The unluckiest billion people on our planet struggle to survive on the purchasing power equivalent of $US1.25  per day, or less.  That’s not the exchange rate equivalent - it’s whatever buys, in their currency,  as much as you can buy for $US1.25.  They are likely to go to bed hungry for at least part of the year.   They can’t afford even the most basic health care.   Their children, who they may not be able to afford to send to school, are likely to get ill because they don’t have safe drinking water, or sanitation, and they are not well-nourished. 

According to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, nearly 9 million children under five die every year from avoidable, poverty-related causes.  That’s more than 24,000 every day - a football-stadium full of children dying every day, unnecessarily. 

We truly are lucky to be Australians.  The overriding reason why each one of us is in little danger of slipping into extreme poverty is that we were born in, or able to migrate to, Australia. Our abilities and our work ethic may help, but as the American billionaire Warren Buffet said, when told that it was his talent for picking stocks that had produced his wealth, "If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru, you’ll see how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil."
 
What is an ethical response to such good luck?  Australia has an aid program, the website for which states, with commendable directness: "Australia gives aid because we want to help those less fortunate than ourselves".  It adds that we also give aid to other countries because it helps our regional security, but our desire to help comes first, as it should.

But then the website tells us:  "Every week, each of us puts in around $3.30 to pay for our aid program - about the cost of a cup of coffee."  Is that how much we want to help those less fortunate than ourselves?  One cup of coffee a week? 

I just pulled my local paper out of the letterbox, and it has an article on a company that wants to take you up in a plane and let you jump out, at a cost of $425 per jump.  That kind of sum can save a child’s life, or restore sight for people who have gone blind and can’t afford the kind of simple operation that Australians take for granted.  How can we compare saving a life or restoring sight to a blind person with a brief thrill?

I shouldn’t pick on skydivers just because the cost per minute is so high.  Four days in a grandstand seat for next month’s Grand Prix costs about the same, and a couple of concert tickets could too, or dinner and wine at a good restaurant, or some new clothes.  And I’m not saying that no one should be having any fun, either.

I’m just reminding you how much we have, in comparison to the little we give.
This year, Australia’s aid will amount to 0.34 per cent of our gross national income, or 34 cents in every hundred dollars we earn.  It’s not quite half of the target of 0.7 per cent that the United Nations General Assembly set in1970, which the British Government has now pledged to meet by 2013.  It’s well below the average for developed nations, which is 0.48 per cent.  It’s barely a third of the 1 per cent that Sweden gave last year.

Let’s give credit where it is due.   In opposition, Kevin Rudd pledged to raise Australia’s foreign aid to 0.5 per cent, and if he sticks to the government’s forward spending estimates, that promise will be met in 2015.   Tony Abbott has said that he supports existing plans for foreign aid (thanks, Barnaby Joyce, for stimulating your leader to say that).  Bipartisan support for the increase is something we should all be pleased about.

We should also be pleased that our government is getting serious about sponsoring research to evaluate the effectiveness of our aid.  That’s a risky political move, because no doubt some projects will be found wanting.  But it’s the only way we can learn what works, and what doesn’t work, and fund the former, not the latter.

Still - why are we planning to stop increasing official aid when we reach 50 cents in every hundred dollars we earn?  Even if we add the contributions many Australians make to Oxfam, World Vision, Care, and other non-government organizations, the total will still not reach 0.7 per cent and will cost us less than two cups of coffee a week.  We are as rich as the UK, and Sweden.  We have millions of the world’s poor closer to our borders than they do.  Is there any reason why we cannot give as much as they do?

This opinion piece was first published in Melbourne's The Age newspaper, Thursday 18 February 2010.