Moments before last year's DFAT-led Anschluss of the un-organisation formerly known as AusAID a highly trained strike force from the National Library of Australia was parachuted into its besieged headquarters to locate, extract and preserve evidence it had once existed.
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AusAID, as keen readers of The Canberra Times would be aware, was one of the first victims of the Abbottification of the Federal bureaucracy in the wake of the fall of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Government.
Catherine Aldersey, the NLA's ephemera officer, who reigns supreme in a sealed, climate controlled, bunker-like enclave the size of an underground car park buried within the bowels of the library on the lake, said when the integration of AusAID with DFAT was announced shortly after the poll result was made public, she immediately thought it would be a good idea to get hold of some of the working documents, paraphernalia, publications and other artefacts the aid agency had either generated or used in its almost 40 years of existence.
This was a view shared by some of the people who worked there, who feared that given the very different cultures and aims of the two organisations that much of significance may have been lost.
While both DFAT and AusAID worked in the foreign affairs space there was a strong perception in the former that the latter viewed assistance as a tool of statecraft, not as an end in itself that should be managed on purely humanitarian lines.
While Gang Gang is not buying into that particular tribal dispute, we do welcome the fact the NLA's intervention, driven in large measure by Ms Aldersey's commendably well-developed bowerbird tendencies, has scored for the nation a collection of documents and artefacts (including items of clothing issued to workers in the field) that makes it plain that successive Coalition and Labor Governments felt it was best to keep aid and diplomacy at arms length for almost four decades.
Whether or not the new arrangements, which still appear to lack a certain element of definition, will hold up as well remains to be seen….
Whatever! The best evidence that AusAID (and some of its predecessors) was not squandering public money comes from some of the material now secreted away in the NLA stack.
Speaking of her collection of merit badges, handed out to students who had done well in programs sponsored by AusAID and the like, one retired aid worker told the NLA the items had often been manufactured so economically she was "almost ashamed" to hand them out.
Ms Aldersey said there had been genuine concern within AusAID that unless the NLA collected some of the material that the identity of the aid body would disappear.
Robin Davies, a former AusAID staffer and the Associate Director of the Development Policy Centre, concurs. He blogged in 2013 that there was a sense "one organisation [AusAID] is being consumed by another whose objectives might not exactly coincide with those of the government. The government wants a focused, high-quality aid program that strengthens Australia's bilateral relationships. It can't be easy for anybody inside AusAID to see how its disintegration could serve that end".
