A Squirmy Question

With regard to politics, Mr Renner called this question a "squirmy" one. "Every organisation giving aid is a political one, but World Vision doesn't get involved in political parties here or overseas, (hough some of the groups we are working with are very political," he said.

Asked whether in giving aid priority to places with a Christian bias his organisation was not making religious distinctions, Mr Renner replied that "it may seem that way" but that the organisation acts on requests, and often requests come from churches. "We don't chase them, they chase us," he said. "We get a lot of requests for aid from churches and we don't have the resources to look beyond that, although there are some, as in Bangladesh, one of our biggest projects, which have no Christian contact. "If a Christian community asks us for help but it is not as poor as some other community then we always help the poorer first, always," he said.

Lindy Cassidy then said that she found claims by Mr Renner that World Vision tries to tread a middle path politically, neither supporting nor opposing unjust regimes "hard to swallow", because "what that means is that you work to maintain the status quo, whether the status quo is any good or not."

Not surprisingly, Mr Renner said he disagreed with this view. "We don't set out to criticise governments or regimes. I'm not saying that isn't a defensible stand to take. I don't hold any truck for martial law and neither does World Vision, but we are interested in people." Reiterating a statement made earlier that there is a pluralism in approaches to aid, he said that "to say there is only one right approach to aid is to be very naive."