A lifetime ago, I went on a roadtrip to Canberra with a group of volunteers with a very specific demand: Australia should increase its foreign aid spending.
We held a brief meeting with a MP from a safe district – his perennial re-election was more or less guaranteed, not matter what he did. Our dialogue lasted 20 minutes, but his response could be summed up in one statement: ‘I hear you, but my party is not in control of the government, so I can do nothing.’ A brief photo-op followed – conducted by the MP with the most enthusiasm he had so far displayed – and then we were out of there.
Since then, Australian foreign aid as a percentage of Gross National Income has halved, from a brief peak of 0.33% in 2015 to 0.18% in 2020. It currently accounts for 0.74% of the Federal budget – still a significant amount, despite how it may look.
NGOs – domestic and international – have persistently fought to maintain an equilibrium between compassion and apathy, reflected in the oscillating but overall consistent trend in per-capita donations in the last decade.
By incessantly telling people that inequalities exist, individuals are forced to become embarrassed about their own inaction. NGOs are at the forefront of a constant tug of war between ‘Papua New Guineans should pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and ‘I need to help them because NGOs told me how poor they are and I feel bad’. In this way, NGOs keep us accountable to ourselves.
Over the last decade, this mild, individual-focussed guilt-tripping has slowly been eclipsed by the bigger players in the charity game: corporations and authoritarian governments.
(this is not counting the odd billionaire who is giving away his wealth as some form of repentance for a lifetime of sexual predation.)
Charitable donations have always been tied to tax deductions as a proven way to connect selfish motivators to the altruistic – nowadays, it is more or less the only sure way to extract tax money from multinationals doing the Double Irish.
This is distinct from the monetization of charity, whereby brands push themed products (Pride-themed sneakers, for example) in exchange for donating an appropriate sum to NGOs for every purchase.
These two methodologies essentially add a ‘middle-man’ to compassion. Picture a fundraiser, where you pay a hundred bucks to enter a potluck to win a house. The house is put up by a real-estate sponsor, of course, in order to market their product, but a proportion of your hundred bucks will still go to charity.
What if, instead of paying that money for a chance at winning, you are explicitly buying something? Picture a fundraiser, where you buy a 100-dollar limited-edition charity-themed jersey, of which all proceeds will go to that charity. Are these two scenarios different?
I would argue that it is, in the sense that the priorities are flipped. In the former case, the participant is there with charitable intent as their number 1 priority, the house their number 2 (unless, of course, they can’t do basic statistics, which to be fair is what gambling relies on).
In the latter, however, I would argue that the participant’s desire for purchasing that limited-time special item exceeds their desire to do good, which ends up more or less an afterthought.
This is, in my opinion, how corporate charitability differs from individual charitability: not in that companies are motivated by the marketing of their product – because of course they are – but in that it reshapes the intent of the individual when they donate, changing it from a ‘I should do good’ guilt-trip to a ‘I want to buy this’ feel-good.
One could easily argue that typing charitable acts to feel-good money-spending has no downsides and all the upsides. After all, if the overall amount of money going to NGOs is going up, then what’s the big deal?
The very successful attempts at tying consumerist incentives to charitability has diminished the fact that the two ideas are separate: one is inherently self-serving, the other altruistic. While no act of charity is selfless, people like to pretend that it is, whereas the concept of ‘pretending to feel good about buying a product’ is somewhat bizarre and requires specific brainwashing, such as the stoking of nationalist fervour.
In this way, the no-bullshit money-and-material driven dopamine of consumerist incentives are at odds with the social-posturing and moral-status-gaining that comes in tandem with charity.
By tying these two disparate things together, those living life under a consumerist-charity environment will become blind to charity driven by other motivators.
Enter authoritarian governments. While they love making money as much as anyone else, it is not their number 1 priority. Their number 1 priority is survival – the sustainment of itself.
To that end, they are willing to give.
While Australia’s foreign aid contribution steadily declined, China’s is ramping up at breakneck speed. In the buffer region of South Asia – Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and numerous Pacific Island Nations – Australia, the once-dominant benefactor of the region, is withdrawing. China is taking over the aid vacuum it is leaving behind, giving out massive loans to small governments so that they may, ostensibly, construct infrastructure projects such as ports and airports.
The loans are never intended to be recouped. It is a loan in name, but a donation in essence. While the books may be balanced by calling it a loan, China would never seek to reclaim that debt – to reclaim it is to give up their leverage.
Australian aid was subtler in the sense that, instead of direct financial ties, the beneficiary governments reciprocated in other ways, such as the approval of mines with lax environmental and regulatory oversight. I scratch your back with aid, you scratch mine with approvals for private enterprises – a tale as old as time.
China, however, wants it done fast, and as always, it is taking shortcuts to get there. It is shoving aid money down the throats of corrupt politicians, in exchange for the most ostentatious KPIs: you let us own a port in your country.
While, in absolute terms, Australian aid still dwarves that of China’s in the South Asia region, it is also the one regional arena in which China is intent on actually winning. The motive is one steeped in history: in the 14th century, China was the dominant trade entity in the SEA region, sending fleets as far as the horn of Africa. After centuries of watching Western powers operate in what they consider to be their turf, China is intent on taking it back, mostly to reaffirm its own strength to a domestic audience.
It is expanding in order to survive.
Note that there is little financial incentive at play here. No amount of money, short of bankrupting the nation, is too much for its own survival. This is the point that most Western governments, including Australia, fail to understand: you can’t negotiate or haggle a nation’s survival. It is not a matter of reaching a mutual accord in the region’s power balance, because while one side is seated at the table, the other perceives the fact that other parties are seated at the same table as an existential threat.
In a country where consumerist charitability dominates, there is little understanding of the political and ideological dangers of reducing foreign aid. Australian politicians are still focussed on saving money and balancing the budget, because, to them, foreign aid is near-irrelevant, nothing more than an overseas offshoot of corporate quid-pro-quo. Their priority list is organized around staying in power, and foreign aid ranks very low on that list, especially for MPs in safe seats.
Perversely, idiots ranting about phantom Chinese threats have led to a recent uptick in aid spending, because of a growing perception in Australian politics that, by being anti-China, one can get more votes.
Once again, the order of priority is key: politicians prioritizing foreign aid because of their own re-election, is different from prioritizing foreign aid because of a regional and ideological contest with a rival that is, in a comical sense, fighting to re-elect its own country. The difference in scale and drive is monumental.
It is not too late. Australia has a long and established relationships with NGOs and local governments in South Asia, one that is not easily replaced by blunt disturbances like piles of Chinese money, because, believe it or not, people are not solely motivated by buying and selling, by spending and making money.
Charity is more than money. To paraphrase Samwise Gamgee, it is the belief that there is good in the world that’s worth fighting for. Don’t let these lofty aspirations stop you from going out and buying that pink ribbon though – if it makes you feel good, then it’s money well spent.
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