Australia was once considered one of the world's most generous aid donors. More recently, Canberra has been criticised for pushing back plans to increase aid spending and for diverting money from overseas development projects to help pay for controversial asylum-seeker schemes at home and in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Oxfam has accused the government of treating the aid budget like an ATM machine and Samah Hadid, from the Global Poverty Project, has lamented that, as Australians prepare to vote in September's federal election, the country's major parties have shown "the weakest global poverty commitments in years".