+1

In it he states that:

And he holds the view not uncommon in the aid industry that the business of handing out taxpayer funds should be reserved for so-called "development specialists" who are beings of superior intellect, attested to by development degrees from Massey University, who…

"The acid test is this: ask the Pacific leaders whether they want New Zealand aid dollars to pour into poverty subsidisation programmes that lead nowhere and are top heavy with expensive administrators, or whether they want to prioritise the development of sustainable futures in fisheries, tourism, agriculture…

Having just read the 2008 review (with, as you would expect, a narrow focus on…

yes, standard neolib twaddle

The original agreement was .7% of GNP but now it's put in terms of GNI (Gross National Income) which is effectively equal to GNP.

However, to misquote a certain political theorist, the point is not only to bear witness to the things going wrong in the world, but…

So am I. But that pessimism needs to be converted into anger about the present state of affairs, and the will to encourage others to vote for (at least) a less-worse option. As Mr…

The aid programme is approx $500m. I had govt revenue as approx $50B. So that's where my figure came from.

$500m is a lot of money true, but it's still only 1%. Or, to put it another way, not so much when you know how much is actually…

With individual income taxes sitting at around $24.3b that 1% works out at $243m. Is that really what inhabitants of a small country…

CWS have an emergency appeal to cover the funding gap resulting from the abrupt changes to NGO funding – some of the CWS partners would normally receive grants in June. I believe they do…

Fionnaigh, good question, I mused on this at DevPolicy a while back: http://devpolicy.org/right-turn/

Politicians of the right often see themselves as the "deciders" – it is a different model of leadership and power. Refer George Lakoff, etc.

Someone mentioned the UK Conservative party up thread, and I was going to say that it's interesting to compare what's happened to the UK's aid programme under the Conservatives with what's happened in NZ under National. My own personal politics…

Why is it that so many Ministers in the current government seem allergic to expert advice or evidence? (Anne Tolley and National Standards springs immediately to mind, but there are plenty of other examples) They think that some uninformed…

"The programme wasn’t perfect but, had you inquired in 2008, you’d have struggled to find anyone who knew anything about aid who thought it needed a drastic overhaul."

Just to explain, Terence isn't in Wellington as per his profile info, but Honiara.

Nik Pak,

You're absolutely correct, some of the Minister's desired indicators of aid success are liable to be completely unreliable once one…

Unfortunately, as the last two and a half years have shown, Murray McCully clearly doesn’t know anything about aid.

So that’s goes on the list of things Murray knows nothing about. Boy am I getting tired of all these nervous nellies who have travelled the safe path risen to positions…

And that's probably why it's all gone so terribly downhill; the idea that foreign aid should be done for the benefit of the recipient countries, because we are so…

That's probably safe. Transparency International's rankings aren't based on any hard science, but rely on asking businessmen how corrupt they think a country is. It's almost axiomatic that the style of friends and favours corruption practiced in New Zealand isn't seen as such.

That has been the core idoelogy of McCully and his fellow travellers for decades – and NZ's dramatic inequality is probably seen by them as a measure of success. All evidence challenging that belief will be…