Just when we thought our concerns about NZAID money being used to fund Jane Kelsey's attendance at anti-globalisation events went by unnoticed someone takes notice. Murray McCully has this to say:
NZAID Funds Radicals and Trouble-makers
Like nature’s innocents located at the worldwide headquarters of mccully.co, most New Zealanders will have fondly imagined that the aid monies generously provided by this country’s taxpayers are targeted at improving the lives of the World’s poor and dispossessed. And, at least in part, we would all be wrong. Leaving aside the sneaking suspicion that rather too much of our aid budget ends up indirectly in the hands of NGO bureaucrats, it is clear that some NZAID monies are ending up in the hands of the least deserving.
Take for example the 2002 donation of $2000 from the Council for International Development-administered NZAID NGO Travel Fund to well known leftist Professor Jane Kelsey for the purpose of representing the radical organisation ARENA at “The World is Not For Sale” meeting in Oslo. This was not, in an ordinary sense, a conference, but rather a gathering of extreme leftist forces from around the world for the purpose of disrupting the World Bank conference being held at that time. As a reasonably well-paid professor at a major New Zealand university, it might have been imagined that Ms Kelsey could afford to indulge her left-wing fetishes at her own expense, without stripping funds from the mouths of the World’s starving millions.
An inspection of the list of donations over the years demonstrates a propensity on the part of NZAID to dispense small amounts of taxpayers’ cash to such activists. That the recipients appear to be uniformly of a left-wing persuasion raises questions of judgment about the officials who dispensed the cash. That left wing activists are paying fancy hotel bills with cash intended to feed the World’s poor and hungry is something that must, in due course, be addressed.
