Hello and welcome to an NZADDs update,
It’s Murray McCully commemoration time in the New Zealand media. We’ll have more to say about his legacy in coming weeks. But for now as a public service in the name of accuracy, I’ve prepared some charts to help in assessing the changes the minister wrought.
As the years since 2008 have shown, New Zealand needs a sustained, coordinated civil society voice that campaigns for better aid. In its absence, when the going has been tough, as it has in recent years, it is hard to effectively oppose changes for the worse. And even when the going isn’t so tough, a campaigning voice would help press for improvements.
New Zealand’s NGOs care about good aid, but it’s hard for any one NGO to speak in a concerted, ongoing way without risking its government funding. A peak body could do what individual NGO’s can’t. New Zealand’s peak body for aid NGOs is the Council for International Development, but it has always been heavily dependent on government funding too–funding which was slashed in 2010, leaving it capacity constrained (and still dependent on the government for over half of its income).
New Zealand needs a sustained, coordinated civil society voice that campaigns for better aid. And it could have one–if New Zealand’s aid NGOs were willing to devote a fraction of their revenue to the task.
New Zealand Aid and Development Dialogues 
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