Penny Wong appears to have made a solid start as foreign affairs minister, but what of her department? Insiders say the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has been so hollowed out by the previous government it is estimated it will take two to three terms of government to staff it at levels commensurate to the tasks ahead.
Just as China is making significant trade and military overtures in our region with traditional allies, and the need to lift our humanitarian aid is a pressing concern, DFAT is running on the smell of an oily rag. DFAT staffing levels, local and overseas, totalled 6401 in 2013. By 2021, just under 1000 jobs had been cut under the Coalition. Two thousand years of experience were lost in a decade, and the work is largely outsourced to former DFAT and AusAID staff. The development expertise inside DFAT is weak; the number of development design specialists can be counted on one hand.
Over the past decade, our foreign aid was cut by 31%. On top of the cuts has been poorly directed spending, like the $65 million we spent on building a chancellery for Australian diplomats in the Solomon Islands; a sum that could have paid for 50 teachers in that nation for 100 years. Or helped refund the World Mosquito Program, or helped deal with ongoing climate disasters that threaten to overwhelm the region.
And as flooding engulfed Pakistan — a disaster induced by the climate crisis — Fiji PM Frank Bainimarama tweeted about the culpability of high-emitting nations like Australia.
Development was one of the “Three Ds” Eisenhower and the West championed as key to winning friends in the messy world of geopolitics (the other two being diplomacy and defence). As China’s successful regional forays are showing, the Coalition’s obsession with small government and its parsimony in foreign aid are having serious and deleterious long-term effects.
