What did surprise me was the apparent blind faith in the efficacy of the neo-liberal economic ideology that was driving these changes.

Surely these politicians must have noticed that such an ideology was on the nose internationally. Why then was our government reaching back in time to a system that had never worked and was clearly breaking down?

In August 2015 foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop released a ministerial statement on engaging the private sector in aid and development.

Some time later she announced what she called a “new flagship initiative” in foreign aid by inviting “businesses and their partners to directly approach the Australian government with proposals for new or redesigned initiatives that create new commercial opportunities whilst addressing specific aid objectives of the Australian government”.

Our aid programs were to shift from a humanitarian focus to a mercenary focus.

I realise that targeted economic enhancement is a useful tool in any aid program but this was going too far.

Teaching people to fish rather than giving them fish is an old adage. Now we were going to sell them hooks and lines instead. To cite another cliché, it was akin to putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank.

And this was occurring in tandem with the most savage cuts to the Australian aid program in its history.

With all this in mind I was curious to read the latest DFAT report on its aid program, particularly as it related to Papua New Guinea.

This was not as easy as it sounds. The slick report is loaded with statistics and colourful charts that are hard to decipher. Statistics and charts are, after all, a great way to obscure actual outcomes. They are a great way to turn facts into propaganda.

I’ve always wondered why governments put so much faith in these kinds of indicators. Back in my public service days I recall fudging and misrepresenting facts and numbers in my own ‘personal performance indicators’ reports.

When you transfer this bureaucratic propensity to a nation’s foreign aid program, the distortions become breathtaking. Thus it is with the DFAT report.

How do I know this? Well, it’s fairly simple, I’ve looked at some of the programs and I’ve talked to people who have done likewise.

I once cruised up the Aramia River in Western Province and observed the outcome of an aid project designed to deliver safe water to the villagers through the provision of rain water tanks.

What I saw was dozens of tanks abandoned on the river banks or, where they had actually been erected, leaking profusely from the holes caused by teenagers practising their archery skills.

And yet in the statistics this program was lauded as a great success. Some 150 poly-tanks delivered to about 40 villages at a cost of countless kina. What an achievement!

No one from AusAID had bothered to visit the villages to see how it the project had worked out. A bit too far and muddy for them, I suspect.

And they didn’t want to know anyway, they were too busy ordering more tanks from one of their business mates for another project on the Purari River.

This kind of thinking, where bureaucratic exigencies outweigh practical results, has dogged Australian aid in Papua New Guinea for decades.

Savagely cutting the money available for the program and then inviting private enterprise in to plunder those funds doesn’t seem to me to be a wise use of Australian taxpayer’s money.

But that’s not what it is really about, is it? It’s all about helping to line the pockets of the people delivering the aid.

It will be interesting to read the 2016-17 report when it hopefully includes details of Australia’s “successful” involvement in the recent PNG elections.