AusAID: Doing, not thinking
Author: Graeme Dobell
The problem for Australia’s aid bureaucrats is that spending nearly $4 billion doesn’t necessarily buy much respect in Canberra. Or bureaucratic power.
Being an efficient spender of cash is not to be scoffed at. AusAID has developed important skills: running tenders, operating contracts and transferring money. But the institutional effect is that AusAID doesn’t always get invited to the policy table. When invited, it speaks last.
The process of selecting a new Director-General of AusAID will force the Rudd Government and Foreign Affairs to confront what it wants to do with aid. As noted in my previous column, Bruce Davis headed AusAID for a decade. That is an unusual tenure for almost any era. At the end, the Government announced that Davis was going and then had him gone in only three days.