16th September, 2005

DAVID ADAMS

Australians rank the war on terror as the most important priority for world leaders followed by eliminating extreme poverty and hunger and protecting the environment, according to a new World Vision report.

The report - Island Nation or Global Citizen? - also found that fear of an increase in terrorism tops Australians’ list of greatest worries followed closely by an expansion of the war on terrorism to other parts of the world and a serious disease threat or epidemic. Economic failure and job losses ranked at the bottom of the list.

Toby Hall, chief operating officer at World Vision, says that while it wasn’t surprising fear of terrorism ranked so highly, it was important to recognise there are links between poverty and terrorism.

“It’s possible for extremists...to manipulate people who are living in poverty more easily,” he says. “So we have to face the reality that there is a link between terrorism and some extreme poverty in some countries.”

“It is a worrying thing that people are so concerned about terrorism, it’s unfortunate, and I think it would be better for us if we were more focused on the issue of poverty and actually trying to do something to alleviate that.”

Tim Costello, World Vision’s chief executive officer, has previously said that this connection is not lost on Australians with the number of those who felt they could play a role in raising the living standards of the poorest people overseas rising by seven per cent to 52 per cent in the three months following the Bali bombings in October 2002.

Among the key findings in the World Vision report - which incorporated some of the findings of a larger Roy Morgan survey based on 60,000 interviews with people in 60 countries - was that not only did the percentage of Australians who felt they could help raise living standards among the poor rise to 58 per cent in the wake of the Asian tsunami disaster but that 88 per cent of Australians believe not enough is being done to close the gap between rich and poor.

It also found that overseas born Australian residents give more to charities than people born here (people born in Greece, for example, give an average of $240 per annum and those from the US $367 compared to $143 for those born here) and that religious people were more likely to give than those with no religion (83 per cent compared to 76 per cent) while those who regularly attend religious services gave an average of $341 per annum compared to an average of $110 among those who don’t.

Among Christian denominations, the Uniting Church had the highest proportion of givers at 88 per cent while members of the Baptist Church had the highest average annual donation of $411.

On the downside, Australian millionaires were found to be less generous than those in the US or Canada, giving on average less than two per cent of their annual income compared to more than three per cent in the other two nations.

Hall says the report showed that there was now a groundswell of feeling among Australians that they not only cared about global poverty but that they also believed they could do something about it.

“And that transcends both the general public and, I think corporations as well. There is a growing kind of voice...that we need to take action, that we need to start thinking as Australians, how we can do something.”

World Vision have previously voiced concerns that while the Australian Government was at the forefront of the promotion of fair trade, this groundswell of public support for tackling global poverty didn’t seem to be matched by Federal Government attitudes toward international aid.

But the organisation - along with other aid agencies - has welcomed this week’s announcement that the Federal Government will significantly increase its overseas aid to $4 billion.

“The announcement...has brought the Government to exactly where we would have wanted them to be,” says Hall. “We asked for a doubling to $4 billion and the Government has responded with that which is amazingly encouraging. It’s a huge step forward for Australia; it’s a huge step forward for the campaigning we’ve been doing around that.”

Australia is among more than 170 nations represented in New York this week at a United Nations World Summit to discuss current and future progress on the Millennium Development Goals - a series of global benchmarks for nations on issues such as poverty, education, gender equality, child mortality, HIV/AIDS and environmental sustainability which are to be met by 2015.

Prior to Australia’s announcement this week, Hall says that the gap between achieving the goals and the current situation in the world equated to about $135 billion dollars.

“Which sounds quite a lot of money but that’s the same as annual insurance premiums for emergency disasters around the world...” he says. “Maybe in that context, it’s not actually that huge an amount of money.”

The World Vision report also highlights the effect the Asian tsunami disaster has had on Australian attitudes toward poverty. It shows Australians gave more per capita in the wake of the crisis than people in the UK or the US ($13.86 compared to $13.84 in the UK and $4.22 in the US) and that the corporate sector - where there had been a 20 per cent drop in philanthropy between 1998 and 2000 - had responded in an “unprecedented way” donating more than $33 million in cash, services and goods.

Hall says that while the Asian tsunami had brought about something of a “paradigm change” in people’s attitudes, particularly within the corporate sector, there has been a slow change in attitudes among Australians over the past 10 years or so.

“It’s definitely something which has been changing over a period of time but I think particularly the tsunami was time when Australians saw something that was very close to home for them and something where they felt they had to do something - it was ‘This is my neighbour’...” he says.

“ I guess our hope is that Australians have that attitude in non-emergency situations...To get some perspective - in the last week, almost as many people have died from poverty related causes as died in the tsunami across the world.

“People have called it the silent tsunami or the African tsunami but the reality is that there are a lot of people dying needlessly everyday and a lot of children who don’t get the education they deserve, who don’t get basic health care treatment and don’t get the basic nutrition which they could get.”

Hall says that when it’s not an issue of resources but an issue of resource distribution, “it really is something...that can be fixed by sharing the resources we have more equitably”.

“I think the time is coming when we should sit up and pay attention and say we can do something about this.”