Note from Rowland: I spent an exciting/strategic decade with World Vision – and we talked about most of this back then (in the 1980s). But (my former parishioner) Tim Costello has the commitment, contacts, and intelligence to put this into practice. Terrific!

*****

World Vision CEO and potential parliamentarian Tim Costello wants to change the world for the better.

Making a difference
Michael Short
September 27, 2010

I can resist everything but temptation
OSCAR WILDE

THE temptation of Tim. We’ll come back to that, and why the name Costello might – arguably should – once again storm the parliamentary stage.

World Vision Australia chief executive Tim Costello has all the attributes one might seek in a political participant: passion, ideas, experience, knowledge and commitment. He does lack one thing – a seat in Parliament. But the bigger impediment, the potential conflicts and familial discomfort of having a brother at the height of government, disappeared when Peter Costello retired after the 2007 election.

The thing stopping Tim Costello, a former mayor of St Kilda, from having another shot at representative politics, in Canberra or maybe Melbourne, is the belief he can better generate change outside the parliamentary system.

”Politicians have a really important role and we’re far too cynical about them,” he says. ”But it’s a narrow role. They have to operate in this narrow space that the public allows to stay in touch with an election. I can actually kick open that narrow space and make it bigger for them because of the things I do outside.

”I don’t think a long way ahead. People say surely you developed a public profile because you want to cash it in and go into politics? Politics was always my temptation but not my vocation. I feel absolutely committed to what I’m doing.”

Costello can kick hard. His TV interview in The Zone covers much – from faith, to the lamentable behaviour of our political leaders, to Kevin Rudd’s fall – and demonstrates why this former Baptist minister feels he can make more of an impact as an external activist than he might as a cabinet minister.

The trigger for our encounter was a fundamental change in the operation one of the world’s biggest relief and development agencies.

Costello, aided by actor Hugh Jackman, has repositioned World Vision’s Australian arm, which raises about $350 million each year and has 700 staff. Until now, the operation has been focused on generating money through the sponsorship of individual children, about 400,000 of whom are supported by donations from within Australia.

The radical change is the launch of SEE Solutions, SEE standing for social and economic empowerment. It will allow donors to give to specific projects, via micro-credit programs. It funnels seed funding for business and community ventures to individuals and collectives, including a community bank in Rwanda, job training for youths in Senegal, coffee farming co-ops in Kenya and business training in Ecuador.

”World Vision will still be doing child sponsorship, and those dollars actually deal with the basics of health and education and the opportunities for better agriculture,” Costello says. ”But essentially they are a charity model, which is needed because you need that foundation to get out of poverty. We’re overlaying that with SEE Solutions, which is an economic empowerment model.

”SEE Solutions is really saying let’s make sure that we give access to credit to farmers, who can organise into co-operatives and have mentors to help them say, ‘This is why the coffee isn’t quite up to export trade, these are the middlemen who are ripping you off, this is where you need to advocate for a bridge that isn’t there so you can’t get your coffee to market.’

”So, the overlay of economic opportunities – a business approach – is really what SEE Solutions is about.”

Peter (rather than Tim) Costello is the sibling more usually associated with markets and business. But the brothers both embrace liberal market solutions. Both would probably argue morality facilitates markets and economic development tends to flourish in freer societies, where economic growth lifts people from poverty.

”Peter sits on the World Bank and he certainly has great passion around some of the economic empowerment issues and open, fair and free markets,” Costello says. ”And on that issue we are absolutely on the same page.”

Tim Costello has looked and learned, most recently from the travails of his mate Kevin Rudd. Mates are allowed to be blunt, and Costello reckons Rudd made a massive error by abandoning the climate change issue, having elevated it to almost biblical status by calling it the great moral challenge of our time.

Costello is hopeful the hung parliament that in part resulted from climate change policy disillusionment may, paradoxically, result in action on climate change.

”I think now we have a very unique opportunity, thanks to the election result, thanks to such a big vote for the Greens to say you know what, we have to face it. Otherwise, this generation will be robbing the next generation of their future, and that’s immoral and unethical.”

But it’s on policies to relieve poverty that Costello has most to say. And here lies the main reason he may well continue to resist the political overtures that have come for the past couple of decades. The global effort he is part of, including the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals and the Make Poverty History operation, is making a difference.

Twenty-five years ago 60,000 children around the world were dying each day. Two years ago that had been reduced to 30,000 children dying each day. Now such deaths have been reduced to 22,000.

”So this is a good news story and Australians should be really excited about that.”

A bad news story Australians should be appalled by, Costello indicates with disappointment but not rancour, is the way Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott demonised some of the most vulnerable, needy people a rich, multicultural community like ours can encounter: those seeking asylum from persecution in places where people will die for a chance to approximate what we take for granted here.

Before the last election, Tim Costello wrote an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald. He wrote: ”Our political leaders have the capacity and the responsibility to reframe the issues upon which this next election will be fought. We can only hope that on both domestic and international issues there will be a triumph of compassion over fear and scaremongering.”

I suggest he must be disappointed, given the readiness with which Gillard and Abbott grabbed the dog whistle.

”Yes, I am; not in Australia’s response, but the way leaders have framed this question. The importance of leadership is actually to explain why there’s a UN convention on refugees, why we take seriously the persecution.

”The great driving force right through history is parents who will make unbelievable sacrifices just so their kids might get a chance. All of our parents did it for us; even if their lives weren’t as enjoyable as they could have been, they would sacrifice for their kids.

And when you say to people, ‘Those fleeing with their kids from persecution are no different to us; let’s actually get on the same common page of humanity. There isn’t a queue. Let’s be generous about the numbers we take and not prejudiced in our reactions,’ most people start to give you a hearing.”

So, why does Tim Costello want a hearing? Why does he care?

”I have always felt that the great lottery of life is unfair. The fact is that I was thrown up on the stage of life called Australia. You don’t choose where you’re thrown on to this stage. So universal health, universal education, of course plenty of food and clean water.

”If I had been born in Mozambique or the 100 countries where World Vision works, the choices to reach my full potential, my destiny, would have been determined just by where I was born. So for me that lottery can be challenged, is being challenged, and I find that profoundly and morally serious in terms of how I structure my life.”

There is too much cynicism in public life. We know why that is, but sometimes someone comes along with a statement as unimpeachable as Costello’s latitudinal lottery allusion, and we should applaud, particularly when words are matched by action.

Which is why it might be so interesting were he, despite today’s deflections, to one day find himself with a swearing-in Bible at the Governor-General’s residence in his hand – and a bit more of Oscar Wilde in mind: ”The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

If he does, bet on him being an independent, not a Liberal, but liberal, with a vocation to help create a better, fairer society.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/making-a-difference-20100926-15s9u.html