Part of my job at World Vision Australia was to maintain its role in the world architecture as part of the postwar international settlement. This meant keeping an eye on the international system and World Vision’s role in complementing it. Civil society and the aid sector had existed before World War II, but after its end they grew rapidly to complement the new international government institutions as a way to meet the challenges of postwar reconstruction and the placement of 40 million displaced refugees, and to ensure peace. Relief and development were viewed as different phases needing different mindsets. As an example, the airlift by the US government in 1948 to save West Berlin from strangulation when the communists blocked supplies getting in was humanitarian relief; the massive economic injection of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe was a development plan.
Relief workers need to be more cavalier and cowboy-ish in their approach, as they have to get in after a disaster, take charge in chaos and move fast to save lives. Time is often critical, and you need to be decisive and confident to make tough calls when setting priorities. But they can have a tendency to trample over community wishes, so there is a need to withdraw such personalities when the immediate crisis is over. Development work is on a much longer timeframe, and workers require patience, sensitivity to culture, and skills in consultation to ensure that the community is on board at every step. But this time-honoured boundary between relief and development is blurring, as the Afghanistan war has gone on for twelve years and the Syrian war for six. Temporary humanitarian relief camps soon morph into semi-permanent cities needing governance, markets, schools and institutions. For example, I visited refugees in the massive Dadaab camp in Kenya who had been there more than twenty-five years. They are mainly Somalis who fled a failed state. All this while the people wait for the war to end so they can go home.
Advocacy speaks to the rules of a society and who they serve and who they ignore. The rules are often invisible or implicit when they are enshrined in cultural attitudes and behaviour. When it is culture that has locked out girls or lower castes from opportunity, then advocacy needs to inform development choices by insisting minority and vulnerable groups get to decide on and benefit from programs and are not ignored. Advocacy also goes to challenging public policies. Policies need to be exposed when they are unjust, and movements need to be built to challenge them. So advocacy is essential in development programs and in humanitarian relief programs. It belongs in the refugee camps and in the development projects of stable but poor countries.
Advocacy recognises that there can be no lasting development or hope of justice without a fair, rule-based order. Institutions, both communal and national, that guarantee transparency to avoid corruption, are essential. So, when able, World Vision advocates for a free and independent press and the checks of accountable governance, preferably a representative democracy with an independent judiciary and police, and a military under civilian rule. The police and military must be paid a fair wage, so they have no reason to use state power for corruption. The work of advocacy is to lock in just structures and policies that are pro poor, to preserve the gains from development.
I took to the advocacy side of the work like a duck to water. Intuitively I understood that to lock in lasting change you needed transparent and fair rules supporting what was done on the ground. Otherwise, excellent relief or development programs become unmoored and wither on the vine. The development world is littered with such projects. People have given sacrificially but nothing has changed because the poor have been undermined, locked out and still miss out.
World Vision was historically anti-communist: supporting religious freedom and democracy over and against atheism and collectivism seemed a no-brainer. In that bipolar world, there was no need for advocacy. And at the end of the Cold War in 1989, there was a brief moment of euphoria and hopes for the ‘end of history’, with all the money previously spent on the Cold War now flowing to development. Yet aggressive nationalism and politicised religions quickly rushed to fill the Cold War ideological vacuum, making advocacy essential. National liberators from colonialism continued to ruin the hopes of the poor as they quickly turned from liberators into despots and oppressors. Concentration of power and abuse of others continued exactly the same as it always had.
World Vision had an identity crisis. It was now impossible to be blind to American support for anti-communist regimes that were corrupt and cruel – for example in Zaire, now Congo, President Mobutu was a murderous and terrifying dictator but a friend to President George H.W. Bush. World Vision now had to engage in advocacy that could at times be critical of Western powers, including the USA. Without the warring ideologies of the Cold War to organise aid, the decision was for World Vision to remain independent and advocate for the poor, to ensure that it was not ever captured and made a proxy for other powerful interests.
I sat on the peak body for the family of World Vision offices. It set strategy for the global portfolio of investments in 100 nations, some stable and many unstable, ranking them by poverty levels and our ability to commit. If we had too many eggs in insecure and unstable baskets where we might be thrown out by the government, it would ruin our supporter trust and business model. We never had anything in the bank, so our reserves were literally only our reputation to respond and to be trusted. Money went straight through to the poor in our programs, as that was our donor promise, so brand risk had to be carefully managed.
I discovered that at the international level we Aussies were regarded as blunt and pragmatic. We just wanted to find a way around whatever hurdle or barrier. Other national cultures were more ideological and stuck in debates that seemed irrelevant to the pragmatic challenge. I made good friends with many of the other CEOs. We supported each other in the goals we were trying to achieve and challenged each other with robust conversation over the years. We knew we were all on a similar journey of responsibility and had great opportunity to effect change in people’s lives. The World Vision culture hung together around the notions of grace and repentance: grace that you could take a risk and be forgiven if it failed; repentance that offered incentives to quickly admit if you had mucked up so you could change direction. These foundational notions build culture, trust and sacrifice across nationalities with vastly different cultures. They are the glue that keeps it operating.
I have to admit some advocacy failures. I had become enamoured with stopping the slave trade after visiting Ivory Coast and Ghana (which supplies 70 per cent of the world’s cocoa) and seeing children working in the cocoa farms. I had been moved at the Elmina Castle in Ghana and the ‘door of no return’, where weeping slaves said goodbye to Africa and their loved ones forever. So, in a headlong rush, I created the Don’t Trade Lives campaign in Australia. And we had success in forcing Cadbury to go fair trade with its Dairy Milk block. But this put great pressure on World Vision Ghana for my characterisation that most cocoa was harvested by children and slaves. Culturally, many Ghanaians had worked on cocoa farms and saw nothing wrong with that. While some poor local children voluntarily work to support their families, some children definitely were stolen and trafficked from neighbouring nations like Mali and Burkina Faso. I should have consulted and got more buy-in from our local office before creating that campaign.
My advocacy was also local; it meant speaking to the public, business and government about the low levels of Australian aid. Not because it benefitted World Vision, as most of their dollars are raised through private donations, but because it benefitted the poor. In the years leading up to the 2007 federal election Peter was soon to be Australia’s longest-serving treasurer. On the Opposition side was Kevin Rudd. He was the Shadow Foreign Affairs minister and, as we were to learn, a self-defined economic conservative. He and Peter were similar ages, and one of them was destined to be the next prime minister.
Prior to the 2007 election some senior Liberal ministers had told John Howard to hand over the leadership to Peter. He had stared the rebellion down and refused. Peter sucked it up and continued to serve as Howard’s loyal deputy; he did not go to the back bench and create havoc. But, under pressure from within the party and from the public to show generational change and pass the baton, Howard did promise to hand the job over to Peter sometime in the first term if the Howard Government won the 2007 election.
To Peter’s credit, as I had noted many times after the initial cuts under Howard, he had been one of the few voices supporting increases in aid in the Howard cabinet; the small increase in aid that had been gained under John Howard was really because of him. Kevin Rudd had strong convictions about lifting the level of Australian aid. As a former diplomat he had sophisticated thinking about aid as a ‘soft’ tool alongside the ‘hard’ (coercive) tools of military expenditure. He wanted to see Australia punching above its weight as a middle power.
Kevin Rudd and I met a number of times. A few weeks before he became leader of the Opposition, Rudd attended the Make Poverty History concert in November 2006 at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne. Make Poverty History was a global civil society movement of optimism supporting the Millennium Development Goals, and was making a global impact. I spoke at the concert, and Bono of U2 and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam performed a song together.
The concert was arranged to align with the G20 meetings in Melbourne hosted by Peter as treasurer. The world’s finance ministers and President of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz were all in Melbourne for this meeting. Wolfowitz had been the neocon US Deputy Secretary of Defence for President George W. Bush and had contributed to convincing Bush to go to war in Iraq a few years before. This was no doubt a factor in the minds of some of the anti-globalisation protesters who gathered to oppose the meetings Peter was hosting. The central streets of Melbourne were closed down and riots broke out in a few areas. This meant bad international press, and embarrassed and greatly annoyed Peter as the host. The G20 was seeking to implement finance policies to foster international rules and stability, which could help development. I also met with Paul Wolfowitz during the time of these G20 meetings to discuss aid and the Millennium Development Goals. So I can see how the coalescence of the chaos in the city and the reportage of my comments calling for aid increases at the concert the evening before would have put unnecessary pressure on Peter while he was leading these high-profile meetings.
After the concert concluded I was travelling in a car with Peter Garrett from Midnight Oil, by this time a Labor MP, who sat in the front while Bono and I were in the back. We were off to find a good pub for dinner. Bono said, ‘Tell me what you think of this new song I’ve written’, and launched into a full voice rendition. Peter picked up the beat and was drumming on the dashboard. I thought, ‘This isn’t a bad private concert for me and the driver!’
At dinner, Eddie Vedder joined us. It was a wonderful night of rich storytelling and optimism about eradicating poverty and making progress for the voiceless and the poor with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. We were seeing dramatic declines in infant mortality and women dying in childbirth. Increases in aid budgets were literally saving thousands of lives and giving girls access to education and hope. Absolute poverty was being put in a human rights focus for the first time ever. Bono told us about his meetings with President George W. Bush and diehard Republican Congress members to convince them to increase aid. So the movement to eradicate poverty was pushing on an open door and we were all buoyed with this wind in our sails. Over dinner I encouraged Bono to meet with my brother and argue for increased aid. A few days later I was interviewed for ABC television’s Lateline regarding aid levels and unwisely added that I had encouraged them both to meet. I’m not sure Peter liked being told what to do by me! But Peter and Bono did go on to meet, to much media fanfare. You can see a photo of them together in Peter’s book, The Costello Memoirs.
But now there were many ‘two brothers’ references in the press. Mark Knight, the Herald Sun cartoonist, did one of me crowd-surfing off the stage at the Make Poverty History concert while Peter held back the crowd so I would hit the ground hard. It was titled ‘Brotherly Love Is History’. This was a time of great political tension in the family. How could I have rained on Peter’s parade as host of the G20? Had I implicitly criticised my brother’s party in front of international leaders by pointing out its underwhelming commitment on aid? Where were my loyalties? All of these questions swirled. The personal and the public dimensions were colliding.
Even my previous support seemed to count for little, such as the time leading up to the 1998 election when the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was to be introduced by the Coalition Government if it won office. I came out in support of Peter as treasurer on this issue, feeling it was a fair way for tax to be levied. I received some vicious criticism from people on the left who were vehemently opposed to it – some were even clergy who felt entitled to have a go at me in the paper for ‘betraying my social justice principles’.
Later the next year, 2007, family relations were tested again and I own responsibility for that. Rudd, as Opposition leader, committed to raising aid, a very significant promise given everyone knew Nixon’s dictum, ‘There ain’t no votes in aid.’ I called on Prime Minister John Howard to match Rudd’s promise of lifting aid to 0.5 per cent of gross national income by 2015. Unfortunately, the substance of my call was right but perhaps not the timing.
On 1 November I did a television interview for a story by Laurie Oakes for Channel 9 evening news. It happened to be three weeks before the 2007 federal election. Other media picked up the story. The gravity of the situation hit me when I opened The Age the next day – it ran a front-page story with a headline ‘Costello (Tim, that is) backs Rudd on Poverty’. I was quoted as saying I believed Peter would support an increase and I credited Peter as the one who got a small increase out of John Howard after their initial cuts. The report went on to add that I said ‘I think he would be very comfortable with’ the proposed increase, ‘but he is not Prime Minister’. By many that was seen as being a gratuitous swipe. I had stirred up trouble, and my parents interpreted my comments as effectively saying to vote for Labor. I did not see it that way. I was simply pointing out that this is a moral issue. I still believe this today, not least because, of Australia’s nearest twenty-two neighbours, twenty are developing nations (except for New Zealand and Singapore) and Australia has obligations as a rich neighbour. I regarded this issue as one of moral seriousness that should be bipartisan in the federal election. Labor’s commitment to the world’s poor in the run-up to this election was much better. John Howard refused to match it, as pledging to spend on those who vote (namely Australians) seemed a saner electoral strategy to the conservatives.
Of course, these headlines were difficult for Peter. And then the Coalition lost the 2007 election to Labor, and Kevin Rudd took to his post with a flourish that included drawing international acclaim for Parliament’s apology to Australia’s Indigenous people. The defeat of the Coalition government, with John Howard even losing his own seat, was a dramatic swing. To have been so close to being PM and now so far must have been excruciating for Peter.
My parents were angry at me. They wondered, was it sibling resentment at Peter’s success that had prompted my ill-timed comments? I tried to explain that even though my timing was not good, it was nothing different to what I had been arguing for a long time. I had been raising the issue of the need for Australia to raise its aid commitments for years in my role as an advocate, including my work on the board of TEAR Australia in the 1990s. When I went to World Vision Australia and was thrust into leadership on aid, which was a federal issue, it placed me in direct conflict with the policy of the Coalition government, where my brother happened to be treasurer. The media tried to capitalise on our blood relationship and drive a wedge to make things harder for Peter – and to a lesser extent me. A few in the conservative media took me to task for my intervention and wanted to prevent more taxpayers’ money being handed over to impoverished foreigners.
Naturally my mother was unsettled and anxious with these developments – particularly when they got a phone call from Peter’s son, Sebastian, the day after the 2007 election loss. He was calling to tell my parents that Peter was about to hold a news conference to announce that he was not standing for the leadership of the Coalition. I think for Mum my comments got mixed up with the end of her dream that Peter might one day be prime minister. She was somewhat in shock. Dad, on the other hand, who had never been excited by that prospect, was irenic. I was at their house when the call came, and I remember Dad saying to Sebastian, ‘That’s fine, Seb. It makes no difference to me.’
Peter was seen by many as the anointed one, and everyone assumed he would still become the next Liberal prime minister. His own party assumed that and were ready to make him leader. I had definitely assumed that myself and was as surprised as everyone when he did not stand for the leadership. I also did not anticipate his decision to leave Parliament altogether a short time later. His disillusionment must have been deep. Mainly I think it was with his own side not requiring John Howard to hand over the prime ministership at a time that would have made Peter’s leadership effective but would have also have killed off Labor’s line of attack that the nation needed fresh leadership. Peter, as a fresh leader from a younger generation, may well have beaten Rudd in 2007. But now we will never know. I can fully understand his disillusionment. But I admire the fact that he believed in loyalty to the Liberal Party and never challenged and caused disunity, which was so different to the egos and self-promotion that later saw Gillard and Rudd tussle for leadership of the Labor government and the Liberals depose both Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull as prime ministers, creating havoc. Loyalty is rare. Many people have said to me in the years since what a loss it has been to have Peter gone from our national politics. I totally agree.
But what of my small intervention? Consistency is one thing, but I admit my timing in 2007, before an election, was bad for family relations. I had criticised Labor leader Bob Hawke when he had cut aid as prime minister, so I was not being partisan in criticising John Howard. I would regularly point out that aid was highest under Robert Menzies, at 0.5 per cent of our gross national income, and so this was not a left–right issue. Later I would criticise Prime Minister Julia Gillard when she diverted aid to plug a hole in refugee spending. I criticised Tony Abbott when he and Joe Hockey smashed aid. I have tried to always be guided by my conscience.
In fact, I suspected we were in for a savaging when Joe Hockey rang me out of the blue a few weeks before the budget of 2014 to say, ‘I’m a World Vision supporter and I just decided to ring you to say I think you are doing a fantastic job.’ That immediately raised my suspicion and I knew we were in trouble. After that phone call Joe went on to cut aid by $11 billion over four years in the May 2014 budget, reducing it to a shockingly low level. This was cruel and cowardly. Worse, it was a path to being a meaner nation and that spirit of meanness seems to percolate across the country, particularly in our attitudes to refugees. Like Xavier Herbert’s memorable book title, I thought ‘Poor fellow my country’! For Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey to make 20 per cent of their 2014 budget savings from aid, which was only 1 per cent of the budget, was balancing the books on the backs of the poor. So, I haven’t changed my position.
For a time, I was close with Kevin Rudd. He was a true believer in Australia’s role to help developing nations climb out of poverty and the role aid had to play as one tool in this toolbox. I gave him plaudits for that. He was interested in theology like me, although it came out at strange times. We were at the Boxing Day Test cricket together when he was PM and were chatting. As Peter Siddle ran in to bowl for Australia, I remember Kevin turning and asking me with deep fascination, ‘Do you think that the Apostle Paul was a neo-Platonist?’ I was surprised at the question in that setting but more than happy to engage. I admire prime ministers who read widely.
Lest anyone thinks this is some left-wing, biased view of the Bible, remember there are over 2000 verses about the poor, and the signature of Jesus’ life and ministry was good news for the poor. Their welfare was a matter of justice. ‘What you have done to the least of these you have done to me.’ So Christian faith cannot escape this responsibility for the poor and those living on the margins, and Christians, right or left, know this to be true. Have a read of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s maiden speech in 2008. It is interesting because it was about the 6500 people who die every day in Africa from preventable and treatable diseases. He said of Africa, ‘When the history books are written, our age will be remembered for . . . what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out.’ He commended the Howard Government’s increased spending on foreign aid (Peter, take a bow) and said, ‘However, we must go further because the need is not diminishing nor can our support. It is the Australian thing to do.’
Then he later sat in the Abbott Cabinet that withdrew virtually all Australian aid to Africa and later, as treasurer, slashed aid. He is entitled to change his mind but this shows he once regarded the Bible as a policy document on the poor. It was an unabashed statement of how his faith had led him into Parliament. No wonder Christians get confused and secular people raise the charge of hypocrisy against those of us of faith in the public square. Much like some Christians claim their religious freedom to be intolerant of gay marriage, I claim, on the basis of what Jesus said, my religious freedom to be intolerant of absolute poverty.
Advocacy is not just trumpeting and campaigning. It is embedded in the field programs and is an essential tool in the development toolkit. One of the most significant programs that was devised in Australia by World Vision staff is called Citizen Voice and Action (CVA). It teaches people about their rights as citizens and encourages them to speak up. It teaches citizens how to organise for their voices to be heard.
In country after country I have seen powerless communities, often including illiterate farmers, become empowered as they understand that a citizen has rights and a voice and can exercise those rights. How does this grassroots advocacy program work? In basic terms, we may be building a health clinic in an African country and ask the question (as we always do), ‘Who should build this clinic?’ The answer is usually, ‘It should be our Ministry of Health.’ Somewhat tongue-in-cheek we will say, ‘Well then you don’t need World Vision!’ They respond saying, ‘Who knows where that health budget has gone: maybe weapons, Swiss bank accounts, palaces for the president.’ So, we agree to build a health clinic with the condition that they form a group, a CVA group. We empower them to know what was in the health budget for their region and train them to seek accountability and transparency from authorities while improving individual and collective responsibility.
The word ‘corruption’ suggests that no resources got through and all was lost. This is never the case. CVA helps visualise and educate so that in an instance where 30 per cent is lost in corruption and 70 per cent gets through, the community is able to set its own goal for the next year to ensure that at least 80 per cent gets through. They have the tools to be vigilant and keep uncovering loss through corruption and setting higher integrity targets. It is realistic and educational.
CVA starts with the lived experience of communities and uses visualisation techniques to educate them. It recovers the pre-colonial traditional methods of learning known as Baraza (a Swahili term) where communities sit and learn through stories, proverbs, humour and drawing pictures. Baraza is collective wisdom where feedback and learning overcome the communal disengagement that induces apathy, and the power plays of politicians who often have seized the methods of colonial governance and robbed the people of their voice.
Visualisation uses their lived experience by asking them, for example, ‘How many teachers does your local school have per student?’ They always know. They may say, ‘Here it is one teacher for 100 students.’ Then the facilitators will show them their own government’s policy manual that stipulates it should be one teacher per fifty students. Visualisation goes a step further and gives them smiley faces and unhappy faces and invites them to vote by pinning them to a board, choosing their priorities, such as health or education, and where they want World Vision’s help. We insist that women, even if alone and stigmatised or from an outcast family, get to vote. This is done to avoid the chief simply speaking for everyone or the powerful men deciding the priorities. We explain this is how governance is meant to work with your own governments! Effectively we are teaching them how to do a social audit that mimics what should be happening at government level. They learn accountability to one another and feedback loops are shaped in story form.
I have seen poor farmers celebrating with dancing and feasting because they have removed corrupt local politicians through tracking the money. The pride in their faces at their achievement is so inspiring and empowering.
This training is crucial because our development model is to always leave within fifteen years. That period allows time to build relational depth and trust, but avoid welfare dependency. So, our community programs begin with benchmarking the conditions and marking our scorecard, with better health, education and agricultural outcomes, against these benchmarks. We ask the community to set their priorities for the next fifteen years across all sectors but with the explicit warning that the money will stop, and we will leave. They must think: how will it be sustainable?
We apply this transparency to the resources World Vision brings into a community. We put up on the chalkboards and charts in village after village what currency we are bringing in, what we are promising to do and over what time period. And we ask the CVA group to keep us accountable. Equally, we ask the community what they will be providing in labour and even funding, though they are desperately poor. It is their community and their lives, and they need to contribute. The accountability promoted by CVA is critical at the grassroots level, as otherwise introduced resources can disrupt a community.
In early 2012 I was in New York attending an International Conference on Children’s Rights held at the UN, where I was participating on some panels representing World Vision. One evening Merridie and I were invited to a private home for a fundraising event for cancer research. There I met Rupert Murdoch and his then wife, Wendy. President Obama had just won a second term and I asked Rupert if that was bad for Fox News, which had openly campaigned against him. Rupert was adamant it was great for Fox News. Surprised, I asked him why. He said that it would be great for ratings because the 47 per cent who voted against Obama and hated him would be watching Fox even more assiduously.
I was shocked at how politics had been reduced to a commercial gain. In that conversation Rupert was congratulated by another person in the group for a tweet calling for gun restrictions, saying that guns were out of control in the USA. When asked if he would consider a gun control campaign on Fox News, Rupert said it would not be appropriate as Fox does not do campaigns. Seriously?
Sometimes advocacy begins with my own mob. Many African churches have been swept up in prosperity theology. This starts with a truth – that God wants to bless us – but interprets that in narrowly material terms. The ‘big man’ tribal culture of Africa has morphed into preachers in megachurches living opulent lives out of the giving from their poor congregants. Faith becomes a formula for giving in order to be blessed; but only the big man and his coterie seem to get the blessing. Prosperity theology implies that to be poor is sinful and to be truly saved is to be rich, so it damns Christians for a lack of faith if they are poor.
This also has local implications. I am proud of an Aussie export that dominates radio music and shapes culture in many Asian and African nations: Hillsong music. It is a phenomenon. But I had a difficult start in my relationship with Hillsong when I critiqued You Need More Money, the book by Brian Houston, the founder of Hillsong. I objected to his teaching that you should go to the best suburb, and the best street in that suburb, and stand in front of the best house and say, ‘This is what God wants for me.’ My comment that ‘the quickest way to degrade the Gospel is to turn it into a formula for making money’ broke out into the mainstream press. To Brian’s credit he admitted the book had erred.
Hillsong do some wonderful work in many areas of need, including our detention centres, and eschew a pure prosperity theology, which is important given their influence in Africa and elsewhere. And I agree with what Brian was trying to say, that we too often operate out of a scarcity model and there is plenty of wealth in the world, not scarcity. So my journey of reconciliation with Hillsong had seen both of us shift and gain a better understanding of each other’s perspectives.