Agency mystified by Australia aid scrutiny

Transcript

The head of World Vision Australia says he's mystified by the Foreign Minister Julie Bishop's plans to introduce further performance evaluation systems to assess foreign aid based on value for money.

Tim Costello told Jenny Meyer there's plenty of evaluation already in place and the move is a cynical one as the key to aid is health and education.

TIM COSTELLO: The importance is that it deals with health and education and all the precursors to trade and economic targets. Obviously trade and economic development's incredibly important for lifting people out of poverty, they want to stand on their own two feet. But aid says how do we keep kids alive under five and once we've kept them alive, how do we then give them an education over five? Then you ask the question how do you get them a job which is where economic development and trade is so important. But aid, if it is only focussed on economic development, losses what its real priority is in those most basic areas of life.

JENNY MEYER: What do you think has prompted the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, to come out with this? It does seem that there may be even more funding going into measuring programmes rather than actually delivering them?

TC: Yeah, the interesting thing is there have been a number of evaluations of the Australian Aid Programme. We have an office of Development Effectiveness that's continually evaluating it. And even under a former colleague of Julie Bishop's, Margaret Reid, who is a liberal member of the government, President of the Senate, there was a review done by her that said the programme is effective and well targeted. Look the public view is always that any dollar spent overseas must be lost in corruption, so there's always an easy free kick of cynical public attitudes. And I don't mind the Minister saying you know 'where going to guarantee value for money, and we'll have benchmarks. But look, we do have plenty of those benchmarks, we have a whole office of Development Effectiveness, so its a little mystifying.

JM: How do you think this might impact on aid programmes to the Pacific?

TC: Look I think Australia will not ever walk away. But certainly with the Solomon's we said there's got to be reciprocity, reciprocal mutual obligation and took $1.2 million I think it was because we weren't happy with how the government was using it; and of course they got all that money back once the disaster hit the Solomons. So there is this language of reciprocity and all of that. What it actually means in terms of trying to get better outcomes, we'll be pushing a bit more. But look at the end of the day, we won't walk away it'll be much the same funding and commitment.