Hasbeen, did you read my whole post?

Big proviso – there should be strong conditions placed on our aid, so that we can be assured that it is being used wisely. And the moment we see that it isn’t we should be willing to withdraw it.

Whether our aid be provided through the UN, through organisations outside of the UN or bilaterally with various countries is not important to me, just as long as it is vigorously overseen and directed at the right sort of things, as outlined in my last post.

Yes the UN has its problems. But I don’t take your hardline view that it should be done away with. It is at least in theory a wonderful organisation.

We should be pushing for reforms to it, as a fundamental part of making sure that our aid money is properly utilised.

There was a sad documentary on Niger the other night. People are
hungry and the UN wants more money to feed them all. They pointed
out that the average woman has around 7 kids to feed.

Sad as all this is, all it will achieve is to produce even more
women with 7 kids to feed, unless food aid is tied to family
planning. All you are doing is increasing the problem for future
years. This just not seem to sink in with the UN, or perhaps its
the Vatican influence at the UN, which is part of the problem.
Let them send their billions, the Vatican Bank is overloaded as it is.

Sponsor a child like Lily.

Gorgeous kid. Doesn’t that ad pull at the heart-strings.

But is that the right sort of aid, or is just addressing symptoms, or worse; exacerbating the problems as Yabby says.

Ludwig, mate, the chances of getting any control over how our aid money, once the cheque is signed, is about the same as the chance of those UN monkeys typing Shakespeare.

Yes mate, the UN was a good idea in 1945 too. How damn long do you want to give it to achieve even some of it's promise.

Having watched how our aid money was wasted by idiot bureaucrats in Papua New Guinea, I'm afraid I have no rose coloured glasses left.

Now they could give it to you & me to administer, but are you sure you are not corruptible, once you get your hands on all that mullah? If you ever worked for government I'm afraid you must be infected, by the waste bug.

I guess that just leaves me. So just give it to me, no matter what I do with it, it will be better than those monkeys would do, & I really do need to see if the latest Ferraris are any better than those I raced years ago. At least I won't buy guns with it.

Well, that was the ad that appeared on this thread.

And then as soon as I posted, the ad changed!!

Aaargh, that damn 4-posts-in-24-hours thing! I can fiiinally post again on this thread. Yaarhoo!

Well Hasbeen, if our aid money can’t be well spent, I’m with you. We should hold onto it.

But we should be doing our damnedest to find ways of making it work. Then we implement or assist projects only where we’ve got confidence of good management and effective outcomes.

In fact, that is probably a very good way of utilising our aid. Rather than spreading it thinly amongst many projects and countries, we should perhaps refine it to just a few and really properly financially facilitate them.

But let’s just remember the priorities; family planning / population stabilisation / sustainable societies and the causal factors of refugeeism, which are not really separate things when it comes down to it. And disaster relief.