Stephen Smith and Julie Bishop missed a crucial opportunity to commit to further lifting Australia’s foreign aid spending to match comparable wealthy countries at today’s election debate, international aid agency Oxfam Australia said.
Climate change is the central poverty issue of our time. Oxfam is seeing the world’s most vulnerable – who have contributed least to climate change – already suffering most from its effects, facing greater droughts, floods, hunger and disease.
The issue of asylum seekers is, without a doubt, a complicated one. International law and emotive political rhetoric make it so. There are no hard and fast answers but there are, dare I say it, ways to truly move forward on the issue.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard won’t be attending a meeting of Pacific island leaders this week (Tuesday 3 and Wednesday 4 August) – despite the fact that she is currently at the helm of the Pacific Islands Forum.
It’s true that people in poor countries on our doorstep won’t be voting for either Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott later this month.
But Australians who care about doing the right thing will be. So it’s no reason for either of the leaders to abandon all mention, during this election campaign, of meeting Australia’s international obligations on climate change, or for not putting up policies that will genuinely reduce Australia’s emissions to the degree that is required.
Coalition costings submitted to Treasury yesterday show Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has broken his promise to match the Government’s commitments on overseas aid, Oxfam Australia said today.
A comprehensive regional approach to asylum seekers must be adopted by whoever wins the election if there is to be any hope of truly moving forward on this complicated issue.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s announcements on climate change this morning further cement Australia’s position as an international laggard on climate change action and condemn the world’s poorest to continuing climate crises.
International mining companies, including some Australian companies, will now have to disclose all payments made to the governments of countries in which they operate, as the result of a new law passed by the US Congress yesterday.
No one likes to think of themselves as a fair-weather friend. Being flaky in a crisis is not, after all, an attractive quality.
But much as they might try to hide it when they meet in Canada this week, the world’s richest nations are proving themselves to be just that to the world’s poorest people: unreliable at a time when they are reeling from the economic crisis, climate change and food shortages.