The Aid Island – a reality check

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Australian officials have been criss-crossing the Pacific recently, underlining not only Australia’s outsized contribution to development aid in the Pacific, but also the country’s central geopolitical role, and that wonderfully intangible thing: Leadership.

This whole space is fraught with misperception.

Last week’s unveiling of the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Aid Map went miles toward showing in clear terms just how dominant Australia is in terms of overall generosity. Optimistic promises notwithstanding, no other nation even comes close.

But it would be unwise to expect a direct relation between influence and spending. How the money is spent matters, and why and how it matters is often not obvious.

Smaller than they appear

When aid spending is concerned, the objects in the mirror may be smaller than they appear.

Ask the average person on the street, and their assessment of the relative size of donor contributions will be based mostly on the evidence right in front of them. In Vanuatu today, that means the conversation will be almost all China, almost all the time. Between a few high-profile ‘gifts’ from the People’s Republic and several high-profile private sector developments, people are confronted with tangible evidence of China’s largesse.

What is less evident, but immensely impactful, is the role the Telecoms Regulator plays in requiring service providers to extend internet services to 98% of the population. Or the fact that Customs and Inland Revenue exceeded income expectations by more than 23% due to efficiency gains. Or, over the next couple of years, the ability for individuals and business owners to pay all of their government fees and taxes through a single window.

Telco revenues rose 15% in two years. Bandwidth usage increased by nearly two orders of magnitude over the same period. DFAT grants were hardly the only reason for these policy wins, but they were a key ingredient.

[Full disclosure: The Pacific Institute of Public Policy received $164,285 from Australia’s Governance for Growth programme two years prior to the author’s employment there. The author also contracted briefly for another recipient agency, and was paid indirectly from DFAT funds.]

Improvements in service delivery and assistance in skilling up key departments are one of the reasons Vanuatu is in such a healthy position vis à vis its public debt.

And even though we all benefit from these things, there’s very little to see unless you know where to look.

DFAT does itself no favours in this. Their risk-aversion when it comes to publicity is legendary. Not entirely without reason, it must be said. In 2002, a tense armed standoff pitted paramilitaries against police in Port Vila when the Prime Minister was accused of being an Australian stooge.

But the perverse outcome of this institutional gun-shyness is that where Chinese-funded projects tend to roll out the red carpet for journalists, media are often made to feel like the enemy when approaching DFAT-funded projects for details.

And as a result of this, nostra culpa, the resulting press coverage is often direly boring.

And the result for the average citizen is Ni Vanuatu get more mileage, if you will, out of the nearly invisible spending—over $414 million since 2011—than they do out of a conference centre they might see the inside of three or four times in a year. (That’s not to denigrate the conference centre. Whatever its suitability to purpose, it’s seeing fairly frequent use.)

Ask them which donor is more influential in their lives, and the answer is the one they walk past on the way to work, not the one that helped put Facebook on their phone.

A Blessing and a Curse

Australia, China and others run the risk of competing to be the most visible tip of the aid island at the expense of the vast seamount necessary to hold that bit up.

As one Australian official stated recently, what’s the point of having all these nice things if you don’t have the means to keep them?

The formulation of development as a kind of branching-logic flow chart in which you decide between infrastructure or capacity building, loans or grants, China or Australia, Japan or the EU… that kind of thinking does everyone an immense disservice. It perverts the very purpose of development assistance.

Infrastructure is woefully lacking in the Pacific. Any development partner that doesn’t want to help build things is not helping enough. And carping at others for doing it is not going to win friends.

But just as important: bootstrapping the means to support and sustain the commerce and social intercourse that access to travel, communications and government services entails. This is where Australia has always over-achieved. It is well-positioned to improve how it leverages this ability.

For an increasingly isolated Australia, whose weakening global alliances need to be shored up with a stronger individual presence in the Indo-Pacific, using development aid as an expression soft-power can be a blessing.

It can also be a curse.

First, it will have to curtail the overtly racist fringe within its own government, and find ways to increase spending in spite of prejudice against all but Europeans. The damage that this divisive rhetoric does internationally cannot be overstated.

Strings attached—just admit it

Second, it will have to own its achievements, for better and for worse. The idea that development assistance has no strings attached is a tired lie, and breeds cynicism.

Yes, aid projects have no overt quid pro quo. They’d better not have.

But to assert hand on heart that the bilateral relationship between developed and developing countries doesn’t come with a raft of obligations is folly. To pretend to deliver aid out of high-minded principle one day, then to hold it over a country the next is plain hypocritical. Better to make no bones about the situation from the start, and be consistent about it. Anything else is counter-productive. Avoiding this fundamental truth twists the power dynamic such that it outright requires duplicity and double-talk between development partners.

China is perfectly frank about which boxes must be ticked: One China. Silence or support concerning the South China Sea. Sign on to Belt and Road. Don’t criticise how we run our country, and we won’t tell you how to run yours.

When the Australian’s Antony Klan triumphantly quoted a Vanuatu journalist who told him that the Chinese Ambassador had admitted that ‘there’s no free lunch’, he neglected to say the statement was made in the context of bilateral relations, not development projects.

It was a frank and honest appraisal of a healthy and respectful engagement between two nations. People are absolutely right to question the immense gaps in that relationship: Complacence, even comfort, in the face of official corruption. Lack of concern about environmental damage. Cavalier attitudes toward the cost of owning the things they build. Callous disregard for human rights and due process. The list is long before anyone even gets near any strategic concerns.

By the same token, Australia isn’t always a poster child for a ‘rules-based international order’. The rules seem only to apply when it suits them. Timorese officials can be forgiven for scoffing at the phrase. It’s obviously meaningless to Nauru’s leaders.

New Zealand’s vastly smaller development engagement is more consistent in many regards, and less bound to reciprocity. But it’s also nearly invisible on the ground. With the exception of one landmark urban beautification project, Ni Vanuatu would be hard pressed to name a single NZ-funded project. But the lives of our inmate population, for example, have improved vastly in the wake of a 2009 exposé about human rights abuses in Vanuatu prisons. That is almost entirely due to quiet engagement by New Zealand, which understands the limits of punitive justice in a way that resonates with Pacific islanders.

It’s not yet clear what shape its much-touted Pacific Reset will actually take, but the decision to give ex-High Commissioner to Vanuatu Georgina Roberts a major role in the process will play well with the local audience at the very least.

Nonetheless, too much coyness is unbecoming in any partner.

Any nation seeking to provide leadership in the Pacific would do well to take a page from the Chinese and treat their neighbours as valued peers. And they should rip the pretence off their own engagement. Pacific Islanders deserve to know what they’re getting from this relationship—and they deserve to know what’s expected of them.

Once that’s under way, it will be possible to justify more of the quiet interventions that help constitute the glue that holds the region’s young democracies together.