WHY OUR GIFT?

A reasonable question to ask of this concept is why …. why should we, Australia, do this?

In the concept document, a number of reasons are provided:

• If you have the capacity, why not give …. and that is true of many Australians.  And as Australia is one of the relatively rich nations on this earth we do have the capacity and we should contribute to the well being of this world. 
• It provides an opportunity for the Australian people to decide what is given to the world by us without being coloured by politicians, bureaucrats or interest groups.
• And gifting to the world is simply a great example to the rest of the world.

But the reasons do go beyond this and two more offered are:

• we get little or no say on the enormous amounts of our money that is spent on our foreign aid program; and
• the sometimes profligate spending or planned profligate spending of our money, on “pet” schemes by politicians from all sides, is appalling.

On Australia’s foreign aid budget, many countries including Australia have aid programs and gift an awful lot of money and effort to good and not so good causes.  Australia has an annual aid program of around $3.90bn (2017/2018) which goes to numerous programs throughout the world.  For some Australians this is too much and for others it is too little.
 
On the profligate spending, Australia is replete with examples, some of which Australians will agree are reckless but others will feel are justified.  To list them here might elicit calls of bias.  But if a government scheme is the “bright idea” of a politician and it is implemented quickly with little research and little justification, it runs the risk of being reckless.

So Our Gift is designed to give all Australians some say in how our money is spent in our name in this one small area of government expenditure, and it is to be done in a deliberate, professional and humble way as most Australians would seek for all spending to be done.