Julie Bishop has defended her appointment of the Danish climate contrarian Bjørn Lomborg to her foreign aid innovation group, saying she wants people who can “think outside the square” and challenge the status quo.



The InnovationXchange was announced last month to harness “the expertise, creativity and networks of global leaders in business, civil society, philanthropy and academia, to drive innovation across Australia’s aid program”.

The foreign minister said Lomborg was just one of 14 eminent members on the international reference group. “I want people to think outside the square, I don’t want everybody to sit around and agree with each other,” she said.

Last month the Guardian revealed Lomborg had been given $4m by the Abbott government to set up the Australian consensus centre at the University of Western Australia. But the decision was met by opposition from UWA academics, some of whom have demanded the university break its agreement with the government to establish the $13m centre.

Bishop said while she had not been involved in the decision to give money to Lomborg’s consensus centre, she thought it was a good idea.

“You don’t want a groupthink approach,” she said. “Universities are incubators for ideas and challenging norms and challenging the status quo. So I think it sounds like a very good idea.”

She said the InnovationXchange would consider “seemingly intractable aid problems” that have not been resolved in spite of billions of aid dollars.

“Bjørn Lomborg is an economist and he has written and spoken on numerous occasions internationally about the way to approach the delivery of foreign aid,” she said. “His name was suggested to me by a number of eminent people and I was delighted that he accepted. But he’s one of about 14 people who will be on a board and I want different ideas.”

Bishop said although Australia had invested billions of dollars through the foreign aid budget in the region, the development indices in areas such as maternal health and infant mortality were going backwards.

“We can’t continue to spend billions of dollars and get worse outcomes,” she said. “So I selected a group of people that I know challenge orthodoxy, challenge the status quo. Come up with different ideas.”