sense of what is healthy and even normal, because of this traumatized state, a cross-generational trauma that confuses everything, scrambles all judgement, and sees morality surrender,  despite the anguish of mothers and fathers who clutch at their children and try to protect them. Too many people, white and black, think it is hopeless. Too many have given up caring. A contagion of sadness and depression sees lives sinking like that big red ball on the horizon.

At this point, as a Nation, we desperately need to find unity… In a state of true emergency with so many lives affected we need to respect the views of many other Indigenous leaders and the medical and educational organizations that have spent decades working in the struggle to improve Aboriginal lives.  These organizations want more than Phase One of an Emergency Plan. They want long term Federal Government commitment to a sustained program of development and support.  They want to change the tone of this whole military like operation. They want to see more consultation with the Aboriginal people at the grassroots level because so many of these people are afraid.

So what lies ahead for the 60 Aboriginal communities in our heartland?

The short-term visitation and inspection Phase of the Australian Government’s Emergency Plan only reinforces the uncomfortable truth that we do not have the essential services in place to provide care to these children and their families. So what is plainly required now is the establishment of adequate primary health care within reach of all of these communities.  .

The other main prong of Phase One of the Australian Government’s Emergency Plan is a ban on alcohol in many of the troublesome remote communities. Is this what we want? Is this part of what is expected?  Will the combination of welfare cuts and a booze ban encourage more people to abandon the outermost remote communities? A sensible, sobering approach would be to establish adequate alcohol treatment teams in the communities during the period of this prohibition.

    We don’t have to retreat from remote communities. We have to engage in committed building up of their services until they are liveable little towns.

    Closing the gap in life expectancy for these children calls for a far greater commitment than we have yet made.    Closing the Gap is this nation’s greatest challenge and the way to close the gap in life expectancy is to close the gap in education.

    A considerable body of international research, especially the work of Fraser Mustard, among Indigenous people in Canada, has established that for every extra year of education we provide to a whole community of young women we add up to four years to the life expectancy of their first child. Dr Ken Wyatt, the Director of Aboriginal Health in NSW, adds that every extra year of education for those young mothers will also reduce the chance of them losing their first baby by seven to ten per cent.

It is essential that Federal, Territory and State Education departments aim higher, stop bickering and cooperate to improve the education of all of our children.