The death of Sir Michael Somare reminded some in Australia that PNG was once a Territory Governed by Canberra and the recent spike in COVID cases should also remind them how much we owe our nearest neighbour.
I’m not talking about Kokoda, although we do owe them for
that, I’m talking about decades of neglecting the importance of the
relationship we should have with PNG. We have an obligation to our former
Territory that extends far beyond thanking them for helping to halt the
Japanese advance.
As someone who likes to draw parallels, it is interesting to
note that in the year PNG gained independence from Australia in September,
Indonesia invaded Timor Leste three months later and despite the Timorese
providing essentially the same support to the Diggers as the Papuans did at
Kokoda during the war, we sat on our hands when they needed us.
Although Timor Leste had to wait another twenty-four years
to declare independence for the second time, Australia made sure it was first
in line to claim the kudos and while we were at it, most of the oil and gas
reserves in the Timor Sea. Now I don’t think Whitlam went as far as Howard and
Downer did by bugging the cabinet room, but the rape of a fledgling nation
wasn’t too dissimilar.
Taking advantage of our neighbours is nothing new to White Australia,
we’ve been doing it for over a century and a half. Not to mention the century
before that (and continuing) where we were happy messing up someone else’s
continent until we got a bit bored and decided to enslave what our current
failure of a Prime Minister refers to as his “Pacific Family”. Then, when what
was known as Blackbirding became illegal, we shipped them back and dumped them on
whichever island we ran into first, regardless of whether that had been where
they were taken from in the first place, or not.
When PNG gained its independence in nineteen seventy-five,
Australia decided to give with one hand while taking with the other and
regardless of political affiliation, we have done so ever since. At this point,
detractors will want to point out that, despite annual cuts to our foreign aid
budget in the Pacific, Australia is still the largest donor to our northern
neighbour, even with China ramping up its presence in the region. This is true
but it is also irrelevant. Papua New Guinea should be one of the wealthiest
nations in the Pacific but most of their wealth flows offshore.
Australia stripped PNG of its wealth by proxy through an
ingenious tactic of offering Australian advisors to the new Parliament who
encouraged inexperienced Members to support Australian mining and logging
companies being granted leases to dig up or cut down some of the most pristine
environments on Earth. The irony of this is that those companies don’t pay tax
in Australia anyway. They don’t pay tax anywhere.
When I was a young child in Bougainville, before The War,
the only major sealed road on the island was from the airport to Panguna mine. Across
the track from the house I remember living in was what many people would
describe as a “Shanty Town”. It wasn’t. Tarpaulins strung up over sticks to
provide meagre shelter from the elements does not scream Shanty Town, it
screams Refugee Camp. I wasn’t old enough to realise that our neighbours were
displaced on their own land, but I had enough competence to understand that
they threw rocks at our house of an evening because they didn’t like us and we
kept dogs, not as pets so much, but as a deterrent. With the benefit of
hindsight, I am not surprised that they eventually took up arms and kicked the
colonisers out.
That PNG managed to gain independence as a nation with
little bloodshed is something that should be commended in its own right, few
other countries have managed to do so, but a cloud of corruption has long hung
low over the country. I won’t delve into specific examples because we’ll be
here all week but the frequency of corruption allegations against Politicians
and Senior Public Servants, including the police and military, speaks for
itself. Australia enabled this culture to develop and needs to acknowledge it
if we are to have a strong, independent, self-sufficient northern neighbour.
By leaving PNG with relatively no infrastructure, Australia
essentially handed over the keys after the house was sold only for the new
owners to find all of the plumbing and wiring stripped from the dwelling. The
health system was inadequate and not fit for purpose while the education system
was essentially ignored excepting the children of the ruling class who were
often born and educated in Australia. I know this because I was in boarding
school with several of them.
Without identifying anybody I can say that I attended school
with the sons of Prime Ministers, Defence Ministers, a bunch of other Ministers
(they switch around a lot), Magistrates, Judges, Police and Tribal Chiefs as
well as prominent businesspeople. Most of them could easily afford the fees but
when an Australian government scholarship program was scrapped, the majority
pulled their kids out. It was predominantly the Papuan boys who left, whereas the
white and other immigrant families kept their children at school in the
Wonderful Land of Oz. This alone is indicative of the perspective through which
PNG is viewed by Australian eyes’, but it needn’t be the case.
The position PNG found itself in following it’s vote for
self-determination was essentially one of submission to its former colonial
masters. Australia was not alone in taking advantage of its former colony, the
British and New Zealand were quite happy to contribute to the continued
subjugation of peoples who had already endured two-hundred odd years of
European occupation. The highest offices in the Judiciary and Public Service
mostly went to white people from the Anglosphere who had been recommended by
other white people from the Anglosphere as being the best person for the job.
Such relationships between the colonialists and the Papua
New Guineans provided a fertile environment for corruption to flourish. When a
mining company, for example, wanted to mine in a particular province they
approached the Governor with offers of building roads, an airport and a
hospital. The Governor was excited with the proposal and began lobbying his
colleagues in Port Moresby to approve a licence. When the licence was granted,
roads were built to service the mine and provided little benefit to the locals
as many of them didn’t own a vehicle and few were given a job at the mine. The
airport was also built but was used predominately by mine workers and their
families because many of the locals couldn’t afford to fly for the same reason they didn’t own a car – the mine hadn’t employed them. The hospital was also
surely built but it was a private facility so many of the locals were unable to
seek treatment because they didn’t get a job at the mine and were forced to the
under-funded Government clinics, which in some cases can be a days’ walk to the
next village.
If you can see a pattern emerging, you can appreciate that
if the foreign companies had bothered to train and employ locals, PNG might not
find itself in the pickle it currently does regarding COVID. By not employing
the population on whose land they were exploiting for profit those companies
kept communities in either poverty or subsistence. This tactic has resulted in
a people who are unwilling to seek medical treatment because they either can’t
afford it or are too ill to make the journey to a free clinic. Had the mines
taken on local apprentices and built vocational training centres to train them
at no cost to the apprentice, PNG would have a highly skilled (and highly paid)
population who would be able to access adequate health care.
The flow on effects of hiring locals extends far beyond
hospitals, it results in better housing, better roads and better schools with lower
drop-out rates because, although the companies don’t pay tax, their employees
do and will demand that the significant portion of their salary being taxed
needs to be spent on these things. All of this would have contributed to a
better local response because the resources would be available locally. Forty-five
years is long enough to have trained at least two generations of tradespeople/University
graduates who would encourage their children to stay in school and seek further
education when they graduated. That means Nurses, Doctors, Engineers and
Scientists, all critical when responding to a Pandemic.
Australia’s attitude to PNG has always been reactive rather
than proactive. White Australia has a saviour complex, from Colonisation to the
present day. We shout to whoever is willing to listen about how good we are when
it comes to disaster relief in the Indo-Pacific instead of doing anything
constructive when it comes to preparing our nearest neighbours for an
independent response to said disasters. Just as Australians think of Aotearoa
as our younger sibling whereas they think of us as the drunken uncle, we treat
PNG (and the rest of The Pacific) as an errant child who needs to be bailed out.
To them we are the father who went out to buy a pack of smokes and never came
back but sometimes sent a birthday card.
Papua New Guinea should have been able to avoid this current
COVID outbreak for several reasons, first being the inadequate health care
system which I have addressed earlier and will return to but the elephant in
the room is the nation’s porous borders, most notably with Indonesia through
the yet to be liberated state of West Papua. Had West Papua been independent
(or merged with PNG as some activists’ desire), the entire island of Papua
could have been locked down in a similar fashion as Australia, Aotearoa, Fiji
and the rest of The Pacific. I’m not saying that all cases in PNG originated in
Indonesia, but I’ll put money on the outbreaks in the border provinces being
the result of Papuans crossing back and forth as they have always done.
Jakarta’s disdain for West Papua is well documented, as are
their human rights violations in the province, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone
that Papuans are at the bottom of the list for vaccinations. Indonesia has
approached the occupation of West Papua in the same manner as the Dutch. The
resources are deemed valuable at the expense of the people who are seen as an
irritant on the path to profit. By not shutting its internal borders, Indonesia
exposed West Papua to COVID via the flow of workers, soldiers and police to the
province from other parts of the country. Uniquely placed as the world’s
largest archipelago, Indonesia had an opportunity to lock down every
island/province in order to reduce any spread of the virus internally but
failed to do so and in the case of West Papua, they don’t care. They would
rather the Papuans be dead instead of campaigning for independence.
West Papua is a topic I could write another essay about and
I intend to do so at some point in the future, but this is supposed to be about
how Australia failed PNG and I only mentioned Indonesia because I was given a
nudge by someone else who cares about this topic. So, let us return to the
abject failing of successive Australian Governments regarding the paired issues
of health and education in PNG.
When Australia walked away from PNG after independence, we
missed what was probably the best opportunity to create an educational and
medical research hub on our northern border. Papua New Guinea should be The
Pacific’s equivalent to Cuba when it comes to medical research and the training
of practitioners for the region. The difference between the two is that Cuba
won its independence through combat, whereas PNG was “granted” it after a one-sided
negotiation process. The subtlety in the difference might be lost on some but
it can essentially be boiled down to Castro nationalising pretty much
everything whereas Somare signed a bunch of agreements with foreign companies
and Governments allowing them to continue operating as usual. This distinction
between the two countries isn’t the only factor to have created such a distortion
but it is significant in so much as Cuba being able to retain the majority of
export wealth which was invested into schools, universities and hospitals. On
the other hand, PNG is still forced to request assistance from its former and
current colonial masters (it must be noted that Lizzie is still the Monarch of
PNG).
Every time Australia, the UK, New Zealand, occasionally
Canada and if the USA have a naval vessel nearby that they can send to fly the
flag in response to Papua New Guinea’s troubles illustrates the dismissive
attitude that the Anglosphere towards The Pacific by framing themselves as
Great White Knights come to save the hapless natives (Yes. I did just say that because
it’s true and you know it).
By crippling PNG as it voted to find its feet, Australia
perpetrated possibly the greatest disservice to an ally and friend we ever
could. On second thought, Timor Leste didn’t need to be occupied by Indonesia
for a quarter of a century, but I’m getting off point again. What Australia did
and continues to do, not only to PNG but all of The Pacific needs to be
recognised as an example of failed policy regarding our nearest neighbours. Had
we left Papua New Guinea with infrastructure comparable to ours at the time and
continued to invest in it, we could have the world’s best tropical diseases
research centre on our doorstep and before you say that Australia should have
that honour, you are completely missing the point. PNG may be sixteen odd years
behind Cuba when it comes to independence but that should never have been an
impediment for Papua New Guinea to have developed into a regional powerhouse of
medicinal and vocational training.
For a country with an abundance of natural resources such as
Papua New Guinea, to have to ask for assistance when a crisis strikes says more
about Australia than it does about PNG. The money that has flowed out of the
country into the bank accounts of foreign companies could and should have been
invested educating, training and employing the population instead of increasing
the inheritance of already privileged people. But if this were to have
happened, the Anglosphere would have not been the beneficiaries of positive
media coverage whenever they decided to react to an emergency that PNG should
have the resources and infrastructure to not require any help. In fact, had PNG
been allowed to realise it’s potential, they would be exporting professionals to
assist other countries in the region when required.
Imagine if PNG was able to deploy highly skilled medical
professionals throughout The Pacific in times of crisis, but also, that they
trained a significant number of said professionals who were already practicing
their craft in their country of origin when said crisis hit. PNG is a country
that still deals with tuberculosis and malaria outbreaks on a regular basis.
That should be enough to justify the establishment of a world leading
Infectious and Tropical Diseases Institute, albeit half a century too late but
we have to come to the realisation that COVID is not a “once in a hundred-year
event”. This is going to happen again in most of our lifetimes and probably
sooner than many people expect.
Were Papua New Guinea at the forefront of infectious
diseases research from the point of independence, they may have been the first
country in the world to have developed a COVID vaccine. Had they the capability
to produce it in country, they might have already begun exporting it across the
Torres Strait to bail out the Morrison Government’s abject failure of a vaccine
rollout in Australia instead of us sending a paltry eight-thousand vaccinations
and a handful of AUSMAT medicos to get in the way of local practitioners.
To say that Australia’s response to Papua New Guinea’s
current COVID predicament is lacking would be too gracious a criticism levelled
at every Australian Government from Whitlam onwards. We left PNG with nothing
and over the subsequent decades Australia has done little more than foreign
policy window dressing when it comes to assisting our former territory and
nearest neighbour (with a strong wind at your back, you can probably spit from
Saibai to PNG) and our COVID response is simply a continuation of this practice.
Of all the Pacific Nations, PNG was recognised early on in
the pandemic as being amongst the most vulnerable and should have been the
focus of Australia’s international response to the pandemic. Instead, Dutton
decided to let the virus boat Ruby Princess dock and disperse her occupants
around the country and globe. With outbreaks popping up all over the place,
Australia (well, the States and Territories) responded better than most of the
world in eradicating the virus internally and when that was done, our priority
should have been preventing something similar happening in our region. But once
more this shouldn’t be the case. It must be noted that Australia and New
Zealand were the best placed countries to provide assistance prior to an
outbreak in PNG but neglected to do so.
Instead of offering assistance from the ADF (as the Papua
New Guineans did with their military during the bushfires that Morrison nicked
off to Hawaii for) we closed the Torres Strait border to traditional trading
but let FIFO workers come and go as they pleased. Closing the border did a good
job of protecting the Torres Strait Islanders but allowing mine workers (who would
not be required had there been a local workforce) to potentially carry the
virus into PNG was negligent at the very least. But there were profits to made by
party donors and who really cares if Cairns Base Hospital has to refuse
everyone except the most urgent emergency cases because a bunch of FIFO workers
come back with COVID.
Australia’s attitude to Papua New Guinea well before they
became independent from us continues to this day and that is one of disdain.
Our political class have developed a rhetoric along the lines of “PNG is a
sovereign nation and they messed up the whole independence thing, so we have to
go save them again”. This would not be a problem, were it true, but
unfortunately this is not the fault of PNG and Australia needs to realise it
was the one who messed up the whole independence thing. By actively condoning
the corrupt practices of Australian and other foreign companies in their exploitation
of Papua New Guinea’s resources, we as a nation are guilty of negligence for no
other reason than we continue to elect Politicians who seek to exploit PNG to
their own advantage.
We really shouldn’t be surprised that we have treated PNG
with such contempt, we’ve been doing it in Australia to Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islanders for two and half centuries and it took around three quarters
of that time for the original inhabitants of the continent and surrounding
islands to be recognised as human. To the credit of State and Territory Health
Departments, the virus was unable to gain a foothold in remote communities
thanks to lockdowns and community led public service announcements regarding
COVID safe practices, such measures may have also been effective in PNG, but
foreign policy is The Commonwealth’s responsibility and once more it has failed
Papua New Guinea.
Putting aside the initial failure of Australia to invest at
independence, instead favouring the “let’s play the hero” role, the Morrison
Government has failed to even do that. Had we offered medical assistance and
materiel as soon as most of Australia had flattened the curve it is possible
that PNG may have been able to contain the virus before it spread. I’m not
speaking of the meagre deployments and shipments that are little more than
token gestures of pretending to care, I’m suggesting that a mass deployment of
medical teams with the ADF providing the logistical support required to
establish field hospitals in remote areas of PNG could have nipped this
outbreak at the bud.
What we are witnessing in Papua New Guinea right now is an example of how Corporate Colonialism can cripple a country. By not investing in infrastructure, the companies who were effectively given control of the young nation set PNG up to fail when faced with a crisis such as this pandemic.
When
profit is put before people, this will always be the case regardless of the
emergency. By robbing emerging nations of their wealth and opportunity, the
Colonial powers established a corrupt world order designed purely to prevent
developing nations becoming “developed”. One only need to look at Africa, Asia and
South America to find multiple similar examples of what PNG has been subjected
to after gaining independence from their colonial masters. It is not unique. It
has been and continues to be common practice in colonies around the globe.
If the world is going to confront global issues such as
pandemics and the undeniable impacts of climate change, the colonial and
neo-colonial powers need to acknowledge the mistreatment of their current and
former subjects is a practice that is detrimental to us all. By continuing to
allow corporations to run roughshod over countries that were invaded and
occupied for centuries is negligent and irresponsible conduct by those nations
who were and continue to be the invaders and occupiers.
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