In late April 1983, Mr Bill Hayden, the Australian Foreign Minister, set up an independent committee under the chairmanship of Sir Gordon Jackson to review the Australian overseas aid program.1 The report of the committee was tabled in Parliament on 7 June 1984.2 In the subsequent public debate on the Jackson Report, it became clear that the committee's position on various key issues on aid and development was often misrepresented. The misrepresentation could have been deliberate because the report adopted a strategy of development that was not universally accepted. It could also have been because the analytical framework adopted was not presented explicitly. The need to keep the report to a manageable size and the large number of issues that had to be covered, under the very wide terms of reference, might also have resulted in too terse a treatment of some of the central issues. This paper attempts to provide the analytical framework of the Jackson Report and to examine within this some of the important issues of aid and development.