There are some quasi-eternal verities about Australian aid, as there are about many other Western countries’ development assistance. These are briefly that who gets the aid depends largely on the state of political relations with that country; that the growth in Australian aid annually is a function of ’incremental creep’ – that is last year’s amount plus an inflation factor; that the terms and conditions of our aid (which are good) are an outcome of a stalemate within the federal bureaucracy; that the purposes of our aid change slowly in response to changes in international thinking on development; that aid is generally not a domestic or foreign political issue, since politicians find little mileage in it with an electorate generally uninformed or else acquiescent in its humanitarian purposes.