Alliance backs aid summit goals

Alliance Party media release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday 1 April 2009

The Alliance Party fully endorses the recommendations of the Summit on the Future on NZAID in Wellington on 27 March 2009.

Alliance Party co leader Kay Murray, who represented the Alliance at the Summit, says there needs to be genuine consultation with Non Government Organizations currently accessing funding for aid projects through NZAID and the wider community, and that the elimination of poverty must remain as the main goal of NZAID.

Ms Murray says the Alliance battled to have aid removed from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when it was in government between 1999 and 2002 and she is horrified Murray McCully has now unilaterally decided that it should go back there.

"It is a slap in the face to the organizations involved in distributing aid and all New Zealanders who care about how our country conducts itself in the global community.” Ms Murray says that the haste of this decision and the lack of public consultation ind a hidden agenda.

"Siting aid within MFAT will enable the National government to use aid as a weapon to force recipient countries into falling in line with its political ideology and accept projects that may well benefit New Zealand businesses more than their own people in need."

The move to have the elimination of poverty replaced by a focus solely on economic development shows very clearly that they still believe in the now discredited "trickle down theory" much vaunted in the 1980’s and 90’s under Rogernomics and Ruthenasia. “It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.”

The Alliance Party firmly believes that aid must be free from political interference so that it can be targeted at the most vulnerable sectors of the community like women and children, and where deprivation is greatest such as small rural settlements.

It must also work from the bottom up supporting small community initiated projects not imposing large scale interventions which are often neither needed or wanted, simply line the pockets of big businesses, and reduce the local people to a source of cheap labour.

The Alliance Party urges the government to rethink its position and to commit itself to a policy of genuine aid, distributed where it is most needed, and aimed at eliminating poverty.

ENDS