THE PNG-OZ RELATIONSHIP

By JOHN FOWKE

There are good intentions, respect, and many, many friendships, both personal and institutional, mixed freely within the existing relationship. It seems to me that Australia has quite a good body of knowledge of the problems PNG faces in its present and future relations with its nearest neighbors, Australian, Asian and Melanesian.

However it is plain that Oz has little idea of how to proceed with effective, useful, culturally-aware aid and advisory projects and diplomatic initiatives. Importantly, no-one in Oz is looking at the long term, and equally importantly, in today’s Australia there has never been any attempt to create an intelligent, dedicated corps of Pacific-aware, culturally-and-politically-interested representatives. Specialists in the area, who wish to work in it as a career-choice, and in so doing, build up career-long friendships and contacts which will be immensely valuable to both sides.

To take an example, the PNG ECP initiative included a major policing input. It failed miserably, principally because no-one looked outside the modern Western philosophy of "State-building" into the depths of a highly-complex tribal society governed by highly-advantaged opportunists. This is to say nothing of the repeated mistake of sending un-briefed and un-orientated Constables from Cunnamulla and Sergeants from South Sydney; men who are simply not suitable, without meaningful introduction and cultural orientation, of fitting in. To my knowledge, nobody has put up suggestions as to how the whole Police thing- going right back to the ‘eighties AIDAB Assistance to RPNGC program, might better have been designed and introduced to PNG. Introduced so as to engage properly and produce a positive and widely-appreciated result. There was and is a way, of course; but its probably too late now.

Australia must start looking not at this year, last year, and the next budget and next list of academically-planned initiatives, but at the reality of the political, personal, and social relationship between neighboring, friendly countries. Countries which will still be neighbors, and we hope, friends, in 100 years time.

What should that relationship be, in its essence, so as to be really beneficial to both sides? What sort of society is it reasonable to hope there will be in PNG, in one hundred years time? Australia bumbles along, imagining that young graduates who go thru whatever passes for training at DFAT and AusAid will be able to create a positive, and, for both sides, rewarding relationship, by being of help in real, measurable ways. This ignores the known results of too many Oz initiatives.

The formation of a task-specific training program with an element of PNG’ians involved as instructors is the precursor to the terribly-important creation of a specific, dedicated cadre, to be generational, ongoing, of Australians who are Pacific/Melanesia ambassadors with energy, broad minds and the desire to identify with and mix in the cultures within which they will work.