Australia is an affluent country, so do Australians have a responsibility to give aid to struggling nations? How is aid money best spent, and is there ever a downside to helping to those less fortunate? There are many arguments surrounding financial aid, with some arguing that it is a moral duty to give as much as we are able, and others saying that aid is a disincentive for development.
Peter Singer and Tim Costello join a panel of researchers and economists to debate these issues at an event hosted by the University of Melbourne.
Bio
Robyn Archer
Robyn Archer is a singer, writer, director, and public arts advocate. Known to many for her major stage success as "A Star is Torn," Archer is also a writer, including of political songs like "Pack of Women" and "Kold Komfort Kaffee."
Over the past decade she has been Artistic Director of several arts festivals. She has recently been appointed as Creative Director of the Canberra Centenary 2013.
Lisa Cameron
Lisa Cameron received her PhD (Economics) from Princeton University in 1996. She was appointed as a lecturer in the Economics Department at the University of Melbourne in January 1997. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in January 2000 and Associate Professor in January 2003.
She currently also holds the post of Research Associate at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University and has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the ILO, UNICEF and AusAID. Cameron is also currently the Director of the Asian Economic Centre.
Tim Costello
Tim Costello is one of Australia's leading voices on social justice issues. He's taken a prominent role in national debates on issues such as gambling, urban poverty, homelessness, reconciliation and substance abuse.
Costello has also been instrumental in keeping the issues surrounding global poverty on the national agenda since February 2004, when he joined World Vision Australia as Chief Executive. In June 2005, Costello was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO); and in 2006 he was named Victorian Australian of the Year.
Bob McMullan
In February 1988, Bob McMullan was sworn in as Senator for the Australian Capital Territory. In 1990 he was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer and in 1991 became Manager of Government Business in the Senate. In 1993 McMullan was appointed Minister for the Arts and Administrative Services and became a member of the Cabinet, the first time the Arts portfolio was represented in Cabinet. In January 1994, he was appointed Minister for Trade.
Following a redistribution of Canberra's House of Representative seats, McMullan stood for the seat of Canberra in 1996, and was elected. Following a redistribution in 1998, McMullan became Member for Fraser. Between 1996 and 2007 McMullan held a number of Shadow Ministerial positions. After the election of the Rudd Government in November 2007 McMullan was appointed as Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance.
John Roskam
John Roskam has been the Executive Director of the free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs since 2004. Before joining the IPA he taught political theory at the University of Melbourne. He was previously the Executive Director of The Menzies Research Centre in Canberra, has been a senior adviser and chief of staff to federal and state education minister, and was the manager of government and corporate affairs for a global mining company.
His publications include Australia's Education Choices (with Professor Brian Caldwell), "Terrorism and Poverty" in Blaming Ourselves, "Liberalism and Social Welfare" in Liberalism and the Australian Federation, and "The Liberal Party and the Great Split" in The Split Fifty Years Later.
His fortnightly column appears in The Australian Financial Review. He is a member of the Editorial Board of The Australian Journal of Public Administration, and Connor Court Press, and the Advisory Board of The Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration, Australia in Victoria, and is Vice-President of the Old Xaverians Soccer Club.
Peter Singer
Peter Singer was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Oxford, La Trobe University and Monash University, and has held several other visiting appointments. Since 1999 he has been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. From 2005 on, he has also held the part-time position of Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.
Peter Singer first became well-known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation. His other books include: Democracy and Disobedience; Practical Ethics; The Expanding Circle; Marx; Hegel; Animal Factories (with Jim Mason); The Reproduction Revolution (with Deane Wells), Should the Baby Live? (with Helga Kuhse), How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, Ethics into Action, A Darwinian Left, One World, Pushing Time Away, The President of Good and Evil, How Ethical is Australia? (with Tom Gregg), The Way We Eat (with Jim Mason) and The Life You Can Save. He also co-authored The Greens with Bob Brown, founder of the Australian Greens.
Singer was the founding President of the International Association of Bioethics, and with Helga Kuhse, founding co-editor of the journal Bioethics. Outside academic life he is the co-founder, and President of The Great Ape Project, an international effort to obtain basic rights for chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. He is also President of Animal Rights International.
Claire Slatter
Claire Slatter is a development expert and Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences at the Fiji National University. She has been a consultant with a number of Development agencies such as the WHO, UNDP Pacific Centre, IWDA, UNIFEM and Oxfam on issues around Gender Equality, Economic security and Human Rights and taught political studies in the Department of History and Politics at the University of the South Pacific for 17 years.
Slatter has a background in the nuclear free and independent Pacific movement, the women's movement, trade unionism and journalism, and is also a founding member of the third world feminist network, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), and was its general coordinator from 1997-2004. She is a graduate of the University of the South Pacific (B.A), the Australian National University (M.A.), and Massey University (PhD).
(born July 6, 1946, Melbourne, Vic., Austl.) Australian philosopher and animal rights advocate. He taught at Monash University (1977–99) and thereafter at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His 1975 book Animal Liberation helped popularize the animal rights movement. Singer argued that beings are deserving of moral consideration by virtue of their capacity to feel pleasure and pain, not on the basis of their sex, race, abilities, or species; to think otherwise is to endorse a prejudice, “speciesism,” that is no different from racism or sexism. Since the use of animals for food and in scientific research produces great suffering for animals but generally only small benefits for humans, these practices are almost always immoral, according to the utilitarianism Singer advocates. His stands on some other issues in bioethics, such as his view that the active euthanasia of severely disabled human infants is sometimes morally permissible, have generated considerable controversy.
Thank You ForaTv.
Public aid starts with the individual.
The finest contribution one individual can give to any society,
is a Happy Healthy SELF
Australians are Historically unique, isolated from Europe America and Asia, this gives them less responsibility to the Global events and Processes. Australia like New Zealand has always had strict Immigration during second world war when American ships docked in Sydney, Black sailers where left on the ship.Could not come ashore!
"For whom the bell tolls" it tolls for Thee"!
Your own first.
Global poverty starts at home,
like charity and LOVE.
Happiness starts with the individual!
member. 
