At a time when the world is giving more to aid, Australia has cut its aid budget by a quarter. What does this say about the kind of country we want to be?

‘A recent Dfat report found that every $1 of aid delivers $1.50 in value on the ground.’ Photograph: Ngoc Vo/The Fred Hollows Foundation

The late Professor Fred Hollows said it was obscene to let people go blind when they didn’t have to. The same can be said of letting people go hungry, or without clean water, or without an education that allows them to escape poverty.

It’s the reason organisations like the Fred Hollows Foundation exist – a deep sense of the utter unfairness of the gap between rich and poor, and the daily proof that our work has an impact.

This week we’ve seen a different type of obscenity: the incomprehensible decision by the Abbott government to tear another $3.7bn from the Australian aid budget in the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook. Added to the $7.6bn already cut in May’s federal budget, it means one quarter of the aid budget is gone and Australian aid is now the lowest since 1954.

The Lucky Country is allocating less than 1% of all government expenditure to help the world’s poorest. The Fred Hollows Foundation already had to axe programmes in Africa, Indonesia, China and Vietnam to cope with a $1.9m shortfall in federal funding after May, including a programme in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta that would have screened up to 20,000 people and restored sight to up to 2,300.

The government promised not to make further cuts to aid. Just last month, foreign minister Julie Bishop said aid was the “flagship” of the government’s foreign policy. Now it’s a flagship with a quarter of its hull missing.

Panicked by political and budgetary problems at home, Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann looked over the fence for easy solutions. They hoped few would notice and fewer would care.

I hope that over time people will be able to reflect on the significance of the decision announced in a room in Canberra on Monday. It’s not just about a broken promise, it’s a question of who we want to be as a nation.
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Times are tough with rising unemployment, falling housing affordability and high living costs, but we’re still relatively well-off compared to developing countries.

The majority of our support comes from the Australian public and the corporate sector, who donate generously to help restore sight in more than 20 developing countries. People do whatever they can – a boy in NSW is breeding guinea pigs to raise money for us, while an Adelaide man walked the length of New Zealand.

These dollars support much of our work in places like Nepal, Timor-Leste and Pakistan. But government funding makes these public donations stretch further, to help more of the 32.4 million people living with avoidable blindness today. Why is the government pulling its hand back, while ordinary Australians keep reaching into their pockets?

Looking at it from the heart, this money puts medical staff in the poorest communities where people have no other access to life-changing eye care. They walk in blind, and walk out able to see their families again, earn a living or go to school.

Australian aid is excellent value for money. A recent Dfat report found that every $1 of aid delivers $1.50 in value on the ground. Our own research showed that for every $1 invested in preventing someone from going blind, at least four times the financial benefit goes to the economy. It’s a 400% return on the investment.

The work of aid organisations also contributes to a much bigger picture: achieving the millennium development goals. As a sign of their success, one goal – halving the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day – was achieved in 2010, five years ahead of schedule.

World leaders have vowed to maintain the momentum and are setting new goals for post-2015. Restoring the sight of a cattle herder in Kenya might seem a long way from the floor of the UN general assembly, but sustainable aid is critical to meeting global development priorities.

Not only is the federal government giving less while Australians are still giving generously, it is doing less when the international community is vowing to do more. We have slipped down to 19th out of 28 developed countries in terms of foreign aid, giving less than countries like Portugal.

Fred Hollows would be appalled. He never listened to politicians, bureaucrats, or anyone else who refused to help people who needed it most. He said, “I’m egalitarian. It’s pretty bloody obvious.”

That’s what most Australians want their country to be. But there’s nothing egalitarian about deep cuts to Australian aid.