Prof. Patience…

Professor Patience until recently held the chair of Political Science at
the University of PNG in Port Moresby. He was very outspoken and hist
articles frequently appeared in the local newspapers. Many of Professor
Patience's ideas and opinions on PNG were scoffed at by locals but for
me they actually rang the bell of truth. You can make up your own mind.
The Other Disaster on Our Doorstep
Allan Patience (SMH 1 June 2006)
The dreadful events that erupted in Dili last week followed hard on the
heels of the burning of Honiara. Together, they constitute a dire
warning for Australia. In both cases Canberra reacted to events. It
seems not to anticipated them.
The simple fact is that all of the South Pacific states are struggling
with increasingly intractable and dangerous problems of misgovernment.
Nowhere is this more ominous than in Papua New Guinea. Australia has a
serious Pacific problem, right here on its doorstep.
There is incontrovertible evidence that the situation in PNG is is
worsening by the day. The systematic corruption that poisons the
political system form top to bottom is well known. Transparency
International continues to downgrade PNG each year on its international
corruption index. Late last year the PNG police force was strongly
criticised by Human Rights Watch International for routinely
imprisoning, bashing, torturing and raping children.
Crimes of violence are escalating, including bashings, murder and rape
of very young children, teenage girls and women. HIV\AIDS is out of
control, as are malaria and tuberculosis. Health services are collapsing.
The education system has all but disintegrated. Literacy rates are
plummeting as schools close. Teachers are not being paid properly, or
are not being paid at all. The higher education sector is fragmented
and grotesquely under-resourced. It long ago ceased being the main
builder of human capacity for PNG.
Over the past two years the United Nations Development Program has
placed PNG successively lower on its Human Development Index because
essential services are failing and governance is stalling. Now the UN
has warned that PNG may be downgraded from being a “developing state” to
a “least developed state”, ranking it among the poorest nations in the
world.
Canberra’s befuddled responses to the looming crisis in PNG have been as
reactive as its responses to the Honiara and Dili catastrophes. Its aid
programs over the three decades of PNG’s independence have, at best,
held a shaky line between basic incompetence and total disaster.
It was stirred into renewed action in the wake of the intensifying
US-led war against terrorism. It has stepped up aid to PNG and sought
to intervene more directly to improve public administration. Yet the
results are not promising.
The failed Enhanced Co-operation Program was a calamity waiting to
happen. Even though many Papua New Guineans supported Australian police
and bureaucrats coming to help deal with mounting law and order and
governance problems, the scheme was ham-fisted from the outset. It
placed well-paid, well-fed, well-uniformed, well-housed, well-equipped
Australian police on duty alongside woefully paid, hungry, shabbily
dressed, disastrously accommodated, hopelessly equipped PNG counterparts.
The contrast could not have been sharper. The inevitable resentments
erupted swiftly.
For a program such as this to succeed, a significant injection of
resources into the PNG police force is needed to improve pay rates
(which are absurdly inadequate), to upgrade police bases, to increase
mobility (outrunning decrepit police cars in Port Moresby is a popular
entertainment), to upgrade accommodation (most police officers and their
families live in hovels), and to radically upgrade education programs.
Many middle-level and senior officers need to be sent to Australia for
training and to gain experience, which would radically improve capacity
and morale.
There are many other issues that reflect the inadequacy of Australia’s
myopic and paternalistic diplomacy within PNG. These include the
short-term working visa proposal at the Pacific Island Forum summit late
last year. John Howard bluntly turned the proposal down, promising
instead to fund a major regional TAFE college somewhere in the region.
Yet firm plans for this have yet to materialise.
The non-attendance of Australian ministers at the recent Australia-PNG
Business Council meeting in Cairns is an unfortunate indicator that PNG
ranks low in Canberra’s esteem.
There are very serious problems on the PNG side of the equation, too.
Governments in PNG have long been managed by ministers who overestimate
their leadership and administrative capacities.
Since independence, most politicians have regarded the national
Parliament as a means to amass personal fortunes. Pitifully few have
articulated a vision for nation building and governance improvement.
Most play the system for what they can get out of it personally. A few
have been prosecuted. Even fewer have been imprisoned. Most are
basically venal and many are seriously corrupt.
Good government has been swamped by the bad politics of survival. This
is especially true of the latest Somare Government. Although it has
been in power for four years, it has achieved little in terms of policy
reform for national development. Its main claim to fame is the handling
of the economy. While this has hardly been a stellar achievement, some
stability and discipline has been realised under the cautious
supervision of the Treasurer, Bart Philemon.
But Philemon is now a partial victim of the bad politics of political
survival. In a recent mini-reshuffle of cabinet, he lost the finance
portfolio, which was given to a minister who is unlikely to demonstrate
Philemon’s caution and discipline.
It is widely anticipated that Philemon will lose Treasury as well in
another reshuffle heralded by Somare.
Given that the next general election is a year away, what small
successes the Somare Government has achieved will be unwound in the
pork-barrelling for which PNG is infamous.
That PNG is a vast administrative and political mess is patently
obvious. It will soon be a major social disaster.
Does Australia have the resources or foreign policy acumen to handle the
problem that will flow as a result? On present indications, the answer
would have to be “no”. Nothing short of major international
intervention can save PNG. The real test for Australia will be whether
it can assemble and co-ordinate a multilateral approach to PNG – and to
all of the South Pacific.
Alan Patience is the Professor of Political Science at the University of
PNG.