Dear Paul,

Thank You for this discussion. The cuts to foreign
aid is a concern. It's hitting the most vunerable
of our neighbours and for us to do that in the midst
of the comparatively good conditions in our own
country will undermine our country's moral leadership
in the world. We pay out far more in "handouts" to
the nonpoor than the poor. This fact generally
escapes attention because these benefits take the
indirect form of hidden subsidies or tax deductions
rather than cash payments.

We have to decide the kind of society that we want to
live in and hopefully our ultimate choice will be
to try to enhance the life on this planet on which
billions of us share our adventure.

cont'd ...

"We make a living by what we get
But we make a life by what we give."

(Winston Churchill).

Foxy - Quote "We make a living by what we get But we make a life by what we give."

WRONG the bosses of the charities etc make a life of what we give.

A lot of the charities of 100% given the needy are lucky to get 25% the rest goes in administration etc.

Dear Philip S.,

That may well be, however if we didn't give anything -
the poor wouldn't even get that pittance.

Foreign aid should be cut to 0.03, not 0.3, & every cent wasted on that greatest of all rip off organisations the UN, should be cut to zero.

Just how naive are you people?

The pilot of one of our helicopters carrying aid to cut off outlying villages in Indonesia, after their last catastrophe, was told by the head man of the base town, "you go home, we don't want you". "You go home, you send money". Do tell me where that money would have gone, & why the Indonesian military, with many more helicopters than us, was not serving it's own people.

Foreign aid is always stuffed up by the rip off merchants in the receiving country, or by stupid ideological day dreamers. For example, Some of our twits forced PNG to waste quite a bit of our foreign aid in buying out European [Ozzie mostly] plantation owners, & giving the plantations to the local villagers.

This is a typical bleeding heart, lefty idea. It was a loose loose system.

The villagers weren't interested in working hard enough to run a plantation efficiently, & did not need the income anyway. A 30 ton a month plantation would soon be a 3 ton a month plantation, & not worth bothering with for the copra boats. It thus ceased to be a plantation.

PNG was not only wasting much of the aid money, but loosing tax income, & the foreign exchange earned by copra exports. It took almost 10 years to actually stop the stupidity.

Any foreign aid should be restricted to the supply of Oz produced food, shelter or medical supplies.

Dear Hasbeen,

Foreign aid contributes to foreign countries being
stable and better governed and that in turn means
that we are less likely to be adversely affected
by their problems (our military budget can be
decreased).

Also, as one writer stated on the web,

"Actually there seems to be quite an irony that a party
that complains about the burden of refugees to our
country increasing the likelihood of an increase in global
numbers of refugees."