Aid groups may have to wait more than a decade before the federal government even considers raising foreign aid spending in real terms as Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the government would not "borrow money to give it to people overseas".
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But Mr Abbott said on Thursday the government still aspired to lift aid spending to the Millennium Development Goal target, made by the Howard government, of spending 0.5 per cent of gross national income on aid.
Foreign aid spending took a $7.6 billion hit over five years in the federal budget, including a two year freeze at $5 billion annually, while spending will only begin to rise again in line with inflation from 2016-17.
On Thursday, Mr Abbott defended the decision as he argued it was implausible for Australia to "borrow money to give it to people overseas".
"The former government constantly pushed the target off, as soon as it was time to increase the spend it pushed it off for another year,'' he told Sky News.
"What we’ve said is that it remains an aspiration but we are not going to contemplate that situation until we have got the budget back into a situation of strong and sustainable surplus.”
In April, Mr Abbott told the Sydney Institute his government hoped to deliver a "strong surplus" in a decade, and the federal budget papers project a surplus of 1 per cent of GDP by 2023-24.
During question time on Thursday, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop flagged a coming shift in Australia's aid delivery performance benchmarks to ensure the taxpayers could be confident aid money was delivered effectively.
"Gone will be the days when Labor would make a big announcement about an increase in the aid budget and then when no one was watching they would rip money out to plug holes in their blow-outs elsewhere. In the last 15 months of Labor, $5.7 billion was ripped out of the aid budget,'' she said.
But Labor foreign affairs spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek called on the government to reveal which programs and countries would miss out because of the budget cut.
"The Abbott government said it would provide certainty on overseas aid, but all it has delivered is chaos, cuts, and broken promises,'' she said.
