Helen Clark sat down with Robin Davies on her March 2024 visit to the Australian National University to talk about whether governments and global institutions are ready to change the way they respond to pandemics.

Clark has had a long career in public service as New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and Co-Chair of the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

With this episode, we're relaunching our podcast after a more than two-year hiatus. In this new season, we'll bring you a mix of interviews, event recordings, and more in-depth documentary features relating to the topics we research at the centre, namely Australia's overseas aid, development in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, and regional and global development issues.

You can also listen to a public lecture that Helen Clark delivered at the ANU by visiting our sister Crawford School of Public Policy podcast, Policy Forum Pod.

Helen Clark will return to Australia to address the 2024 World Health Summit Regional Meeting, which will be held in Melbourne from 22 - 24 April 2024.

Download the transcript.

Photo credit: David Fanner / ANU.

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On the eve of the 2021–22 Federal Budget, Stephen Howes set out three tests for Australia’s aid budget: Will there be any further increases in aid next year? Will the government sustain any aid increases beyond this year and next? Will the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade provide an estimate of this year’s and next year’s Official Development Assistance (ODA)? In this ninth edition of Devpolicy’s aid budget breakfast, he answers those questions, provides analysis on the broader budget context and compares aid and defence spending. He also looks at specific aid updates, including how the Pacific Step-up has been funded, regional and sectoral trends, multilaterals and NGO aid. The analysis finishes with a look at some of the major aid initiatives in response to COVID-19 and Australian aid in the global context over the past decade.

>> view presentation

>> read blog

Speaker:
Professor Stephen Howes is Director of the Development Policy Centre and Professor of Economics at the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

Photo credit: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

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The Australia Pacific Training Coalition (APTC) is a major Australian government foreign aid initiative that commenced in 2008, that has spent over $350 million, and that has turned out over 15,000 graduates with Australian qualifications. In a recent Devpolicy Discussion Paper, Richard Curtain and Stephen Howes analyse graduate tracer surveys and show that employment outcomes for APTC graduate job-seekers have worsened over the last decade. This is mainly because of falling demand for the trades and hospitality qualifications APTC has offered since inception. They suggest a more demand-led approach to course selection and a greater focus on promoting international migration opportunities to improve employment outcomes for APTC graduates. In a related Policy Brief they propose that APTC should redirect its labour mobility efforts and focus on the Temporary Skill Shortage visa and those graduates who are eligible to migrate to Australia as skilled workers.

>> view presentation

>> view Discussion Paper

>> view Policy Brief

Speakers:
Dr Richard Curtain is a Research Fellow specialising in Pacific labour mobility at the Development Policy Centre, The Australian National University.

Professor Stephen Howes is Director of the Development Policy Centre and Professor of Economics at the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

Chair:
Sadhana Sen is Regional Communications Adviser at the Development  Policy Centre, The Australian National University.

Photo credit: Flickr/DFAT

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Australian foreign aid has changed considerably in the last 20 years. Dr Terence Wood discusses the findings of a recently published report that examines the changing nature of Australian government aid through the lens of publicly available data on aid flows, which provide evidence of change and allow direct comparisons between Australia and other OECD Development Assistance Committee donors. These comparisons help highlight where Australian aid conforms with international norms of good giving, where Australia lags behind the global community, and where it is a global leader.

Speaker:
Dr Terence Wood is a Research Fellow at the Development Policy Centre. His research focuses on the domestic political economy of aid in donor countries, public opinion about aid, NGOs, aid effectiveness in poorly governed states, and Melanesian electoral politics. 

>> view presentation

>> view report

Chair:
Ashlee Betteridge, Manager,  Development Policy Centre, The Australian National University

Photo Credit: DFAT/Timothy Tobing/CC BY 2.0

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Charles Scheiner presents the 2021 economic survey of Timor-Leste, outlining  the current economic situation, particularly in relation to the state budget, and the dominance of the Petroleum Fund in state finances. He also looks at future oil and gas possibilities, including Greater Sunrise and the Tasi Mane petroleum infrastructure project, and argues regardless of the paths Timor-Leste chooses to follow, investing in its people – through education, health and nutrition – is essential. 

The presentation is a draft of a forthcoming paper in the Pacific Survey series, published in the Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies journal.

Speaker:
Charles Scheiner is a researcher at La’o Hamutuk, the Timor-Leste Institute for Development Monitoring and Analysis, an independent, non-partisan, Timorese civil society research organisation. He specialises in the effects of oil and gas extraction, including on economics, governance, environment and revenue management. 

>> view presentation

>> view presentation with notes

Chair:
Professor Stephen Howes, Director, Development Policy Centre, The Australian National University

Photo credit: Charles Scheiner

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The economic costs of COVID-19 continue to mount, globally and in the Pacific. But what is the damage in the Pacific, and how are Pacific governments responding? In this webinar, panellists explore the economic damage caused by COVID-19 and the responses Pacific governments are taking. Professor Stephen Howes presents an overview based on the Pacific Covid Economic Database compiled by the Development Policy Centre. Dr Jenny Gordon, Chief Economist at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, assesses pathways to recovery post COVID-19 in Pacific Island economies. Dr Neelesh Gounder and Maholopa Laveil present their perspectives on Fiji and PNG, respectively.

Panellists:
Professor Stephen Howes, Director, Development Policy Centre, The Australian National University

» view presentation

Dr Jenny Gordon, Chief Economist, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

» view presentation 

Dr Neelesh Gounder, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of the South Pacific

Maholopa Laveil, Lecturer in Economics, University of Papua New Guinea

» view presentation

Chair:
Sadhana Sen, Regional Media Adviser, Development Policy Centre, The Australian National University

Photo credit: Gail Hampshire on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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Historically, Australia has lacked a coherent policy to attract immigrants with less extensive formal training and education, despite the needs of its ageing population and labour market. 

The Center for Global Development has recently concluded a project with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has produced two papers. Michael Clemens outlines the findings of the first paper, which estimates the demand for vocational workers in Australia by 2050 will exceed native supply by over two million. While there will be ample skilled labour available within Pacific Island countries, facilitating this movement in a managed way that maximises the development potential of migration will be key. To that end, Satish Chand discusses the second paper, which proposes the development of a ‘Pacific Skills Partnership’, a model that would facilitate skills creation across 14 low-income Pacific Island countries, with the greatest development potential lying in Papua New Guinea.

Speakers:

Michael Clemens is Director of Migration, Displacement, and Humanitarian Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he studies the economic effects and causes of migration around the world. 

>> Related paper:  Skill Development and Regional Mobility: Lessons from the Australia-Pacific Technical College – Working Paper 370

Satish Chand is a Professor of Finance in the School of Business at the University of New South Wales and based at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. His research interests include labour migration, fragile states, and the challenges of development.

>> View presentation

>> Related paper: A Pacific Skills Partnership: Improving the APTC to Meet Skills Needed in the Region

Chair:
Dr Ryan Edwards, Deputy Director, Development Policy Centre, The Australian National University

Photo: Hohola Youth Development Centre, PNG (DFAT/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

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It is time to fundamentally reframe the research agenda on migration, remittances, payments and development. Many policymakers in the developing world, and researchers, tend to view migrant remittances as windfall income, rather than as returns on investment, which is how families with migrants tend to see remittances. Migration is thus, among other things, a strategy for financial management in poor households: location is an asset, migration an investment.

Some of the most basic questions about remittances and their effects remain inadequately answered, in part because of a blinded research agenda. Asking better questions is a step towards better policies, programs and regulations and, above all, to enable people on low incomes to improve their lives.

In this webinar, based on the article “Migration and household finances: How a different framing can improve thinking about migration”, Timothy Ogden discusses some of the new and alternative research questions that emerge from the shift of perspective on remittances – from windfall to return on investment.

Speaker:
Timothy Ogden is Managing Director of the Financial Access Initiative, a research centre housed at New York University’s (NYU) Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service focused on how financial services can better meet the needs and improve the lives of low-income households.

>> view presentation

Chair:
Dr Ryan Edwards, Deputy Director, Development Policy Centre, The Australian National University

Photo credit: AU/UN Ist Photo/Stuart Price (Flickr CC0 1.0)

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In this panel event at the 2020 Australasian AID conference, John Langmore makes the case for stronger government and civil society commitment to conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Joanna Pradela argues that Australia should adopt a feminist approach to foreign policy, one that is grounded in gender equality. Pierre van der Eng analyses the rapid expansion of Australia’s foreign aid to Indonesia during the 1960s and 1970s in the context of Australia’s evolving foreign policy towards Asia. And Dave Green and Kaisha Crupi report on their analysis of Aid Program Performance Reports, including their purpose, how well they deliver on their purposes, the challenges associated with balanced public reporting on program performance, and the tension between public diplomacy and performance management objectives.

Presenters:

Security through sustainable peace (at 2:50 in)
Professor John Langmore AM, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, and Dr Tania Miletic, Research Fellow, Melbourne School of Government, University of Melbourne 

Feminist foreign policy: A new approach for a new era (at 15:38 in) 
Joanna Pradela, Director, Knowledge Translation, International Women's Development Agency (IWDA), and Alice Ridge, Research Policy and Advocacy Adviser, IWDA 
>> view presentation

‘Send them a shipload of rice’: Food aid and Australia-Indonesia bilateral relations, 1960s–70s (at 29:35 in)
Dr Pierre van der Eng, Associate Professor, Research School of Management, The Australian National University
>> view presentation

Where’s the dirty laundry? DFAT APPRs and the public diplomacy imperative (at 44:24 in)
Dave Green, Principal Consultant, Clear Horizon and Kaisha Crupi, Consultant, Clear Horizon
>> view presentation

Chair: 
Professor Caitlin Byrne, Director of the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

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In the Pacific over the past three decades, women’s domestic violence services have led advocacy for policy for increased gender equality, women’s human rights and in engaging men and boys as allies and advocates in prevention of violence against women. In partnership with regional governments, development partners and Australia’s aid and development resources, this model has provided agency, leadership and generated a significant shift towards building support and a more strategic approach. This panel of experts discuss their views on how best to engage men and boys for primary prevention of violence against women.

Panellists: 

Melkie Anton, male advocate for ending violence against women and development project adviser

Abigail Erikson, Program Specialist, UN Women 

Amy Gildea, Managing Director Asia and Pacific, Coffey International Development 

H.E. John Kali CMG OBE, High Commissioner for Papua New Guinea to Australia

Chair: 

Glenn Davies, Director, Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion Asia and Pacific, Coffey International Development 

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In November 2018, the Australian Government announced the Pacific step-up, taking its engagement with the Pacific to a new level. Despite this shift, new research finds that many people in the Pacific are concerned Australia does not know how to engage successfully as part of the Pacific community. 

This panel event at the 2020 Australasian Aid Conference outlines the key findings of research commissioned by the Whitlam Institute on the views of Pacific islanders from Fiji, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands on their countries’ and region’s future place in the world. The panel explore how these three island nations perceive Australians and the government’s policies and interventions in the Pacific, and makes some recommendations. 

>> Read the research report here

Panellists:

Dr Tess Newton-Cain, Principal, TNC Pacific Consulting

James Cox, Executive Director, Peacifica

Dr Geir Henning Presterudstuen, Lecturer, Anthropology, Western Sydney University

Linda Kenni, Local Consultant, Vanuatu

Chair:

Leanne Smith, Director, Whitlam Institute

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