Foreign aid 'shameful'
15 July 2006
By MICHAEL FIELD
New Zealand's official foreign aid is shameful and pathetic, LiveAid founder Bob Geldof says.
In signing a petition to Prime Minister Helen Clark, he attacked the $315 million aid programme, noting it was only 0.27 per cent of gross national income. That is below the OECD average of 0.42 per cent and the United Nations' desired 0.7 per cent.
Geldof, whose Make Poverty History campaign has got huge amounts of debt cancelled in Africa, said millions were benefiting. "This is not an intangible wish list, this is an attack on something that is so intellectually absurd and morally repulsive that it will happen and the great shame of New Zealand is that it is the second-lowest in the world with their generosity," he said outside Auckland's Aotea Centre.
Inside he was a paid speaker at a lavish corporate motivational session along with former punk rocker Malcolm McLaren.
According to the OECD, New Zealand is third from the bottom in official aid; the worst performer is the United States, followed by Japan. Norway and Sweden are top.
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters called Geldof's comment unfortunate, saying if he had been better informed he would have been "a lot more positive" about New Zealand's aid.
But Geldof said New Zealand's official aid did not represent the spirit of the electorate. "In a democracy we are able to insist that our wishes are made manifest," he said. "And they are not being made manifest by the pathetic 0.27 per cent this government gives to the poorest people on the planet. That is a great disgrace."
It was no defence that New Zealand's non-government aid to the Third World was high. Much of global poverty was government business, he said.
It was absurd that at a time when much of the world had never been healthier, people were dying of poverty.
"We don't die of drought in the South Island, Queensland or Kent. They die of drought in Africa. Why? They are poor. We don't die of Aids in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch any longer, thank God. They die of Aids in Africa. Why? Because they are poor." Only governments could deal with the structures of extreme poverty. Private aid dealt with the symptoms.
New Zealanders would not accept the low level of aid: "Look around you, look at what you've achieved together with your indigenous population together in a couple of hundred years, and you don't feel you owe anything to what I believe is the greatest political problem of our age?"
