Tuesday, December 20, 2005



Boosting aid

At the beginning of the year, the Council for International Development organised a petititon calling on the government to honour its promise to boost its level of foreign aid to the UN target of 0.7% of GDP, and to set a firm target for doing so. Their petition was considered by the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Select Committee, and today it has reported back, backing the call for further rises. The question now is whether the government will listen to the committee, or continue to ignore its international responsibilities.

Posted by Idiot/Savant at 12/20/2005 12:18:00 PM

2 comments:

I'm sure an elevated level of foreign aid will be of great comfort to the sick & dying on waiting lists in New Zealand.

First the Government forces them to pay for & use a defective socialised healthcare system, and then they underfund it while giving taxpayers money to overseas charity.

Nice.

 Posted by Duncan Bayne : 12/20/2005 03:34:00 PM

Duncan,

The government doesn't force the public to use the public health system. People are free to use private health care if they so wish.

Everyone does pay to fund our public health system true. Just like everyone pays to maintain our roads and for our police force, and for prisons. In the case of health care such payment makes perfectly good sense though as public helath care is clearly more efficient (New Zealanders spend less per capita for health coverage than do americans for example) than a privatised health care system in guaranteeing some health care coverage to the entire population.

It's true that our public health care system is underfunded, which is why we need to raise taxes (preferrably the top tax rates); on the other hand, your implied solution - that we could pay for a resaonalbe health care system rather than spend the money on ODA is flawed. Health care is one of the big ticket items on our budget; ODA is not. We currently spend 20% of total government spending on health, 0.3 percent (approx) on ODA; meaning that we could cut all ODA spending entirely and still not save enough to dramatically improve our health care system. Moreover, the giving of ODA is not charity, it helps create markets for our products and makes the world a safer place

 Posted by Terence : 12/20/2005 05:23:00 PM

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