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The Australian
Raskols on the rampage
Rory Callinan
08 September 2004

LIKE ghosts, the boys of the feared 585 raskol gang glide
silently in from the balmy Papua New Guinea night. Wielding
bush knives and homemade guns, and hidden behind balaclavas
and crude scarves, they are a sight to inspire terror among
the citizens of the capital, Port Moresby.
 

But tonight, as they gather beneath an old house in the poor
suburb of Gerehu, north of the capital, the gangsters are
there to speak about a new threat to their turf - Australian
police.

"If they shoot at us we will have to shoot back. It will be
self-defence," says their local leader, a tall,
thirtysomething man with a nasty scar on the side of his
face, who asks to be known as K.

This week the first operational Australian police officers
arrived on Bougainville island to begin training duties as
part of Australia's $1.1 billion, five-year aid program
designed to combat the breakdown of law and order in PNG.

At its height, more than 200 police will be occupying key
roles in the nation's police force, led by a commander with
the rank of assistant commissioner. They will be armed and
allowed to use lethal force against criminals such as the
raskol gangs.

Well aware of the arrival of the foreign police officers,
two Port Moresby gangs - the Kaboni, or devil gang, and the
585s - have agreed to allow The Australian a glimpse into
their criminal life and their connections with organised
crime and police. Checks on some of their information have
revealed links between a convicted criminal and one of the
city's most senior police officers.

Among the slums of Port Moresby's outlying suburbs, the
gangs provide security, employment and food for a growing
army of unemployed youths and men. With names such as Kaboni
and Mafia, the gangs make no secret of their criminal
intent. They boast generations of members who believe crime
is an official employment and express pride in their ability
to rob banks, execute carjackings or bash and mug victims.

At 585's headquarters, a poor village of battered wooden
stilt houses surrounded by swamps and dusty dirt roads,
middle-ranking gang leader K meets The Australian with his
boys to explain a few home truths.

"My job is crime," says K, who has two wives and three
children. "I have bought my house from the money I made from
robberies. I respect crime. It looks after me."

K reveals he is still wanted for attempting one of Port
Moresby's biggest robberies on the heavily fortified Westpac
bank more than five years ago. Four of his fellow gang
members died.

"I was driving the car. There was a four-hour car chase and
a two-hour gun battle," K says. "The matter is still under
investigation," he adds, even though the incident happened
more than five years ago. K says he was arrested but, like
many of the crimes, his case has not been followed through.
"I saw my arresting officer," he says. "He said: 'It is good
that you are keeping your head down."'

He says one of his latest jobs has been helping an Asian
businessman with a new type of poker machine that has
slipped through a loophole in gaming regulations. The
Government moved to ban the devices, known as Horse Racing
Machines, which resemble amusement arcade video games but
pay out money. Several wealthy foreigners have lodged an
appeal against the ban. An inspection by The Australian this
week revealed scores of the machines still operating across
the city.

"One [foreigner] asked me to approach a gaming inspector to
ask him to hand back some of the chips they had confiscated
when he imported them," says K. "The gaming inspector
refused. But that was because I think someone else had paid
him."

K then takes The Australian to view a so-called motel owned
by another foreigner who is making a fortune from
prostitution. Sitting in the beer garden are scores of young
women.

"The client pays for the room and then negotiates the price
with the women. Some are very young," says K.

K also reveals he is aware of a suspected criminal
connection between a convicted fraudster and one of the
city's top police officers.

The Australian, later checking his claims, finds he is
referring to the head of the PNG police force's crime
directorate, Awan Sete. Sete was suspended several months
ago after being named in federal parliament as aiding and
abetting three anonymous Chinese businessmen in drug
trafficking and people-smuggling activities, and having a
heart operation paid for by the same businessmen.

Sete has since been reinstated and denies the allegations,
which include claims he was being allowed to live in an
up-market city unit provided by a local businessman who was
not named in the parliamentary statement.
 

The Australian has learned the businessman involved is the
owner of a local supermarket, Frankie Chong. When confronted
, an angry Chong says the claims are wrong.

"You clear my name. I am not involved in any of that," says
Chong in the backroom of his supermarket. "I was set up. If
Sete was corrupt, don't you think I would have used him to
avoid going to jail for that [the fraud]. Somebody forged my
signature on a cheque over that [the jail term]."

Chong confirms he provided free accommodation to Sete.

"We are old friends," he says. "When he was transferred back
here, I offered for him to stay with me instead of out at
the police barracks. It's just friends. If it was the local
wantok [family favours], it would not be a problem. I am not
doing any of those things. I have had the police raid and
take away my books and my firearms. Yet they find nothing.
The bank closed my accounts. But I have sued the bank."

Chong also denies he funded heart surgery for Sete. "That is
another policeman and it was a nightclub in town here,
Songbird," he says.

Over at the Songbird nightclub, when The Australian arrives
at 5pm it's happy hour. Barely a handful of customers have
turned up. They are heavily outnumbered by the club's
hostesses, young women who prowl aimlessly among the bar
chairs with their rotting, holed cushions placed around the
concrete dance floor.

Hostess manager Alex Johang confirms the club may have
raised money for a police officer's operation last year. "It
was just fundraising," he says, but he can't recall any
other details.

The club's marketing manager Henry Duva says urgently it has
changed from that. "Now anyone who wants to raise funds has
to book the club and register," Duva says.

Both deny the club is a front for prostitution. "We don't
encourage any of that," Duva says. The club's motto is Your
Leisure is Our Pleasure.

PNG's acting commissioner Gari Baki this week revealed to
The Australian that Sete, while reinstated, will face
disciplinary action. "He's been investigated but it could
not be proven. He's been reinstated," Baki says.

Back near the centre of Port Moresby, The Australian finds
the Kaboni members, who live in a hillside shanty in the
suburb of Kaugere. The gang agrees to a meeting in their
sleeping quarters - a dilapidated gym that was opened in the
1980s by Prince Charles. When they turn up, several are high
on a cocktail of marijuana and alcohol, and one appears to
have a pistol.

Kaisen, a 27-year-old, who has lived in the gym for more
than three years, describes his day.

"When I wake up, the first thing I do is go out and look for
the boys," Kaisen says. "Then we sit down and we smoke
joints. Sometimes we smoke up to 20 joints. Then we start
planning - something to forget their troubles. The boys
might do a bus hold-up, take money, watches, cameras. We
sell that for food and rice and smoke [marijuana].

"Sometimes we do big robberies. We rob the payroll of
stores. Get all the customers to lie down and get all the
money. When you are lucky, you are lucky. When your luck
runs out you bump with the police."

The Kaboni are equally hostile to the Australian police
should they get in their way.

"We don't care about them. This is our country. They are
standing by the Government to control the criminals. I shoot
at them because they will take away my life," says a gang
member, White.

All gang members believe, however, it will be almost
impossible for the Australian police to stop corruption.

"They will be working with police who are corrupt. How can
they do that successfully?" asks 585 boss K. "There are so
many corrupt police. I have lost many friends who have been
killed by them."

But another 585 member says: "Maybe they will be good. They
won't shoot us or bash us. They will have to take us to the
police station."

Baki admits the biggest challenge will be corruption.
"Because it is evident that it is not only happening at the
lower place," he says. "It is very high up. It has
infiltrated into the system. It will be challenging but, at
the end of the day, we will look to use [the] operation as a
learning process for us as well."

A terrible orthodoxy has crept into the management of most of the world’s developed economies.
This orthodoxy instructs that people exist simply to serve the economy — especially its biggest stakeholders.
This once-totalitarian doctrine is now a central plank in the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. It’s just plain wrong. The economy exists to serve the people. If we could rewrite the silly statement by George Bush Senior: It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s the people.
In developing states like Papua New Guinea, it is vital that economic planning first be directed at improving the life chances of the people. This means first investing in community development, education, health services and security. All of these things must come first. Without those things in place, no economic development can occur — none at all.
The history of all of the former “command” (or communist) economies demonstrates this point very clearly indeed. Those decrepit regimes put the welfare of their peoples second. The result was always the total failure of their economies — as such despicable regimes as the old Soviet Union, North Korea and Burma clearly demonstrate.
PNG has an advantage in innovating for its immediate economic future, right at the time when world oil prices are starting to spiral upwards. Soon they’ll be out of control. In the medium-term and long-term these increases will snowball, making oil-based energy extremely — even prohibitively — expensive.
One fact that has to be faced squarely is that economic growth during the first three decades of independence has been unimpressive. Some experts even accuse economic managers of producing underdevelopment in PNG, not development at all.
Big ticket items — especially large-scale mining projects and logging of forests — have mostly failed to deliver on most of the wild promises made at their beginnings. These developments have certainly resulted in large-scale environmental pollution and ecological destruction.
Their cultural, social and political consequences have sometimes been disastrous — eg, Bougainville. It is widely believed they have massively contributed to the corrupting of certain politicians, public servants, police and members of the judiciary in this country.
This view especially focuses on the role of foreign forestry-related companies in allegedly undermining the integrity of the PNG political system.
The truth of these allegations needs to be tested before a totally independent, properly resourced investigative tribunal. This tribunal should first read and then release the Barnett Report on logging in PNG (a copy is available in the UPNG library). By examining this excellent report, all future investigations will be able to move forward decisively.
This tribunal could be something like the Ombudsman Commission — that noble but rare office of real integrity within the entire PNG system of justice.
For this tribunal to be effective, it will need considerably increased resources.
If the ECP is serious, this is one area that would benefit from real backing — with first-class investigators and all the necessary equipment to ensure criminals are rapidly apprehended, stripped of all their assets, imprisoned and banned from business and public life forever.
There are some very frightening stories out there. Not a few crucial potential witnesses are afraid to speak out. Some diplomatic representatives are aware of what’s going on but they are turning a blind eye.
Could it be that political forces in their own countries are also benefiting from the largesse of certain foreign business enterprises operating in PNG? Time will certainly tell.
There are four major areas of the economy that have not been adequately addressed by governments over almost 30 years.
First, unemployment. This cancer eating into the PNG economy is an appalling economic disaster.
It is the main source of the law and order problems bedeviling the country. It represents the massive under-use of a potential labour force that should be contributing to development.
It has been noted frequently in this column that a national training and service scheme could very quickly solve most of the unemployment problems in PNG. And it would also address the problems of “discipline” highlighted by the Prime Minister recently. It would also put to rest the evil spirit of the law-and-order crisis haunting the country.
Second, agriculture. PNG is a land of centuries-old subsistence agriculture. Many of its regions contain rich soil that has never really been properly developed for surplus production. The primitive slash and burn techniques of gardening and food production badly need updating.
They constitute environmentally destructive methods of cultivation that should have been superseded years ago.
There are other crops PNG should be producing in abundance. For example, rice production should be stepped up, becoming a major export for PNG. Oil palm will become ever more important as the world’s oil supplies begin to dwindle. Vanilla and coffee will remain in reasonable demand on world markets. And why ever are vegetables and fruit being imported into this country?
Sustainable agriculture should replace the unsustainable mining and forestry industries that have been ruining the PNG landscape and corrupting its politics for far too long.
Third, hydro-electric power. PNG’s wonderful river systems are a natural source of cheap hydro-electric power. If properly managed, electricity could even be exported to places like Australia (via undersea cables) and West Papua (by conventional electricity grids).
This will become increasingly viable, potentially profitable, as the world price of oil skyrockets.
This leads to the question of transport in PNG. It’s time for PNG’s planners to realise the old fossil-fuel burning, internal combustion engine is about to become a dinosaur. It is patently not the transport of the future.
An electrified rail system throughout the length and breadth of PNG is the obvious answer to the country’s transport needs. Indeed, PNG should be leading the South-east Asian and South Pacific regions in really adventurous railway construction. There could be major overseas partners (eg, the Japanese, the French and the Germans) who could be interested in joint-venture developments of a major rail network for PNG.
Apart from moving goods and people across the country — cheaply and cleanly, note — it could also be a major tourist attraction.
Fourth, tourism. Tourism is the least developed of all the potential major money-spinners for the PNG economy. PNG’s spectacular mountains and valleys, coastal settings and islands could be a fabulous draw-card for people from all round the world.
The tourist market PNG should aim for should be the burgeoning eco-tourism market. Resort developments are passé. Well-planned bush-walking, mountaineering programs need to be developed that focus on the magnificent bio-diversity of PNG and its conservation. Similarly, sea-focused programs — diving expeditions, snorkelling, swimming, fishing, surfing — could become the very finest on offer in the world.
But tourism will never develop in PNG while the law and order crisis remains.
Nor can it develop without a comprehensive plan for training and deploying expert managers, hospitality experts, park rangers and guides. So many of PNG’s tourist programs are hopelessly managed, service is ridiculously under-trained and inefficient, staffing levels are far too low (tourism should be a labour-intensive industry).
Much of this training could be done in the framework of a national training and service scheme. But a world-class tourism and hospitality education program has to be developed within a major PNG university.
This would require the construction of an on-campus multi-function hotel in a good location (eg, next to the Botanical Gardens in Port Moresby, on the UPNG campus).
This would ensure that the necessary theoretical and practical training courses go hand in hand.
The main focus of the academic training and education programs in this university-hotel should be on eco-tourism. This means placing first-class environmentalist and conservation courses at the heart of the tourism and hospitality training, as well as food and beverage programs, management training programs, language and cultural programs.
It is entirely likely that this kind of development could be developed in a joint-venture arrangement with a major international hotel chain.
It’s time for PNG to stop being fooled and bribed by foreign interests wanting to rip out its mineral resources cheaply and chop down its forests even more cheaply.
The people pressing PNG in those directions should all be expelled from the country. They’re contributing nothing economically and they’re perverting it politically.
An entirely new economic approach is required — a sustainable approach.

* Allan Patience is Professor of Political Science, UPNG

By Allan Patience

The people of Papua New Guinea are at least as vulnerable to all “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” as those suffered by other people around the world.
In many instances they are even more vulnerable, mainly because of poorly resourced health infrastructure and endemic serious “tropical” diseases like malaria. This is all compounded by the complexities of the terrain with its associated communication and transport problems.
The delivery of an efficient and comprehensive health-care system for PNG must therefore be right at the very heart of an effective National Development Plan.
By placing health centrally in such a plan, PNG could lead the world in training skilled health workers in remote emergency medicine and primary healthcare.
And it could provide an effective model for demonstrating reliable medical care is a necessary condition which has to be in place before any real development can occur.
The vulnerability of PNG’s health services is not only related to shortages of doctors and nurses but also to a near absence of well-trained paramedical people.
Today, there are routine breakdowns in health care delivery that have nearly all increased since independence.
Under Sir John Gunther’s directorship of health, there was a reasonably integrated health system; there were good rural health services; aid post orderlies and related schemes operated effectively. It’s not as if it can’t be done. PNG needs to develop the capacity to do it well again, in part by heeding the lessons of history.
The breakdowns in the present system are evident in the failure to pay medical interns in public hospitals and in poor stocks of basic medical equipment and drugs (eg, the non-availability of anti-venoms in a country where the incidence of venomous snakebite is one of the highest in the world).
A comprehensive health program for PNG should begin in partnership with the national training and service scheme described in earlier columns.
Under such a scheme, aid-post workers and “rural medics” could be educated to deal with a wide range of emergencies and illnesses.
At the same time they should be trained to deliver health education programs relevant to specific areas of vulnerability. Reproductive health, infant welfare and child care should all be elements of this.
There are four major threats looming over PNG’s health today.
First, there is the HIV/AIDS pandemic (which is of course shadowed by the TB epidemic and malaria).
The simple fact is that unsafe sex with many partners is the most lethal way of spreading HIV/AIDS. To borrow an Australianism: If you have you unprotected sex with multiple partners, you’re a bloody idiot.
It is frequently asserted that promiscuity is traditional (culturally embedded, so to speak) in PNG and the South Pacific.
These claims about cultural entrenchment suggest that nothing can therefore change. This is just wrong. Cultures are always changing, all the time and are never static.
There are three effective ways of dealing with the AIDS pandemic. (1) Good public education — both about abstinence and safe-sex practices. (2) Compassionate treatment for people living with the HIV virus and proper availability of cheap retroviral drugs. (3) Wide and free availability of condoms and sound education campaigns to make their use “normal”.
PNG needs candid and compulsory education programs about sexuality in general, and about sexually transmitted diseases in particular, in all its schools and universities.
This education program needs especially to address the prejudices and negative myths about people living with AIDS that abound in PNG. These people need special care and love — and they have the right to lead dignified and productive lives, just like anyone else.
At present there are insufficient condoms for PNG’s needs, and they are not readily available or properly distributed. On current estimates, there are only three or four condoms available per adult male per year in the country. Some health officials have spread the absurd story that using two or three condoms at one time provides greater protection. It doesn’t.
Other “authorities” suggest condoms are porous and permit the entry of the virus. This is both unscientific and unconscionable. Though not fail safe, condoms offer the highest level of protection currently known against the spread of the disease. Abstinence from sex is as much a myth as it is a surety against the disease.
Many groups in PNG are opposed to condoms on the grounds they encourage sexual promiscuity. This ignores the fact promiscuity is some kind of norm in PNG (as it is in many parts of the world). To claim condoms increase promiscuity is at best naïve; at worst it is deadly.
I am a Catholic and my faith matters to me deeply. My Church demands of me obedience to the view that condoms should be banned. But in all conscience, I cannot accept this view. This is because it endangers the lives of many good people throughout this diverse and mostly nominally, or peripherally, Christian country. Future historians may even interpret the Church’s teaching on condoms as a form of murder, possibly genocide. It grieves me to have to say this.
Second, there is the pandemic of human conflict in nearly all of PNG communities. This is evident in the primitive concept of payback, in tribal warfare and in the terrible violence that results from law and order breakdowns (eg, bashings, murders). But most of all, it is evident in the widespread rape and violence directed against women.
Indeed, the spread of HIV/AIDS into the female population of PNG is probably mainly caused by rape — not infrequently, multiples rapes. PNG men should be deeply ashamed of the horrifying crimes committed against women in this country.
Once again, public education is a major way to address this serious problem. But it also demands much greater representation of women in politics — especially in the National Parliament, in provincial governments and in local level governments. So long as women continue to be unjustly under-represented, they will continue to be violated by backward and brutal men conforming to uncivilised and contemptible customary practices.
Third, linked to the violence against women is the issue of reproductive health in PNG — the availability of resources for women and men to have healthy, wanted babies and to be able to nurture children in secure families.
Resources are particularly essential for women and men to plan families. At a national level, too-rapid population growth exacerbates every other social problem. If population growth outstrips development, the availability of health services — and every other service — will diminish and deteriorate.
All parents, infants and children must be accorded special rights — to a full and happy life, to good nutrition and to a secure family environment. And they must have access to a comprehensive and sustained health system.
Fourth, the average death ages of men and women in PNG are far too low. Infant mortality rates are far too high and they are increasing.
In addition to the reforms advocated above, some simple issues could be addressed for increasing life expectancy.
A vigorous anti-smoking campaign is needed, showing the clear causal links between the multitude of poisons in tobacco smoke and lung, arterial and heart disease.
Reliable reports suggest that, as tobacco sales are restricted in developed countries, so international tobacco companies are trying to impose their toxic products on the Third World. PNG should lock out tobacco companies and ban smoking in all public buildings and spaces.
People also need much more effective educating about the association of betel chewing with lime, mouth cancer and heart disease. The associations with cancer and heart disease increase rapidly if smoking is also involved.
In addition, the disgusting spitting of betel sputum is related to the spread of diseases like TB (also an epidemic in this country). Papua New Guineans’ spitting habits have to be seen for what they are — filthy and un-hygienic. They will certainly be repugnant to the international tourist market that PNG should be developing.
Leaders (e.g., politicians, teachers, lecturers, public servants) should be setting responsible examples by quitting smoking and betel chewing and encouraging others to do likewise.
Once a good health system is in place, and provided it is closely linked to a good education system, PNG’s development prospects will rapidly improve. That is why a National Development Plan is now necessary. Sustainable economic growth will only come after people are healthy and well educated.

By Allan Patience

A National Development Plan for Papua New Guinea has to nurture and prepare ordinary people in their everyday communities for the massive social and cultural changes development brings.
Without a first-class education system there will be no development. None at all.
The cultural changes that accompany development are not easy. They can be terribly painful, dislocating, bewildering and frightening.
They demand from political leaders a profound talent for educating the people. To achieve this, they need to be backed up by a highly effective education system.
The role of the politician as teacher is critical here. Members of Parliament have to be able to explain the difficult changes that have to take place in order to make their societies better, safer, more prosperous, healthier and far more promising for generations to come.
Two outstanding examples of leaders-as-educators are Mahatma Gandhi, in India, and Vaclav Havel, of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. Both were themselves highly educated men.
Gandhi was the gentle patriarch, wisely weaving ancient Hindu, Islamic and other Indian traditions into the fabric of modern India. People listened to him and understood why decolonisation was happening and how a stable independence could eventually be achieved. The achievements of Indian democracy today would never have been possible without Gandhi’s patient and sustained teaching.
Through his plays and other writings, Havel (a Nobel Literature Prize winner) educated his people not to be cowed by the terrorism, incompetence and corruption that characterised the behaviour of the old communist leaders — leaders who had utterly failed them. He taught the people how to rebel successfully against the stupidities of Marxist totalitarianism.
Despite imprisonment and torture, he remained always the leader-teacher — endlessly explaining, berating, cajoling, persuading and inspiring his followers, over and over.
PNG needs leaders like that — people who are both educated and educators; people highly conscious of the realities (local and international) that simultaneously constrain and enable PNG’s development prospects. They must be able to explain these constraints and possibilities to the people clearly and honestly — to inspire them to work tirelessly, to improve conditions for themselves, their children and grandchildren.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has explained education is the primary driver of development. Not only does it contribute to the economy, it also richly enhances citizenship and positive community engagement with social and cultural transformation.
For example, the educating of girls, he explains, is especially important. Many of them will be the mothers of the future — the primary nurturers and values educators of their children. Girls therefore need to be educated in maternal and family health issues, about the nutritional and physical security needs of their families and about the rights these vitally important roles confer upon them. They are also the primary educators of democracy.
Education also permits informed and inspired women leaders to emerge, to represent issues relating to family and community — as well as other issues too — at the very power centres of public policy.
Educating the people of PNG effectively must take high priority in a National Development Plan. It ought to be integrated into the national training and service scheme advocated in earlier columns.
Elementary schooling must first be made freely, comprehensively and compulsorily available to all children from the ages of six to 16. The primary schooling program should have four basic elements: literacy and numeracy, history and cultures, citizenship educating and vocational skills training.
This will require more schools, Internet access in all schools, properly equipped classrooms, laboratories and libraries — and a reliable supply of well-trained and dedicated teachers.
PNG’s teachers are not adequately educated. Teacher -training needs a radical overhaul and greater resourcing.
It should be at the very centre of a national tertiary education system. After parenting, teaching is by far the most important thing in all societies. A society unwilling to properly train and reward its teachers is one that does not want development.
Teachers in this country are inadequately paid. And they are often poorly valued — by governments, by the communities in which they are based and by too many of their pupils. Too many schools are under-resourced. Curricula are often out of date and mostly irrelevant to any coherent national development strategies.
The 6-to-16 elementary education program being suggested here would have to be totally re-designed to remedy these many flaws. New curricula, new facilities and a new philosophy of “education as development” are all badly needed. At age 16, students should graduate either into high schools or proceed into the national service and training scheme.
The main aim of the high-school system should be to prepare students for tertiary education. The tertiary system (universities) should be sharply focused on developing up-to-date curricula for the teaching profession, for other professions (especially for medical GPs and nursing, engineering and technology, and for socio-cultural communication and understanding), for the legal system (lawyers, magistrates, judges), and for private and public sector administrative careers (“good governance”).
That is, PNG’s universities should be shouldering the task of capacity building, at the very highest levels of international education, to prepare young citizens for positions of leadership in this country in the years ahead.
Capacity building is mostly not happening at the highest levels in PNG’s universities. They are appallingly under-resourced. Compared to overseas universities, the levels of overseas staffing are too low.
Local staff are seriously underpaid and under-valued. Opportunities for research are far too limited. Institutions are clouded by a culture of demoralisation. And they are mostly failing to provide young PNG students with the kind of education they desperately need.
There are far too many universities for this small country. There are six in all, accounting for some 7000 students. When you consider the average size of an Australian university is around 20,000 students, the luxuriance of universities in PNG looks ridiculous. It is ridiculous.
So what can be done?
Millions of kina could be saved by rationalising the universities into one “federal” university system — say, the National University of Papua New Guinea (NUPNG).
There are some excellent overseas models where this has been extremely successful. For example, the University of California has about half a dozen major campuses (eg, UCLA, Berkeley, San Diego, etc.). The University of London is another example.
In a federal university system each campus has its own character, its own culture but is expected simultaneously to work collaboratively and competitively.
It is easy to imagine UPNG, the University of Goroka, Vudal University, and Unitech, and even Divine Word and Adventist University coming together under the one federal administrative umbrella.
At the same time other related institutions should come into this system — eg, the Institute of Education, the NRI and the IPA.
Arguably the most expensive staffing of universities is at senior management level — vice chancellors/presidents, their deputies and associated senior staff.
In a federalised university system, instead of five senior executive teams, you could have just one. The savings could be spent on more staff, more student places and better resourcing.
You would make huge savings in terms of benefits of scale. You could have one comprehensive information resource system accessing the Internet, multi-media electronic communications between all campuses, one centralised library system rationalising and moving scarce resources efficiently around all the campuses as needed and campuses could specialise more.
The advantages to capacity building for development in PNG would be considerable.
The university system could be swung more directly behind national development strategies — not simply in terms of educating manpower, but also in terms of responding to the country’s research needs.
It is time to shake up the entire education system in PNG. By associating its primary and secondary tiers with a national training and service scheme you could make a massive contribution to national development.
It would result in reducing unemployment, opening up national development projects — and significantly, reducing law and order breakdowns.
And by federalising the university system, you could transform the serious absence in PNG of capacity and capacity building — an absence that is massively contributing to the “development of underdevelopment” in this country.
 

Post Courier, Monday 16th August, 2004
 Looking after ordinary people
By Allan Patience

A National Development Plan for Papua New Guinea has to start with ordinary people in their everyday communities. People must be its number one priority.
In particular, the people of the future — young people — must be provided with the resources and conditions to live longer, better, happier, more educated, healthier and much safer lives than the generations before them.
A society that cannot deliver this is going backwards. It is in such societies that governance generally equals failure.
A National Development Plan has to be able to make things better — much better — for the children of PNG, its grandchildren and its great grandchildren.
The governance of the country is dishonourable if it does otherwise. And, as the great English philosopher John Locke pointed out, the people have not only the right, but also the duty, to get rid of dishonourable governments.
In the recent past, all around the Third World, development meant “modernising” the economy first, stupidly.
This involved exploiting resources, ripping out forests, hastily pushing people from subsistence to consumerist lifestyles, naively (or dubiously) welcoming each and every shady overseas “investor”, and trying to look like “modern” states and societies as quickly as possible.
In this old-style development, ordinary people always came second, or even last, in the mindless rush by the few to get rich — always at the expense of everyone else. Ugly open-cut mines were gouged into the green mountains of the past, rivers were polluted, fish poisoned, senseless logging turned rainforest landscapes into moonscapes and damaged the world’s climate systems.
Meanwhile, unemployment grew as people were pushed from villages into the sleazy margins of the burgeoning towns and cities. Governments concentrated on the “big” economic deals.
They complained that they had insufficient resources for “little” things — like schools, housing, health clinics, public transport, decent roads — and security against crime and violence.
They even asserted the “little” things would have to wait until “big” things developed first — to pay for “little” things in some vaguely imagined medium-term or long-term future. Everyone was told to wait and mostly they’ve been waiting ever since.
Unrestricted mining and logging were seen as a panacea. A blind eye was turned to many a devious scheme designed to override legal constraints originally put in place to protect people, their communities and the environment.
It was naively believed this would all bring about huge economic growth and generous rewards for the politicians and officials cunning enough to accept the “persuasions” of overseas investors.
Those investors are mostly banned from operating in the more advanced states — their criminality is well-known there. So, like vultures, they prey on poor states.
It was said the economic benefits of all this shortcut taking would inevitably “trickle down” to everyone.
Leaders were bribed. Law-enforcers were under-resourced. Local radicals soon realised that quick bucks were to be made by pretending to be spokesmen for what anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski called “the natives’ point of view” — and ending up as apologists for the exploiters.
Media plants were paid to conceal the truth. Critics were silenced — one way or another. Whole political parties became clients of outside interests.
Local bigmen and entire villages were dazzled by short-term promises of “community development” projects and compensation pay-outs.
But all that proved to be very short-term. It added up to little more than a cloak for the rapacious and socially destructive “development of under-development” that was really taking place.
A few flimsy schools and chipboard clinics appeared — and then mostly disappeared. Some roads and bridges were erected, only to be washed away and forgotten. None of this was long-term.
None of it was focused on the
welfare and development of local people and their communities.
And so the phenomenon of “urban drift” set in. Soon it became a stampede. Squatter settlements mushroomed on the edges of towns. They became human sinkholes.
Crime, disease and prostitution festered among the derelict shanties and potholed roads, between the smouldering rubbish fires and heaps of burning tires, behind the clapboard brothels and sly-grog joints.
Uneducated and unemployed kids turned into rascals, desperately trying to find meaning in what were utterly meaningless lives. In reality, they had little choice but to break and enter, brawl and booze, gamble and shoot up, rape and murder — all in the shadows of night.
Insufficient resources were spent on widespread and culturally transformational education programs, to inform people about why things were changing and how they could benefit from, and contribute to, positive change — rather than to be exploited and tricked by all the liars and corrupt officials.
This pattern can be seen all over the decolonising world. Is it copied in PNG?
To try to answer this we need ask: Just how much has really been delivered on all those mining projects and logging development promises that were made to the peoples of PNG?
Who has really benefited? Where are the sustained and functioning contributions to community development? How sustained is the improvement in per capita income in PNG? How rapidly is the economy growing? Who are the winners?
Not the ordinary people in the villages — the 80 per cent of PNG’s population who are the backbone of the nation. Not their communities. Someone must be benefiting — but it’s obviously not the ordinary people. And it certainly doesn’t add up to a National Development Plan.
So how would a real PNG National Development Plan commence?
The answer has been spelt out consistently over the past two years by the Minister for Community Development Lady Carol Kidu. She has shifted what in the past was a neglected and unglamorous portfolio to the centre of PNG politics, often despite especially recalcitrant male colleagues.
It is noteworthy that it took a woman to bring good sense into PNG’s modern governance. There should be more like her, many more, in the National Parliament.
This is because if you want real national development, you have to inform, encourage and empower ordinary people. There has been almost none of this in PNG in its nearly 30 of independence.
Spurious anthropological theories have been spun to claim that traditional cultures in PNG are permanently focused on bigmen, that “corruption” is a white-man’s concept, that women will always be bashed and raped, that tribal wars will never cease, that governance failure has deep cultural roots and can never be stopped.
In PNG this constitutes a Big Lie. It has to be thrown out — and the way to start throwing it out is to plan and activate a comprehensive community development program for the entire country.
The community development focus of a PNG National Development Plan has to attack three major issues simultaneously, right at the outset.
First, it has to radically address the issue of unemployment.
This column has already canvassed a compulsory national training and service scheme as one solution to the unemployment problem that is holding PNG’s development back. All young males and females between the ages of 16 and 30 not in fulltime education or work should be obliged to serve in the scheme, for at least five years.
Basic education, training and work experience should be provided in the first two years. The graduates would then be employed on a wide range of national development projects right across the country.
Second, families and communities need to be given the resources to ensure children, old people, parents, adolescents — and other family and community members — can live peacefully together. (This would be complemented by the national training and service scheme.)
It also means providing proper housing, reliable water and electricity utilities, honest and efficient community policing — and dependable education and health facilities.
Third, it must radically address the issue of the terrible inequality of women in PNG — of which endemic (“cultural”!) violence against women is the tip of an utterly evil iceberg.
The multiple rapes, the wounded wives, the bashed girls — all this must stop. And the associated issues of women’s reproductive health and child care have to be positively addressed.
It was Chairman Mao — hardly a feminist, though occasionally a poet — who once pointed out “women hold up half the sky”. His poetry was spot on. For a society and state to flourish, women must be granted equal rights, equal rewards and equal power as men.
The best way to achieve this is through well-focused education programs — as Dr Thomas Webster’s excellent columns in this newspaper have been demonstrating over these past few months.
Next week’s column will consider what kind of education program is needed in a PNG National Development Plan.

Post Couier, Monday 9th August, 2004
 Pimps who live off the people
By Allan Patience

Politicians who live off politics are the moral equivalent of pimps living off the immoral earnings of prostitutes.
They contribute nothing to the public good. They simply don’t care what happens to the people they extort to make their shameful living.
A vividly brutal example of a political pimp is Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe. He has driven his country into the ground.
More than half his people are now facing famine. The country’s once-rich farming sector is in ruins. Mugabe is building extravagant mansions for himself up and down the land, sometimes with the questionable help of friends like Dr Mahathir Mohammad, the former Malaysian prime minister.
Everyone knows Mugabe is corrupt. Everyone knows he is in league with goons and thugs who murder and bludgeon his critics into a terrified silence.
Sadly, his people now appear incapable of removing him and hurling him into the prison where he belongs.
Are there any Mugabes lurking in the interstices of Papua New Guinea’s politics, waiting to unleash their goons and devastation on the people of this country?
The mark of politicians living off politics is their inability or unwillingness to formulate coherent policies that will lead to inspiring nation-building and sustainable development.
They spend their days plotting and scheming and bribing for their own advantage. They’re obsessed with grabbing the directive organs of the State — for their own profit and to pay off those cronies stupid or venal enough to side with them.
If they do address policy issues, they talk rubbish. Sometimes it can sound good. But detailing the strategies that would take the country towards their dizzy goals is something they studiously avoid.
This is because their promises are empty words. They have no practical way of honestly delivering on their pie-in-the-sky scheming and rubbish-talk. They are specialists in the politics of hot air and bulldust.
A lot of people seem to think that many (if not most) of Papua new Guinea’s politicians are highly skilled at living off politics. This would make them political pimps of the worst order. If this is true, what does it say about the National Parliament?
With a high turnover of politicians at each election, there is no policy stability, no focus on principles and on real and sustainable development. The resulting “temporary MPs” grab at the perks of office and try to squeeze yet more money or power for themselves, before they are gone.
Today, they are your friend. Tomorrow, they are someone else’s friend. No-one trusts or believes them. Most people who understand what is happening despise them.
Increasing numbers of people are getting very angry about PNG’s politicians and the ramshackle political system they are constructing around themselves.
The only good thing is that most of them will be voted out at the next election in 2007.
What can be done to make PNG’s politicians start serving the people and stop living off politics?
The country now badly needs a long-term political vision — a National Development Plan (NDP), say, for the next 20 years.
This NDP must contain real, progressive, inspiring developmental goals for the entire country. They must be goals that will capture people’s imaginations and show them they don’t have to put up with the bad governance that they’ve been forced to accept as “normal” in this country.
The plan needs to set out achievable goals over clearly defined periods. It must show how its various elements can be co-ordinated to move the country forward.
Politically, support will need to come from right across the all the political parties and interest groups, provincial administrations, and local-level governments. It will need to be “above” politics in the first instance.
It will have to be a plan relevant to everyone who wants to see real development taking place in PNG. The country has to face up to the fact there are certain basic realities that can no longer be brushed aside.
As Australian Treasurer Peter Costello bluntly pointed out last week, population growth is outstripping economic growth in PNG.
On current estimates, this means an inevitable and severe decline in the standard of living over the next decade-and-a-half for all but the richest Papua New Guineans.
The fact that Mr Costello made this observation indicates Australia is following the situation in PNG closely, because it thinks its national interest is affected by what happens here.
So, the second reality is that PNG will be increasingly under pressure from that quarter and from other external sources.
If PNG wants to remain an independent country, a country in which its people get first priority when it comes to development, then it must get its public-policy act together fast. The first way to do this is to get rid of those politicians who are only interested in one thing — living off politics.
Six steps would then need to be taken for a National Development Plan to get off the ground.
First, the plan needs to be sketched as a simple and clear “philosophical” statement — a little bit like the old eight-point plan — so people right across the country can focus on what it is trying to achieve and how it will help the country.
Second, a broad cross-section of public support for the NDP needs to be recruited and mobilised. This could be developed within a specially constituted body to be called the Congress for the National Development Plan (CNDP).
Third, the congress would then spearhead a major public education program all around PNG, explaining to people what it means and why it is important.
Fourth, the congress would be responsible for helping politicians develop their approaches to the central components of the plan. To achieve this, it would draw on a specially constituted PNG National Institute of Governance that would bring together expertise in all the tertiary education institutions and public administrations across the country.
Fifth, the Institute of Governance would also have to be given the responsibility and resources to closely monitor what the politicians are saying and doing in response to the plan.
It would be required to report back, regularly and in a scrupulously non-partisan way, to their electorates, informing voters exactly what their MPs are up to.
Sixth, the congress (assisted by the Institute of Governance) would be responsible for expanding on the first “philosophical” document. This would have five closely related sections: (1) Community Development and Education, (2) Health Strategies (especially in dealing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic), (3) Sustainable Economic Development (for instance, developing PNG’s vast and magnificent eco-tourism potential), (4) Regional and International Affairs (including formulating a sensitive leadership role in the South Pacific and establishing a mature relationship with Australia), and (5) Constitutional Reform.
Over the next few weeks, this column will try to spell out some policy proposals within each of these sections of a workable National Development Plan.
Readers’ responses — critical and supportive — will be noted and made available on a website.
Stimulating policy debate is absolutely essential if a truly bold and ambitious NDP is to get PNG out of the politics of despair and disillusionment in which the country is now struggling.
It will be especially interesting to see how the politicians respond to the idea of an NDP. It will be quite threatening to those MPs who are lucratively and corruptly living off politics.
They are the political pimps whose policy laziness and malevolence are forcing PNG to its knees.
The people in PNG’s rural areas and in its towns are groaning for proper and progressive governance. They are bewildered by the massive leadership failures that too many of their politicians and administrators impose on them on a daily basis.
They need a bold new initiative, a genuine reform agenda. It must be part of a wide and deep sea change in PNG politics.
PNG needs a National Development Plan. It needs it now!
 

Post Courier, Monday 02nd August 2004
 Australia is obliged to do more
By Allan Patience

The passing of enabling legislation in the Papua New Guinea Parliament means the so-called “Enhanced Co-operation Program” (ECP) — a new approach to Australian aid — can now go ahead.
Some 230 law enforcement officers, recruited by the Australian Federal Police (arguably the elite law enforcement agency in Australia) and 70 or so public servants are to be deployed in PNG to help upgrade the PNG public service — and improve the law-and-order situation.
Most Papua New Guineans are reluctantly supportive of the ECP. Many can see its potential benefits even as they ruefully understand the reasons for it.
They are hopeful the Australian police will achieve results similar to the RAMSI policing successes in the Solomon Islands. There are nearly 4000 alleged criminals now in jail in the Solomons — some are former policemen, politicians, public servants and gang bosses.
Will something like that happen in PNG?
A few outspoken critics of the ECP have been raging against it. They say it contravenes the Constitution and infringes PNG’s sovereignty. But this attack is naive. The constitutional issues are not so clear cut.
The concept of sovereignty has rightly been dismissed by political scientists as “organised hypocrisy”.
The sovereignty of smaller states (including Australia’s) will always be compromised by bigger states if they calculate that it’s in their interest to manipulate, invade, “pre-empt”, bully, or pressure the former to do their bidding.
For example, look at the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United States of America. Most experts agree that in the short and medium terms, Australia will gain very little — and the long term prospects are not all that promising either. In this deal, America is clearly the winner, not Australia.
Any State’s sovereignty is only as real as the bigger players in global affairs permit it to be. This is the grim reality (one expert calls it “the tragedy”) of international politics.
In the South Pacific, of course, Australia is a big power. Given the nature of big power politics, it has a legitimate interest in what is
happening in PNG.
PNG is a gateway to Australia. Drugs, guns and people can be smuggled easily into remote parts of northern Australia from this country. It’s probably happening already.
The potential for terrorists plotting to strike at Australia is increasing, especially as Australia aligns itself more closely with the US’s “war on terrorism”.
An ungovernable, corrupt and disorderly PNG offers terrorists an easy entrée down south.
Therefore, Australia is coming, whether PNG likes it or not.
So, what are the historical and cultural influences shaping a renewed Australian presence in PNG?
People in PNG generally think of Australia as a benign big brother, a bit of a bully perhaps but indisputably an ally. They were surprised therefore by Australian demands for legal immunity for its officials in the lead-up to the ECP. They shouldn’t be so surprised.
Australian governments over the years have assiduously swept under the carpet the fact that the governance crisis in PNG is partly a consequence of the lazy and short-sighted era of Australia’s colonial administration.
Australia’s sole purpose for colonising Papua in the 1880s and, following World War I, extending its colonial rule into German New Guinea, was to shore up its own security.
Therefore, there was no sustained commitment to providing adequate infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals, communications networks, housing programs, economic development). Education and training programs came too late in the day to provide the experts needed for administering a successfully independent state.
This was particularly true of the post-war administrations of External Territories ministers Paul Hasluck, Charlie Barnes and George Warwick Smith. Theirs was an era of massive policy failure.
The administrative outcomes in PNG were paternalist to the point of racism, lazy to the point of negligence and terribly damaging to the medium- and long-term development of PNG.
The errors of that period were compounded by an incompetent decolonisation process hastily set in train by the Whitlam government. PNG is one wing of the moral albatross around Whitlam’s neck. The other wing is East Timor.
PNG today reaps the bitter harvest of Australia’s haste to impose independence on people who mostly (apart from the Bully Beef Club boys) were neither ready for it nor wanting it.
It is not incorrect to see this colonialism as predatory. Australia needed (and still needs) a passive PNG to fit into its security strategies. You don’t educate and develop a colony (or neo-colony) if you want it always bending to your will.
When you read the colonial history of PNG you realise it meshes with the European colonisation of the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders on the Australian continent.
And you only have to contemplate the plight of the Australian Aborigines today to see how deeply racist Australia’s colonial culture has been over two centuries.
That racism is also reflected in the harsh ways in which asylum seekers and refugees are being treated now.
Since independence, Australia has effectively neglected PNG. True, it has been active through the many and varied adventures of AusAID in funding some worthy development and humanitarian projects.
But, as Alexander Downer has observed, one could desire better outcomes for all the millions of dollars spent by AusAID in PNG over the years.
And we yet have to see an independent audit of all that AusAID money, to see how much has really stayed (and stays) in PNG and how much PNG money it siphons out of this country when it returns to Australia. We also need an audit of the companies and consultants it hires. And we could do with a follow-up of those consultants, to see who they are and what they are up to in PNG, post-AusAID.
PNG must wake up to the realities of big brother Australia. It’s time for an extensive and detailed historical critique of the colonial era, interpreted from PNG viewpoints.
That history no doubt will have many and varied interpretations. But hopefully, it will be a lot less nostalgic and cozy than the mostly morally limp Australian histories of this period.
PNG now needs fresh historians, like professors Henry Reynolds and Robert Manne who are systematically uncovering the terrible truths about European colonisation of the Australian Aborigines. A morally dynamic history should detail the very important parallels between that Aboriginal history and the history of Australia’s colonisation (and decolonisation) of PNG.
So, will the ECP achieve its aims? Most observers agree that if it remains simply a law-and-order corrective, it will fail.
A clear follow-up strategy for the ECP is now essential. Has it been thought about in Canberra and Waigani?
To think it through productively, it is vital to identify the very real responsibility Australia bears for the current governance crisis in PNG.
This is not to absolve the self-serving, policy-free, “thieving politicians” who meddle and muddle with governance in PNG on a daily basis. The criminals among them must be rooted out, stripped of all their assets, jailed and never allowed back into public life again.
But what it certainly does mean is that much more aid will be necessary, more intelligently negotiated and more consistently targeted, within the framework of a bold new PNG National Development Plan.
The priorities in this plan should be education, health, community development and communications.
It must have a national training and service component to soak up all the unemployment in the squatter settlements. A well-planned pilot for this component would probably be funded by overseas donors. If it is shown to work, it will not want for funding until it gets on its feet.
The plan also requires significant constitutional reform to get rid of the ridiculous Section 145 and to place equal numbers of women in the PNG parliament and in all provincial governments and LLGs.
And it must have a PNG Crimes and Corruption Commission at its core, to ensure that no one in public life, no one at all, can lie, cheat and steal from the peoples of PNG and ever get away with it ever again.
 
 
 

May 4, 2004

Widespread corruption and violence have left our nearest neighbour on
the verge of collapse. But an ambitious $1.2 billion Australian program to
restore order and stability could save the day. Mark Forbes reports from
Port Moresby.

Lush glimpses of life flash through the wire-mesh windows of Highlands
Highway patrol 01. Metre-high, red powder nut cobs are stacked for sale and
large, freshly caught trout are staked by the roadside. Native women sell
betelnut under multi-coloured umbrellas and a constant stream of locals walk
their produce along this important artery in the isolated, resource-rich
Highlands province of Papua New Guinea.

The road is the lifeline of the nation, the only route to rich gold mines, oil fields
and coffee plantations. But to the highway patrol, this bone-shaking,
teeth-jarring journey is marked by ambush spots, murder sites, tribal battles and
abandoned, Australianfunded police posts.

From the Highlands capital of Mount Hagen — still shocked by the recent,
brutal, Sunday morning slaying of an Australian pilot — to the wild west town
of Mendi, the journey reflects the extent of the crime wave and general social
crisis facing PNG. Here, many areas are reverting to violent tribalism,
self-styled warlords are heavily armed and rampant corruption diverts
practically all funding from essential services such as education and medical
care.

Later this year, more than 40 armed Australian police will patrol this lawless
country as part of a 230-strong contingent of police funded by a $1.2 billion
Australian initiative. The five-year Enhanced Co-operation Program is
supplementing $1.3 billion in Australian aid.

Alongside the Solomon Islands intervention, the move to restore order and save
PNG from collapse is Australia's most significant regional initiative, according
to Prime Minister John Howard.

The Australians will face a volatile mix of greed and guns in trouble spots such
as Bougainville, Port Moresby, Mount Hagen and Lae. They will be working in
a young nation, but an old land, where sorcerers are as feared as the criminals
who rob and rape. Their first task will be to revitalise a local police force that
Police Minister Bire Kimisopa concedes is dysfunctional and corrupt.

Moses Makob is a typical young, but embittered, constable. "We are all
sinners," he says as the decrepit troop carrier thumps along the crumbling
highway. "The commanders, too, are corrupt; corruption starts from the top
down."

Corruption helps support families trying to survive on the $8 a day Makob and
his fellow constables are paid, he says. "There wouldn't be corruption, law and
order problems if the Government looked after the wealth of the policemen."

The only reason the police can go out on patrol today is that The Age paid for
the petrol. But local criminals, such as the three men wielding bush knives who,
earlier in the day, had stopped a crowded ute and raped a young woman, know
there is little chance of being apprehended.

Parts of the highway have deteriorated so badly that Shell has halted deliveries,
thereby causing a fuel crisis. Mount Hagen trucking operator Andrew Rice
warns his rigs are fine when moving but "as soon as the truck stops they are all
over you; you are a sitting duck".

In Mendi, Southern Highlands police commander Simon Nigi admits police
have lost control of much of this vital region, with most posts having been
abandoned during the widespread violence surrounding the 2002 elections.

Arms smuggling connected to tribal power struggles and a booming marijuana
trade have left his men heavily outgunned — they now face between 1000 and
3000 military weapons. Traditional tribal fights, once confined to bows and
arrows, now wreak deadly havoc.

"We are heading for disaster," warns Nigi, the man hand-picked to return a
semblance of order to the province. About 400 rapists and murderers are still at
large and they cannot be brought to justice because of "logistics", he says.

Standing in Mendi's leaking, thrice-condemned, fibro police barracks, he says
police wages and living standards must be boosted. His police vehicles are
rationed to less than two litres of petrol a day.

Nigi advocates a Solomon Islands-style paramilitary operation to sweep guns
out of the region, backed by Australian soldiers. "I am keeping my fingers
crossed and hoping the quicker the Australian program comes the better. We
alone cannot fight this losing battle." But the first aim of the package must be
"to do something about this sickness called corruption".

Along Mendi's dusty main street a salesman spruiks Ngunu juice, which he
guarantees will cure diabetes, asthma and AIDS. The ramshackle town is
dominated by one five-storey building; in name it is the provincial government
headquarters, but in reality it is an empty shell.

Robert Posu, chairman of the local landowner council, fears the town is facing
ruin. People become frustrated because there are no books in the classroom, no
medicine in the hospitals; people are dying of curable diseases."

Mistrust of the police and courts has seen villages create their own militias
armed with powerful guns. "If it goes on like this, the people in the village
might take over town, close it down, say go back to the old ways," Posu says.

"We are the richest province in PNG. How can there be holes in the road?
Where is the Government, where is the medicine, where are the books? It's
coming to boiling point."

Several villages supported the guerilla campaign of self-proclaimed regional
freedom fighter David Adini, who was slain in a roadside ambush by the police
mobile squad a fortnight ago. Nigi relates his unsuccessful attempt to negotiate
a surrender. The heavily armed Adini vowed to shoot any police who came
after him. "He said: 'These guns of yours are just toys'." Adini told Nigi he was
protesting against the lack of regional development, saying, "I have no choice;
by doing this the Government will see I mean business".

A Price Waterhouse audit of the Southern Highlands provincial government
obtained by The Age reveals that senior officials, including national MPs, were
complicit in an "astounding and sinister" diversion of public funds. Almost all
of the province's $15 million revenue has disappeared.

The audit found that nearly $2 million went to a Queensland-based company
linked to the provincial governor for work on hospitals that was never carried
out. It also criticises the local bank manager of an Australian bank for
improperly clearing a cheque the recipient said was a pay-off for ballot-box
rigging.

This kind of fraud explains the lack of regional services, according to the
minister responsible for local government, Sir Peter Barter, who says the
situation must change to avoid "total anarchy". Police Minister Kimisopa says
the failure to charge those implicated "is another classic case of the lack of
capacity of the police force".

An even bigger scandal is the looting of the nation's superannuation nest egg,
the National Provident Fund. Lawyer Jimmy Maladina, brother of the deputy
PM, is facing minor charges as a result, but one of the lead investigators says
he has been hobbled by political interference, with investigators reassigned to
remote posts to halt their inquiries.

Kimisopa wants the Australian police to urgently assist because, he says, the
case places "a cloud of suspicion over the head of the police". He says
Australia's Enhanced Cooperation Program could provide a much-needed
solution to PNG's crisis.

It could help restore law and order by repairing the malfunctioning court and
prosecution system from "the ground up". Tribal traditions of compensation
and escalating payback killings have taken over from police, Kimisopa says.

Corruption has been politically institutionalised and a combination of endemic
political instability, a fragile economy dependent on commodity prices, massive
unemployment and a lack of police capacity "is leading to a total breakdown in
law and order".

Kimisopa says some of his colleagues are giving up, quietly moving funds
offshore and seeking Australian residency.

However, a diplomatic row over Australian demands for blanket police
immunity appears to have been resolved by a face-saving compromise and
Kimisopa is hopeful the ECP can begin within weeks.

One senior Australian official bluntly told The Age that while Australian police
would take casualties, the cost of inaction would be greater. But, he said, five
years and $1.2 billion will be "nowhere near enough" to prevent a nation of 5
million on Queensland's doorstep from becoming a base for crime, people
smuggling and the emerging security threats of the 21st century.

John Davidson, the head of Ausaid in PNG, also believes the nation will not be
turned around in his lifetime, but the package is essential.

"A baby dies every nine minutes in PNG, 10 women die in childbirth each day;
we have to make this work," he says.

As difficult as policing the Highlands will be, plans to place Australian officials
in financial management positions in the major departments to staunch the
diversion of funds will be the key test of the political will for reform in PNG.

"The machinery of government is broken here," says Davidson. "This will take
a long-term engagement." In the capital, Port Moresby, residents are weary of
constant, vicious crime. Last week, a leading Australian lawyer was bashed
senseless by three thugs in a popular nightspot. The thugs are believed to have
been hired by a rival firm following a court loss. Another expatriate was
dragged from his family car by "raskols" (criminals), surviving only because the
home-made pistol put to his temple misfired three times.

Raskol leader "Bita" is dismissive of what he calls such "petty crimes". "We go
for the big money — bank robbery, business houses," he says. His loose
network of 10 gangs has easy access to pistols, shotguns, M- 16s, even a
machine gun, and claims to work in concert with corrupt police.

"I shoot people, I kill them. When they get aggressive and try and fight back, I
shoot them."

Bita escaped from jail a fortnight ago. He has a wound on his left foot where
police shot him after an armed robbery of the Number One Finance
Corporation.

"Government needs to come down to the ground, when you talk in the air it
blows away," he says, waving a snub-nosed 38 special. Bita claims the nation’s
leaders are "the great raskols; our leaders steal millions".

Providing jobs or the dole would halt crime in Moresby, Bita says. "We want a
job so we can eat bread in the morning and have our dinner at night, that's the
truth.

"Australian police, they can come, but still crime will continue. When we rob
we don't care who you are, we take it. We are not scared. They come here to
stop crime. How can they feed these guys, these youths on the streets?"
 
 
 
 

Copyright © 2004 Port Moresby Chamber of Commerce and Industry