On Australia’s doorstep, women, children and men are dying. They’re dying from malnutrition and from diarrhoea. They’re dying during childbirth. They’re dying because they can’t afford medicine, proper meals or shelter to keep them safe and healthy.

And they’re dying in their millions every year.

If this was happening on the suburban streets of Australia, we’d be doing everything we could to stop it. We’d be calling on the government to do everything they could. We’d be feeding the hungry and buying medicine for those we knew would die if we didn’t.

We’d be showing mercy.

The thing is – it’s not happening in Australia. Poverty certainly exists here, but not to anywhere near the extent it does in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia or India. I’ve heard mothers talk with tears in their eyes about how their children will die because they don’t know how they are going to feed them. I’ve seen children – girls as young as 7 – break rocks with their bare hands to make road base when they should be in school.

On Tuesday night, the Australian Government confirmed earlier cuts to foreign aid for the 2015/16 Budget.

It is a cut of an incredible $1 billion.

It’s the biggest cut to aid in Australia’s history and it makes us the least generous we’ve ever been.

It’s important that Australia remains stable and prosperous. But are we comfortable with it costing the lives the mothers, fathers and children who are our close neighbours?

It’s said that charity begins in your own backyard, but does it have to stop there? Helping people at home vs helping people overseas – it is a false contest. Every women, child and man deserves to live without poverty and hunger and with access to education and medical facilities – not just Australians. Where they live makes them no less ‘worthy’.

We are responsible for what happens in this world as a whole. If we, as one of the wealthiest countries in the world won’t help, who will?

Last year, Australian aid built 9,000 new classrooms and enabled over 1.3 million more children to enrol in school. It vaccinated more than 2.3 million children; gave access to critical services to 66,000 survivors of violence against women and gave 2.9 million people access to safe drinking water. It responded to emergencies in 24 countries including the devastating Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.

It’s in our own interest to give foreign aid. It creates a more secure, stable region and a safer, healthier world. It can work to lessen refugee flows and open up new, stable markets for economic growth.

At Opportunity International Australia, we see just how hard the mothers who receive our small loans to start their own businesses work to get their families out of poverty. They wake up before sunrise and go to bed well after midnight. They sew clothes by candlelight; they hand-plough fields; they walk for hours to sell their produce at the nearest market.

Without small loans, these mothers have no opportunities. They live like Alfrea in the Philippines, collecting garbage to try and earn a few cents to provide a meal for their children. They are desperate.

Because of this foreign aid cut, mothers like Alfrea will go without loans. They will come home at the end of the day and have to tell their children that there is nothing to eat tonight. And then in the morning, they will have to tell them that again.

Alfrea’s son Leo is 11 years old. His favourite games are playing with rubber bands and marbles. And he says he loves his mum because she tries to buy him medicine when he is sick. Sadly, so often she just can’t.

As Mother Theresa said:

It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.

With $1 billion less to give a hand up to families living in poverty and to respond to natural disasters, lives will be lost. You alone can’t make up for that kind of shortfall, but you can make a difference to the one.

You can help a mother like Alfrea.

Just $70 is enough to help fund a loan to enable her to start her own small business and provide for her children.

By giving her a hand up, you can remind her that Australians will not turn a blind eye.

Australia is not without mercy.

Please donate today.