Peter Boyle
In the first week of April, Austrade, AusAID and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) will be conducting seminars in all major Australian cities "to give Australian companies a detailed understanding of reconstruction planning, funds disbursement, contract tendering arrangements, and which agencies are taking lead roles in projects" as part of the Howard government's much-bragged-about but mostly yet-to-be delivered $1 billion tsunami aid package.
While in Aceh unbelievable misery continues to plague victims of December 26's devastating tsunami, it is big corporations that are lining up with their hands out for the promised $1 billion.
The tsunami victims may not actually get much direct assistance from this "aid" package. A March 3 parliamentary research paper by Dr Ravi Tomar, from DFAT, coolly admits that, "While money will be spent on rehabilitation and reconstruction projects in Aceh, it seems likely that a substantial amount of the money will be spent on projects outside the tsunami-affected areas, although nonetheless in deserving parts of Indonesia".
According to Tomar, major Australian companies expected to be involved in the bidding process include Boral, BlueScope Steel, OneSteel, Leighton Holdings, Thiess and Linfox, as well as numerous medium-sized and smaller firms.
Two of these companies have already scored big contracts from non-government aid agencies. According to a report in the March 16 Australian, three aid organisations, including World Vision, have contracted BlueScope Steel to supply 1500 steel buildings and 60 tonnes of steel roofs. The Red Cross has commissioned Thiess Contractors to construct an office building in Banda Aceh at a cost of between $500,000 and $1 million.
The government's "tsunami aid" package is really about corporate welfare and strategic interests, Tim O'Connor of AidWatch told Green Left Weekly. "AusAID staff have stated off the record that up to 90% of Australian aid money boomerangs back to Australia."
Officially, at least 40% of Australian overseas aid is "tied", O'Connor explained. That is, the money has to be spent on certain products and services provided by certain companies.
"The World Bank estimates that tied aid is 20-25% more costly than untied aid. AidWatch says aid should not be in the form of loans. Even [foreign minister Alexander] Downer's 1997 review into Australian aid found that loans were an ineffective and inefficient way of giving aid."
Until last year, the standard Australian government tendering guidelines ensured Australian companies won all of the management contracts, but a senior DFAT official stated to a Senate estimates committee hearing on February 17 that new "procurement guidelines are still being worked through" and Australian and Indonesian companies will be eligible to tender for the "tsunami aid".
Wendy Bacon, an investigative journalist and journalism lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, suspects that the notorious US war profiteering company Halliburton may be planning to make bids, perhaps through its Adelaide-based subsidiaries.
"The so-called tsunami package is not really about tsunami relief but about Australia's relationship with the Indonesian government. It is not what the Australian people have been led to believe", O'Connor told GLW. "The areas that [Prime Minister John] Howard mentioned in his January 5 statement [on tsunami aid to Indonesia] were identical to those targeted by Downer in last year's budget statement."
The DFAT research paper concedes that the public "perception, based on reports in some sections of the media, is that most of the money (if not all) will be spent on reconstruction and infrastructure building projects in Aceh, one of the poorest and most conflict-ridden provinces in Indonesia. This may not necessarily be the case. While the package does focus on areas affected by the tsunami, its application is Indonesia-wide."
Howard said as much in his January 5 statement: "While there will naturally be a clear focus on the areas devastated by the Tsunami, all areas of Indonesia will be eligible for assistance under the partnership.
"The grant aid will be directed at areas of priority need in Indonesia. It can be expected to encompass small-scale reconstruction to re-establish social and economic infrastructure in affected areas, human resource development and rehabilitation. It will also include a large scholarship programme, providing support and training in areas such as engineering, health care, public administration and governance."
The word "governance" is code for military or security aid, says O'Connor. The tsunami disaster is being used by the Australian and US governments to boost their military aid to Indonesia, previously cut back under public pressure around the bloody Indonesian occupation of East Timor.
AidWatch has been warning about the rapid growth of the "security agenda" in Australia's aid program. AidWatch points to it in PNG, the biggest recipient of Australian aid, and in the Solomon Islands. Indeed, military and police assistance now dominates the Australian aid agenda in the South Pacific.
According to a March 2 article by Michael Walsh and Ross Kendall in Ethical Investor: "Opportunisitc aid delivery companies are reflecting the trend to securitisation in the aid budget... As aid has shifted from a focus on poverty alleviation to one of security aid consultant companies are now getting in on the act."
The article pointed to a move by Coffey International, an Australian engineering and consulting firm, to buy Adelaide-based Specialist Training Australia, "an armed forces and paramilitary training provider with Middle East expertise".
Coffey also owns SAGRIC, one of the largest recipients of AusAID funding and a company that has the contract "to employ and send over the [Australian] Federal Police contingent to PNG", O'Connor told GLW.
Another "preferred tenderer" of AusAID, the Kerry Packer-owned GRM International, obtained a $14 million AusAID contract for a "law and justice strengthening program" in the Solomon Islands in 2000.
"Obviously that program wasn't very successful and the Australian military intervened", said O'Connor. "Yet although no independent evaluation of that program has been published, we have reason to believe that one was done and GRM has since got another $40 million contract to build and run prisons in the Solomon Islands."
"Security" has long been at the top of the Australian government's agenda in Indonesia. The March 16 SBS Dateline program carried a grim warning from a West Papuan Baptist minister, Sofyan Yoman, that Australia's tsunami aid may end up funding the Indonesian military's ethnic cleansing plans in West Papua. In the past six months, between 15,000 and 20,000 West Papuans have been forced from their homes by military action partly funded by so-called "special autonomy funds".
In March, a special delegation from the Indonesian government began working with Australian government officials on how and where the "tsunami aid" will be delivered. AidWatch will be scrutinising the program to the best of its ability. But O'Connor knows from past experience that this won't be easy.
"It is very hard to track the details because as soon as an Australian company subcontracts to another, it becomes 'commercial in confidence'."
[Tim O'Connor is writing a book about Australia's aid programs, and will be giving workshops on this topic at this Easter's Asia-Pacific International Solidarity Conference. For program see <http://www.apsc.net.au/>.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 23, 2005.
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