PM Rudd confronts realities of evolving
AUSTRALIAN prime minister Kevin Rudd is a special, and very welcome, visitor today.
Rudd has signalled the importance he places on bilateral relations with Papua New Guinea by making this country his first port of call for an official State visit.
Although he ascended the topmost political position in Australia in very recent times, Rudd has already had an incredible impact.
For most Australians, like myself, there have been two standout events.
The first was when he led the Australian delegation to the climate summit in Bali to cast aside the nonsensical stance of his predecessor, John Howard, and to accede to the Kyoto Protocol.
Fortunately, Australia does not need to make excuses anymore and will take its rightful place as a leader in the search for solutions that are vital for the future of mankind – as Papua New Guineans know very well from islands that may disappear because of sea level rises.
On the second occasion that Australians stood tall had much to do with Rudd’s simple and symbolic decision to say “sorry” to the nation’s Aboriginal people, a proud people whose long history somewhat mirrors that of Papua New Guinean society as well.
Because Rudd is clearly a man of action with a great deal of empathy for the concerns of ordinary people, I am sure he has come well prepared for his first official State visit overseas.
He will come with many concerns and will certainly be well briefed on some of the reasons why Australia-PNG bilateral relations had fallen to possibly its lowest point during the Howard years.
But, as with that former government’s stance on climate change, it is not worth raking over the coals on this issue because it is time to move on.
What Rudd is unlikely to have been told in these briefings, is the likely scenario that Australia had sown the seeds for PNG’s ongoing malaise when it granted this country independence in 1975.
Many people will disagree vehemently because many ‘old timers’ and others like to believe those were the ‘golden days’, when everything was ‘hunky dory’!
The Whitlam Labor government, which was ideologically discomforted by the nation’s role as a colonial power, moved with some speed to grant PNG independence soon after it took office in 1972.
Data that I have seen from early AusAID reports have pointed to appalling social indicators at the time of this handover in areas such as infant mortality and the deaths of mothers during childbirth.
Prior to the somewhat more enlightened Whitlam era, which did not last long, Papua New Guinea had been administered under the kind of ‘White Australian’ paternalism that native Aboriginals also had to endure.
Prof Ted Wolfers, professor of politics at the University of Wollongong, in a paper delivered a couple of years ago, suggested that in 1975 PNG had been less prepared for independence than the troubled Congo when it gained independence some 15 years before.
Whitlam tried to offset this lack of preparedness – attempts at promoting mass education had began in the 1960s after a highly critical United Nations report – by offering a generous aid package of A$300 million in grants annually.
At that time, this represented more than 40% of the PNG Government’s annual budget and, despite serious concerns then, as now, that much of this aid was being dissipated through corruption, significant improvement occurred in the nation’s social indicators until the late 1980s.
One of the contributors to the prevailing mood of prosperity flowed from the tremendous success of the Bougainville copper mine, one of the biggest open cut mines in its day.
But even there the colonial authorities had sown the seeds of the later problems by refusing to hold any meaningful negotiations with local landowners who could not fathom the idea, that the sovereign entity or the “Crown”, owned all the rights to the minerals below the surface.
Even though this is still the law in the statute books, I haven’t yet met a single Papua New Guinean who doesn’t believe that minerals in the ground, or anything else that might be there, belongs to them.
Being a matriarchal society it was the women of Arawa that lay down before the bulldozers of the Bougainville copper mine, when construction work first began, in a forlorn attempt to halt construction of the mine.
One of the books written at the time about the mining plan was aptly titled, River of Tears.
The secessionist movement and the civil war, with the Bougainville copper mine caught as the ‘meat in the sandwich’, occurred some 15 years later.
The period from 1975 to 1989 has been classified by the recently published second edition of the Bank of Papua New Guinea, Money and Banking in PNG, as a “stable low-growth period”.
Even though much had not changed in this period – some 85% of the growing population remained subsistence farmers – a study by Dr Thomas Webster, director of the National Research Institute – said that by the end of the 1980s PNG had for the first time almost achieved the goal of universal primary education.
But everything seemed to go wrong from the early 1990s onwards, not least of which was the immense loss in human lives and diversion of scarce resources by the Bougainville conflict.
In its unhappiness with its aid performance, the Australian government began a transition away from grants towards provision of direct project aid.
The diversion of these funds at a time of severe financial pressures coincided with a period during which PNG’s foreign debt rose rapidly to unsustainable heights.
By this time Australian aid to PNG had shrunk to around 20% of PNG’s budget, having effectively been halved over the years and replaced by new sources of revenue from the Ok Tedi and Porgera mines and the Kutubu oilfields.
Project aid also introduced the factor that many Papua New Guineans have termed “boomerang aid”, where a significant proportion of funds are used by Australian companies that implement projects.
Besides repatriating their profits, they generally have less of a commitment to the training of local labour.
Since the ending of the severe recession of the first few years of this decade, these issues are giving way to new challenges in the bilateral relationship and in the resolve of the PNG Government to improve lifestyles and living standards.
A new sense of optimism has arisen in the past three years as a result of a resources boom that has brought record revenues into the coffers of the Government, along with considerable concern that capacity constraints in the public service will hamper progress. This also gives rise to growing fears of the stifling effects of corruption.
Prospects in the coming decade are brighter than at any time since independence, partly because of more enlightened Government policies, which have resulted in a big upsurge in mineral exploration and plans for several major new mining operations.
Two consortiums are also investigating the opportunity to build plants that will produce liquefied natural gas, either of which have the potential to transform the economy.
In this scenario, Rudd is presented with an opportunity to assist PNG to shed Australia’s oft-promoted tag as the leading nation within the Pacific’s ‘arc of instability’ and to shed often-expressed PNG concerns that Australian policy is aimed at keeping PNG ‘weak and dependent’.
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