Tony Abbott Quotes

We have already provided a strong humanitarian response to the problems in the Middle East and that response will be stronger within coming days.

C-17s should be ready to go at various military bases around the world packed with water, food, medical supplies, sleeping bags and tents, all prepared to be air dropped in alongside soldiers and doctors to begin relief efforts.

I think we are challenged in how we define humanitarian action today and how we relate to long-term needs. We are also confronted with legitimate expectations from the people who want us to respond far more thoroughly to their basic pleas than we would have done in a much more contained form of conflict.

The two things that could have been better is number one, to get major military force into the community almost immediately to make sure that there was law and order. Number two, we had enough helicopters to airlift food into the centers of population and those places.

This is the United States of America. It means we respond to our fellow Americans in times of crisis and emergency and disaster.

When you are pulling people out of the water and off of rooftops, there are no Republicans and no Democrats.

His unit is in charge of 5,000 homes, and they've only been able to search about 2 percent of them. People are standing on roofs or sticking their hands out of air vents so they can get rescued.

We are taking the steps necessary to be ready to send whatever assistance is requested of us, and we are preparing to receive citizens who seek refuge in our state.

Following the devastating India Ocean tsunami of 2004, I founded Chefs for Humanity, modeled after Doctors Without Borders, but comprised of chefs. There wasn't anything out there like it, and there was a definite need for chefs to be able to offer assistance and aid.

Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives.

My father did a lot of disaster relief work, and he was always in places where there was a lot of pain.

In a world full of competing emergencies and disasters, it really helps if there is an international locomotive that can help us bring attention - help us bring resources.

I have been working, as emergency relief coordinator, on an international scale, very hard to build a wider alliance of partners in assistance efforts.

In the pandemonium of the crisis in New Orleans, somehow getting people on busses took priority over keeping them alive.

You have to first handle the humanitarian crises and troops are very useful for doing that.

Responding to a natural disaster is a complex problem.

There is never a humanitarian solution for a humanitarian crisis. The solutions for the humanitarian crisis are always political ones.

Access to humanitarian assistance and information are all the more important during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The principal cause of suffering during humanitarian crises is insufficient respect of applicable rules of international humanitarian law.

As conflicts last longer, as the scale of needs increase, we are having to adapt. There is an increasing blurring between immediate humanitarian assistance and long-term development needs.

What we have is a great number of people working extremely hard to make sure that death number stays where it is and the people that have to go to shelters are taken care of tonight and for as many days as it takes and that we support our first responders that are out there keeping security.

First there is the search and rescue phase that is now ending. It is a cruel reality.

Who takes care of their people better? FEMA or Hezbollah?

I think there was an overemphasis in the early stage on militarization rather than directly providing relief. I don't think it has any long-term significance.

We should be focused on the Haiti earthquake victims, not on what contracts your company should get, if you're a friend of Bill [Clinton].