 Before we dive into the nitty-gritty and unleash all of our charts, I'd just like to let you know about a few of the upcoming events and initiatives we have going on at the centre while we have a captive audience. For press, we have our 2017 annual report, which is available outside today. You can also grab a copy of our website if you prefer it in soft copy, so do have a look at what we got up to. This week we've also just confirmed the date and the speaker for our 2018 Mitchell aeration. It's the 6th in our annual series. So, so much of the feature, we'll be speaking on the topic of re-engineering the aid industry, a priority for the 21st century, on Thursday 28th of June. So do save the date and we'll have more details online. Speaking of flagship events, we have also set the dates for the 2019 Australasian Aid Conference, even though it feels like it just happened. And we'll be issuing a call for papers and for panels soon. We're also taking sponsors again this year, so if you are interested in coming on board, do get in touch with me and we can discuss the options. Also embarking on our next series of aid profiles, which will form the shortlist for the 2019 Mitchell Humanitarian Award, which we'll be presenting at the aid conference next year. You can see our past nominees up here on the screen and we'd encourage you to read their stories if you haven't already. But if you do know someone whose story deserves to be told as part of this series, please do get in touch with us because we'd love to hear from you. We're also about to embark on our next Australian Aid Stakeholder Survey. So we'll have information coming out on that soon. We really value your participation in this and it provides really useful information on the state of the sector. So do keep an eye out when we launch the various phases of the survey. Also we have two great P&D related events coming up this month. Next week we've got the screening of the P&D made film, Aliko and Ambi, and the Q&A with the assistant producer, Theresa Meckie. And on May 30, we have a P&D evaluation forum, discussing three recent P&D aid evaluations. I'm about to free you from these barrage of announcements, but before I hand over to Stephen, I did just want to say that when it comes to the type of work that you see today, the analysis on Australian Aid, we do need to maintain independence so we can be as frank as we need to be. So we are asking that if you do support the work that we do and are able to, if you could please consider making a donation. We try not to ask often, but we do need financial support. So we are asking you now and we're very grateful to anyone who feels compelled to maybe chip in just a little bit to help us continue the work that we do on Australian Aid. But now it's time to move on to the main show, which is what everyone's here for. This year we changed the format up a bit and we've decided to broaden the scope beyond the budget and share some of our wider analysis with you. So now I'm going to hand over to our centre director, Stephen House, who will give you the low-down on the aid budget and much, much more. Please welcome Stephen. Good morning a lot, Ashley, and good morning everyone. As Ashley mentioned, we felt the format, while useful, had perhaps got a little stale. The aid budget has become a little bit predictable and so we have broadened out this event to give a wider review. So the cost for that is you have to put up with a lecture from me. I've got lots of slides and we'll see how far we get through. But let's dive straight into it. This is what I'm going to talk about and then if we have time I'm going to talk even go beyond the official aid program and beyond Australia to look at the international, other partners in the international scene. Let's start first with the budget that was handed down last night and the broader budget context. So I think it's fair to say that public policy has been dominated by the deficit that came into being at the time of the great financial crisis. But that problem is now shrinking and you know what, it's always been projected to shrink. The difference this year is these are actuals or estimates. It actually has shrunk already and it's already gone away. And in fact it's meant the budget is meant to return to a small surplus next year. So that's on the back largely of increases in revenue and they've revenue has already started to rebound and is projected to continue. That in turn is on the back of improved commodity prices and stronger than expected employment growth. It may all go wrong again and these rosy projections not come to fruition. But even if it does, you know, the deficit is already so small that that whole narrative of debt and deficit that was had already pretty much faded away. I think it now been almost obliterated while the revenue while the deficit elimination is driven by strong revenue performance. It's important to note that's in the context of strong expenditure growth. So this is not a deficit problem that's been addressed by austerity. Indeed, if you were to look at this graph and try and work out how Australia solved its deficit problem, you would say, well, revenue fell away at the time of financial crisis and took a while for it to catch up and expenditure growth, expenditure that's kept on growing and that's not a bad simplification of the underlying much more complex reality. That's the overall budgetary context within which the aid budget is positioned and normally we dive straight into the aid budget numbers. But this year there's a slight, there was a slight complication because we had some retrospective adjustments and we need to understand those in order, well first of all they're important to themselves but also in order to be able to understand the budget numbers, you've got to understand what are now the historical numbers. So you can see for the last three years there are some fairly significant aid increases of some almost 200 million for each of the three years. So what explains this fit of retrospective generosity? It's really the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. Australia joined the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015 and the price tag for that was 930 million over five years starting in 2016. At the time we wrote in blogs and in submissions, I mean we commented on the price tag which seemed to us fairly high but we also said that it would be ODA eligible. So here in DFAT took another position that Australia's Pating Capital would not be provided from the aid budget. In the end it turns out we were right or at least 85% right, 85% of it is being charged to the aid budget. It's only been officially confirmed by DAC recently, that's the government's rationale for taking this somewhat confusing approach. I think you could have taken a much more transparent approach, it was always obvious from the start it would be ODA eligible. The good news is that this sort of approach has meant that the AIIB cost has come on top of the existing aid budget because you can't have retrospective aid cuts. So I guess if you're looking from an aid budget, protecting the aid budget point of view it's a strategy that has worked. But that explains the need for the retrospective adjustments as well as two more are needed, right? We've had three, we need two more. So with that context you can now understand what actually happened in the budget. Of course there were all these rumours and denials of cuts. But if we actually look at what happened, it's fairly simple. You can make a fairly simple comparison with what happened, what was put in the forward estimates last year. So this year and next is increased by about 160 to 170 each year to pay for the AIIB. Then on top of that, this year and the next two, so what were the three forward estimates years, otherwise reduced by $10 million. It's a small amount but somehow this government can't resist just taking out these small amounts from the aid program. And then what was a two-year freeze to be followed by a resumption of CPI indexation has now been extended by a third year. So the nominal aid freeze extended to the new forward estimates year of 21-22. It's now, according to the budget papers, to be lifted the following year. So outside the forward estimates and we'll see whether that happens. So this is the new aid trajectory under the coalition just in nominal terms, slightly different to the old. The red is the last year of the Labor government. That's also been adjusted for reasons I haven't quite got to the bottom of yet, maybe to do with refugee costs. So in fact, we see a slight increase now in the first two years of the coalition, but then we see the cuts and you end up pretty much where we were before. So some micro level changes, but if you look at the big picture, it's pretty much unchanged. We've always said that the coalition is cutting aid by a third once you take account inflation and the number now comes out at 32%. This is this number here. So slightly lower base because of the reduction in that last year of Labor, but then an additional year of the cuts. So the final position is almost unchanged. And if we put that into a longer term historical perspective, this is the graph we've shown before. We've now extended it by another 10 years back to the 60s, but you see a period of gradual increase, the massive scale up, and then the significant reversal of the scale up. I'd say the difference is that we used to think that there was kind of a reversal of the scale up and then aid will continue, go back on the trajectory of slow increases. That seems like a little optimistic. Now we still have an aid budget in freefall. Maybe the fall is slightly less steep, but it's still heading south. And I guess that's the question, how long will the aid program continue to fall? We can't be as sanguine that we're back on a stable or increasing trajectory after a series of cuts. In fact, we are still in the midst of those cuts to aid. But if you look at it on a year-on-year basis and adjust for inflation, we're in a sea of red. These are the ongoing aid cuts. And in fact, there are eight of these. That's what we blogged about last night. We were just struck that there are now eight years of aid cuts in a row, some much bigger than others, but nevertheless eight in a row. And we've never seen anything like it before, either in terms of magnitude of the cuts or in terms of the number of cuts. Most governments aid for a couple of years, one or two years when they're facing a difficult time, but this government has just kept on cutting. And if we look at the implications of that for generosity, this ODA to GNI ratio, it's at an all-time low and falling. I guess that hasn't changed. But that point two, we were already at a record low. The point two sort of threshold is now just a couple of years away. We're going to hit that in 2020 and continue falling. I want to put this now in the international context. It's a fairly gloomy picture and it's important to realize this is not symptomatic of some broader international malaise when it comes to aid. It's all too easy to think that aid is something old-fashioned and the whole world is moving on from it. No, the whole world, we can't say the whole world, but in general the world is embracing aid. Aid is at a record high and has continued to increase and indeed increased strongly. There's a slight reduction in this very last year, but overall the trend is strongly positive. And that is reflected in the global ODA to GNI index. There are two ways to calculate the index. One is weighted and one is unweighted. The weighted is the total, the unweighted is the average. And if you weight it, you do see this sort of long-term decline. It has now stabilized, even that one's picked up. And that really reflects the US. The story of aid, the US is the blue. The US started big and has basically stayed the same. The rest of the world started small. The rest of the OECD started small and has increased. So you see this early decline in the blue line, the weighted average, but that's stabilized, and for the orange line, it's actually almost at a record high. So you can also see it this way. If you think of that 0.7 target, it's very easy to think that target's at a date. It's totally irrelevant. But in fact, if you look at the number of countries that are achieving the 0.7 target, it's the blue. Again, it's at a record high. There are four of them this year, and there are a couple just below the 0.7. And the orange shows 0.5 to 0.7, and a 0.5 was a target Australia once aspired to achieve. And again, there are another three or four countries at that level. So yeah, I just want to underline that point that what we're seeing in Australia is not symptomatic of abroad. The rest of the world's going in a different direction. And the cynic might say, well, this is all about paying the cost of in-country refugee processing and entry, but it's not. That is one factor, and it is ODA eligible, the first year of in-country refugee-related expenditure. And it's a very legitimate and productive use of development. But it's around to be small. It has increased, which is the blue. But even if you take out the blue, you don't agree with that. You just look at the red. You'll still see strong growth in development assistance. So if you put those two conflicting trends together, the rest of the world becoming more generous, Australia becoming less. Of course, it's not surprising that our global ranking is plummeting. This one doesn't show the ranking. This compares the ratios. We never got to the unweighted average. We got close when we were scaling up, but we're now below even the weighted average and significantly below by more than we've ever been. And that's because the two are going in different directions. We're getting richer. As a country, we're becoming more prosperous. That's the blue line, but as a nation, we're becoming less generous. That's the green line. And just to drive this point home, you can rank Australia by our prosperity and by our generosity. And in terms of prosperity, that's the affluence. What I call the affluence rank the orange line. So we're here with a ninth most affluent OECD country. But in terms of our generosity, here's our ranking. We're now the 19th most generous. So the difference between those two, what I call the generosity deficit. So 19 minus nine is 10. So our generosity deficit has never been higher than it is currently. And as I mentioned in a couple of years, we're going to be joining the 0.2% club, which is the group of OEC donors who give 0.2% or less in aid. And it's not really a club you want to be a member of. The U.S. is a member of that club. And you know, if we were the largest aid donor in the world, perhaps you might think, okay, well, it's not so, you know, that's a compensating factor, but we're not the largest donor in the world. And the other members of that club have a per capita income much lower than us, at least 10,000 lower. And they're either former aid recipients like Korea or Greece. And all they're coming out of a severe economic and fiscal crisis, Spain, Portugal, Greece, or they are, you know, economies in transition, new joinees of the OECD. But this is the club we're going to be joining in just a couple of years. So why have we decided to buck the global trend and be so savage with our aid budget? As you all know, the old rationale for aid cuts has been the debt and the deficit. And this has been reflected in Julia Bishop's comments and is, you know, was picked up by the DAC review in its remarks, in its review of the aid program. But this rationale, you know, doesn't really make a lot of sense because, as I mentioned, the fiscal position is improving. You know, we should have seen some respite for aid if that really was the rationale. And as you can see from this graph, you know, and as I mentioned, consistent with what I mentioned before, non-aid growth has actually been growing pretty strongly. It's 31% under the coalition, adjusted for inflation, and here's that 32% cut for aid. So it's not really fiscal austerity. It's more that aid is simply much further down the priority list. And if you look at the spending on ODA to total expenditure, you know, it's been on a downward trajectory throughout the coalition period, and it's now down at under... well under 1%, well under 1 cent in the dollar. And I just particularly want to focus on the defence aid comparison. Some of you will remember in the days when aid was being scaled up, there was a lot of criticism that aid was being scaled up by the neglect of defence and that this was, you know, very bad from a national security point of view. Well, that's certainly no longer the case. And in fact, it's quite remarkable that the ratio of defence spending to aid spending has already increased by such a large extent from about $5 for every $1 of aid, $5 of defence. It's already gone up to about $8. And over the forward estimates, it's gone up to $11 of defence for every $1 of aid higher than it's ever been, you know, including during the Cold War. And given that Australia doesn't actually face any military threats, you really question the efficiency or effectiveness of this type of government decision-making. I think it's been very hard to justify this high level of defence spending. But anyway, all that stuff on, you know, fiscal austerity seems to be on the back burner. There's now a new rationale for cutting aid, which is the lack of public support. And if you've listened to recent speeches or you can see this YouTube interview with the Minister for International Development, you'll see she very much casts the aid budget in terms of lack of public support rather than the fiscal position. So just to run through some of what she's been saying in explaining why the aid is so low, 80% of Australians think we're spending just enough or too much on ODA. And she's been citing low e-polling on this, and sure enough, low e-polling does show that about 80% are in the too much or about right category. Of course, it doesn't explain why you cut aid because if you want to follow public opinion, you've also got a majority here who wouldn't support cutting aid. That's the first point she's been making. The second one, drawing on some research that we've done, Terence Wood in particular, 80% of the development sector believe we should spend more on ODA, but only 10% of regular Australians think the same. So yes, welcome to all the irregular Australians who might be here, and indeed non-Australians. But that's also roughly true. Here you see the big difference between those in the poll in the development sector and the general community. I think where the minister goes wrong is to get in terms of her response to this and what she's going to do to build public support, she says the only way Australians have confidence in the aid program is to understand that we'll have a direct benefit to Australia. Whereas in fact, Terence has polled Australians on precisely this point, and you can see that only 4% think that are going to be motivated by the argument that aid has direct benefits to Australia. The great majority are more persuaded by arguments around it being a moral obligation or around enlightened national interests. So as a strategy to build public support, it doesn't seem to have a lot going for it. So where are the glimmers of hope that these aid cuts will at some point come to an end under the current government? We'll talk about labour policy later. It's hard to be hopeful, but I guess the China factor is one that will be certainly bolstering aid in the Pacific and may have a broader effect. And then the whole loss of international influence status hasn't seemed to have had worked so far, but when we are actually going to join this 0.2% club, it may swing into action. But overall a fairly bleak outlook. All right, moving on from the overall aid quantities to what was in the budget in terms of allocations and initiatives. Let's look at countries and sectors. I think this was a budget for the Pacific. This is the Aussie DFAT allocations, which are not as comprehensive as the total aid flows, but do kind of reveal government intentions. And you can see that over the coalition period the Pacific has largely been protected and in this budget in particular the Pacific receives a boost in its aid allocation and is the only region to do so. East Asia has had cuts and then has now had further cuts in its aid and other regions are pretty much constant. So this is a budget that was consistent with earlier government priorities but which takes them further in terms of prioritizing the Pacific over East Asia and the rest of the world. And we'll come to the initiatives behind that next. In terms of sectors, you can also say this is a budget that's consistent with broader policies and continues earlier trends. These are my estimates of where the various budgets with the adjustments for the AIIB have come out and you can see that infrastructure continues to increase. Agriculture continues to increase. Governance is steady and education and health are cut once again. I think this is consistent with the government's policy. It's got an aid for trade target. Perhaps what's surprising is the government has overachieved that aid for trade target. It's now 23%. You had thought perhaps there was a rebalancing with the health security initiative that there was going to be some stop to those, especially the cuts to health, given that you've got a flagship initiative on health security. But I guess this is a ship that takes a long time to turn around and priority is firmly set on aid for trade. So infrastructure and agriculture continue to grow at the expense of the other sectors. I'm going to skip this. Humanitarian funding is increased. That's part of the white paper announcement. I've just put in a question mark there because it was meant to increase last year and didn't actually. And it'd just be worth finding out a bit more about that. Perhaps there weren't the rapid onset disasters to exhaust the money allocated. Last year, at the same time, you think there's so many chronic crises that it's hard to believe how your humanitarian allocation could be underutilized. So I guess there's a promise to increase the humanitarian allocation. But on last year's experience, you couldn't say that that promise will necessarily be delivered on. Looking at other aspects of the aid program, it's interesting to think of other government departments. It used to be a big part of aid, really not any more. Apart from ACR, which continues to grow, you see other government departments exiting development. I've taken out the AIIB allocations which go through Treasury because we're really interested here in actual departmental participation through sending advisors and twinning programs and so on. It doesn't seem certainly no longer a priority. But that's broadly on the allocations. Just some of the major initiatives underlying those numbers. So the underwater cable to Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. This is probably the biggest initiative in the budget. It had already been announced, but for the first time, there are allocations. It's still unclear what the allocation is, and the government says it's because it's being tendered out, so it's commercial and confidence. But there was a newspaper report that was 200 million. And if you look at the actual increase to Solomon Islands and PNG, which is driving the increase to the Pacific, it's an increase of 100 million. And so that kind of makes sense. It's a pretty quick project. It could only take two years to lay the cable. So 200 million. Of course, we were told not to conclude anything from the increase in PNG in Solomon's, but if you do make that calculation, it all seems to add up. This is funded by cuts to Indonesia. 30 million. I guess Indonesia is singled out as the largest aid program outside of the Pacific, and so vulnerable to aid graduation talk. And then basically the rest of the program is held flat in nominal terms. So it's cut in real terms. And then there is a small nominal increase in this budget, almost in line with inflation, which then funds the underwater cable. Of course, there are lots of debates about the cable, whether it should be part of the aid program or not. Putting, you know, we can debate those, but I think regardless of that, there are certainly big issues around co-financing, which is expected from the governments. These governments are both in fiscal stress. PNG struggles to pay its salaries. It's not clear how they'll get the money for their co-financing contribution. And then how the cable will be governed, what the open access arrangements will be, are also unclear. And I can anticipate these two problems being quite thorny going forward. Second, big initiative is health security. This wasn't a budget initiative, but it was announced late last year. And it certainly features in the budget. This is a very large program. It's equal in size to the eighth largest by natural program. They've just announced PDP funding, which is medical for global medical research, which continues on and increases what's now become an established patent or established program of support from the Australian aid program. That's very welcome, I think. And just to say we continue to support this initiative, but to make the case for a separate international health research organization or to broaden ACR's mandate. And then finally, I thought, what was really positive in the budget was the emphasis on labor mobility. You also see this in the numbers. There's, apart from the PNG and Solid Alliance increase, there's an increase in Pacific regional. That's for a number of regional initiatives. There's also a Pacific security college. There's a schools twinning program. But there's also support for both the APTC for training with a specific mandate to train for international markets and the Pacific Labor facility. Yeah, I think this is terrific. It's the biggest dividend from the DFAT, AusAID integration. I think in the old days, DFAT saw the Pacific as AusAID's responsibility, and AusAID saw the Pacific through an aid lens. Now they're together, and DFAT's rather skeptical of what aid can achieve. You've had this confluence of promotion of labor mobility with the government expanding the seasonal worker program introduced in the Pacific Labor Scheme, expansion of labor mobility, but then now the mobilization of the aid program to support labor mobility. So you know what we call aid for migration as against aid for trade. And it is delivering serious money to the Pacific direct to households. So if you believe in cash transfers, you'll like what this is doing. This is just from the World Bank report. If you compare the income that workers are bringing home from the seasonal worker program with the money that governments are getting through the aid program, in Tongar it's the same. Vanuatu has stood a long way to go, but Vanuatu's participation is growing rapidly. And this is direct to households. It doesn't have all the waste of aid programs, and this is also in fact a benefit to Australia. The aid program, however much you might like it, it is a cost, whereas this SWP income comes actually at a benefit to the Australian economy. Okay, moving on to aid performance. You know, do feel free to interrupt. I know I'm just rabbiting on. Government also just released last week the new aid performance report, Performance of Australia in Aid 2016-17, which has a whole raft of information around various performance aspects of the program. I won't summarize it for you, except to say that nearly all the performance benchmarks, all the 10 are either achieved or very nearly achieved. We'll just share with you a little bit of the analysis that we've done. We do this every year. Each country is ranked for performance against program objectives, and whether they're on track to achieve the objectives. And this is the data for the last four years. And, you know, I just want to point out how unusual it is to get a rating of less than 50%. And how, if you do get a rating of less than 50%, you invariably bounce back the next year. So kind of the message is sent, this is unacceptable. We need to lift our game, and performance bounces back up above 50%. Sadly, P&G is the exception. You know, it sort of proves this rule. P&G is languishing at the bottom of the performance table. It does show some slight improvement over the years, but still well below 50%. And I guess that does just highlight what a difficult environment Papua New Guinea presents for the Australian Aid Program. You know, it's not to pick on P&G, but it is our closest neighbour and the largest recipient of Australian aid. So it's certainly significant. It's somewhat, it also gives a perspective on the shift away from Indonesia, which is up here. So, you know, it's actually got 100% at the moment. 100% score for program objectives on track. So it's taking funding from what is one of our best performing aid programs to what is our worst performing aid program. Just want to say a word on transparency, since it's a subject that we often write about. There's clearly been a deterioration in transparency at the project level over the last few years, and this has both been shown by the two audits that we've done and by the perception, or is confirmed by the perception of stakeholders in the two stakeholder surveys that we've undertaken. And it's, you know, also consistent with, and it was good to see the DAC review, the OECD review of Australian aid, come up with transparency as their number one recommendation, their first recommendation, that DFAT should improve its transparency in relation to the timing and assessment of publication of activity level information. And I mention this because this new performance report signals that the government will be coming up with a new set of performance indicators. Those 10 have been achieved or largely achieved, so it's seen as time to refresh them. That's a process that's underway, so I encourage everyone to, you know, get involved in that process. But I think a real, a litmus test for the credibility of that process will be whether there is a, one of the 10 new benchmarks is for transparency at the project level. And then finally on performance, and just one of the numbers we crunched for what was interesting was this, the admin ratio or the sort of the running costs of the aid program, you know, they're just around 7% and they seem rather high by historical standards, especially given all the talk of, you know, we don't have the skills and we're contracting everything out to facilities unclear why the admin ratio is at that level. Just briefly the government announced a 5% cap but sort of abandoned that almost immediately. You know, I just flagged this as something worthy of more research. Well, that's all about government policy. I think we should say a word about labour, so enough of the blue, time for some red. What's labour been saying on aid and these various issues? Prior to the last election, a labour committed an additional 800 million over the forward estimates, or 200 million a year, so about 5% as an increase. This year so far, they've made a much weaker commitment which is simply to provide more ODA than the coalition. But you know, that could be a token amount. It may be that a more concrete announcement will come closer to the election, but so far, it's still very vague and indeed not as clear as it was in the run-up to the last election. In terms of position of labour on aid policy, many of you would have heard Penny Wong speak at the Australasian Aid and International Development Conference. She made several points, I thought, one basically signaling she would have bothered the innovation exchange. She said she was unconvinced by it, that it operated in relative isolation. Second, she would reform the Health Security Initiative while she supported it. She said it was bureaucratic and disconnected and I think it can certainly be better structured, as we said, outside of DFAT. And then she spoke generally on the need for DFAT reform, highlighting structural inadequacies, management failings, growing dependence on management contractors, expertise and skills in decline. So certainly a lot more on aid policy from labour so far than on aid quantity. Okay, now we want to go, as I said, beyond the official aid program and look at who's delivering Australian aid, the delivery partners. So this is the graph that summarises it. This data is very hard to get on a comparable basis and we've tried different ways. This is sort of the latest just for four years. And using the categories of multilateral, commercial or contractors, NGOs, universities and developing countries, there are some other categories that are harder to interpret. And I want to talk about the first three, which are the biggest. But I'll just note, you do see this decline here, very sharp decline in developing country, recipient executed projects, which reflects a move away from budget support. Okay, but I'm going to focus on the first three, which are the biggest. I'm going to start with non-government organisations. And I do that because, you know, we've just done, well, Terence Wood, one of our researchers, has just helped Acford write their stated sector report, which is a new report now available on their website. I think it gets the award for having the most boring cover, which is... Which is I put Terence's photo up there just to make the slide look better. Anyway, I'm not going to summarise that report. It has a wealth of information in it. I commend it too. I'm just going to highlight a few things that come out from it, combined with some of the other research we've been doing. If we look at NGO funding, it's a pretty positive picture overall. And you certainly don't see any scale down. This is in constant dollars, so adjusted for inflation. And, you know, 2,000-2,000-1 is 400 million. Today, it's 1.8 billion, right? That's almost half the size of the official aid program. Of course, there's some overlap. That's relatively small amount comes from the official aid program. But, yeah, it's a massive and rapidly growing sector. This is non-defat other. So this is the use of Australian NGOs by other international NGOs or by other governments or other UN agencies. And to be interested to find out more about this, it itself is growing rapidly. Defat funding is less positive. In fact, I've seen that decline. That comes from the first graph. Although this data which comes from DFAT shows more of a decline than this data that comes from the NGOs. Here's a smaller decline. And that may reflect that some of the cuts that DFAT reports is because DFAT's giving it to the contractors. But then the contractors are then handing it on to the NGOs. So the NGOs are reporting it as from DFAT, whereas from DFAT it's actually going to the contractors. So this may exaggerate the cuts in funding to NGOs. They may, there's still been reduction, but it may be smaller as suggested by this graph. The biggest source of funding for the NGOs is from the public. And this is the picture for public donations. And I think you can look at this in a positive or negative light, depending on your mood. In a positive light, if you adjust for inflation, again, a massive increase from 200 million at the start of the millennium, or just less than 300 up to a billion. So that's tripling. Then less positive spin... Oh, sorry, sorry, that's notified. Inflation adjusted is 400 to a billion over the last 15 years. I guess the less negative spin is on the more recent past. We saw a big spike in the Asian tsunami, and those donors were... Some of them were lost, but others were retained or recaptured. But the growth has certainly slowed down in recent years and now seems to fluctuate depending on whether there's a large humanitarian appeal or not. If we look at it using the same sort of metrics we do for official aid as a percentage of GNI or per capita, again, for the decade as a whole, a significant increase. But for the last four or five years, our flat lining, and it's about 40%... Sorry, $40 a person is the average NGO donation. So I'd say for the more recent period, public generosity is steady rather than growing. One concern we've had is that NGOs have been cannibalising each other's donations and resulting in kind of an arms race and increasing spend on fundraising without an increasing return. But if we combined what Terrence has done with some earlier work we did, they're not quite comparable, but the suggestion is the fundraising ratios have stabilised rather than increased. So I think that's a good sign. And if we go down to the individual level, who are the big NGOs? World Vision Store dominates. This is truncated. If we had World Vision, we'd have to go up to 348. Everyone else would seem rather small. So I've truncated the graph. But there are some interesting other members of the top 20, MSF and Compassion, neither of the members of ACFID. Fred Hollows, I'll show you soon, are growing rapidly. And then MAA, which I had to look up, which is Muslim Aid Australia, which has propelled itself into the top 20. And there's another, I think it's Islamic Relief, which is just outside the top 20. So we're certainly seeing some new entrants. You'll also notice the two UN agencies, UNHCR and UNICEF that have been both very successful in fundraising. It is a very competitive environment, and one with a lot of churn. So just to give you that perspective, this figure only looks at the top 10. And in fact, there are nine, because World Vision is one, right, or 100%. So these are ratios to World Vision, both now, or the most recent, 2016, and then the early stage we got is 2003. So the first thing you can see is that the other agencies are catching up to World Vision, where World Vision still dominates. Back in 2003, the second largest NGO, which then was Oxfam, was a little more than 10% of World Vision's size. Whereas now you've got four NGOs that are 10% or more of World Vision's size, and the largest MSF is now a quarter. So World Vision dominates, but other NGOs are catching up. And then you could just see some of the very differential growths. So you see how MSF has sort of come from nowhere. Fred Hollows, likewise, has come from nowhere. The ones that don't have any red weren't in the top 10, right? So again, Australia's for UNHCR have come from nowhere, as has Global Development Group, which is another church-based NGO. So yeah, it's a very dynamic and competitive environment at the NGO level. Finally, just for those of you who aren't in the sector, but might be interested in what's going on, we had an interesting session at the Australasian Aid Conference, which is actually now available as a podcast, which certainly drew my attention to this debate. Oh, thank you. There's not much more to go. To this push by government, actually, to institute a joint fundraising mechanism. Australia used to have something called IDEC, which is the IDEC of the International Development Emergency Committee, which used to run joint appeals back in the days of live aid. It didn't last, and really what the push from government now is to re-institute something like IDEC. As far as I can tell, the government's motivation, it sees it as a way to reduce fragmentation on the ground. If the aid agencies are forced to collaborate for fundraising, they'll have less of an incentive to get their own people on the ground for their own fundraising efforts. The NGOs, as far as I can tell, don't seem very keen on the idea. As I said, it is a very competitive environment, but of course the government has a lot of leverage being a major funder of humanitarian aid, so it will be interesting to see how this debate plays out. All right, moving on from NGOs to contractors. I don't have as much information, but we'll start with the basic data from DFAT. Here's DFAT funding of contractors. This is just in nominal terms, but you can see it has increased over the last few years. No sign, you wouldn't know that the aid program was cut by a billion over these couple of years if you just looked at how the contractors were doing, so no doubt there has been more emphasis on funding through, to and through, contractors. Going down to the individual level, it's harder to get that information, but you can get some. There's a useful answer to a Senate Estimates question on who are the largest contractors, and this was information provided for 2015-16. As I understand, this is sort of money expended in that year by these contractors, and you can see it's a very concentrated market. If you take the top three, it's 50%, and if you take the top six, I think you're up above 60%, and you take these are the top nine, I think you're up to 97%, so it's a very concentrated market. It has been disrupted by apps. There's a website called Love Me Tender, which scrapes all government tender documentation onto one website, and you can download that and sort by whatever category you want. So this is in terms of contract award, so this is not a flow of money, this is how successful you've been in that year, and you can see in 2016-17, the app was very successful in winning a number of large contracts, and so it is sort of the emerging player. We hope to do a lot more analysis using this database and to be able to report it to you later. But just to compare the contractors and the NGOs, the contractor community is much more concentrated, even if you just focus on DFAT funding for the NGOs. As I mentioned, top three, over 50%, whereas the top three for the NGOs, only 30%. And then finally, for those of you who aren't contractors, you may not know, there has been this interesting move. I mean, Acford has always been much stronger than what was the IDC, which was the contractor body, but the IDC has now been replaced by the IDCC, which is the International Development Contractors Community which was launched at the start of this year. And as I understand, it's meant to be better resourced, to actually have paid staff and a more active voice in the development community. So I think that's a very welcome development. And then finally, multilaterals, I think this is the sort of real news. I think we've sort of been very focused on the share of the contractors versus the NGOs, that kind of battle as it were, jostling for funding, but really not paying any attention to this recipient of Australian aid, which is the multilateral system, twice as big as the contractors. So if we're looking at contractors, we're seeing $800 million, but we're looking at multilaterals to $1.6 billion. It's a much bigger share. And again, it's slightly volatile, but you don't see any cut. You wouldn't think this was an aid program that was in sharp decline. So what's going on here? Well, core funding to multilaterals is on the rise. You know, this is very surprising. This actually was brought out by the DAC review. You know, it's always been said Australia's not a big believer in core funding. The multilaterals focus on Africa. We focus on the Asia Pacific. Why would we give core funding to the multilaterals? And then in any case, the average figure, which I show here, is biased upwards because all the European countries give to the EU. But, you know, and you can see this was true for this period. We were most of the period. But somehow we've hit it now. Now, this is slightly inflated because of those AIB payments. But even so, the trend goes well beyond that. And you can actually break down that the core funding into, well, you can go right down to the agency level, but just if you look at three different types, the international development banks, the UN agencies, and other, other being like Global Fund, Gavi, Global Partial Education, all of them show an increase over the last decade. This is a five-year average, moving average, because these are very volatile numbers. But, you know, there is an underlying trend there. And I think it's particularly surprising to see the UN doing so well. You know, we can understand the pickup here to do with the UN Security Council bid and labour, but it certainly continued under the coalition government. So I think it'd be interesting to talk about why this is. But it's certainly there. It's somewhat offset by reductions in earmarked contributions. This has been traditionally the way we've given support to the system. If you look at 2011, the earmarked contributions exceed the core contributions because that's exactly the argument. We want to get these agencies to work in our region. So we give them specific funding. But I guess what's happened, a lot of that happened in Asia. A to Asia. So we've cut earmarked contributions to the multilaterals at the same time as increasing our core contributions for perhaps a range of different reasons. But the net effect is that multilateral funding is stronger than ever, which is probably an unexpected outcome. Okay. Well, this is the final section. I wanted to just say to round it off, you know, go back to the international context. I'm not going to go through every donor I'm just going to focus on the big three plus one. So the big three are now the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. There were five with France and Japan. But as you can see from this graph, France and Japan have somewhat fallen away, partly as a result of, you know, their own changing economic priorities and difficulties. And these are, you know, very much loan-based donors, and so they're getting a lot of inflows, reflows, right, that push down their net ODA, which is what's reported here. The U.S. is still by far the biggest, but you can see the gaps closing. It doesn't dominate as it used to. Let's start with the U.S. You know, I think we're all concerned with the impact that Trump would have and he certainly had a very negative impact with the global gag rule against agencies from receiving funding for family planning and also receiving U.S. aid funding. But beyond that, a very regressive step, impact has not been negative. In fact, now looks somewhat positive. Trump administration proposed cuts of about one-third, both last year and again for this year, but it was simply ignored last year by Congress that actually sets the aid budget and it looks like it will be ignored again in this year. So we're not seeing those savage cuts that we thought would come to fruition. And in terms of what we are seeing, there's a lot of emphasis in the Trump aid administration on what is called journeys to self-reliance, so graduation. So that's a narrative that may play out in our region on East Asia. It's now referred to as outcome one and there are metrics to measure countries' progress to graduation. Whether that's good or bad, I'm not sure. But in terms of probably good things, the last two, Trump is now proposing a strengthened OPIC, which is a pre-existing small development finance institution to be made much bigger. So I think that's a positive step. Something's been advocated for in Australia and brings together a kind of concern for development with a belief in the private sector. Something that's a good development to come out of a Republican administration. And then interestingly, the World Bank has just agreed on a big capital expansion that could have been vetoed by the US with thought that it would be vetoed, but in the end the Trump administration have signed off on this capital replenishment for the World Bank. I guess driven by concerns around China as a strategic rival and so therefore a need to bolster the World Bank. That's the US-UK in Germany. You know, we pay a lot of attention to the UK and how it went up to 0.7 and stayed at 0.7, but I think we probably haven't really noticed that Germany has sort of snuck up there unannounced and is pretty much at the 0.7 mark now and then so being a bigger economy is actually a larger donor than the UK. For Germany, the in-country refugee costs are a significant part of that, so probably you're not going to stay at 0.7. In 2016 it was one quarter of its budget went to in-country refugee costs, but it's not only that. If you look at the yellow, you also see a significant increase. So excluding in-country refugee costs and you've seen a big push in Germany as a chair of the G20 in terms of advocating a Marshall Plan in Africa or a compact for Africa. Just on Africa, that does remind me I was going to comment on the multilateral funding that big increase in multilateral funding for everyone who thinks that Australia should be doing more on Africa. You should be very welcoming of this increase in core funding because their focus is Africa. That's Germany and then finally UK. That's the case of what you wish for. UK is what we would have looked like if we did ever get to 0.5 or anything like it. I'm sure it's aid program is still doing a lot of good, but it's also it's a very troubled, divisive aid program. There's a very good article on it which is hyperlinked here. There are constant campaigns being run against the aid program, such as this Daily Mail campaign that charity begins and Department for International Development is also no longer the glorious institution of one squad and is having to fight for funds. You see a big increase away from funding through a different, its share of the aid program has fallen from 87 to 74%, whereas the other government departments have gone from 11 to 18. In a constrained fiscal environment a large aid program becomes very attractive. Those are the three I was going to comment on, but as some of you know last night there was a big announcement coming out of New Zealand that I just couldn't that's also important. New Zealand's announced, although it's not their budget but just ahead of their budget they've announced a large increase of 180 million a year for the next four years. It's not clear exactly where it's going to go but the range of things are mentioned the Pacific multilaterals climate change humanitarian. New Zealand's also been pretty poor performer when it comes to aid generosity, but they are now a bit of a trajectory and with some very ambitious goals. So interesting to see how that plays out if that has any influence here. Well that's the end of my presentation. I do want to point you to the aid tracker if you want to find out more. A lot of these numbers are up there, it's already been updated and I do want to say that I presented this myself but I've drawn on the work of a lot of colleagues and I'd like to thank all of them for this analysis. So thank you and happy to take questions or comments. Do you include the World Bank with the UN? No, no. So the World Bank is here, with the IDBs, so the International Development Banks. So where the increases have been for the UN? Like specific agencies? No, but I can give you the spreadsheet and you can have a look. It's all there on the OECD deck. I'd be very happy to share that with you, John, and try and dig into it. Hi, Jonathan from Loewy. Just back to the point about public support for aid. It was disappointing that the minister used Loewy polling in isolation. There's been plenty of other polling about Australian perceptions on aid including from the Institute. In 2011 we asked a question of how much you think the Australian budget spends on aid and we again asked that question this year and the answers are quite deafening. The average Australian thinks that 16% of the federal budget goes towards the aid program and when asked how much they think should be they think it's 10%. So when you talk about that the majority of Australians want to cut the aid program it's a very different picture from thinking it's 14% going up 10% as opposed to where it really is under 1% of federal expenditure. I mean, I'm not sure any Australian could really identify or myself included pinpoint the exact breakdown of federal government expenditure but I think it was disappointing for her to pick that statistic in isolation and it shows that public support is just a really poor excuse for a lack of leadership on this issue. I was just going to add it was interesting, the government didn't actually give a reason for this latest aid cut, the latest freeze. So in the past, first of all we had the unable to get the budget saving measures through the Senate right, that was the 2015 cuts, then last year we needed the money for, I think it was for a spy agency whereas this year they didn't even give a reason for cutting in the new year, the forward estimates. So, yeah there's certainly no coherent policy on aid quantities and it just seems to be taken for granted that you can just cut it again and again and not really seriously think about a reason for it. Thank you very much, can you make any comments about the Australian Government's approach to volunteers? There's been a continuing program there, is there any news on that? Right, I'd have to look in the book. There was a, the Government made a big, at the lock up there was a big emphasis on the there's a new community grants program which is going to bring in smaller community groups not for profits, into the aid program and there's a lot of detail on that in the budget document, I think that it's a small program, it's about 10 million for fairly small grants of about 30,000 but that's not volunteers it will be in this book which I would have to look at so... Yeah it wasn't highlighted so I'm guessing it's not changed from previous years. Mark Rice from Results Australia on the topic which has been debated in the last few weeks about Government leading versus following public opinion the introductory section of the aid budget paper does have an overview and I think an attempt to explain and sell aid to the Australian public, would you see that as being a first attempt to try to build extra support for either among the public or maybe even among the Government? Yeah it's only true this is the orange book and for a Government that didn't really have a aid budget in the first year or two it's now it's a massive it's quite heavy and it's up to 134 pages and you're right the first few pages are a sort of aid narrative and that aid narrative is pretty much around how it's in our interests to have a growing and prosperous region yeah whether that's going to sway public opinion I doubt it I think it's hard for the Government to make the case to the Australian public for aid because it's cutting the aid program and it's one thing to have cut it and said well we had a difficult situation we've cut it but now we committed to it we're not going to cut it anymore but when you continue to cut it I think what makes sense politically is just to keep quiet so I think until the Government stops cutting aid it's not really going to be able to make the case convincingly for aid Stephen thank you very much for all the analysis that you and your colleagues have done two questions about effectiveness the Government's 10 performance benchmarks which you mentioned first how well do they relate or correspond to what you and your colleagues would regard as the best measures of effectiveness or beneficial impact and secondly have you seen any a sign that they are used year on year to determine the allocation of the Government's aid good questions I think the system in place is pretty good and has been quite stable so that's been one of the ways in which integration has been well managed I think that basically it's taken the performance system that was established over the last decade in AusAid and brought it to DFAT over complex simplified it somewhat but has basically maintained it and has produced these reports on a regular basis you might remember with AusAid sometimes the reports were long delayed because they were seen as politically sensitive whereas now they bring out this performance report every year before the Budget so I think that's a good sign of discipline and it's it's both at the project level and at the country level and it's sort of scrutinized by the Office of Development Effectiveness which while not independent totally has some degree of autonomy and so does give a second opinion and has that independent evaluation committee sitting over it and also has a fairly in-depth program of evaluation and one thing that we talked about last year but this year ODE or the department through ODE's work department introduced a new evaluation policy which replaced a sort of mandatory approach you must evaluate these projects over a certain amount which inevitably wasn't complied with with a more realistic voluntary approach that you should evaluate at least two or three programs a year putting the onus back on the country managers to choose which evaluations they'll do but at the same time then once they've committed those evaluations you put out a plan these are the evaluations we will do and ODE's now come back and said they basically have followed through on that and all those evaluations there are a few changes but more or less what was promised in terms of evaluations was was delivered and it's all been published which isn't normally the case so yeah I would say overall is a pretty strong performance system you know is it is it used? that was the second part of your question and I guess I was trying to say with that example of Indonesia and PNG no, right if you were doing performance based allocations which is what the government initially promised it would do then you would increase aid to Indonesia and reduce aid to PNG, of course I mean the world is much more complex than that and you can understand why that's not happening so I'd say at the macro level my own take is that there's not a lot of influence of performance on macro allocations it's not like infrastructure is going up because those are the really good projects infrastructure is going up because that's the government's priority at the individual project level is performance having more of an impact I'm not sure, I'm not immersed enough there have been some positive developments recently there's a new governance aid board which has an external member and is a more rigorous screening mechanism for aid projects coming into the pipeline and aid projects have to be signed off now not only I understand it by the high commissioner but also by the counterpart here in Canberra so I think DFAT's trying to respond to those criticisms that it's not giving enough attention to performance at the individual project level perhaps it's too early to tell whether that's having an effect Daniel Steven Question, tagging on to the issue of evaluation is there any quantification or measure as to how much worse off recipients are as a result of decreased foreign aid expenditure? No, I think in general you'd say they've I mean aid is just too small if you look at Indonesia try and quantify how much Indonesia has lost you can talk about some individual projects that have been seen to be really good and weren't extended but it would be sort of heroic I think to try to quantify the macro cuts of those aid the macro costs of those aid cuts Steven two questions just about the SDGs so the first Australia signed the SDGs in 2015 the OECD DAC peer review said that the government should work similar to other donors and align their program more to SDGs programmatically the budget document doesn't have anything about the SDGs except an appendices which shows the logos what would the utility be of giving greater alignment to SDGs and indicators of this question is there any utility a second is around transparency so you've mentioned that the DPC cable it's hard because they're hiding under commercial and confidence at the moment the scoping study that was announced through a limited tender in December very quickly went to a company called Vocus who were a donor to the Liberal Party in 2015-16 so what sort of issues do these commercial and confidence types of lack of transparency raise for the aid program well, others are also feel free to add in, I'm not an expert on all these issues but on the SDGs, you're right they appear as an appendix, it seems rather tokenistic but at the same time it would be very hard to frame an aid program in line with the SDGs and there are 17 of them and you really want to have 17 sort of headings in your aid program, is it a coherent way to think about the way you give development assistance likewise the MDGs weren't really ever used as a frame for the aid program I think they're more a communication device and a framework for reporting on performance rather than a planning mechanism so I know the SDGs are popular in some parts of the aid community but I would caution against advocating for their use as a planning framework they just don't add value at the planning level to be a planning framework you've got to have some priorities and the SDGs don't prioritize and on transparency and this limited tender I mean it's I mean it's quite transparent that this company won the tender and that there are donors of the Liberal Party so it doesn't seem to be that's a transparency issue I guess it's a value for money issue and I'm sure they're in a hurry to do this program and so that's probably why they didn't go through the tender process and whether this company was the best I mean I've got no reason to think it wasn't the best I just don't have any information at all in terms of not giving the cost for this tender I mean you'd think they would know enough to give an upper bound on the cost so I would not and obviously the newspaper gave 200 million floating around so it wasn't very convincing not to see any costing for this for this submarine cable and also I think where they could have done more on transparency was talk more about these issues around implementation co-financing how much is going to be co-financed and governance arrangements and you do worry about this that it's normally better to negotiate a project and then agree on it rather than agree on it and then negotiate and this seems to be a case where it's been unannounceable so it's already been agreed and now you've got to do the hard work of trying to negotiate co-funding arrangements and good governance Fusai Ibrahim my question is on aid to Africa it's almost unbelievable that our file has survived about 120 million per year for all of South Africa and I think currently even the bilateral is much worse 31 million out of the 120 million I just can't understand this because I think in many ways Africa is in great need and it's on the west side of Australia and yet you know now there is not at all any focus on Africa or even it doesn't exist so I'm just wondering whether the China factor could actually maybe in many ways help so have you got some insights on how we could move forward because certainly there is a lot of NGO support and most of the money from NGOs is spent on Africa but where is the government going this way so I'm just wondering if you could give us some insights. Yes so I wanted to emphasize this slide for all people who think there should be more aid to Africa this is core funding for multilaterals and so it is at a record high level in fact it's 30% of the aid program 30% right and that's slightly biased by this AIIB but if you take that out you're looking at above 20% or 25% and as I showed here it's on an upward trajectory for all types of multilaterals and for these multilaterals their main focus for core funding is Africa I would say IDA is more than 50% Africa and if you think about global fund and GAVI Australia is fighting to keep them in Asia their focus is so strongly on Africa I'm sure global fund and GAVI would be more than 50% Africa so yeah there are two ways to support Africa one is to set up our own bilateral programs and be yet another bilateral donor in a crowded donor environment and the second way is to support organizations that are already focused on Africa and give them more funding and actually although I'm not sure if it's actually a policy and if this is the reason but that's actually what the government's been doing is boosting it significantly core contributions to multilateral agencies who are focused on sub-Saharan Africa so I think this does change the way we should change the way we think about Australia's aid there have been the very sharp bilateral cuts of the Africa program but there have also been these compensating increases that's right we have to do more work but my hunch would be why we see this if we look at the IDBs there is the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank factor but then also high levels of support for IDA and that is the support for this rules-based system and sort of counterbalancing China if we look at the other that's the Global Fund and GAVI that have very strong domestic lobbies and the government didn't want to take them on so they protected their allocations and then we look at the UN and that's a surprise but maybe that's to do with Security Council bid and then the Human Rights Council bid and as you said again wanting to be an international business and yeah the effect at the margin maybe some increase of those greater attention by those agencies on our region but they are even if Australia has some marginal influence they are going to remain overwhelmingly focused on sub-Saharan Africa so we are still indirectly channeling funds to Africa a very quick point of clarification from last night I thought I heard DFAT say that Australia was now the 12th largest donor on the OECD rankings and then here you said the 19th that's about most generous or is it a different number or was there a conflation or if you could clarify? No I guess yeah we didn't I could have shown those numbers but I wanted to keep the slides to under 100 but yeah you're right because we are one of the biggest economies then you put our prosperity and our generosity together yeah we were 13th but with this AIIB boost we are now 12th so yeah if you want to make it sound like we're still a pretty good donor then you'll use that number that we're 12th but I think the standard international metric for comparison is this generosity index and that's where we're 19th and that's the one I've focused on here but they're actually consistent yeah sorry just to build on the discussion about how we look through and I'll take your point about the aid effectiveness and perhaps the utility of going through to multilaterals on their prioritisation but given the white paper Australia can't be said to be leveraging our relationships in any way with African countries because of the effective demise of bilateral programming if you've got a 300,000 person diaspora African born diaspora in Australia we're not utilising that so there is a political imperative around aid as well and it's basically not realised in our relationships with Africa currently and I think this goes to a sort of a second issue around aid communications that there's no centre to it so it's either by through announcements in the minister's office or it's dispersed through DFAT so there actually is no grander narrative so despite the white paper narrative we're not actually telling the story about the Australian aid program as achieving in any coherent or effective way which then underscores the point perhaps the minister Connie is trying to make that there's not support there well that's because the government is not leading and is not communicating one of the things Terence does in his report is look at where NGOs give aid and Africa is the main region so it's very different to the official aid program but Steven Thanks so much for this morning just a quick question I think you had a slide there about the big three I don't know if this was China there anyway or do we have any sense of their level of investment etc that's a good question again I just ran out of time I thought I've got to stop somewhere but obviously China is the emerging donor and when you look at China as a donor if you try and apply the DAC criteria they're still not that big as a donor but of course they bring in they're like a massive development finance institution they bring in all this additional development financing that doesn't strictly count as aid but which is certainly seen by countries as coming from China and valued by them and on those indicators it leads everyone else behind I think at this stage the interesting news from China is they've set up this new development aid agency which they haven't had before wrote a blog for us just recently on that aid agency and what its issues will be so if you're interested in that check out our blog there's certainly a lot more that needs to be said in fact one interesting thing I was told is you know CDD has this global commitment to development index where they rank every country by their commitment to development using their their aid effort but also other indicators like trade and migration policies and that's just for OECD but they're now redoing that to try to include China and that's a big exercise because how do you measure China's commitment to an impact on development of other countries sorry for coming back again I guess what I try and say is that in my view the small amount of aid that's allocated to Africa I can't actually see advancing Australian economic and trade relationship with Africa at the moment Africa growth is increasing I mean China had about 108 billion in trade with Africa so I think it just doesn't make sense to me you know that there is a huge economy potential next almost next door to Australia and Australia is keeping a blind eye so I just can't see you know why Australia is not actually advancing in Africa at the moment I'll take that as a comment you know you had up one of your graphs there before there's only about three big contracting organisations had the biggest share of the pie that implies to me there's not proper competition there is the OVA tender process and we're not giving a fair go to the small contractors it doesn't seem to be we're not really getting competitive results with only three manufacturers it seems to me not correct yeah I can't really represent DFAT so this is just some analysis that we've done I can see it it's meant to raise those kind of questions yeah Jackie I mean as a contractor maybe I can comment I mean I don't think the tender process is so much has changed but the way in which they're doing procurement has changed so fewer projects and I think that they are much easier you have to have really big balance sheets and be a big company to bid for them effectively so I think it's the restructuring of a lot of the way they're doing the tenders innately preferences the larger tendering organisations it's not how they apply value for money or conduct the tendering it's how they structure the bids themselves we're trying to get in on this market you know things that I guess if we were in the UK they would come back and ask us for clarification around things but they're being very good at talking with us about how we can potentially not make really basic mistakes because some stuff is really yeah I don't know you know like the advisory remuneration frame it's very specific things that can not benefit to Australia things that are very niche to the Australian aid landscape that don't happen in other places but I would say that DFAT is very conscious and I think trying to make it fairer so I do feel like there's a definite what's the word viewpoint on their side that this is an issue and that they yeah they're looking at it I think and I'm someone who loses out on from this stuff but it seems like it's not going to last like that and it's going to get better Thanks Stephen just two interesting slides for me from the Papua Nini perspective is this one and then the one that shows how the aid effectiveness is and of these the bigger companies there I wonder what percentage of those are in Papua Nini so ABT for example I think most of that would be in Papua Nini so I'm not implying that it's these big big contractors causing aid in effectiveness it's probably the other way around the governments that it's a to try and fix this aid in effectiveness they're throwing all of the aid under some of these big companies and big contractors I mean I don't think it's controversial to say that we might see a lower aid effectiveness next year in Papua Nini with everything under one which is no disrespect to the good people working there but it doesn't seem like a very sustainable model they do also monitor aid performance at the project level and those numbers are much higher and show much less variation I mean there is some variation I haven't got the numbers with me but as I recall there is a slight reduction in project level effectiveness in PNG in particular compared to other countries but there's nothing like the gap you see here and I think PNG is a very difficult place to operate in as are some of the other Pacific Island economies and I'm a bit skeptical of some of the other countries but I put it this way there's no obvious solution to to improve the effectiveness of our aid in PNG we've been trying for a long time I'm pretty conscious that yes please one very last question on the question of the admin costs that DFAT is bearing would you say that is also because of it's never really realistic and no matter whether they have the in-house capacity and manage it that way or the managing contractors you'll still need to have a higher admin cost so the use of contractors should reduce your admin costs because that's not charged to your these are actually called departmental costs these are like the running costs so the contractors even though they're supplying that administrative service they're all charged to the aid program so the use of contractors should bring down this ratio I was saying CAP I think it was about the first budget or maybe the second budget I think it was the first and it was meant to be we've integrated and now we're going to get all these efficiencies and so it was kind of a signal from Julie Bishop this is going to be different from the AusAid waste but I think the next year there were very steep aid cuts so it was abandoned straight away I think it's too high at 7% you know it's a very imprecise measure of efficiency there may be differences in the way that DFAT count this compared to AusAid but I guess this is one of the number of things that deserves more research it is a puzzle if we're always hearing that DFAT short on staff and that it's contracting everything out why is the admin ratio so high that's the question that's the last graph alright well I'll just close proceedings thanks everyone for coming hope you found it useful it's a lot thank you no not too many slides