Tim Blair: Can we please call time on the hostage puppies?

Money can only end starvation, poverty and pain if third world corruption and first world bureaucracy don’t consume it first, writes Tim Blair.

We’ve all encountered a hostage puppy or two. Problem is, not all of us have realised it.

Once you’ve learned of them, however, you’ll be seeing hostage puppies everywhere. US computer scientist and author Perry E. Metzger recently described how this common but crafty strategy works:

“A group spends much or most of its time and money in horrible, counterproductive ways, but they are also keeping an extremely cute and vulnerable puppy alive.

“If anyone tries to cut their funding or shut them down, they wheel out the puppy, show its soulful eyes to the cameras, and explain that if their budget is cut or they are shut down, the cute little puppy will die.”

We’ve witnessed this often in Australia. Whenever the ABC’s funding was previously threatened, for example, pro-ABC activists would anxiously announce that Bananas in Pyjamas were up for execution. Perhaps those activists have moved on since then, and will next offer Bluey as a literal hostage puppy.

Defund all three of ’em, I say. Not that it would make much difference, because hostage puppies breed at a ferocious rate. Especially in the Middle East.

People watch speakers at Melbourne Town Hall during a Friends of the ABC (FABC) rally. Picture: AAP Image/Penny Stephens

Actual puppies are relatively rare in Gaza, where Hamas – enforcing anti-dog beliefs held by some Islamic followers – previously banned dog-walking in markets, roads and along beaches.

But metaphorical hostage puppies abound. Hamas kidnaps, rapes and murders Israelis - including infants – and uses its own children to shield military installations, then deploys the old hostage puppy ruse when Israel responds.

This was a successful tactic, for a time. Australian university students were particularly sucked in by Palestinian hostage puppy pleading.

Protesters gather on the lawns of The University of Sydney in support of a pro-Palestine encampment. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Maybe, just maybe, they’re less sympathetic now after discovering in detail how Hamas and their Gaza fans (obscenely financed by Western aid) slaughtered 32-year-old Shiri Bibas and her children, four-year-old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir.

Subsequent to those horrific murders, a friend who has long supported the Palestinian cause is now coming around to my point of view. We’re both in favour of a two-state solution, but in our case it’s one big state of Israel and a smaller state of Israel next door.

Consider that as part of a wider and very welcome do-gooder and charity-sector reset, driven by recent exposure of the United States Agency for International Development’s ridiculous funding.

Truly, USAID never met a hostage puppy it didn’t love. The Trump White House last month listed several examples of USAID excess, including: $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”; $70,000 for production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland; $2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam; $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia; $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru; and $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala.

Overall, USAID’s budget runs at about $40 billion per year. The above examples only come to a total of $6.14 million – just .015 per cent - so imagine the full, frightening extent of USAID’s decades of waste.

Pro-Ukrainian activists demonstrate in front of the White House in Washington, DC. Picture: Tierney L Cross / AFP

Credit to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, I guess, who saves money by being his own hostage puppy, big, sad, soulful eyes and all. Too bad nobody ever taught him how to wear a tie or do other human-impressing tricks, otherwise his meetings might run a little more smoothly.

Representatives of what we might call Big Charity are not best pleased by all of this. World Vision Australia chief executive Daniel Wordsworth is critical of those who are “making fun of silly supposedly USAID funded projects … this is not what I have seen and been part of for my working life”.

Poor bloke needs to spend more time in Colombia. USAID can probably line up tickets to one of those hit transgender operas.

“It’s convoys of trucks filled with emergency food supplies driving through the deserts to feed millions,” Wordsworth told The Australian, pointing to charity’s grander purpose.

“It’s doctors and nurses running health clinics up distant rivers or in overcrowded slums.”

Yes, it is all of this. The thing is, though, that it’s always been all of this. There has never been a time in any of our lives when we haven’t seen heartbreaking images of third world suffering and been asked to donate.

So we do. Yet the misery continues, generally in the same broken, blighted areas.

At a certain point, it should become clear that funding isn’t the answer. Money can only end starvation, poverty and pain if third world corruption and first world bureaucracy don’t consume it first.

So let the worldwide charity re-evaluation keep rolling on.

And let it run over a few hostage puppies along the way.