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SPEECH
BOB MCMULLAN MP
PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
MEMBER FOR FRASER
________________________________________
15 August 2008
Future Directions for Australian Assistance to Africa
Transcript of speech delivered to Australia Africa Business Council
Sydney
12 August 2008
I welcome the opportunity to speak to you because your engagement with Africa is an important part of the emerging, enhanced Australian engagement with Africa. I will mainly speak about the development assistance relationship and our plans in that regard because that is the thing about which I know something and have something to contribute.
I want to start by thanking you for your engagement. Australian businesses with investment in and trade between Australia and Africa is a very important underpinning of any long-term relationship and it is important that it is done at a high standard and I thank you and the association for your advocacy of that.
The new Australian Government has committed itself to enhance its engagement with Africa and the change will mainly be seen through development assistance. That is because there is already substantial trade and investment, and while we intend to continue to provide assistance in the facilitation for that, and I expect it to grow naturally, I don't think that the direct policy measures we take will automatically change that. That will change because of your initiatives and because of the economic developments in Africa.
It will change diplomatically. It's not what I principally want to talk about this afternoon, but I just need to mention the new government's commitment to enhance multilateralism, our participation in the Indian Ocean region - which is very significant for us - and also the East African nations. The major diplomatic and humanitarian issues that are in Africa will be important elements of our engagement and we intend to be more actively engaged in those regional organisations, looking at our relationship with the African Union etc. But principally the change that you will see and the change I want to talk about relates to the humanitarian and development task in Africa.
I want to talk about what we want to do, why we are going to do it and how we are going to do it.
So what are we going to do? I was delighted to have Leigh Pillay, President of the Australia Africa Business Council, outline the proposal we have for a very big increase overall in our aid budget; as he said, the biggest increase in our history. The detail of the election commitment is that we will increase the aid budget from 0.32 of GNI to 0.5. With the normal assumptions about economic growth that we make in the budget, the overall aid program will go from about $3.2 billion, which it was when we came in, to something in the order of $8 billion by 2015 - in other words, the aid budget will grow two and a half times. That figure may not be precise, because it depends on the rate of economic growth and how big the GNI is, but with economic growth and with increasing proportions going to development assistance, it will at least double over the next seven years.
Even if we simply maintain the percentage of the aid budget we have now flowing to Africa, the growth in the aid budget would lead to a substantial increase, but we intend to do more than that. We intend to increase the percentage of our aid program going to Africa. In the budget we just had we increased our aid to Africa from $91 million to $116 million, so it was a substantial increase in dollars, but we didn't change its character. Its character is still essentially assistance provided through NGOs and through multilateral agencies operating in Africa.
We have to get a sense of proportion about how modest even our increased contribution going to Africa is. We are providing now just over $100 million a year, which is a small part of the more than $40 billion that is being provided globally, so even with the increase we need to appreciate that we are always going to be a relatively small player and therefore that has implications for how we go about our aid delivery.
Let me just look at the arithmetic. If we simply maintain the percentage going to Africa from the current aid budget, it would mean that by 2015 we would increase from $91 million when we came to office to about $250 million, but our intention is to increase the percentage because we have made a commitment that we are going to re-engage as a government with Africa.
Up until last year, we had a policy position that in development terms we would not engage with Africa. If multilateral agencies with whom we worked did things then some of that would be spent in Africa, if our NGOs had programs in Africa, well, part of our funding could flow there, but there was no direct government-to-government engagement.
That is about to change, and that will lead to an increase in the percentage of our aid budget going to Africa. It is too early for me to say what it will increase to. There is a significant assessment going on now about a whole range of pressures on the future aid budget. We are in the process between now and the budget in May next year trying to determine the framework of our expanded budget flowing forward - what the $8 billion, 2015 program will look like. Of course we can't decide exactly because we don't know what pressures will emerge, but we know the broad shape of it - we have a rapidly growing budget and we have the capacity to change priorities without harsh cutting decisions. So we are looking at that, and part of that is how this increased engagement with Africa will be reflected numerically, but it does mean by 2015 the program will be more than $250 million - that is more than two and half times what it is today.
Now why is that?
It is not just because my friends from the African missions are here and I want to make them happy. It's a really good reason. I do want to make them happy but probably the taxpayers wouldn't think that was sufficient reason, and it is not because you have invited me to lunch and I want to make you happy because I want to earn my lunch, because that may or may not be a good reason but probably not sufficient.
There are more reasons than are obvious. The first and most important reason why we have, in our view, a moral obligation to be engaged is that as a government we are committed to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals globally and we are furthest off track in achieving the MDGs in Africa. We have an obligation to make a more substantial contribution to the achievement of those goals in our region, and almost every country in the Pacific is not yet on track to achieve those goals, so that will be our bigger task, but in Africa the challenge is bigger and if you are serious about the achievement of the MDGs you have to be engaged in Africa.
Let me give you an example. With regard to the infant mortality for children under 5, of the 40 countries where the problem is biggest, where we are furthest off track to achieving the MDGs, of those 40 countries, 38 are in Africa. If you think that the issue of infant mortality and the MDGs they relate to - infant mortality - is a significant global challenge and a major moral responsibility for any developed country trying to be a good international citizen, you have to engage in Africa. That is our primary reason. It's about the MDGs, it's about the development challenge, it's about the campaign to make poverty history.
But we have other legitimate, enduring reasons. Australia is and always will be an Indian Ocean country. Here, as we sit in Sydney and look out at the Pacific, we realise how recently Australia has come to the realisation we actually live in the Pacific. For someone who grew up in Western Australia I have to continue to remind my East coast friends, and I have been living on the East coast a long time, that for many Australians when they wake up and talk about the ocean they mean the Indian Ocean. We have an Indian Ocean interest and we have an Indian Ocean responsibility and that requires us to be more effectively engaged, and therefore the countries of East Africa are littoral states for us and we need to have a sensible engagement in our long-term regional and diplomatic interest.
Thirdly, it's because in one of the new and emerging challenges in Africa we have, we think, a comparative advantage.
When you are a middle-sized power like Australia you have to realise you can't do everything, everywhere and spread yourself too thinly be inefficient, so you have to look at where you either have a particular responsibility or a particular opportunity. We have a particular responsibility in our region in the countries that are in our neighbourhood - the small countries of the Pacific, the countries of South East Asia - but in addition to that regional commitment we have a unique opportunity because there are very few developed countries more suited to the challenge of the food crisis that we currently confront which is so substantially affecting many countries in Africa and which is reversing so many of the gains we have made in lifting people in developing countries out of poverty.
In our view, the current food crisis, when properly analysed, is a significant challenge but a great opportunity in Africa. It is a significant challenge because there is an immediate spike in food prices that is having a serious problem on the poorest people. That is straightforward. There is nothing complicated about that. But if you look through that, what might be a temporary food price spike, you see a long-term upward trend in the price of food. I don't think that spike will be as high at the current temporary spike particularly in grain prices, but World Bank analysis and others show a long-term upward trend in price caused by fundamental supply and demand imbalances. Nothing surprising there - that's straightforward economics.
Normally you would expect the market to respond and resolve that supply and demand imbalance, but a number of factors have prevented this from happening. One of them is the distortion in the trade rules, which unfortunately were not resolved recently as we attempted to find a conclusion of the Doha Round. There are other reasons too. There is a long-term supply and demand imbalance and it is particularly affecting the poorest people, and very significant in Africa, and we need to have short-term responses in terms of the creation of assistance for people to buy food and assistance to farmers to produce crops.
But there is also an opportunity and this is where Australia's capacity to contribute comes in. The discussions I have had with agricultural experts in, for example, our Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, say the greatest gap between the current production and productive potential lies in Sub-Saharan Africa; that in that part of the world there is a significant capacity to significantly increase food production and actually to turn this long-term challenge of the global supply and demand imbalance to the interests of African farmers. Now it won't solve everybody's problem, it won't mean that there are no more food problems in Africa, but it does mean that if we apply our intellect and our resources to substantially enhance the capacity of agricultural production in Africa, it would be good directly for those farmers and the people who buy their food, but also create in at least some countries an export potential.
Australia's geography, our climate, creates circumstances where we have a capacity to contribute, most particularly through our agricultural research and distributing the benefits of the knowledge generated by that research, that very few others have, because our agricultural practices and our agricultural challenges are very similar to those faced in a number of parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. We see a unique opportunity for us to contribute and we think the challenges for the economic development in Africa may well be changing its character.
Leigh referred to that in his opening remark that a number of African economies have been growing strongly, and it is true that statistics show that, notwithstanding the very serious poverty challenge, a number of countries have taken successful advantage of the recent years. But we are now going to go through a more difficult period in global economic growth, and there is a precedent in economic history to suggest that when global economic growth slows down, the poorest are the ones who lose the most. It is not necessary certain or automatically, but we have to give special attention to areas, not just Africa, but including Africa, where the consequences of a global economic slowdown might be most harshly felt.
That is essentially the what and the why.
Now how are we going to provide this assistance?
I briefly referred to that earlier. At the moment our assistance is essentially only through two vehicles: we provide assistance to multilateral agencies who work all around the world, including Africa - UNICEF, UNDP etc; and we provide support to our NGOs and we don't proscribe where they might operate to use that money, so a significant amount of it is used in Africa, and that is where an apparent approximately $100 million is spent.
We intend to re-engage bilaterally, but we have to do it in a manner that doesn't exacerbate the administrative burden that donor countries already place on countries in Africa. Let me give you an example. I should have checked which ambassadors were coming to give an example from one of your countries. I am sorry, but let me give you the example of Mozambique. In Mozambique they have 28 international donors, so in their donor coordination activities they have to deal with 28 different programs. However, more than 90 percent of their assistance is provided by the largest half, so there are a dozen to fifteen other donors who are very small players, but they still put the same administrative challenge on the resources of the Government of Mozambique, and their example is certainly common across Africa.
We don't want to be another one of those small players who simply creates with a relatively small program and an extra administrative burden on the countries of Africa, so we have to be intelligent in the way we go about it. Our plan is to engage in discussion with the countries in the region because it is their countries, and we will be working in a manner with which they are prepared to agree.
We will start, broadly, to seek harmonisation and cooperation such that where other countries have successful programs in developing African countries we might join with them, so it would be a common program between ourselves and some other country. We are doing that with the UK Department For International Development in Pakistan, where we are jointly delivering a health program, and it may be that through those vehicles we can increase the flow of resources without increasing the administrative burden.
It may be we can do it through joint activities with multilateral agencies. I don't mean just providing more money to the multilateral agencies for their activities, although we will do that quite separately, but where we see UNICEF, UNDP and others conducting successful programs we might join with them, or co-sponsor a program rather than developing another one.
It is our intention to find ways consistent with the best principles of modern development assistance to develop a bilateral program. Unashamedly we want to do it in a manner such that the people and the governments of those countries are aware that Australia is contributing - we don't want to be so cooperative we are anonymous - but we do want to do it in a manner that is consistent with those good principles.
We think we have a lot to offer. We have agricultural expertise, which I mentioned before. We have some successful programs already, such as the Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, which is doing great work in child and maternal health, which is an area of significant priority for our Prime Minister, who wants to see Australia more effectively engaged in issues of child and maternal health, so it is an area we think we have the capacity to contribute. We already have a lot of NGOs and volunteers working in Africa, which is a base on which we might be able to build. We provide scholarships, and we don't want that to become the centrepiece of what we do, because we think the priority on education needs to on basic education, primary education, where the best development returns are achieved, but we get a lot of initial benefit from African scholars coming here on the basis of our scholarships and we intend to do more of that. And, of course, there is a very significant and continuing humanitarian challenge to which we all have to respond, and climate change suggests that is going to become a more onerous responsibility for all of us in the future. It is not absolutely clear the impact of climate change in different countries will be, but on balance it is likely that the humanitarian assistance challenge will get more difficult rather than less, and therefore this is an area that might call on us to do more.
That is not where we would choose to spend our money because it doesn't usually have the best development results, but you can't wait and say 'Well, I am sorry that is a humanitarian crisis and it doesn't fit our development priorities.' With a humanitarian crisis you have to respond. We responded to the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar after Cyclone Nargis, notwithstanding how repugnant we think that regime is, because there is an emergency and there are people in desperate need. We will deal with our political concerns concerning that regime subsequently.
We are concerned to re-engage. We think that in the 21st century it doesn't make sense for Australia to see itself as isolated from Africa. We will be engaged with it diplomatically, we'll be engaged with it in terms of trade and investment, and will be engaging in terms of development assistance.
We hope an enhanced priority in our diplomacy we will see more Australian ministers visiting. My colleague the parliamentary secretary for trade John Murphy has already been. I am going soon. The foreign minister will be going at some stage.
We will be engaging more across a range of activities. It is an enhanced priority for us so your business engagement is really very welcome for us. You can engage in ways we can't and we can hopefully create an environment where your engagement might be more effective and significant, so your investment, your trade, your business activity between our two continents is very valuable to us because it is a complement to our work, and will help an enhanced development assistance engagement work more effectively.
So I thank you for what you have all already done. I hope that you can enhance your activities as we set about enhancing ours, because engagement is more effective the more comprehensive it is, the more diverse it is, the more elements it has, the more we have people-to-people links, the more we have business links, the more we have development assistance links, the more we have diplomatic links, the more often we beat the Springboks! That's a very good part of the process - let it never be underestimated as a significant element.
The last time I was in South Africa - and I am afraid to count how many years ago that was - coincided with us getting thrashed by the Springboks, so I was welcome fodder for anyone wanting to talk about rugby. I regret to say I pretended that I was from Western Australia and only knew about Australian Rules. It's not true, but it was the best excuse I could come up with at the time.
All those elements are a healthy part of our relationship and I thank you for all the work you have done so far as the Business Council, as individual business people, and I look forward to working with you more as we enhance our engagement and I thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today.
Thank you very much.
BOB MCMULLAN MP
PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
MEMBER FOR FRASER
________________________________________
15 August 2008
Future Directions for Australian Assistance to Africa
Transcript of speech delivered to Australia Africa Business Council
Sydney
12 August 2008
I welcome the opportunity to speak to you because your engagement with Africa is an important part of the emerging, enhanced Australian engagement with Africa. I will mainly speak about the development assistance relationship and our plans in that regard because that is the thing about which I know something and have something to contribute.
I want to start by thanking you for your engagement. Australian businesses with investment in and trade between Australia and Africa is a very important underpinning of any long-term relationship and it is important that it is done at a high standard and I thank you and the association for your advocacy of that.
The new Australian Government has committed itself to enhance its engagement with Africa and the change will mainly be seen through development assistance. That is because there is already substantial trade and investment, and while we intend to continue to provide assistance in the facilitation for that, and I expect it to grow naturally, I don't think that the direct policy measures we take will automatically change that. That will change because of your initiatives and because of the economic developments in Africa.
It will change diplomatically. It's not what I principally want to talk about this afternoon, but I just need to mention the new government's commitment to enhance multilateralism, our participation in the Indian Ocean region - which is very significant for us - and also the East African nations. The major diplomatic and humanitarian issues that are in Africa will be important elements of our engagement and we intend to be more actively engaged in those regional organisations, looking at our relationship with the African Union etc. But principally the change that you will see and the change I want to talk about relates to the humanitarian and development task in Africa.
I want to talk about what we want to do, why we are going to do it and how we are going to do it.
So what are we going to do? I was delighted to have Leigh Pillay, President of the Australia Africa Business Council, outline the proposal we have for a very big increase overall in our aid budget; as he said, the biggest increase in our history. The detail of the election commitment is that we will increase the aid budget from 0.32 of GNI to 0.5. With the normal assumptions about economic growth that we make in the budget, the overall aid program will go from about $3.2 billion, which it was when we came in, to something in the order of $8 billion by 2015 - in other words, the aid budget will grow two and a half times. That figure may not be precise, because it depends on the rate of economic growth and how big the GNI is, but with economic growth and with increasing proportions going to development assistance, it will at least double over the next seven years.
Even if we simply maintain the percentage of the aid budget we have now flowing to Africa, the growth in the aid budget would lead to a substantial increase, but we intend to do more than that. We intend to increase the percentage of our aid program going to Africa. In the budget we just had we increased our aid to Africa from $91 million to $116 million, so it was a substantial increase in dollars, but we didn't change its character. Its character is still essentially assistance provided through NGOs and through multilateral agencies operating in Africa.
We have to get a sense of proportion about how modest even our increased contribution going to Africa is. We are providing now just over $100 million a year, which is a small part of the more than $40 billion that is being provided globally, so even with the increase we need to appreciate that we are always going to be a relatively small player and therefore that has implications for how we go about our aid delivery.
Let me just look at the arithmetic. If we simply maintain the percentage going to Africa from the current aid budget, it would mean that by 2015 we would increase from $91 million when we came to office to about $250 million, but our intention is to increase the percentage because we have made a commitment that we are going to re-engage as a government with Africa.
Up until last year, we had a policy position that in development terms we would not engage with Africa. If multilateral agencies with whom we worked did things then some of that would be spent in Africa, if our NGOs had programs in Africa, well, part of our funding could flow there, but there was no direct government-to-government engagement.
That is about to change, and that will lead to an increase in the percentage of our aid budget going to Africa. It is too early for me to say what it will increase to. There is a significant assessment going on now about a whole range of pressures on the future aid budget. We are in the process between now and the budget in May next year trying to determine the framework of our expanded budget flowing forward - what the $8 billion, 2015 program will look like. Of course we can't decide exactly because we don't know what pressures will emerge, but we know the broad shape of it - we have a rapidly growing budget and we have the capacity to change priorities without harsh cutting decisions. So we are looking at that, and part of that is how this increased engagement with Africa will be reflected numerically, but it does mean by 2015 the program will be more than $250 million - that is more than two and half times what it is today.
Now why is that?
It is not just because my friends from the African missions are here and I want to make them happy. It's a really good reason. I do want to make them happy but probably the taxpayers wouldn't think that was sufficient reason, and it is not because you have invited me to lunch and I want to make you happy because I want to earn my lunch, because that may or may not be a good reason but probably not sufficient.
There are more reasons than are obvious. The first and most important reason why we have, in our view, a moral obligation to be engaged is that as a government we are committed to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals globally and we are furthest off track in achieving the MDGs in Africa. We have an obligation to make a more substantial contribution to the achievement of those goals in our region, and almost every country in the Pacific is not yet on track to achieve those goals, so that will be our bigger task, but in Africa the challenge is bigger and if you are serious about the achievement of the MDGs you have to be engaged in Africa.
Let me give you an example. With regard to the infant mortality for children under 5, of the 40 countries where the problem is biggest, where we are furthest off track to achieving the MDGs, of those 40 countries, 38 are in Africa. If you think that the issue of infant mortality and the MDGs they relate to - infant mortality - is a significant global challenge and a major moral responsibility for any developed country trying to be a good international citizen, you have to engage in Africa. That is our primary reason. It's about the MDGs, it's about the development challenge, it's about the campaign to make poverty history.
But we have other legitimate, enduring reasons. Australia is and always will be an Indian Ocean country. Here, as we sit in Sydney and look out at the Pacific, we realise how recently Australia has come to the realisation we actually live in the Pacific. For someone who grew up in Western Australia I have to continue to remind my East coast friends, and I have been living on the East coast a long time, that for many Australians when they wake up and talk about the ocean they mean the Indian Ocean. We have an Indian Ocean interest and we have an Indian Ocean responsibility and that requires us to be more effectively engaged, and therefore the countries of East Africa are littoral states for us and we need to have a sensible engagement in our long-term regional and diplomatic interest.
Thirdly, it's because in one of the new and emerging challenges in Africa we have, we think, a comparative advantage.
When you are a middle-sized power like Australia you have to realise you can't do everything, everywhere and spread yourself too thinly be inefficient, so you have to look at where you either have a particular responsibility or a particular opportunity. We have a particular responsibility in our region in the countries that are in our neighbourhood - the small countries of the Pacific, the countries of South East Asia - but in addition to that regional commitment we have a unique opportunity because there are very few developed countries more suited to the challenge of the food crisis that we currently confront which is so substantially affecting many countries in Africa and which is reversing so many of the gains we have made in lifting people in developing countries out of poverty.
In our view, the current food crisis, when properly analysed, is a significant challenge but a great opportunity in Africa. It is a significant challenge because there is an immediate spike in food prices that is having a serious problem on the poorest people. That is straightforward. There is nothing complicated about that. But if you look through that, what might be a temporary food price spike, you see a long-term upward trend in the price of food. I don't think that spike will be as high at the current temporary spike particularly in grain prices, but World Bank analysis and others show a long-term upward trend in price caused by fundamental supply and demand imbalances. Nothing surprising there - that's straightforward economics.
Normally you would expect the market to respond and resolve that supply and demand imbalance, but a number of factors have prevented this from happening. One of them is the distortion in the trade rules, which unfortunately were not resolved recently as we attempted to find a conclusion of the Doha Round. There are other reasons too. There is a long-term supply and demand imbalance and it is particularly affecting the poorest people, and very significant in Africa, and we need to have short-term responses in terms of the creation of assistance for people to buy food and assistance to farmers to produce crops.
But there is also an opportunity and this is where Australia's capacity to contribute comes in. The discussions I have had with agricultural experts in, for example, our Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, say the greatest gap between the current production and productive potential lies in Sub-Saharan Africa; that in that part of the world there is a significant capacity to significantly increase food production and actually to turn this long-term challenge of the global supply and demand imbalance to the interests of African farmers. Now it won't solve everybody's problem, it won't mean that there are no more food problems in Africa, but it does mean that if we apply our intellect and our resources to substantially enhance the capacity of agricultural production in Africa, it would be good directly for those farmers and the people who buy their food, but also create in at least some countries an export potential.
Australia's geography, our climate, creates circumstances where we have a capacity to contribute, most particularly through our agricultural research and distributing the benefits of the knowledge generated by that research, that very few others have, because our agricultural practices and our agricultural challenges are very similar to those faced in a number of parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. We see a unique opportunity for us to contribute and we think the challenges for the economic development in Africa may well be changing its character.
Leigh referred to that in his opening remark that a number of African economies have been growing strongly, and it is true that statistics show that, notwithstanding the very serious poverty challenge, a number of countries have taken successful advantage of the recent years. But we are now going to go through a more difficult period in global economic growth, and there is a precedent in economic history to suggest that when global economic growth slows down, the poorest are the ones who lose the most. It is not necessary certain or automatically, but we have to give special attention to areas, not just Africa, but including Africa, where the consequences of a global economic slowdown might be most harshly felt.
That is essentially the what and the why.
Now how are we going to provide this assistance?
I briefly referred to that earlier. At the moment our assistance is essentially only through two vehicles: we provide assistance to multilateral agencies who work all around the world, including Africa - UNICEF, UNDP etc; and we provide support to our NGOs and we don't proscribe where they might operate to use that money, so a significant amount of it is used in Africa, and that is where an apparent approximately $100 million is spent.
We intend to re-engage bilaterally, but we have to do it in a manner that doesn't exacerbate the administrative burden that donor countries already place on countries in Africa. Let me give you an example. I should have checked which ambassadors were coming to give an example from one of your countries. I am sorry, but let me give you the example of Mozambique. In Mozambique they have 28 international donors, so in their donor coordination activities they have to deal with 28 different programs. However, more than 90 percent of their assistance is provided by the largest half, so there are a dozen to fifteen other donors who are very small players, but they still put the same administrative challenge on the resources of the Government of Mozambique, and their example is certainly common across Africa.
We don't want to be another one of those small players who simply creates with a relatively small program and an extra administrative burden on the countries of Africa, so we have to be intelligent in the way we go about it. Our plan is to engage in discussion with the countries in the region because it is their countries, and we will be working in a manner with which they are prepared to agree.
We will start, broadly, to seek harmonisation and cooperation such that where other countries have successful programs in developing African countries we might join with them, so it would be a common program between ourselves and some other country. We are doing that with the UK Department For International Development in Pakistan, where we are jointly delivering a health program, and it may be that through those vehicles we can increase the flow of resources without increasing the administrative burden.
It may be we can do it through joint activities with multilateral agencies. I don't mean just providing more money to the multilateral agencies for their activities, although we will do that quite separately, but where we see UNICEF, UNDP and others conducting successful programs we might join with them, or co-sponsor a program rather than developing another one.
It is our intention to find ways consistent with the best principles of modern development assistance to develop a bilateral program. Unashamedly we want to do it in a manner such that the people and the governments of those countries are aware that Australia is contributing - we don't want to be so cooperative we are anonymous - but we do want to do it in a manner that is consistent with those good principles.
We think we have a lot to offer. We have agricultural expertise, which I mentioned before. We have some successful programs already, such as the Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, which is doing great work in child and maternal health, which is an area of significant priority for our Prime Minister, who wants to see Australia more effectively engaged in issues of child and maternal health, so it is an area we think we have the capacity to contribute. We already have a lot of NGOs and volunteers working in Africa, which is a base on which we might be able to build. We provide scholarships, and we don't want that to become the centrepiece of what we do, because we think the priority on education needs to on basic education, primary education, where the best development returns are achieved, but we get a lot of initial benefit from African scholars coming here on the basis of our scholarships and we intend to do more of that. And, of course, there is a very significant and continuing humanitarian challenge to which we all have to respond, and climate change suggests that is going to become a more onerous responsibility for all of us in the future. It is not absolutely clear the impact of climate change in different countries will be, but on balance it is likely that the humanitarian assistance challenge will get more difficult rather than less, and therefore this is an area that might call on us to do more.
That is not where we would choose to spend our money because it doesn't usually have the best development results, but you can't wait and say 'Well, I am sorry that is a humanitarian crisis and it doesn't fit our development priorities.' With a humanitarian crisis you have to respond. We responded to the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar after Cyclone Nargis, notwithstanding how repugnant we think that regime is, because there is an emergency and there are people in desperate need. We will deal with our political concerns concerning that regime subsequently.
We are concerned to re-engage. We think that in the 21st century it doesn't make sense for Australia to see itself as isolated from Africa. We will be engaged with it diplomatically, we'll be engaged with it in terms of trade and investment, and will be engaging in terms of development assistance.
We hope an enhanced priority in our diplomacy we will see more Australian ministers visiting. My colleague the parliamentary secretary for trade John Murphy has already been. I am going soon. The foreign minister will be going at some stage.
We will be engaging more across a range of activities. It is an enhanced priority for us so your business engagement is really very welcome for us. You can engage in ways we can't and we can hopefully create an environment where your engagement might be more effective and significant, so your investment, your trade, your business activity between our two continents is very valuable to us because it is a complement to our work, and will help an enhanced development assistance engagement work more effectively.
So I thank you for what you have all already done. I hope that you can enhance your activities as we set about enhancing ours, because engagement is more effective the more comprehensive it is, the more diverse it is, the more elements it has, the more we have people-to-people links, the more we have business links, the more we have development assistance links, the more we have diplomatic links, the more often we beat the Springboks! That's a very good part of the process - let it never be underestimated as a significant element.
The last time I was in South Africa - and I am afraid to count how many years ago that was - coincided with us getting thrashed by the Springboks, so I was welcome fodder for anyone wanting to talk about rugby. I regret to say I pretended that I was from Western Australia and only knew about Australian Rules. It's not true, but it was the best excuse I could come up with at the time.
All those elements are a healthy part of our relationship and I thank you for all the work you have done so far as the Business Council, as individual business people, and I look forward to working with you more as we enhance our engagement and I thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today.
Thank you very much.