Foreign aid spending will take a multi-billion hit under a Coalition government, according to the long-awaited final policy costings and budget cuts announced this afternoon by the Opposition.
Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey says the cuts are necessary to “grow” Australia’s economy.
“We can only be a more generous nation to the rest of the world if we have a strong Australian economy,” he said.
“And so we are reducing the growth in foreign aid by $4.5 billion over the forward estimates to fund essential infrastructure here in Australia.”
UNICEF Australia has reacted angrily to the announcement.
“Mr Hockey may well wish to argue the economy will grow faster under a Coalition but his costings are at the expense of children’s lives,” UNICEF Australia CEO Norman Gillespie said in a media statement.
The Opposition says the money will be spent on infrastructure projects, including $1.5 billion on Melbourne’s East West Link, $1.5 billion on Sydney’s WestConnex and another $1 billion on an upgrade to Brisbane’s Gateway Motorway.
“You’ll see that we’re front-end loading a lot of the infrastructure spend so we get projects up and away,” finance spokesman Andrew Robb said.
Growth in foreign aid spending will also be tied to the Consumer Price Index.
Other “modest” savings will be made through spending $650 million on the Murray-Darling Water Buyback Scheme over six years, instead of over four.
The public service efficiency dividend will also be increased by a further 0.25 per cent, by targeting government advertising, consultancies and travel. The coalition forecasts that will save more than $400 million over the forward estimates.
Albanese says costings a ‘farce’, attacks late release
etc…
• Prime Minister Kevin Rudd attacks ‘cynical’ Coalition in final address at Press Club
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has used his last set-piece address to the nation before Saturday’s election to attack the Coalition as “cynical” and defend Labor’s time in office.
Fending off questions about whether he would remain as Opposition Leader and the member for Griffith after Labor’s likely defeat, the Prime Minister said he will be “fighting” for victory to the very last.
“Between now and 6pm on Saturday I will be fighting for every vote in the country, and with one objective, which is to see the return of an Australian Labor government,” he said.
Published polling during the five-week campaign has largely pointed to a Coalition victory – a trend Labor has been unable to turn around.
In today’s speech, Mr Rudd has repeated his warnings that a Coalition government will make “cuts, cuts and more cuts” to the budget with a risk of triggering a recession.
And he has criticised the timing of the Coalition’s final costings and savings as a deliberate strategy of “evasion”.
“So with 48 hours before the polls open, with the media blackout now in force, Mr Abbott has still failed to release a comprehensive, detailed, independently verifiable account of all of his cuts,” he said.
“The Australian people are left completely in the dark on how his massive cuts will hurt their jobs, hurt the economy and even risk the possibility of a recession.
“This is a deliberate act of evasion at a time when the media blackout has already begun so that no scrutiny is applied to where his cuts will fall because he has politically cynically concluded that’s the best way to win an election.”
• Meanwhile, in Tasmania: Logging in a World Heritage-listed forest emerges as an election issue
The future of logging in Tasmania’s World Heritage-listed Western Tiers is emerging as an election issue two days out from polling day.
In June, the UN’s environment body UNESCO approved an extension to Tasmania’s World Heritage Area.
At a meeting in Cambodia, it agreed to add more than 100,000 hectares of logging land in the Western Tiers region to the World Heritage List.
The Coalition’s policy document sets out a plan to have that land de-listed.
The Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says the heritage listing is bad for Tasmania’s ailing economy:
“I love Tasmania, but it needs to be an economy as well as a national park,” he said.
The Greens leader, Christine Milne, says Mr Abbott needs to explain his position.
“Is he going to go to the World Heritage Committee and seek to remove the last listing of the forests? ” she said.
“Or does he intend to just change the law in Australia to allow the logging of a World Heritage area and then put the Tasmanian wilderness World Heritage area as listed, in danger?”
Mr Abbott says Tasmania already has enough public land locked up.
• Bob Brown: What do Abbott and the Taliban have in common?
The Coalition has pledged to remove natural wonders from the World Heritage List.
In 2001 the world reacted with horror as it saw graphic film of the Taliban dynamiting the Buddhas of Bamiyan, two giant 6th-century statues of Buddha in central Afghanistan. Later the area’s remaining archaeological treasures were included on the World Heritage List. In blowing up the statues, the Taliban provided a vivid illustration of its callousness and willingness to justify acts of irreversible cultural vandalism. Australians like to believe this sort of behaviour is confined to less civilised corners of the globe where democracy and due process are unknown. Yet Tony Abbott has now pledged to remove the world’s tallest flowering forests from the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in Australia.
His plan for Tasmania states: ”The Coalition has never supported Labor’s recent rushed and political World Heritage extension, which was put in place against the will of the Tasmanian people, and we will seek to have it removed.”
The extension is 170,000 hectares of forest and mountain wilderness that was added to the World Heritage Area in June, including the Mt Field National Park, the Great Western Tiers, and the Weld, Huon, Styx and Upper Florentine valleys. The forests, measuring up to 100 metres tall, are important habitat for the Tasmanian devil, platypus and giant wedge-tailed eagle. If the Coalition wins the election and goes through with its promise, it will be the first time that a developed country has deliberately removed a property, or part of a property, from the World Heritage List
While many people will find it uncomfortable to draw parallels between the actions of the Taliban and Abbott’s plan, they are essentially the same; the intention is the deliberate destruction of a site of ”outstanding universal value”. The parallel is all the more stark because large trees in Tasmania’s forests have been dynamited by Forestry Tasmania – it saves time and money. Abbott has not revealed his mechanics for getting the 170,000 hectares of forest and mountain wilderness off the list. There is no process under the World Heritage Convention for undoing a boundary extension.
A Coalition government would have to request the removal of the entire 1.6 million hectares of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area and then resubmit it without the 170,000-hectare extension. The World Heritage Committee which oversees the list is unlikely to look favourably on such a plan.
The Tasmanian World Heritage Area is near the top of the list of 1000 properties. No other site satisfies more than its four natural and three cultural criteria for inclusion on the list.
Removing it in order to facilitate the destruction of part of it will be unprecedented. It undermines the core aim of the World Heritage Convention to permanently protect the world’s greatest natural and cultural wonders. It will be met by howls of protest from committee members, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and other nations which have greater respect for the Convention.
The other option available to the Coalition would be to amend federal environmental laws (Abbott plans to effectively abolish them with his promise to get rid of ”green tape”) to allow the logging to proceed while the forests are still on the World Heritage List. This approach would run into similar problems. In particular, it is likely to lead to the entire Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area being included on the List of World Heritage in Danger – a fate also facing the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area if dumping of spoil from the dredging of coal ports there continues under either a Rudd or Abbott government. If the logging in Tasmania continued, the World Heritage Committee could remove the area from the list, as it did recently with Dresden in Germany as a result of a decision to build an ugly modern bridge across the Elbe River in the heart of the picturesque city.
It appears that pandering to the Tasmanian hard right led by Coalition Senate leader Eric Abetz has more appeal to Abbott than protecting a national and international heirloom for future generations.
With 48 hours to polling day, Tony Abbott should answer questions about how and why he intends to take on a global convention to fulfil his promise to let industrialised logging back into the magnificent World Heritage forests in Tasmania.
Bob Brown is former leader of the Greens.
First published in The Age:
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/what-do-abbott-and-the-taliban-have-in-common-20130904-2t5cn.html#ixzz2e0XKZgeo
• Jan Davis, TFGA CEO on party policies: It’s like herding cats …
• Cassy O’Connor: Give threatened species a voice on election day
