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by JOHN P.
FOWKE
Getting it wrong in Papua New Guinea
IN days of old, in PNG, white men
were generally addressed by non-English-speaking Papua New
Guineans as masta. Today this honorific is infrequently heard;
where a foreigner is known well, his first name is universally
used.
Where there is no bond of familiarity; say, in a shop or a taxi, a
Tok Pisin speaker is likely to address a foreign man as “boss”
although “mate” is also widely used in application to those
obviously of Australian or Kiwi origin.
In the 1980s, a time when foreign personnel were being rapidly
replaced with locals as managers on the coffee plantations of the
Waghi Valley, there were daily enquiries regarding any upcoming
vacancy for a blakmasta.
Today, in the wisdom generated by 30 years of increasingly bad
public administration and the emergence of a cynical and
manipulative political elite, the term is returning into common
usage to describe this ruling clique of powerful men – ol
blakmasta ia!
Thinking Australians on both sides of the political divide are
concerned about their country’s relationship with Papua New
Guinea.
This is natural both for reasons of proximity and of history, but
more specifically, questions are being asked about the monumental
failure of the Howard government’s recent Enhanced Cooperation
Package (ECP); a major initiative which began with a bang
engendered by positive experience in the 2003 Solomons
intervention but one which had ended without even a whimper in
circumstances which require an open examination.
The ECP was an expensive, ambitious and highly-publicised aid
package agreed upon by the parties – and one which received a
resounding knock-back when actually implemented.
Within a very short time of their arrival, more than 100
specially-recruited Australian police officers together with
families and support retreated in a forced and humiliating manner
from Port Moresby and Bougainville.
Following this, there has been a deafening silence from the
initiator of the scheme, foreign affairs minister Alexander
Downer.
Nothing is said about the stupefying level of failure in primary
research and planning by the Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade (DFAT) which led to the ignominious retreat of the
Australian police.
Nothing is said about the immense, unbudgeted cost of compensating
and resettling these Australian contractors, nor of the stress and
strain they and their families have suffered.
Nothing is said either, about those others, many others, signed
on, packed and ready to go, who remained yet to take up their
postings in PNG when the ECP edifice collapsed.
And again, nothing is said about the abandonment of long-leased
high-cost apartments and offices; of abandoned vehicles and office
and communication and technical equipment and hastily-terminated
supply and service contracts signed with Port Moresby-based
agencies. The total cost of this incredibly-badly-planned exercise
can only be imagined.
Canberra will be extremely coy if asked to provide figures.
What is revealed anyway is the incredible naivety, the plain,
simple, old-fashioned bungling incompetence of Australia’s
extremely well-paid diplomatic and aid mandarins.
There is no gain saying the fact that the road to reform in PNG is
through the enhancement of policing and the jailing of a
sufficiently exemplary number of those leaders proven as being
corrupt; the first step, indeed, but a first step which has to be
taken by Papua New Guineans regardless of any assistance, which
may be offered.
The fact that the Australians underestimated the pressure elements
of the elite of PNG is able to bring to bear, added with the
already-mentioned lack of effective research and planning
regarding legal and constitutional issues, is a major indictment
of those in charge of the ECP project.
Is this the standard for all Australia’s overseas aid programmes?
Does anyone today remember the infamous Margarini Resettlement
Scheme in Kenya?
An Australian-funded and planned and managed dry-land farming
project of major proportions involving the relocation of thousands
of impoverished people, Margarini was touted as the embodiment of
the hands-on, Mr Fixit ethos of Australian dry-land farmers.
It was in fact such a disaster that a book written about it by
knowledgeable observers became a classic of “what not to do”
within the world’s vast aid-based consultancy industry.
Since PNG’s independence in 1975, Australia has implemented many
generously-funded projects there. Many have been failures in one
way or another although none has been as embarrassingly bad as
Margarini.
In recent years, the costly and largely wasteful South Simbu and
North Simbu projects come to mind, as does the 15-year-long
assistance to the PNG Police programme – costly and largely
without result except for the enrichment of the relevant
consultants.
It is a characteristic both of AusAID and its partners, the
private consultancies which plan and execute projects, that memory
is not in their vocabulary.
If there are good summing-up or debriefing procedures for project
evaluation these are not activated, and whilst one can understand
why, one can also understand the propensity which exists here for
reinventing the wheel.
But perhaps the trouble is that summary briefings following
completion are never asked for. In fact the whole
sisterhood/brotherhood of the aid industry, the departmental
bureaucrats and the consultancies concerned, is collectively very
quiet about what it does. This begs the obvious question: why?
Australians in general together with the breed described in the
media as “Pacific specialists” really do not understand just how
different PNG society is from that which occupies Australia.
The “Pacific specialists” upon whose advice, aid programmes
delivered in PNG are based, obviously draw from a Western matrix
for their ideas, not only because this is usually the only basis
they have, but also because it is the unstated but underlying
objective of all these projects to Westernise the recipient
society in some measure.
With only a superficial understanding of the groups of people they
are working with, it is natural that engagement and achievement
also are superficial, together with results. PNG is a
highly-convoluted maze both in a physical and a conceptual sense.
Nevertheless, there is a way into this maze, and it involves a
knowledge of both the culture and the language of the people
targeted.
An ability engendered by the interest and initiative needed to
move freely and without fear in street-side and village society;
to speak the lingua franca as it is spoken by the people; to be
accepted and welcomed as a friend by ordinary Papua New Guineans.
Whilst the remnants of the old Australian School of Pacific
Administration may have formed the early development of the School
of Pacific Studies of the Australian National University, a
continued offering of courses helpful to those of a mind to take
up the Pacific challenge – (if such people are there) – is
entirely lacking so far as this writer is aware.
More’s the pity. The lack is so obvious, manifest in any encounter
with a young Australian DFAT official or Australian
project-consultant.
The writer has often had cause to feel angry at the bland and
comfortable assumption that you can take a 30-year-old MBA from a
teaching position in some God-forsaken TAFE College in country
Victoria and confidently put him in charge of producing a
relatively complex set of results in a rural setting in PNG.
Just watching these young men and women smiling uncertainly and
speaking very slowly in what they imagine to be a form of broken
English comprehensible to their little captive audiences is enough
to make ones hair turn white.
On the other hand, it is just as aggravating to be present in a
hotel largely taken over for an Australian-funded police seminar,
and to find that whilst the PNG police officers attending the
seminar socialise together in the bars and bistro areas, the
Aussie consultants presenting the seminar arrogantly dine
separately in the hotel’s high-cost restaurant.
Insulting enough in a Western setting, in Melanesia where the
sharing of food is the basis for all meaningful interaction, this
sort of behaviour is both outrageous and provocative.
The writer has been witness to many such instances of the
inability or unwillingness of Australian advisers/ consultants to
engage.
In 1964, in the first general election ever held in Papua New
Guinea – (that for the House of Assembly which paved the way for
National Parliament and full independence in 1975) – the
Australians introduced the Westminster Parliamentary system.
In the sense that a “loyal opposition” provides checks and
balances it may have been possible at the time to see a “party
system” as desirable; but only for a moment. For where, in this
society, were the natural “parties” requiring representation?
A simple, subsistence-based tribal society is one which defines
itself on the basis of region, of “turf”; not by social class or
by possession or by disparity in terms of wealth and opportunity.
Whilst it was important for the territory to begin to address the
rest of the world as a nation after 1964, the needs of a
rapidly-changing society were – and still are – visualised by the
people in regional terms.
Reason suggests that fair distribution and the empowerment of the
people would best have been answered by a regionally-anchored
system of representation; representation able to be controlled by
the electorate.
Nevertheless, a caricatured version of Australian party politics
was allowed to arise, more by default than with intent, or so it
seems today.
The party system of representation was and is like a dollop of oil
dropped into the pond of PNG society.
There is no affinity, the one for the other. Here, in PNG in 1964,
as opposed to Walpole’s England of the early 18th century, there
was no landed aristocracy, no landless peasantry, no rentier, and
no hereditary class of soldier, squire and priest empowered by
social position alone to oppress a lower order.
Here was an almost uniquely egalitarian, subsistence-farming
society whose wealth, the land upon which it subsisted, was shared
by all.
The blithely-approved-and-imposed Westminster party system has
been the nursery within which the political, administrative and
social dysfunction which defines PNG in 2006 has developed.
Far from an enfranchisement leading to the empowerment of the
people, the party system set up by – or perhaps it is better said
countenanced by – Australia, has led to the marginalisation of the
proletariat in this once most egalitarian of societies.
It has led to the growth of a small, unstable, unscrupulous but
very tenacious governing elite, divided by greed within itself but
united in its concern to keep and expand its hegemonic hold over
the affairs of the nation through its exclusivity.
The growth of the very conditions which the Westminster system
slowly eradicated in Britain is, in complete paradox, the outcome
of Australia’s foolish decision to establish it in a setting where
there was no requirement for it.
How could the Australian powers of the day have been so dense?
The answer lies perhaps in the strong
“them-and-us” outlook manifest in the ruling clique of senior
administration officials viz-a-viz the elected and appointed
“private enterprise”, “mission” and “indigenous” members of the
old chamber of representation, the Legislative Council, or “Legco”
as it was called.
Today it is difficult to find any record of more than superficial
discussion of alternatives.
At least one was readily to hand, in the shape of a fully-democratised
version of the former Legislative Council supported by the 19
existing District Advisory Councils, democratised, and the network
of well-established and democratically-elected local government
councils then numbering more than 100.
This would have been governance anchored firmly at the roots of
society, government answering the reality of regional needs and
interests as opposed to non-existent social, class-based or
occupation-based needs.
Those who administered PNG in that time were under the thumb of
the irascible, intelligent, and idealistic Paul Hasluck, minister
for territories, a man who bridged no objection from an underling.
Whilst a forceful man, it must be said that Hasluck suffered
opposition from the largely-conservative bureaucracy in Port
Moresby in the form of delayed responses and obfuscation; delays
which may have caused him to be unduly testy and perhaps
precipitate in some of his decisions.
In the late 1950s, one of the very few really clear-thinking and
innovative officers of the post-war TP&NG administration the late
David Fenbury, advocated “a common inter-racial franchise for
direct elections to the Legislative Council ...”, and again in
1960 he reminded Hasluck of this in a personal communication.
Fenbury was the principal guide and philosopher of the local
government council system introduced into the territory in the
early 1950s.
Whilst respected by Hasluck as his equal in intellect, Fenbury may
have been something of a bete noir as far as the minister was
concerned as he was probably the only senior officer in the
administration who would not defer to Hasluck in exchanges of
opinion.
Hasluck and those in power in Port Moresby who failed to see the
fatuity, even if not the potential menace, of the evolving
party-system prior to the 1964 elections, must bear much
responsibility for the looming social disaster which is modern-day
PNG.
As the 21st century opens, PNG is being forced through a process
of massive social adjustment more intense than that experienced by
almost any other nation.
A simply-structured tribal society is becoming, willy-nilly, an
incredibly more complex one.
However, change occurs incrementally as far as an individual is
concerned; few pause to analyse and understand what is taking
place in terms of a movement towards hegemony.
In any case, they know that their voices will not be heard in the
forum provided by the party system. So people just put up with
things until an issue such as Sandline galvanises them into brief
violence.
Australia has been a humane and unusually generous foster-parent
to PNG, both before and after independence.
Though the standard of public administration and accounting in PNG
is poor, there is a foundation of convention and methodology and
procedures and principles which is well-enough established to
remain in place for better times.
Better times in which, with a more mature, less-self-important and
all-knowing approach, Australia may be in the position to help in
very important ways, in particular by engaging positively with
current moves to institute a revised programme of decentralisation
and service-provision.
This has been designed and presented for comment by a group of
well-qualified and respected Papua New Guineans and deserves all
the support it can gather. It may be an opportunity which if lost
or spoiled by half-measures does not come again for decades.
Australia laid solid foundations in terms of a wide appreciation
of democratic ideals and principles among the educated of PNG, who
are themselves largely the creation of Australia.
There are many of these who remember the era of their elevation
into literate, numerate adulthood in well-run schools managed by
Australian teachers, with great gratitude – people who resent the
fact that such a facility is no longer available for the benefit
of their own children.
It is this generation of the educated middle-aged, educated but
village-based men and women, who will welcome and support an
Australian effort to return PNG’s dormant local government system
to a lively, living grassroots-governed vehicle of social and
economic progress in the land. Here is the place to spend the
remaining loot from the unfortunate ECP scheme.
Noted Australian poet and friend of PNG, the late James MacAulay
once said something to the effect that what Australia achieves in
its relationship with PNG will come to define Australia as a
nation.
When we think of Australia’s own history as the prison colony of
Great Britain and of the ambivalence many Australians of the ’20s
and ’30s of last century felt regarding Australia’s growing role
as a colonial power in PNG, MacAulay’s statement has great
resonance, and as well, great meaning for the future.
PNG’s ongoing social crisis is not just today’s problem; nor is it
just PNG’s problem; substantial assistance is needed and it will
come from nowhere but Australia. This is as it should be. But in
the manner of its giving, Australia must be much more insightful
and much more cogniscent of the causes of the problems of its
close neighbour and ally.
*The writer has spent most of the past 48
years living and working in rural Papua New Guinea. He has had a
close acquaintanceship with a number of rural development projects
funded by Australia and managed in PNG by Australian consultants.
The article was published in the December issue of Quadrant
magazine.
 
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