Coates BarryBARRY COATES (Green): Kia ora Mr Chair. I have the great pleasure of talking about a subject that is near to my heart. I want to talk about overseas aid and it is a subject that we do not talk enough about in this House. In particular the mission for New Zealand giving aid to foreign countries is around the reduction of poverty in those countries. It is about sustainable development. These are really important goals in our troubled world where we often forget that much of the world is still struggling with the basics of life.From my own experience as CEO of Oxfam for a decade I have seen all too often the way that countries and communities just need a little bit of help in order to recover from disasters or to be able to build their capacity to be able to get ahead. New Zealand can do that. We are a country that can help others. We are quite rightly focusing on the Pacific—our nearest neighbours—and I think it is very good that we have an official aid programme that supports the Pacific.However—and this is where I come to comment on the Budget—all is not well in the New Zealand aid programme. From the apparent statistics in the Budget it looks like we are giving more aid in this current year. Actually what has happened is that we have grossly underspent our aid budget over the past 2 financial years and suddenly we have got money to spend at the end of a 3-year appropriation which looks like being a case of shovelling money out the door without having planned a programme. The whole idea of having a 3-year appropriation is to even out the spend of money over 3 years. This has not happened with the aid budget.In addition even with this blip what has happened to New Zealand aid is that we are progressively giving less and less and less aid as the years go on. At the end of the last Labour Government it was giving 0.3 percent. That is way below 0.52 percent which is the peak of aid that we gave as a percentage of GDP. Now under this Government's current spending plans the figure is going down to 0.21 of a percent—so that is 0.21 percent. That is extraordinarily low. It is less than one-third of the UN target of 0.7 percent and we are one of the lowest aid givers in the OECD. This is not the right trend for New Zealand in our overseas aid.There are other problems with our overseas aid. Twenty percent of our overseas aid is about to be spent on Aid for Trade under the terms of the PACER-Plus agreement which we have initialled with Pacific Island countries. That is 20 percent. It is going for Aid for Trade. That sounds great but what actually happens is that you end up giving aid that is meant to be for poverty reduction to business and very often to the elites who sit in capital cities and commercial enterprises. That is not what we need aid for. We do not believe in trickle-down in the aid programme. We actually want to help people who need the assistance not help business.We have also seen New Zealand businesses now benefiting from overseas aid. We have seen the concept of New Zealand Inc." not being applied to the marshalling of New Zealand's resources to help overseas countries but resources being marshalled to help New Zealand companies in their trade overseas and this is the wrong direction. We have seen aid subsumed within the all-consuming passion of having a free-trade agreement with anyone who would have one with us—typically happening at some time in about a decade's time—and as we have found out from many retrospective analyses not necessarily with any net benefits for countries like New Zealand. So we have seen the objectives of aid come in behind the objectives of trade and as we have seen from a previous speech we are seeing an enormous amount of money being invested in defence—$10 billion—and we have not seen commensurate money for aid. Thank you."