Council for International Development

No Right Turn blogs:

The Council for International Development is an umbrella organisation for aid groups operating from New Zealand. Last year, it criticised the government’s disestablishment of NZAID and shift in the focus of aid from poverty reduction to business growth. In retaliation, Murray McCully has just cut all their funding, resulting in 10 of its 11 staff being laid off.

This is a vicious, brutal, vindictive act of political thuggery. But its also stupid. Those staff perform a vital role in coordinating the efforts of relief groups during disasters. Without them, aid money is likely to be poorly spent. And when the government’s preferred response to disasters is to channel relief funding though NGOs, that will have a direct impact on the effectiveness of that spending.

I disagree of course. First of all I am staggered that the CID has somehow grown so it has 11 staff. I recall the days when it was around 1 to 2 staffers.

Secondly it is nonsense to say they perform a vital role in co-ordinating relief groups during disasters. I worked at the Red Cross for four years, and co-ordination was done globally or bilaterally. This is not to say the CID hasn’t been a group which provides some value, but it is massively hyping it to say they co-ordinate relief efforts and nonsense to say without them aid money is likely to be poorly spent. That is in fact insulting to the Red Cross and Save the Children Fund who are global leaders in effective relief. The demise of some CID staff will not affect the quality of their work in my opinion.

The CID, while providing some useful stuff, was partly a lobby group, and I regard it as improper for the Government to fund lobby groups. It is in fact anti-democratic. The health sector is full of these groups also.

What Idiot/Savant has overlooked is that if CID really does play such a vital role with aid agencies, then the aid agencies themselves can choose to fund CID, rather than the taxpayer. Taxpayer funding go on actual aid and relief, not Wellington lobbyists.

Look at their 2008 manifesto to see that they were very much a lobby group. Now nothing wrong with that, but don’t expect taxpayers to fund it.