Something encouraging happened recently: the Australian government listened!
We know that serious issues like the beauty of wind farms, whether ministers should appear on a particular TV show, or how much the Speaker spent on travel must be given due attention and consideration by our elected officials.
With all of this and more on the government’s plate, it was positive to hear that Foreign Minister Julie Bishop met with the executive director of the UN’s World Food Program, Ertharin Cousin, when she was in Australia earlier this month.
In case you had forgotten, the WFP is the largest humanitarian organisation in the world working to fight hunger across the globe. With its international partners, the WFP is able to provide food assistance to 80 million people in 82 countries around the world.
The meeting between these two great women wasn’t just a photo opportunity. Ms Bishop took time to listen to what Ms Cousin had to say, with their conversation resulting in a new partnership between Australia and the WFP to the tune of $167.5 million over four years.
This kind of partnership is a great example of what our government can and should be doing to help people most in need.
The money will be really important for countries like East Timor, Laos, the Philippines, and our pacific neighbours. It will be strategically invested in innovative solutions like school feeding programs, which encourage children, especially girls, to go to school.
Programs like these have a huge impact. Dungkar Drupka, a young boy from a village in the south-Asian nation of Bhutan, was given access to school meals back in 1973. He remembers being fed “world food” which included “extremely tasty Australian rice.”
Now, more than 40 years later, Drupka runs the WFP’s food assistance operations in Bhutan, providing children in schools with hot and nutritious meals every day. What an incredible story of sustainable and life-changing investment.
Also built into the partnership is flexibility to respond to natural disasters, like this year’s earthquake in Bhutan’s neighbour Nepal. These terrible incidents can destroy livestock and wipe out crops in affected countries and throw the availability of nutritious food into perilous uncertainty.
We should be grateful that we live in a society where we can ask things of our government. We should be grateful that our nation’s leaders take the things said by the people they govern, and global experts, seriously.
We should be grateful that our government is prepared to use the money collected from each one of us to help the most disadvantaged people in the world.
Why don’t we all take this great news as an opportunity to say thanks to Julie Bishop for listening to what we have to say? I’m sure she’d love to hear from us.
You can send her a message via her personal website, write on her Facebook page or send her a tweet.
Tell her you’re grateful she’s listening, and share your ideas for what more our government can do to help achieve Zero Hunger in our lifetime.