A better fit: national security and Australia’s aid program

• Australian Strategic Policy Institute

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28 March 2011

A new international consensus is emerging on the place of aid and development in the national security of major OECD donors. The key elements of the new consensus are:

• making the promotion of development a more important foreign policy objective
• identifying national security more closely with increasing aid, encouraging global development and bringing security to fragile states
• giving aid agencies more say in decisions about national security
• boosting civilian–military cooperation and integration in delivering aid and security.

Australia has in some respects anticipated this new approach, especially in civil–military cooperation in delivering aid to fragile states and in humanitarian emergencies. This report acknowledges Australia’s good record of achievement in the field, but we need to do more.

The governments of Britain and the US are already moving to integrate aid and security. The United Kingdom’s 2010 National Security Strategy and President Obama’s recent presidential policy directive on global development both recognise the need to see aid through the prism of security, and vice versa. USAID, Washington’s equivalent of our AusAID, has a seat on the US’s National Security Council when security and aid concerns are intertwined.

The report recommends that Australia should:

• maintain the official objective of the aid program, but put more effort into explaining how Australia’s aid contributes to national security
• increase the accountability of the aid program, for example by giving AusAID’s Office of Development Effectiveness a statutory role and by instituting a quadrennial diplomacy and development review, as the US has done
• give official development assistance a ministerial portfolio of its own within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
• maintain the new focus on aid to Africa, but in the context of a heightened awareness of security issues
• recognise the importance of Australia’s strategic interests in Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific
• recognise climate change affecting neighbouring countries as a potential national security problem for Australia
• consider creating a separate security sector in the aid budget
• develop a coherent strategy for whole‑of‑government delivery of aid in permissive and non-permissive environments, given the extent to which effective cooperation between different government agencies remains problematic.