Letter from the Land of Plunder
FOR the past few days I have been working in Papua New Guinea, a country where I lived for more than a decade, in an earlier era. That past was another country. They did things differently there, as many Papua New Guinean friends from that time have kept reminding me this week. They did some things differently, but not everything of course. So much has changed, so much not. The constants include positives such as the sunny nature and good humour of Papua New Guineans. But that also includes their frustration at the failure of government services, at the astonishing gap between the cost of housing and their wages even many managers and skilled workers have no choice but to live in teeming squatter settlements and at the tales of vast sums of money that seem to flow past, tantalisingly just out of reach. The dominant focus is on the distribution rather than the creation of wealth. The creation is widely assumed to come from the resource game. As the quantums there have