Sean Dorney
first went to Papua New Guinea in 1974 and has spent twenty of the
last twenty-five years (seventeen of those as the ABC Correspondent)
reporting on the politics, people and perplexities of Australia's
nearest neighbour. He has written two books on PNG. The second, 'The
Sandline Affair', published last year provides an in-depth examination
of the Chan Government's 1997 aborted attempt to introduce mercenaries
to the South Pacific to fight on the PNG Government's behalf in the
war on Bougainville.
In preparing
this address I trawled through the small sea of words I have spoken or
written about Papua New Guinea over the past decade. Shallow waters they
may be but amongst the items my net dragged up was the following from a
lecture I was invited to give to my old university, James Cook in
Townsville, in 1991 on the theme, Australia's Melanesian Future. I began
my talk that night with a tragic tale to illustrate how we Australians
and our neighbours often don't understand each other very well and how
easy it is for signals passing between us to be misinterpreted. This was
the tale:
On
Monday, November the 19th, 1990, an Australian Defence Force
helicopter practising high altitude flying in the Highlands of Papua
New Guinea landed in the village of Ogelbeng not far from Mount Hagen
to pick up a PNG Defence Force soldier from the village who had been
dropped off there several hours earlier. One of the older village men,
a father of four, strode towards the helicopter from the rear to
welcome the pilot. The co-pilot, foreseeing tragedy, waved frantically
in an attempt to warn him of danger. Apparently misinterpreting the
warning wave as an enthusiastic response to the welcome the villager
walked faster, thrust out his right arm for a handshake and died. The
spinning rear rotor blade cleaved him in two. The blade sheared off
from the impact. The Ogelbeng villagers impounded the disabled
helicopter, built a wooden fence around it and demanded $135,000
compensation from the Australian Government for the man's death.
That sort of
misunderstanding of what the other side means happens again and again in
our relationships with Papua New Guinea, though of course not always
with such shocking results. Over the years I have found that almost
every assumption I have made when reporting in and about Papua New
Guinea has been proved wrong. Further on in that B.J. Dalton Lecture to
the James Cook University audience, I made an attempt at explaining why
the misinterpretations continue and how differently the people in each
country probably see the other.
The
countries of Melanesia are not simple to understand. Especially not
for we Australians, members as so many of us are of a migrant,
transplanted, European culture. If over the past twenty years we have
built up any mental picture of Melanesians at all it is probably one
that classifies them as having barely emerged from the tribalised
Stone Age; tending to revert at a moment's pretext to barbarism;
susceptible to ravenous corruption; jealous of our Western, we would
like to believe hard-won and hard-worked-for, lifestyle; and, the men
amongst them anyway, rapists lusting after the poor, brave white women
who foolishly dare to live amongst them.
To present the
view from the other side let me try to describe how, I believe, we are
seen by some of our Melanesian neighbours. In their eyes we Australians
are land-snatching migrants from the other side of the world; lumbering
awkwardly around a region that is not ours; money spilling from our
pockets; soulless in the way we dispatch our aged parents into
prison-like old people's homes; worrying obsessively about our
individual safety and comfort; boring in our narrow work-related
concerns; culturally vacant in our limited, mono-language world; and, to
top off the arrogance, far too ready to lecture them about their
incompetence and preach to them about how they should run their
countries.
Actually, I could
probably have saved myself a whole lot of trouble by simply reading out
that whole address. There is not too much I would change eight years on.
However, what I have committed myself to do this evening is to
concentrate on Papua New Guinea and its problems of governance. And, in
particular, to outline why we should not share the Howard Government's
apparently wild optimism that PNG's new Prime Minister, Sir Mekere
Morauta, is going to bring about magical change - that he will, somehow,
be able to undo all the damage inflicted by that terrible man, Bill
Skate.
When I spoke to
Sir Mekere a month ago he looked more worried than I have ever seen him.
Harassed, perhaps, may be a better description. I was conducting an
interview for a television documentary series on Papua New Guinea that
the ABC has commissioned me to prepare for broadcast next year. It is
going to be a program in which I will try to give Australian viewers
something of a portrait of what our protege, our former colony, PNG, has
evolved into during its first quarter-century as an independent nation.
Because, although it may pass otherwise without much fanfare, on the day
after the official opening of next year's Sydney Olympics, we will be
marking the anniversary of another significant national achievement. On
September the 16th in the year 2000, it will have been 25 years to the
day since Gough Whitlam liberated Australia from the onerous moral
obligations of colonialism.
I will speak in
more detail a little later about how I view Australia's record as a
colonial power but let me finish this anecdote about my interview with
the disturbed man who is now Papua New Guinea's sixth Prime Minister.
During one break in our video recording - and we had many breaks because
we were using a brand new Japanese digital, wide screen camera which
annoyingly took regular exception to the tropical humidity - Sir Mekere
said, "Sean, these are very hard questions!" The comment intrigued me
because what I was asking him was more conceptual than specific. And it
had been on the conceptual level that PNG's new Prime Minister had been
so effective in his own vociferous criticisms of his predecessors:
first, Sir Julius Chan, and then later, Bill Skate. His oft quoted
observation of corruption in Papua New Guinea having become both
systematic and systemic being but one example.
I suppose I had
made things a little awkward for Sir Mekere because, in a way, I was
inviting him to absolve Chan and Skate (and Somare and Wingti and
Namaliu) from some of the blame for Papua New Guinea's current problems
by inviting him to describe how tough it is for anyone to deliver good
governance in a country as diverse as PNG. However, it was not my
interviewing technique, I hasten to admit, that was primarily
responsible for the Prime Minister's discomfiture. If anything Mekere
seemed a little too distracted to be thrown by any questions from me.
And the reason for this distraction was explained to me after the
interview was over by one of his staff members. "He's in the midst of
preparing the budget," this fellow told me when PNG's Prime Minister had
departed. "And Sir Mekere is horrified at the incapacity of the system
to provide him with the tools he needs or with reliable information on
even the most basic matters."
There lies Sir
Mekere's and Papua New Guinea's dilemma. The things that once seemed to
work do not any longer and the political forces at play in modern PNG
will make damn sure they won't work efficiently again. It is
particularly stressful for somebody like Mekere who was there at the
beginning 24 years ago as a top bureaucrat. He was the first indigenous
head of the PNG Finance Department (what in Canberra is called the
Treasury). And he had some extremely capable people around him including
Ross Garnaut, now Economics Professor at the ANU, and Alan Morris, now
head of the Commonwealth Grants Commission. Back then, the PNG Finance
Department seemed right on top of its brief. It had devised the Hard
Kina Strategy - a strategy which saw the value of the PNG currency, the
Kina, steadily appreciate against the Australian dollar - and it was
responsible for managing PNG's early, and much remarked upon, solid
macroeconomic stability.
One of the
advantages that the Finance Department and the first Somare Government
had in the mid 1970s was, paradoxically, inheriting the aura of colonial
administrative authority. Autocratic, authoritarian rule is far easier
for administrators in a developing country than is democracy. And it was
a little while before Papua New Guinea's politicians and the general
population learned just how much freedom and just how many individual
rights their Constitution guaranteed them. If there is one thing upon
which almost all of the senior political figures in PNG I have
interviewed for this documentary agreed upon it was that their country
suffers from too pure a form of democracy. Nobody concedes anybody else
the right to tell them what to do and almost every Member of Parliament
believes he or she is destined for the top job in the country.
Papua New Guinea
is not an easy country to govern under any circumstances. Sir Paul
Hasluck made that abundantly clear in his book 'A Time For Building'
which dealt with his tenure as Australia's Minister for Territories for
thirteen years. Sir Paul said that whereas he looked with pride upon
what he achieved in the other responsibilities within his portfolio -
the Northern Territory and the smaller island territories - Papua New
Guinea 'was a task for Sisyphys'. Sisyphys was the character in Greek
mythology who was punished in the underworld by having to push a boulder
to the top of the hill only to have it roll down again and no matter how
much he tried he could never succeed in getting it to stay at the top.
'I think I did just as well as Sisyphys did,' Sir Paul said
sardonically, 'and certainly got just as tired.'
Australians who
despair of present-day PNG public administration would do well to read
Hasluck's book. Sir Paul wrote that on his first trip to PNG, the Acting
Public Service Commissioner in the Territory, Mr E.A. Head, told him 'a
disheartening story' about the state of the then Australian dominated
service and the incompetence of some of the key men. Head summed it up
for Hasluck by suggesting that if the Australian Commonwealth public
service was taken as a yardstick to be 100 per cent efficient, it would
be 'an optimistic view' to think of the PNG service as being twenty-five
per cent efficient. That comparison was made at a time when PNG's
Independence Day was considered to be at least a century away. In fact
it was nearer to 1975 than we are now. Nobody could even conceive of it
in 1951 but PNG was then only 24 years away from independent nationhood.
I am not an absolute critic of Australian colonial rule but the truth is
we never woke up to the realities of decolonisation until we had
fewerthan five years to get PNG ready for it. And, of course, by then we
concentrating a good deal of our attention on getting out.
It is nostalgic
rot to suggest that we Australians left behind a fully functioning, well
established and effective bureaucracy. The comments that Australian
visitors often elicit from some Papua New Guineans about how good things
were when the Australians were in charge bear an uncanny resemblance to
the way the people in the former German territory of New Guinea used to
refer to the German reign (1884-1914) as the 'gut taim bipo' - the 'good
times before' the Australians took over. Our colonial touch was very
light indeed. In 1970, just five years before Australia granted PNG its
Independence, an area of some 170,000 hectares was still classified as
not being under any Australian administrative control. When
self-government and independence finally came with a rush there was an
understandable scramble by many Australians in the Territory's public
service to leave. This was, of course, encouraged by the rapid
'localisation' policy adopted by the first PNG Government (formed in
late 1972) led by Michael Somare. Too few Papua New Guineans had been
trained to do the jobs they were quickly promoted to fill and some
government departments have never recovered.
Of all the
agencies which Australia handed over to PNG in the mid-1970s, the most
crippled was the police force. Most of the country was still nominally
under the care of patrol officers ('Kiaps'). In the year of
independence, 1975, police responsibility covered only ten per cent of
the land area and forty per cent of the population. A PNG policy
document produced just one month after Independence by the Finance and
Planning Department stated that the force had 'major problems' because
of inexperienced and untrained staff. 'Of a total force strength of
4400,' it said 'there are 239 commissioned officers, 96 below
establishment strength.' The shortage of senior
non-commissioned-officers (NCOs) was even more debilitating at less than
half strength. There were only 149 sergeants, for instance, instead of
324. It was hardly the type of law-enforcement agency that one might
wish upon a new nation with PNG's complexity of problems.
Another aspect of
Australia's administration that is regarded with enormous nostalgia is
the system we had up there of patrol officers, Kiaps, working for the
Department of Native Affairs. As an aside when I first arrived in PNG in
1974, the tucker-box I used to frequent to buy hamburgers had pinned on
its wall, 'Licence to deal with Natives'. That was the year before
independence. 'Bring back the Kiaps,' is a cry you often here from those
disillusioned with the consequences of independence. But Kiap Rule, fine
for the period of initial contact, was never going to last. If you are
going to have democracy then you cannot have individuals who perform the
jobs of arresting officer, judge, jury and jailer all at the same time.
We imposed a system that worked for a time and for us but we had the
distinct advantage of being a colonial, authoritarian power. The Kiaps
never had to answer to PNG politicians. Democracy is ever so much more
difficult a system to administer. It is especially so when the people
being governed speak an average of eight distinct languages per
electorate. Of all the statistics that can be reeled off about Papua New
Guinea the most vital for any real understanding of the place is the
fact that Papua New Guineans speak 867 languages. That is one third of
the world's languages still in use. The population is about 4.5 million.
So you have upwards of one thousand indigenous ethnic groups, most quite
small in number, who have been thrust together as a nation for less than
a quarter of a century.
One hundred years
ago most of these tribal groups still did not know any of the others
existed apart from those who were their immediate, usually hostile
neighbours. This rapid transition from a thousand tiny society-states to
a modern nation-state has its political ramifications. Yauka Liria, one
of PNG's best modern writers, put it succinctly in his remarkable book,
'Bougainville Campaign Diary', about his time as a Defence Intelligence
officer in the early years of the Bougainville conflict. 'The Papua New
Guinean's loyalty is firstly to his parents,' he wrote, 'then in order,
the clan, the village, the tribe, the district, the region, the
occupational identity such as the Defence Force, and the nation-state of
PNG comes last. That's right, last of all!'
The absence of a
popular perception of the primacy of the State - and the reality of the
obverse of that, the general belief that your family and tribal group,
your wantoks (Pidgin for 'one-talk' - people who speak your language)
come first - is fundamental to what many outsiders see as some of PNG's
biggest problems: political instability caused by shifting loyalties in
Parliament; corruption and the diversion of public money to benefit
one's wantoks; poor land utilisation (ninety-seven per cent of the land
remains in the hands of its traditional owners); gang crime; and a
generally ineffective public service.
However, there are
some positive aspects to PNG we often overlook. More than eighty per
cent of the people still live in their villages on their own land, many
of them engaged in the informal economy in a state of what some have
described as 'subsistence affluence'. Also the wantok system of social
obligations provides a safety net for tribal members, including those
who have migrated to the towns, which saves the state from huge welfare
payments it could never afford anyway.
And then there is
this huge enthusiasm for democracy. The combination of the
multi-fractured nature of PNG society and the Constitution adopted at
independence - a stunningly liberal document that emphasises the rights
of the individual over those of the State - mitigate against the
emergence of any despotic ruler. But equally they combine to inhibit the
exercise of tough, single-minded leadership. A Prime Minister has to
constantly shore up support in Parliament and disciplining Ministers can
imperil continued survival. Bill Skate's recent resignation in the face
of certain defeat if a no confidence vote had been brought against him
was just the latest example of how transitory the job of leading any PNG
government is.
In their
determination to avoid dictatorship the framers of the PNG Constitution,
and they were the greatest nationalists of the day, made certain that
the Parliament would be more powerful than the Prime Minister. One
result is that if a Prime Minister is facing a challenge in Parliament
he has no option to go to the people, no option to call an early
election. Only the Parliament itself can vote to end its five year term
early and that has never happened yet. And it is not likely, to as no
ordinary Member of the PNG chamber wants to face the voters before it is
absolutely necessary.
This is because of
the extremely precarious nature of political life. In the 1997 elections
fewer than half the outgoing Members were returned (just fifty-three).
This high attrition rate has been a feature of all elections since
independence (in the 1992 poll the turnover was even higher - 65 of the
109 Members voted in had not been in the previous Parliament). Fewer
than one-fifth of the current Members have won more than twice (only
twenty of them) and fewer than one in thirteen have been successful at
more than three elections (just eight). Thereason for the flushing out
of over half the sitting Members at each poll is more complex than just
voter dissatisfaction with performance, though undoubtedly that is a
factor.
Political parties,
though important in the Parliament, have been unable to establish much
credibility in the electorate. Few have any grassroots structure. Those
that have tried to build up party support at the provincial or local
level generally have given up in frustration and left the party's
branches to wither between elections. In 1997 forty independents were
elected. The best any political party could do was sixteen seats. That
was Sir Julius Chan's Peoples Progress Party (PPP) which had gone into
the election with twice that number. Chan was amongst those to lose and,
after his demise, his PPP split, twice. The only other party to win more
than ten seats was PNG's most enduring party, the Pangu Pati, now led by
Chris Haiveta which won just thirteen, its worst performance since it
won eleven in its very first election in 1968, seven years before
independence. Ten other parties won seats but some of those parties
quickly disappeared. At least three new political parties were created
on the floor of Parliament in the nine months following the 1997
elections. One of those, Prime Minister Bill Skate's PNG First, was
formed out of the remains of several others including his own Peoples
National Congress which had won only six seats in its own right.
One reason for
this inability of political parties to take root is the very fractured
nature of a society made up of so many language groups. That and the
first-past-the-post voting system combine to encourage a proliferation
of candidates. As the number of candidates has increased with each
election the proportion of the vote the winner needs to secure victory
has kept falling. Democracy is rampant but the results show that it is
becoming ever less representative. In 1997, several new records were
set. 2372 candidates nominated for the 109 seats. This was a forty per
cent increase on the record set five years before despite the doubling
of the already hefty nomination fee to K2000 per candidate. More than
half the members (sixty-one) were elected despite getting the support of
fewer than twenty per cent of the voters in their electorate. Throughout
the country the average winning vote was just twenty-two per cent. In
round terms, therefore, four out of every five voters in PNG backed
losers.
The tenuous nature
of a Member's hold on his seat contributes much to the way the
Parliament operates. PNG's former Prime Minister, Sir Julius Chan,
claimed to an audience in Brisbane some years ago that the bewildering
nature of politics in PNG becomes logical if this lack of security is
taken into account. 'Our politics [is] still regionalistic and tribally
based,' Chan said. 'Each Member has a strong commitment to directly
benefit his immediate electorate - much more so than in, say, Australia,
where only a minority of seats are considered 'marginal'.'
Sir Julius claimed
that commentators who bemoaned the lack of ideology in PNG political
debate simply did not understand. 'Ideology is a luxury marginal members
cannot afford,' he claimed. 'It becomes a case of delivering the goods -
a pragmatic approach, just as in marginal seats in Australia before
election day with both sides offering election bonuses. The Australian
parties play Santa at every Federal and State election. For us it is a
full-time job!' This need to deliver to those who voted for you led to
the establishment of the notorious Electoral Development Fund (known
popularly as the 'Members slush fund') under which Members get huge
grants to disperse in their electorates as they see fit. This is the
fund the World Bank and the IMF want abolished but any Prime Minister
who moves to get rid of it is courting his own demise.
During the 1997
elections I took an ABC TV Foreign Correspondent crew up to the
Highlands to the electorate of Lagiap-Porgera where there were 53
candidates. I chose that electorate not only because of the
extraordinary competition that broad field promised but also because it
includes the Porgera gold mine. One of the candidates, the eventual
winner, Opis Papo, was vigorously attacking the record of the mining
company, the Porgera Joint Venture. Incidentally the company had put
Opis through university. Opis Papo won the election despite polling just
9.1% of the vote. So in Lagiap-Porgera 90.9% of the voters were
presumably disappointed with the result and had wanted somebody else to
be their member. The man Opis Papo won the seat from, Anton Pakena, had
been victorious in 1992 with a similarly paltry percentage of electoral
support. Nine out of ten had not voted for him then either. And even
though Mr Pakena handed out huge amounts of money during his five year
term - more than one million dollars from his slush fund allocation
alone - his vote in 1997 declined to 6.6%. I asked Anton Pakena to take
us to one of the so called 'electoral development projects' he had
funded from the public purse. Astoundingly, he took me to one that had
failed completely. It was an egg production business. Together, with the
camera rolling, we walked into and through an enormous shed containing
row upon row of empty chicken batcheries. There were empty egg cartons
strewn about the floor and discarded bags of chicken feed piled up all
over the place. Anton told me he had spent the equivalent of $270,000
helping a village business group set up the egg business. But it had
collapsed because of poor quality control and inept management. I asked
him if the money had been wasted? 'Wasted,' he agreed, nodding. Then
added, 'Not only this project but other projects too in this area.'
Incredulously I asked him if he found that frustrating? 'It is not
embarrassing for me,' he replied, 'but [it might be] for the villagers.'
He was not worried though because on his reasoning he had done his part
as a leader and the people, now in his debt, would have to vote for
him!
I also did a
revealing interview with one of Mr Pakena's campaign organisers. Sol
Taro was hardly a man in desperate need. He owned two shops and had four
wives. In the 1992 election he had delivered his village to Anton and
was showered with money from Mr Pakena's share of the budgeted slush
fund. He was given $100,000 worth of vehicles, money for a church and
$10,000 in cash to start a new business. In the interview Sol told me
that he had tried to interest the Porgera Joint Venture [gold mine] in
helping him out with contracts for this proposed new business but gave
up when the mine's business development office turned him down. 'So,
after I failed to get my proposals through,' he admitted with the
disarming frankness that makes being a reporter in PNG so interesting,
'I used up this money buying drink, buying beer . I have a big family
and that 10,000, I couldn't hold onto it.' Sol told me he had promised
Anton Pakena 600 out of his people's 820 votes and that he'd be
directing the rest to other candidates to keep them sweet.
'Members hold the
key to the money,' Sol Taro went on as he tried to explain why he was an
Anton Pakena man. 'They guarantee our business ventures and support us.
For this,' he went on, 'I supported Anton last time. I supported him and
he bought me a truck. It's over there - a big Dyna. He gave it to me.
Whenever we are short of money to buy a car or whatever, he will help
us.' In his interview with me, the soon to be defeated sitting Member,
Mr Pakena, told me he had put twelve new vehicles on the road for his
campaign. 'And you've got to feed the people,' he said, 'tinned fish,
packets of rice, coffee, sugar and so on. You've got to give them money
and so many things.' I asked, 'You've got to give them money or they
won't support you?' 'Right!' he replied. 'If you don't give them the
money they won't support you.'
Once a Member does
get into Parliament he becomes virtually a free agent trading his vote
for what he can get for himself and his electoral supporters. On the
floor of the House party discipline is paltry because loss of
endorsement and expulsion is no real penalty. All of this elevates the
power of the ordinary Member. As one Somare staff member put it to me in
early 1985: 'PNG suffers from the dictatorship of the backbench.'
Keeping Members onside is an endlessly absorbing task. During his first
term as Prime Minister (1980-1982) Chan told a constitutional workshop
that the PNG Constitution 'encourages corruption because a Prime
Minister has to continually buy parliamentarians' support.' He said the
system was a recipe for weak, unstable governments. 'People would be
surprised if they knew how much of my time as Prime Minister was spent
coping with requests for special favours of all kinds from individual
politicians,' he said. In 1981 Chan told a University of PNG student
audience that as Prime Minister he regularly had to deal with political
blackmail and that it was more sorrowful than amusing for him to relate
that on several occasions Members had expressed loyalty to three
political parties at the same time.
Of the eight
changes in Prime Minister since Independence, three have come through
votes of no confidence, one, the most recent, through Skate resigning
when he was certain to lose a vote of no confidence, and one resulted
from an aborted attempt by Paias Wingti to secure himself a second
eighteen months in power by resigning in secret and then putting himself
forward again. That backfired badly when the Supreme Court ruled it
unconstitutional. Only three of the eight changes at the top had
anything to do with an election. And even then the voters had very
little say in who got the top job. That was decided by the elected
Members. I can tell you that there was considerable public
disenchantment at Bill Skate's winning the Prime Ministership after the
1997 elections when so many Papua New Guineans thought they had voted
against corruption.
Smooth flowing, no
nonsense government is a difficult proposition under the present system
when no Prime Minister can ever be certain of the loyalty of any
government backbencher or even, as has been proved repeatedly, members
of his own Cabinet. Attempts at reform have been made. But the problem
is that while constitutional change in PNG requires the overwhelming
support of the Parliament, most of the changes seen as vital are aimed
at limiting the freedom and power of the very people who would have to
vote those changes through - the backbenchers. Most constitutional
amendments need either a two-thirds or a three-quarters majority,
depending on the section, at two separate votes taken at least two
months apart. This has to date stymied all efforts to overhaul the
system.
There is an
attempt now being made in PNG to introduce laws to try to strengthen
political parties. But I am afraid I do not see Sir Mekere succeeding in
making significant change. If the proposed Integrity of Political
Parties proposals do get through, one result could well be that we will
have almost everybody standing for the next elections in 2002 as
independents so they won't be encumbered by any rules limiting their
freedom as it would be if they were elected as endorsed party
members.
The other area
where Morauta has a monumental challenge before him is in depoliticising
the public service and making quality appointments to the management of
the government's statutory authorities. Giving jobs to the boys has been
a feature of PNG political life for a long time but Bill Skate outdid
all his predecessors in the extravagant way he went about hiring his
mates and firing those who weren't. Heads of Departments went rolling
every few months and many workers in what was an already thoroughly
demoralised public service gave up hope. This regular sacking of those
at the top had its side benefits for some and it has led to one of worst
rorts now going on in PNG. The trick is to get an appointment as
Departmental boss or as Managing Director of one of the government's
corporations. You don't have to do any work. All you have to do is wait
for your dismissal - the sooner the better - and get paid out for your
full contract. If your Minister gets the chop then all the better - your
sacking and your big golden handshake payout will come even
quicker.
During the
dramatic days leading up to the recent change in government in PNG, much
was made of the alleged briefcase full of money that was confiscated
from one of Bill Skate's senior advisors, Utula Samana, at the Madang
airport. Morauta, amongst others, claimed the briefcase contained
payments to Members of Parliament to encourage them to switch sides. The
evidence produced to support these claims, however, in my opinion, did
not amount to proof of much more than the sort of rort I have just
referred to. Mr Samana's briefcase contained pay slips revealing that he
had been given K70,000 a few days earlier as termination pay. In fact he
told us that's what it all was - his payout for having been removed as
Secretary of the Agriculture Department. Interestingly he had only been
Secretary for a matter of months when Bill Skate announced he'd been
promoted to a new job as a Prime Ministerial advisor. Not bad - getting
the equivalent of more than a year's pay as a Departmental Head in PNG
in one hit while being given a better, presumably higher paid job on the
Prime Minister's staff.
Sir Mekere has
already made a number of his own jobs for the boys appointments. Some of
these people are closely linked to the political party Sir Mekere heads,
a party in which the influence of the party's founder, Paias Wingti,
still looms large. Please do not get me wrong. I am a great admirer of
Mekere Morauta. But his ability to win battles on every front is
severely limited given the nature of PNG's political system. He's had to
make accommodations and will continue to have to compromise. I would
just plead that the Australian Government understand what the limits to
his scope for positive action are. There is great suspicion of Australia
in Papua New Guinea and the worst curse we could put upon PNG's new
Prime Minister is to reinforce the belief that already has some currency
up there - that Morauta is Australia's choice for their country's
leader. We certainly made it abundantly clear we wanted Skate dumped,
and antipathy to Australia amongst many of the MPs is one of the reasons
Skate was almost able to keep his government in power.
While the
Australian Government may find the way things are done in Papua New
Guinea and the attitudes of Papua New Guineans frustrating, I do think
that, far too often, we Australians are expecting them to be a bit more
like us. Rather than accepting them as Melanesians coming from an
extraordinarily complex set of societies unlike ours we assume that
Papua New Guineans, and Papua New Guinea, would be far better off if
only the people were, damn it, more Australian. Papua New Guinea will
never be what Australia wants it to be despite the amount of aid and
support we might pour in. It would do well for us all to remember the
words Captain Belden Nama whispered into the ear of Sandline's boss,
Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, as he lay pinned to the floor of the PNG
Defence Force Commander's office on the night of the soldiers revolt
against the Chan Government's hiring of mercenaries in 1997: 'Welcome to
the Land of the Unexpected!'
Monday, November
15, 1999