Danis Dragovic’s ‘No Dancing, No Dancing: inside the global humanitarian crisis’ (Odyssey, 2018) is an important reflection on the aid and disaster industries, revisiting sites of previous aid work – South Sudan, Iraq and Timor-Leste – to discover what, if anything, has remained of earlier aid efforts and, where there has been failure, to seek […]
Tag Archives: aid
Australia’s draw-down of its remaining military force in East Timor, and the conclusion of the United Nations mission on December 31, has signalled that this sometimes troubled tiny country is now responsible for its own future. The stark realisation that the security blanket provided by the international community is being taken away has left some […]
Presentation to the Asia-Pacific Civil-Military Centre for Excellence, 8 November 2011. In putting a case against the involvement of civilians in military operations at an event hosted by the Asia-Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence is bit like placing Christians before lions and then having a debate as to whether the lions are hungry, and I […]
Australians are a generous people. On a per capita basis, public donations to help those affected by natural disasters are amongst the highest in the world. Studies show that it does not hinge on where these emergencies occur, nor what type of emergencies they are, and nor finally does it depend upon how long it […]
Desperate times, they say, call for desperate measures. Proposing to cut $400 million from Australia’s aid budget to Indonesia’s schools program looks pretty desperate. So one can only assume that having alienated damp Queensland voters and not just a few Victorians, Tony Abbott is trying to find a way out of opposing the one-off tax […]
Speaking to the National Press Club on Tuesday, Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce’s comments on Australia’s international aid program are startling. They not only reflect, as shadow finance spokesman, ignorance of the Opposition’s own policy and Australia’s international aid program, but imply a knuckle-dragging ‘survival of the fittest’ approach to international policy. Without any prompting, Senator […]
It always takes a couple of weeks for the dust to settle on the ‘big ticket’ items in any federal budget before space can be found to discuss some of the smaller budget areas. The global financial crisis (GFC), certainly added a extra level of complexity to the budget process (and perhaps an extra level […]