Australia's tsunami aid to Aceh

According to the World Bank, the Australian Government has failed to ensure that aid money meant for Acehnese victims of the Asian tsunami receive it. Only one eighth of the billion dollars Australia promised the region has been contributed.

As a represenative of the World Bank explained to the ABC:

It'd be good to look at the Australian contribution, and maybe ask where it's going, because the initial public impression was oh it's a billion dollars for Aceh. When you dissect that, half of it is soft loans that the Government may or may not take up, but they certainly don’t need for Aceh, and then the $500-million in grants – only less than a quarter of that will go to Aceh, and the remainder will go to pursue broader strategic interests of the Indonesian and Australian Governments, throughout Indonesia.

Aid/Watch, an Australian non-governmental organisation that tracks Australian foreign aid activities, says the figure is only $50 million. Much less than even one eighth of a billion dollars. An Aid/Watch representative told the ABC:

...the primary concern is accountability and transparency, and the Australian Government haven't been very transparent or accountable in the regard to how much money has been allocated to this point, or how much of this money is actually for tsunami funds.

The Government response, courtesy of Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs Bruce Bilson, is this:

Some of the assistance and a large proportion of that funding is going directly into the immediate Banda Aceh area, but other areas of assistance is designed to benefit Banda Aceh but would have broader positive outcomes for Indonesia as a whole.

Not exactly the most insightful response.