Time to increase aid spending

Stuff reports that the government is reviewing its level of spending on foreign aid. Good. As the article shows, our level of foreign aid - which was never particularly good - was systematically underfunded by National, and has eroded from 0.3% to 0.23% of GNI. This compares badly with Australia (0.27%), the OECD average (0.4%), and our longstanding international commitments (0.7%). If we're to meet the latter, we're going to need to more than triple our funding to ~$1.5 billion a year.

This is a big ask, both in terms of priorities, and MFAT's capacity to actually do it. Its likely that we'll see a much smaller increase initially. But it would be good to see a pathway laid out for us to meet our international obligations.