Opinion & Commentary
High price for a bruised ego
For the second time in little more than a year the Papua New Guinean Prime Minister, Michael Somare, has found a pretext to thwart Australia's five-year $800 million Enhanced Co-operation Program.
This can only serve to confirm doubts about the degree of high-level commitment in PNG to the revamped aid package in the first place.
Widely regarded as the last chance for PNG, the ECP involves the deployment of some 260 Australian police and other officials to help restore law and order, but it cannot be effective unless the PNG government supports it.
The program was unconscionably postponed in late 2003 over the issue of immunity for Australian officials when the Somare government adjourned parliament for five months, ostensibly to avoid a no-confidence motion.
Now the first ECP quarterly review has been suspended and deployments of Australian officials are in doubt after the incident at Brisbane airport last month when Somare was asked to take his shoes off during a security check.
Papua New Guineans are being asked to pay an extraordinary price for their leader's bruised ego. There are any number of pressing problems that should be occupying the mind of the Prime Minister.
One of the most alarming is the HIV/AIDS epidemic the country faces. This could reduce the labour force by a third, leading to economic and social disaster, unless effective government intervention begins immediately.
Some Australian commentators, buoyed by the renewed attention from Canberra to Papua New Guinea 's chronic problems, have tried to see the glass as half-full instead of half-empty. They have warned that constant criticism and negative commentary could be used by the real crooks in PNG as a justification for ousting from power the beleaguered minority of politicians committed to real reform.
But we must seriously question whether treading softly is really going to lead to the changes needed to turn PNG around. A key challenge is how to overcome the resistance of those elites who hide behind a facade of sovereignty to protect ill-gotten gains and corrupt practices.
It is not clear that a steady-as-she-goes approach is going to work against such criminals. If ECP officials and their PNG counterparts cannot bring these crooks before the courts, then perhaps the Australian government should consider denying them visas.
The determination to paint a rosy picture of a PNG on the mend is well-intentioned. And it is not unfounded. Treasurer Bart Philemon has managed to halt decline so that economic growth has at last been positive, at 2.3 per cent in 2003 and a projected 2.8 per cent in 2004. But with population growth at nearly 3 per cent, per capita incomes barely rose. For most Papua New Guineans, living standards continue to decline.
High mineral prices and two major new resource projects the Chinese nickel mine at Ramu and the gas pipeline from the Southern Highlands to Queensland have now reduced pressure on the government to reform.
Such projects are important, but they should be seen as the icing on the cake of labour-intensive agriculture, tourism and manufacturing that would provide the bulk of jobs and incomes.
Longtime PNG watchers fear that history is going to repeat itself. In the 1990s at the height of the last mining boom the windfall revenues that filled the government's coffers were spent, not on roads, health clinics and schools, but consumption. Papua New Guineans would have been better off if the minerals had stayed in the ground.
PNG already has a reputation as a corrupt and dysfunctional state on the brink of failure.
If the current diplomatic storm in a teacup continues, it risks not only becoming an international laughing stock but also losing what is a dwindling constituency of support in Australia for continued aid.
It is in everyone's interests particularly the 5.5 million long-suffering Papua New Guineans, to put this ridiculous spat behind them and to focus not on hurt pride but what can be done to put PNG on an annual growth path of 7 per cent a year that would double its GDP every decade.
Susan Windybank is foreign policy research director at The Centre for Independent Studies and co-author of Papua New Guinea On the Brink, CIS, 2003.
