CARE Australia 21st Anniversary Dinner
11 September 2008, Melbourne
Thank you Eddie McGuire
CARE Australia Chairman Peter Smedley
Distinguished guests; ladies and gentlemen
Congratulations CARE
I’m delighted to join you in celebrating CARE Australia’s 21st anniversary. Tonight is a 21st celebration without any long speeches—you have much to celebrate.
I want to acknowledge Malcolm Fraser’s leadership as CARE Australia’s founding Chairman. He led the organisation when it joined the CARE International network back in 1987. His vision has helped create an Australian charity with an outstanding reputation.
I’m also honoured to be here among CARE Australia’s supporters from business and the community.
We’re here to celebrate CARE’s exceptional work in emergency relief work and in improving the lives of the poorest members of society. It’s a decent cause to which many of you have contributed passionately.
From the Government’s perspective, CARE Australia is an organisation we’ve been proud to help fund over the years, through our overseas aid agency, AusAID.
AusAID has funded CARE Australia a total of around $40 million in the past three years. Through this funding, the Australian Government and CARE have been able to provide humanitarian assistance in emergency situations and protracted crises.
We are ready to respond quickly when needed, whether through financial means, personnel or goods.
Australia was quick off the blocks with a $55 million response to Cyclone Nargis in Burma this year and CARE Australia was instrumental in helping deliver this AusAID-funded support on-the ground.
In East Timor, we’ve contributed more than $1 million to CARE Australia’s work assisting people displaced by violence there.
A generous nation that responds to crises
So congratulations to CARE—we look forward to working with you in future years. There are two points I want to leave with you tonight.
These examples above reinforce Australia’s reputation for our practical, commonsense and generous response to crisis situations.
But beyond generosity in crisis, I believe we need to embed that generosity and establish a sustained commitment to aid, to enable appropriate planning and capacity building over the long term.
That’s why, early in the Rudd Government’s term, we signaled in this year’s Budget our pledge to increase Australia’s Overseas Development Assistance from 0.3 to 0.5 per cent of gross national income by 2015.
We’re reversing the trend over the past decade which saw Australia’s commitment to Overseas Development Assistance going backwards. This commitment will also help the Government and organisations like CARE Australia to plan beyond crises—and look with more certainty to long term capacity building.
Aid and trade are complementary
The second point I want to underline is the strong connection between trade and aid in helping alleviate poverty. A connection that isn’t conditional but complementary.
It’s a fact that world trade has historically grown faster than world economic output. So for countries to develop and lift millions of people out of poverty, they need to engage in trade.
It’s what the World Trade Organization’s Doha Development Round has been all about.
Despite the breakdown of recent talks in Geneva, we’ve actually locked-in hard won gains that would contribute to reducing poverty among the majority of the WTO’s developing country members.
If concluded, the WTO Doha Round, would see the amount of import tariffs paid today reduced by half, with the biggest cuts being required of developed countries.
Developed countries would contribute two-thirds of the cut, with developing countries receiving two-thirds of the benefit, in terms of more access to developed country markets.
So if we succeed, it can truly be called a development round. And coupled with the Millennium Development Goals would enhance a substantial multilateral response.
But we’re not stopping at Doha. Important as Doha is, it’s a platform for further liberalisation.
The Government is using free trade agreements to build on what we can achieve in the multilateral negotiations—that is “WTO plus” agreements.
In our recently negotiated trade agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and New Zealand, we’ve committed to capacity building programmes in areas such as agricultural development and assistance for small and medium enterprises in ASEAN.
This will assist ASEAN to make the most of the new trade and investment opportunities that this agreement will provide.
There’s no point opening up markets if countries don’t have the capacity to compete in world markets. That’s why trade and aid must become more complementary, along with economic reforms to enhance productivity and competitiveness.
In ourmore immediate neighbourhood, we’re working towards a trade agreement for the Pacific Islands, called PACER Plus. It will have a strong development focus. A key objective is to build economic self-sufficiency in the Pacific through trade.
We’ll also engage the Pacific Islands to ensure that our aid programs provide better infrastructure and enhanced capacity. Done properly, PACER Plus can develop as a mini-Doha.
It’s a genuine commitment to a “trade plus” approach that combines trade and aid policy to promote development. This is an exciting time because of the opportunity for many of these countries that are, in fact, resource rich.
But if they are to take advantage of this opportunity, we have to help with capacity building. I support greater labour mobility and capacity building within the Pacific.
Take the example of Papua New Guinea. If a proposed Liquified Natural Gas program gets approved, PNG would need 7,500 construction workers.
These workers should come from across the Pacific. Australia could play a key role in their training, either here or in country, as part of an expanded labour mobility initiative. Properly developed, this would equip them with skills in infrastructure building vital to all their own economies.
This could be a creative development of the Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme recently announced.
I want to urge you to think about similar creative ways of using our aid, trade and economic policies to enhance economic growth and stability in our immediate region and in other developing countries.
Ladies and gentlemen, I want to join you in celebrating CARE Australia’s 21 years of dedication to long-term development. They are doing an outstanding job. With your ongoing support CARE can keep making a positive change in millions of people’s lives.
The Australian Government shares these goals and looks forward to working with CARE over many years to come.