PNG doesn’t need the left’s absurd gender agenda

Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong during Senate Estimates at Parliament House in Canberra.

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A PNG student races home from school to tell her parents she has a shot at a decent university education, funded by generous Australian taxpayers.

This kid is in a tiny minority in PNG. She can actually read the glossy scholarship pamphlet from the Australian government detailing the process for the 2026 Australian Awards Scholarship (formerly known as AusAID). She learns that university fees, airfares, living costs, health expenses and some living expenses will be covered by a generous scholarship.

Then comes the rude lesson in luxury politics. She wanted to do nursing. She was also thinking about teaching. But she learns that Penny Wong and Australian bureaucrats at DFAT want her to get a degree in gender studies, or something about climate, or in disability services.

The six areas stipulated in the previous round of scholarships for PNG students studying in Australia on these scholarships focused on agriculture, education, health, governance, law and justice, transport and infrastructure.

Wong says the Albanese government has broadened the areas of study for PNG students. Tell that nonsense to the PNG student who’s filling out an application – the closing date is April 30 – which says on page three in bold font that “applications focusing on gender, climate and disability-related studies are strongly encouraged”.

This is elitist arrogance, at its worst. Under the terms of the 2026 Australian Awards scholarship PNG students are expected to return to PNG with their new degrees and skills to help their impoverished country develop a stronger economy and a better health system and improve its woeful education system.

These students have a chance at earning a decent wage to help themselves and their family. They will likely become role models for other kids, showing them that education, learning, working is a way out of poverty.

Domestic violence survivors sit together in Lae, Papua New Guniea.

Why on earth are Wong and DFAT imposing their luxury politics on the poor kids of PNG?

Has Wong read what’s on the menu at our universities?

Gender studies students at Sydney University will be expected to “think beyond commonsense ideas about what it means to be male or female, and to recognise instead the many different ways that people embody and experience gender”.

In Wong’s home town of Adelaide, gender studies students will examine “the ways gender intersects all aspects of our lives. Discover the many ways gender shapes our lives from identities, sexualities and embodiment, to work, health, and popular ­culture”.

What’s a young PNG graduate going to do with a gender studies degree? Set up a gender department at the University of PNG?

It’s true that violence and domestic violence rates in PNG are horrendously high. But sending a handful of PNG university students to Australia to study Marxist-tinged ideological discourse about gendered violence won’t help reduce domestic violence in PNG. It may make it worse because your run-of-the mill Australian university gender studies course will focus on elite perspectives. It’s the educational equivalent of doling out a spoonful of Russian caviar to a kid who hasn’t eaten for three days.

Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia are plagued with violence, including domestic violence. Does Wong propose fixing that by sending some Indigenous students down to ANU to do gender and climate studies?

Wong and her department colleagues at DFAT need to get out more. Many parts of PNG have no, or grossly inadequate, power. They need a steady supply of electricity to establish fishing canneries and other agricultural businesses or to better extract minerals and petroleum. Families need electricity to heat homes, cook food.

Telling kids to get a degree about climate when PNG contributes next to nothing in global emissions and can do nothing about it is another Western frolic. In PNG, the issue for most people is whether they have electricity, not how it’s generated.

Literacy rates in PNG are shockingly low. A few years ago, the ABC featured a report about Cedric Agurope. Then 25, he went to the state-run Jangit Primary School, located in PNG’s East Sepik Province.

He enrolled in year three in 2014 when he was 17 years old. That’s right – as our kids are getting ready to leave school, this young man was in infant school. He didn’t get past year three because teachers didn’t show up. The violence kept them away.

“We didn’t learn anything,” he told an ABC reporter. “Now I am a grown man and should be married. I don’t know how to read or write.”

If it wasn’t so depressing, Wong’s haughty frolic with PNG students might be funny. Picture the scene. Work from home DFAT public servants are zooming in to settle departmental preferences for the 2026 intake of PNG scholarship students to impress Minister Wong.

One boffin asks earnestly: “What do PNG students really need to study? What would really help our impoverished, violence-stricken, underdeveloped neighbour?”

“I’ve got it,” says another. “Gender and climate studies with a side order of Marxism.”

Ditto with their push for “disability related” studies. Disabled people in PNG face vast practical barriers not encountered by disabled Australians. They often don’t have access to electricity, basic health services, clean water and health services. PNG’s shoddy infrastructure – roads, buildings, let alone internet services – make life harder for everyone, and especially disabled Papua New Guineans.

Do DFAT and Wong seriously believe the best way to help disabled people in PNG is with scholarship students learning about discrimination against the disabled in first world countries?

Their position here is so untethered from real life you have to wonder what other crazy stuff they’re doing to our neighbours in Australia’s name with taxpayer money. What do they have in mind for emergency aid in earthquake-ravaged Myanmar? Some urgent seminars on Foucault, or critical studies, perhaps?

President Donald Trump and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk speak to reporters as they sit in a red Model S Tesla vehicle.

Wong’s woke scholarships give a whole new meaning to the Albanese government’s efforts to exert soft power in PNG. The Chinese are eagerly investing in infrastructure, hoping to set up military bases and extract minerals and export them back to China. CCP officials must be guffawing at the mushy underbelly of Australian foreign affairs boffins wanting to export to the poor kids in PNG their privileged zeal about gender and climate.

It’s one thing for rich barristers in Sydney to hold re-education sessions and issue form guides on alternative pronouns – such as “xe/xem/xyrs” or “sie/ze/hir/hirs” – and to discourage barristers from using terms such as “transitioning” or “transgendered”.

It’s another thing for this country to impose equally fringe and privileged preferences on our developing neighbour. It might be done in our name, using our taxes, but this is the work of Wong and DFAT.

Wong’s hopelessly misguided paternalism towards PNG students is a reminder of a disturbing and controlling zeal among many on the left side of politics. They would be the first to tell Catholics, Anglicans and other Christian believers to keep religion out of politics. That’s harder for the ideological Left; their politics is their religion.

If Wong wonders how a bloke like Donald Trump becomes President of the United States, she’s closer to the answer than she probably realises. Just take the US equivalent of Wong’s overzealous, wasteful wokery with taxpayer money and multiply it by say 13, being the multiple of US population to Australian population. Don’t be surprised when the result is Trump, Musk, DOGE and their equally granular and grassroots war on woke.