Having watched more Budget night speeches than is probably healthy for any woman, I have to say there is always a touch of la lunar about the whole thing. It’s like everyone on the government’s side agrees to take stupid tablets while the Opposition gets tanked on laughing gas, both sides face off and either “hear, hear” or “haw, haw” depending on where they sit.
Meanwhile the Treasure gets up and says, “Blah, blah, a billion for new roads, blah, blah, another three billion for school, something, something, five billion from Defence and another couple of billion given to the mining industry.” The numbers are off the Richter scale for mere mortals that aren’t use to managing thousands, let alone millions or billions, so we leave it to our favourite news reader to tell us how the blah, blah, will put money in our pockets.
But this Budget there was a difference for me because I had spent the day with mates from the Pacific Calling Partnership. We spent most of the time talking and laughing about what was going on for them and their work in both Australia and the Pacific. Talking, because it’s how women sort this stuff out and laughing because no other response makes sense in light of the need and suffering.
There were the usual stories about over-crowding and poverty, of an appalling level of infant mortality and maternal health, of an ambitious but impoverished school curriculum and a sewerage system that packed up years ago. But there were also the stories about the drought that devastated communities across these island nations, about what people tried to do when all their trees had died, wells had run dry and they confronted the real possibility of having no water to drink in just weeks because many communities had next to no water storage tanks. As well as the on-going discussion about how to build resilience to deal with the impact of rising tides, salt water inundation and loss of productive land to the creeping tide.
Every single one of these issues has a solution, but they all cost a little bit of money.
So when I heard the Treasurer say; “blah, blah, my government will cut $2.9 billion from Australia’s aid to the world’s poorest people,” I sat up and listened.
GetUp! have put the consequences of this decision in very simple to understand numbers. The first is that this money could have saved 290,000 lives, according to World Vision estimates. That 290,000 could have included the babies that will die on Kiribati, the mothers who will continue to struggle with such poor health, the little kids that suffer with diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, measles, polio and tuberculosis.
The other number is $3. For every $1 taken away from foreign aid, the Treasurer announced that we will put $3 into the pockets of mining companies through the fuel tax subsidy alone. That’s $4,480 a minute over the next four years.
There are some who will scream blue murder at having those two facts linked, but in the real world they are. Money spent placating the bully boys in the mining industry is money not available to help protect those who cannot speak out for themselves, those who don’t have $20 million to run slick advertising campaigns to get their way.
The other conversation we had on Budget day was about what was going on in the Torres Strait. Torres Strait Islanders have been campaigning for funding to rebuild their sea walls for at least six years, to address the issues of inundation and coastal erosion on the Islands.
A report commissioned by Torres Strait Island Regional Council (TSIRC) shows that $22 million is needed to rebuild sea walls on the six most affected islands of Saibai, Boigu, Masig, Iama, Warraber and Poruma – just $22 million to secure the on-going viability of these communities.
At first things progressed well – or as it should in such a wealthy country. In August 2011, the ‘Torres Strait Islands Sea Wall Bill’ passed Federal Parliament with bipartisan support.
Then in December 2011, the Federal Government reneged. Minister for Regional Australia, Simon Crean, said the responsibility lay with the Queensland Government and the Torres Strait Island Regional Council (TSIRC). It is not clear why Mr Crean had his change of heart because the previous Queensland Labor Government had already said they were not prepared to put up the funds, and unsurprisingly the TSIRC does not have sufficient resources or funds to foot the bill.
They have applied for Regional Development grants, however even if the council is successful, these grants will not cover the necessary $22 million. Recent media programs show the extent of the damage being done by the rising sea levels and how that will accelerate over coming years.
Twenty-two million dollars is all that is needed to secure the safety and wellbeing of communities across the Torres Strait – a vital part of the Australian community. This is truly pathetic and as climate change builds this bad situation will become a lot worse.
That’s why the decisions made about Australia’s Budget matter. As ACF CEO, Don Henry, put it on Budget night; “Continuing the senseless diesel fuel handout to mining companies is a much bigger slug to Australian households than any carbon price, with the handouts to mining companies projected to increase to $182 per taxpayer, per year, costing $9.4 billion over the forward estimates.”
Just imagine what Torres Strait Islanders could do with just 1% of that $9billion, or what 0.5% of that could do for the women and children of Tuvalu, Kiribati, Cook Islands and PNG.
It may sound like, blah,blah,blah, but how we spend our money – and remember it is our money generated by the tax we pay – really matters. It can be the difference between life and death for real people, not just a political point scoring exercise for people that will never know what it is like to be without.
Macken Sense is a weekly metabolic breakdown of media and green events by our astute commentator, Julie Macken. Follow Julie Macken on Twitter @juliemacken.
