29 Jun 2007

Australian opposition politician calls for aid spending to focus on urban areas

1:39 pm on 29 June 2007

An Australian opposition frontbencher says the government needs to focus is aid assistance to Pacific countries more on poor people in cities, rather than in rural areas.

This week's launch of the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) report was told policies targeting the urban poor are more likely to help Australia's neighbours such as Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.

Bob McMullan, representing the parliamentary group for population and development, says the report challenges assumptions underpinning international development assistance.

"We have to now recognise that nothing is gong to stop the cities growing and growing and therefore we need to give extra attention as our aid programmes grow as they need to, we need to be using some of that extra resource to focus on the problems in the cities."

Bob McMullan says a greater focus on aid in the urban areas doesn't mean donors would abandon the focus on rural development.

He says the latter will help stem urban drift and therefore alleviate some of the problems of urbanisation.