Source: Radio New Zealand
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Tonga’s Prime Minister Lord Fatafehi Fakafanua meet a drug sniffing dog during a police and transnational crime event in Nuku’alofa. The Pacific Detector Dog Programme is a recipient of NZ foreign aid. Ben Strang/ AFP
Giving aid to shore up your strategic position in the world isn’t the way to go about it, says an expert – because your aid won’t help if you’re not trying to help
If New Zealand’s foreign aid programme focused only on need, most of our money would go to sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, the lion’s share goes to the Pacific.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, according to foreign aid expert Terence Wood, but it’s not purely based on largesse, either.
“Geo-strategic thinking is starting to motivate where we focus our aid and that’s just not a good driving force for aid-giving, you really want to be thinking about need, not who you perceive your threats to be,” says Wood.
“If you want to give aid effectively you really need to prioritise it based on the needs of developing countries and not your own geo-strategic preoccupations. Your aid won’t help if you’re not trying to help. And once upon a time New Zealand had pretty good motivations for giving its aid … its aid was more likely to help .. [but] the new cold war with China in the Pacific is undermining the quality of our aid, and that’s quite depressing.”
In the case of aid sent to the Pacific, “there are both good and bad reasons” for doing so.
“The good reason is that we have strong historical ties with the Pacific, or some Pacific countries, and then also it’s just kind of good aid practice to specialise in one part of the world. If you don’t spread yourself too thin you can build up country or regional expertise.
“The bad reason is that we are increasingly preoccupied with China’s presence in the Pacific.”
And it’s not just governments’ reasons for aid spending that are changing. Increasingly, countries are reducing their aid and backing out of commitments.
“Globally [the World Food Programme] had a 40 percent cut in our funding in 2025, and that’s massive. We were at 10 billion and we are now at about six billion. So it is a collective trend as opposed to an individual one,” says Samir Wanmali, the World Food Programme’s regional director for Asia and the Pacific region.
Much has been reported on the US dropping out of commitments, but Wanmali says globally, there’s been a “progressive reduction” in funding from OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) countries, most notably from Europe.
He puts some of that down to post-covid budgets, and also to the war in Ukraine.
“I should also note that New Zealand and Australia have actually maintained your funding, so you have not reduced.”
But that’s funding to WFP – which is only a small part of the picture.
A report released last October by the Australian foreign think tank The Lowy Institute painted a grim picture. It said that over the next two years, New Zealand is expected to reduce foreign aid funding by about 35 percent.
Aid contributions are generally measured compared to the size of an economy, in a metric called the ODA over GNI (official development assistance over gross national income.)
“Generosity should really be measured compared to what you’re able to give,” says Wood.
“New Zealand’s never been a particularly generous aid donor.
“It’s around the median of OECD countries but it’s not particularly good and it’s also going to fall, as our aid budget falls, we’re going to end up looking worse on that metric.”
The same report said that Australia is filling the gap, making up about half of the funding to the Pacific region.
But Wood says that Australia’s not doing so well either.
“Australia gives a lot more aid than us in an absolute sense because it’s got a much larger economy but on the ODA over GNI metric it actually scores quite a lot worse. So they are more tight fisted than us – at least at present – we may overtake them in the race to the bottom though.”
Wood says that countries – including New Zealand – sometimes manipulate the figures.
“Often countries like New Zealand really are trying to cook the books.”
He says climate change is considered a ‘cross-cutting’ issue, and some aid can be claimed as helping countries adapt to climate change.
“It’s that type of aid where an awful lot of greenwashing goes on.
“So the New Zealand government will claim that all sorts of things that have really got very little relationship to helping countries adapt to climate change are in some way related to that.
“When we are presenting at international fora and so on we want to seem like a country that is concerned with these things but we don’t want to fork out any extra money.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
