Dear Tash, Tarsh, Matho, and team. More philanthropy? Hi Guys, well done for a great start. You’re offering a refreshing, lively option, and i’d like to think that you can carve a niche for original, thought provoking opinion, insights, humour by confident, articulate ladies and gentlemen. We already have enough of the tied, banal, slogans and sheep herd mentality of most shows on Wake Up Ch10 Dear Tash, Tarsh, Matho and team More Philanthropy? Just a point you raised on philanthropy (in the context of banking profits). The traditional aid / charity model has been commonly regarded by most westerners as the only way to go pretty well since WW2. Multi billions of dollars have been channeled into this model, and it has comprehensively failed. Yet most people still talk it up as the moral thing to do. This is despite the fact that the same regions of the world continue to suffer from conflict, inadequate security to go about their daily productive lives, lack of food production, inadequate water storage, inadequate transport, health, education, endemic corruption and generally lead miserable, brutal lives that we in the west can barely appreciate. But this is not something that has been dumped upon these people by aliens. It reflects their cultures. But the misery is perpetuated by the traditional aid model, which means there is no end to it until we change our behaviour – as well as they. The UN washes its hands of any kind of obligation to deliver outcomes, and spends most of its massive budget on staff staying in expensive hotels, air travel, driving around these wretched countries in flash four wheel drives, which they move from crisis to crisis; giving tyrants and thugs a forum to spread their propaganda, monitoring barbarous behaviour and employing a monstrous bureaucracy to produce voluminous reports that never result if any change. The opportunity cost of all this is staggering – and we in Australia are complicit! Please use Wake Up (how apt!), to help shift away from this failed paradigm, simply by asking questions in relation to these observations, challenging the traditional aid language and stereotypes. Proponents of aid rarely offer any evidence for their case, typically relying on emotional blackmail – if we don’t give aid in its traditional form, we are not a ‘kind’ people or we are in some implied way responsible for starving kids’, emaciated women, villages of sticks and rubble etc. This amounts to a gross misrepresentation. It is gross and self indulgent sentimentality. We need to abandon this illusion and its slogans and adopt the same view of aid as we do for investment. Aid proponents also rarely offer tangible evidence of outcomes. The help most developing countries need is to learn to generate wealth through their own resources and efforts and use it constructively to build their economy. Africa for example, is probably more resource rich than (and therefore as ‘lucky’?) Australia. The only defensible way to ‘donate’ funds is to use an investment framework, where what we do and how we do it is tied to proven economic preconditions, evaluations, appropriate local inputs of skill, infrastructure; prudent, disciplined support to deliver measured, accountable outcomes. Australia should abandon aid in the form of misguided ‘charity’ in favour of an approach consistent with the model above. This concept is not new, see Atlantic Philanthropy’s web site. In addition such investment needs to be deployed in a context of joint partnerships between us and the target countries – either with government or private investors. Then we both benefit from development. Until aid proposals can meet the same criteria as a bankable feasibility study – they should not happen. Otherwise it is waste at best and at worst undermines real economic development. Relationships based upon dependence are always unhealthy. Relationships based upon constructive, reciprocal economic partnerships are the only solution. Let’s inject some rationality and evidence into our aid debate. Traditional aid has failed miserably by any standard. It amounts to waste which we simply can’t afford. If we have any moral obligation, it is to transition aid into an investment / partnership framework. Happy to elaborate. The evidence is all around us. We just need the courage to stop and make that shift. You will attract spiteful criticism from aid proponents with their unspoken vested interests. But with persistence, people of goodwill will realise what you mean. All the best, AFH
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 03:29:05 +0000
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