Aus AID - Operation

Operation

The Minister for Foreign Affairs (and hence responsible for AusAID) is Bob Carr. The Director General is Peter Baxter.

The Australian government is committed to the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals —agreed targets set by the world's nations to reduce poverty by 2016-and incorporates the principles of aid effectiveness into all its activities.

The 2005–06 Annual Report recorded 18 staff in the senior executive service out of a total of 516 public servant staff. 68 AusAID public servants are serving long-term postings outside Australia. These figures do not include locally employed staff outside Australia.

Total Australian Official Development Assistance in 2005-06 was A$2,605 million, not all of it administered by AusAID. AusAID administered $1,587 million of expenses in 2005-06 and also had departmental expenses (i.e. under its direct control) of A$78 million.

AusAID's key manual is AusGuide - A Guide to Program Management, which is available on the AusAID website. However, changes in the approach to aid programming that crystallised in the government's 2006 White Paper have not yet been fully incorporated into a revised version of AusGuide. Many of the changes can be summarised as a move from traditional stand-alone projects managed by contractors to more sustainable, long-term programmes of assistance with untied procurement.

Over most of AusAID's existence, tenders providing services associated with aid programs were generally limited to firms from Australia or New Zealand, or firms doing substantial business in those countries; only in 2005 did the agency liberalise its guidelines to allow firms from the recipient country to apply for some tenders. The agency was considerably more liberal with construction contracts, allowing bidding from any company worldwide, though this has the effect of shutting out many potential bidders from recipient countries.

In 2002, as part of an international initiative, AusAID untied aid to Least Developed Countries. Since the White Paper in 2006, all AusAID procurement has been untied (i.e. open to international firms) except for the Australia Indonesia Partnership for Reconstruction and Development (AIPRD). There have not yet been significant numbers of contracts awarded to international firms.