Kiwiblog

Derek Cheng reports:

A Labour-led Government would look into having weekly study-free afternoons in every secondary school for pupils to play sports.

Its sport and recreation policy, to be released today, includes broad initiatives such as fighting obesity, encouraging physical activity and maintaining back-country huts and tracks.

It has a focus on participation in school sport, including investigating “reintroducing midweek early finishing nationwide to facilitate midweek sport”.

Rather than trying to have the food police in school tuck-shops, an emphasis on more exercise and sport is a much better approach.

It’s a pity Labour were not a bit bolder and made it a policy, rather than merely investigate it. But still better than nothing.

The policy document also cites back-country huts and tracks as a significant asset that draws tourists.

“The existing network of back-country huts and tracks is vital as well and should remain. A bivvy in the right place, for example, can save lives,” the document says.

“Labour will promote development of new outdoor recreational opportunities, for example, walking and cycling trails on former railways land.”

I’m a big fan of huts and tracks, so welcome Labour saying they are vital. However I’m not sure what this means in policy terms. Are they going to build more? If so, how many and at what cost?

So overall the policy gets a tick from me. Not so impressed with the overseas development policy though.

National shut down NZAID as an organisation and moved the aid programme back into MFAT, with the explicit aim of aligning the aid programme with foreign policy goals. This has undermined the credibility and legitimacy of the aid programme.

Labour will re-establish NZAID as New Zealand’s international development agency, committed to the elimination of poverty, implementing a high-impact development programme, transparent and accountable, and contributing to New Zealand’s broader foreign policy goals.

First of all it is idiocy to say that our aid programme should not be compatible with our foreign policy goals. Of course it should be.

The issue of whether NZAID should be a semi-autonomous agency or a division within MFAT has arguments on both sides. I wasn’t actually convinced that it should have been merged back into the MFAT. However as it has now been merged back in, the last thing you want to do is pull it back out again. This would be massively costly and disruptive. You can’t have its status changing every few years.

Basically Labour’s policy is to just reverse everything that McCully has done. It’s not future looking in any way at all – it is just trying to turn the clock back, without realising you can’t.

The Herald reports:

New Zealand is among the top three countries in the world for its humanitarian response to international crises, according to an aid watchdog’s report.

That’s nice, but as normal I want to know why, so lets go to the full report:

The HRI is not an index on the volume or quantity of funding provided by Western governments for humanitarian assistance. Instead, it looks beyond funding to assess critical issues around the quality and effectiveness of aid in five pillars of donor practice:

And they are:

1. Are donor responses based on needs of the affected populations, and not subordinated to political, strategic or other interests? 30% weighting
2. Do donors support strengthening local capacity, prevention of future crises and long-term recovery? 20% weighting
3. Do donor policies and practices effectively support the work of humanitarian organisations? 20% weighting
4. Do donors respect and promote International Humanitarian Law (IHL), and actively promote humanitarian access to enable protection of civilians affected by crises? 15% weighting
5. Do donors contribute to accountability and learning in humanitarian action? 15% weighting

On a weighted 0 – 10 scale, the results are:

1. Denmark 6.87
2. Ireland 6.54
3. New Zealand 6.50
4. Norway 6.42
5. Sweden 6.32
6. European Commission 6.24

Others were UK 8th 6.12, Australia 13th 5.65, US 19th 5.16

For NZ they say:

New Zealand is in 3rd place this year. Despite its small size and limited field presence as a donor, New Zealand has shown a good level of commitment to applying the GHD Principles in the way it supports humanitarian action.

It is one of the best donors in terms of timely funding, and in learning and accountability. However, it could improve in terms of supporting beneficiary participation in programming and Funding to NGOs.

NZ’s scores in each pillar are:

1. 6.49
2. 5.46
3. 6.36
4. 6.29
5. 5.72

In terms of individual indicators, the best were:

1. Funding for accountability initiatives 9.14 vs OECD average of 2.75
2. Funding and commissioning evaluations 9.90 vs 4.25
3. Un-earmarked funding 7.91 vs 3.45
4. Facilitating humanitarian access 7.78 vs 5.52
5. Funding for reconstruction and prevention 5.99 vs 4.12

The bottom two relatively were

1. Funding UN and Red Cross Red Crescent appeals 2.53 vs 5.05
2. Funding to NGOs 2.73 vs 4.40

No Right Turn blogs:

The Council for International Development is an umbrella organisation for aid groups operating from New Zealand. Last year, it criticised the government’s disestablishment of NZAID and shift in the focus of aid from poverty reduction to business growth. In retaliation, Murray McCully has just cut all their funding, resulting in 10 of its 11 staff being laid off.

This is a vicious, brutal, vindictive act of political thuggery. But its also stupid. Those staff perform a vital role in coordinating the efforts of relief groups during disasters. Without them, aid money is likely to be poorly spent. And when the government’s preferred response to disasters is to channel relief funding though NGOs, that will have a direct impact on the effectiveness of that spending.

I disagree of course. First of all I am staggered that the CID has somehow grown so it has 11 staff. I recall the days when it was around 1 to 2 staffers.

Secondly it is nonsense to say they perform a vital role in co-ordinating relief groups during disasters. I worked at the Red Cross for four years, and co-ordination was done globally or bilaterally. This is not to say the CID hasn’t been a group which provides some value, but it is massively hyping it to say they co-ordinate relief efforts and nonsense to say without them aid money is likely to be poorly spent. That is in fact insulting to the Red Cross and Save the Children Fund who are global leaders in effective relief. The demise of some CID staff will not affect the quality of their work in my opinion.

The CID, while providing some useful stuff, was partly a lobby group, and I regard it as improper for the Government to fund lobby groups. It is in fact anti-democratic. The health sector is full of these groups also.

What Idiot/Savant has overlooked is that if CID really does play such a vital role with aid agencies, then the aid agencies themselves can choose to fund CID, rather than the taxpayer. Taxpayer funding go on actual aid and relief, not Wellington lobbyists.

Look at their 2008 manifesto to see that they were very much a lobby group. Now nothing wrong with that, but don’t expect taxpayers to fund it.

The Dom Post reports:

The Samoan prime minister is defending his country’s response to the devastating tsunami, denying claims of aid relief rorts and saying international relief is reaching disaster victims.

Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi said yesterday that Samoan media had fabricated stories of corruption and aid diversion, including claims that some aid parcels were being sold off in local shops.

“Our media will print any story that anybody comes up with, and it is one of my contentions that our media should have come and analysed, followed up, the truth of these allegations,” he told Radio NZ.

But Porirua Deputy Mayor Litea Ah Hoi, who returned from Samoa on Saturday, said she had no doubt aid was being mismanaged by the government.

I always recommend that if people wish to assist victims of an overseas disaster, they donate to the Red Cross, for four reasons:

1. The NZ Red Cross will pass onto the International Red Cross every cent donated towards a specific disaster. There is no deductions for marketing, admin, political lobbying or the like. In fact not even the cost of the telegraphic transfer is taken out of the appeal funds.
2. The International Red Cross also does not deduct a cent for its own administration. The IRC (actually several bodies) funds it administration directly from grants from parties to the Geneva Conventions, foundations and member red cross societies. So every dollar earmarked for an appeal, is actually spent directly on field operations.
3. The Red Cross has presence in 186 countries – basically every country on Earth. This means it doesn’t generally hand money over to Governments to spend, but they spend it themselves  through the local Red Cross (or Crescent) Society. This reduces corruption immensely. It also tends to mean a little money can go a long way, as the local red cross society tends to have extensive volunteer networks.
4. The Red Cross doesn’t discriminate as to whom it helps. It doesn’t do politics. It doesn’t try to convert people to a religion. It doesn’t also operate as a left-wing lobby group.  The seven fundamental principles are why they are sometimes the only group allowed into war zones etc.

There are many good charities out there (Save the Children Fund is also excellent) and they generally all do good work. But for me, when there is an international disaster I always donate to the Red Cross.

The Herald report:

Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully has been accused of acting vindictively towards overseas aid agencies which criticised his changes to the direction of the aid programme earlier this year.

Labour’s associate foreign affairs spokesman, Phil Twyford, said funding had been cut to the Council for International Development (CID), an umbrella organisation of aid groups, by $650,000 over the next two years.

However, Mr McCully’s spokesman said Mr Twyford was not correct. No final decisions about the funding had been taken and the figures quoted were indicative at this stage.

I’d ask why the Government is funding the CID at all? Shouldn’t it be funded by its 94 members?

One would think that Labour would support spending overseas aid money on well overseas aid, rather than lobby groups in Wellington.

Mr Twyford said he expected the minister to say that he wanted to spend the money overseas instead of in New Zealand.

“The funding of CID is a tiny fraction of the $32 million NZAID spends each year on aid delivered by NGOs.

“It builds the professional and administrative capacity of the NGOs so they can be more accountable for taxpayer funds.”

The cuts threatened to undermine the NGOs’ efforts to be more effective and accountable, Mr Twyford said.

Don’t you love the double speak here. Twyford (the parliamentary spokesperson for aid NGOs) claims that the taxpayer has to pour money into the CID so that NGOs are more effective. In my experience the removal of taxpayer subsidies is what causes NGOs to be more efficient.

The NZ Herald has a nice line in the debate about helping the third world:

It has been estimated that barriers to trade in developed economies cost poor nations more than $100 billion a year, about twice what rich countries give in aid.

I’m not optimistic of progress though with a protectionist President and Congress in the United States, and the loss of Mandelson as Trade Commissioner for the EU.

I missed in all the Peters excitement that John Key gave a foreign policy speech this week. Nor most foreign policy is bipartisan, so no major surprises, but a few things of note:

The past 20 years have seen a plethora of FTAs signed between countries and groups of countries. Their very nature is that they are exclusive. The greatest risk to our economy is that we are excluded.

Indeed. While NZ First and the Greens want us to be excluded!

There is much that New Zealand can do to improve our role in the Pacific, and the first thing is to ensure that our aid programme there is focused and targeted properly. While the National Party acknowledges that the main target of New Zealand’s aid effort is already the Pacific, we have stated that we believe a greater proportion of our budget should be targeted there.

I agree. It is our backyard, and the area in which we can have the most influence.

It is also important that this aid is properly focused. New Zealand’s aid in recent years has been targeted at “poverty elimination” – the focus should be on economic development.

Poverty elimination or reduction is necessary in the short term, but indeed economic development and growth is the only long-term solution to poverty.