There’s a buzz in Canberra this week as hundreds of Australian Christians gather for Micah Challenge’s annual Voices for Justice event.

The week-long advocacy and lobbying events at Parliament House and around Canberra bring together Christian supporters for Micah Challenge’s campaign calling on Australia to do its bit to meet the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, which in the year 2000 set the target of halving world poverty by 2015.

For Micah Challenge, the 2013 Federal election is the last election before the 2015 deadline.

Phil Chan is in Canberra with Micah Challenge’s ‘Voices for Justice’ this week.

Over 300 Christians from different denominations around Australia have converged on Canberra this week to join the Voices for Justice events, which include meeting with Members of Parliament, events at Parliament House, political forums and advocacy training. Phil Chan is one of them, and he’s blogging about his experiences.

“Day in and day out, politicians meet with their constituents and professional lobbyists, who are armed with their own agendas and issues,” Chan writes. “But over the next two days at Parliament House, our local politicians will be meeting with us, a motley crew of passionate Christians, half of whom are first-timers, determined to halve poverty by 2015.”

Chan outlines the three things on the mind of Christians in Canberra this week, which will be voiced to politicians:

“Following the Australian government’s decision to delay giving 0.5% of our gross national income to foreign aid to 2016, we want both sides of politics to have a timetabled commitment of 0.7% by 2020,” says Chan.

“We also want to see more effective aid, particularly investing a quarter of our aid budget into health. Following our water and sanitation campaign last year, there has been great progress on access to fresh drinking water but we want to see an increased focus on sanitation, which is still being neglected.

“Our third ask is to tackle tax evasion and corruption, which is a new campaign called “Shine the Light” launched by the Micah Challenge. Having very little knowledge about this issue, I was shocked at how corruption was acting as a brake on development. Shrouded in secrecy, big corporations are evading tax in a process called transfer mis-pricing. Many companies operate in developing countries, such as mining firms. Rather than paying tax in the source country, which would contribute to that country’s aid and infrastructure, the companies are moving their assets through tax havens to avoid paying tax.

“It’s a complex problem, but one that continues to go under the radar and really hinders our aid efforts and poor countries’ efforts to lift themselves out of poverty. So we’re asking our politicians to increase transparency by introducing country-by-country reporting for multi-national corporations registered in Australia.”

Voices for Justice participants will begin to meet with local MPs on Capital Hill tomorrow.

Featured image: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1387510