Poverty is insoluble unless those in receipt of aid start doing something for themselves. History clearly shows this. All the billions put into it only tinkers around the edges.

One thing good about the budget was the reduction in foreign aid, although it should have been cut completely. This useless rip off merely removes money from the poorer in a 'rich' country, and gives it to the rich in poor countries; not to mention the salaries and administration costs of those Australians constantly on TV saying that we are too mean.

If poverty stricken people abroad and at home haven't yet worked how to do something for themselves with all the aid they have had, it's unfortunate, but it's time to cut them off.

Most of us don't ask rich people to give us money because they have more than we do. It should the same with poor countries expecting rich countries to hand over money.

This might sound hard, but I've read enough books and literature by sensible people in third would countries begging the world to stop giving aid so that their people can start looking after themselves.

ttbn, foreign aid does not remove money from the poorer in rich countries. The government could easily double foreign aid spending without leaving Australia's poor any worse off at all.

The claim that foreign aid's merely giving to the rich in poor countries is also wrong. It's spent on specific projects that benefit everyone there, not just the rich.

Your claim that "Poverty is insoluble unless those in receipt of aid start doing something for themselves" is based on a false assumption. If you remove the false assumption, it would become "Poverty WOULD BE insoluble IF those in receipt of aid STOPPED doing something for themselves".

Your statement that "If poverty stricken people abroad and at home haven't yet worked how to do something for themselves with all the aid they have had..." suggests that you're under the illusion that we're just handing out money to people. That's not how aid works.

Most of us don't ask rich people to give us money, but do (rightly) want richer people to pay more taxes than they do, and want the government to spend at least part of the revenue on things that benefit the poor and help them to become rich sooner. It's the same principle with countries, but the lack of an international government controlling the money means it's all voluntary and it's much easier for countries to weasel out of commitments.

I suggest you read some more dissenting books, but failing that you should more carefully consider the arguments of those you have read. For there have been problems with some countries dumping subsidized products and calling it "aid". But that's got nothing to do with the real aid that Australia gives. Our aid doesn't prevent countries (or people) from doing anything for themselves, and I don't think it ever did.

Having said that, there are more things that we should do to encourage self reliance. As long as we announce it well in advance, I'd be in favour of denying development aid to those countries that fix their currency to the US dollar (or any other foreign currency).

Aidan,

You and I will never see eye to on anything, and that's fine with me.

If only do-gooders would get the hell out these problems & places conditions would improve much more quickly.

Most of them are no worse than Europe was in the middle ages. Events like the potato blight famine killed millions in Ireland, but did cure their overpopulation problem, allowing the survivors to develop more successfully.

Band aid supported millions, allowing them to continue to breed & multiply in countries way past their carrying capacity. The real question is not did it help, but how much worse did it make the future for those concerned.

People have to want to improve their lot, & giving handouts, like sit down money for aboriginals, merely makes things worse long term. They need to be left to their own efforts to develop their own destiny. Continually bailing people out of their self developed failures, only teaches that failure has no consequence. To help, long term requires they be left to learn the hard way, the way we have.

There is some woolly thinking in this article. It is excessively negative. It focuses only on failures, and does not acknowledge the enormous gains in fighting poverty in recent decades. According to the Millennium Development Goals Report, “the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has been halved at the global level [between 1990 and 2010]; over 2 billion people gained access to improved sources of drinking water; and remarkable gains have been made in the fight against malaria and tuberculosis”. We are close to achieving the Millennium target of halving the number of people suffering from hunger.

http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/mdg/the-millennium-development-goals-report-2013/

I’m no Pollyanna – there are still hundreds of millions living in acute poverty and suffering malnutrition. But large-scale poverty reduction takes decades, it can't happen overnight. In the course of less than three decades our rate of progress has been remarkable, and deserves to be acknowledged.

Instead of just focussing on causes of failure, it may be valuable to also look at causes of success in countries that have succeeded in reducing poverty sharply. The most dramatic success has been in south and east Asia, most notably in China where absolute poverty rates have fallen from 60% to 12%.

Aid policies or governance programs don’t seem to be the decisive factors in poverty reduction. I suspect that it’s more important to have government with a strong focus on growth, an export-led growth strategy, a willingness to exploit comparative advantage based initially on low wages, and high domestic savings to support investment (contrary to the article’s claim, foreign investment contributed little to China’s growth, though it was probably more important in other Asian success stories like Hong Kong and Singapore).

Judging by the countries that have actually succeeding in reducing poverty substantially in recent decades, aid seems not to have been a decisive factor. Aid can still make a difference, and is certainly important in alleviating the effects of poverty and natural disasters, but economic fundamentals predominate

IMHO where one should start in fighting poverty is to promote zero or negative population growth. Educate girls so they consider themselves other than future baby-making machines and have other options. Provide adequate health care so people will not have many children in hopes that some will survive. The above can be hard to do since religion and culture may oppose it.