PNG turns 50 as locals see different sides to its complex story
As Anthony Albanese prepares to join the party as guest of honour on Tuesday, Papua New Guinea still faces so many challenges, 50 years on from independence.
Papua New Guinea was dubbed The Land That Time Forgot by Mick Leahy, leader of the 1930s explorer-prospectors who first made outside contact with the million Highland farmers in the interior that was thought empty of people.
Increasingly after its independence, PNG has seemed The Land That Australia Forgot. Few Australians are curious enough even to visit, or aware that sports stars such as Mary Fowler and Jack Genia are of PNG descent.
The idea that Australia has a colonial past is puzzling and awkward for many.
But Anthony Albanese looks to be framing the international dimension of what may well be a long prime ministership, firmly in the footsteps of his Labor hero Gough Whitlam, by focusing on Australia’s closest neighbour and on China.
Whitlam established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, then swiftly entrusted Michael Somare, “the Chief”, with preparing and leading PNG to independence on September 16 1975.
Albanese has “stabilised” formerly rocky relations with China, capped by his six-day visit in July, and soon will fly to Port Moresby to sign an epochal security treaty and then become guest of honour for PNG’s 50th birthday party on Tuesday.
These two Albanese priorities make sense. But helping wear some of PNG’s challenges after 50 years – many of them self-generated – is perhaps the mightier task.
The country has always had a capacity to surprise outsiders by having them fall for its beauty and for its warm people.
It has hundreds of inhabited islands, mountains reaching 4500m and rich cultures where 812 languages are spoken. It is more than twice the size of Britain or Victoria.
Its population is soaring. At independence, it was 2.7 million. Today, respected estimates project it at 15 million to 17 million. Its fertility rate is an extraordinary 4.2 children per woman. By 2050, the total population will exceed 30 million. But for most, the quality of life is not soaring commensurately.
The lifestyle gap between us and our neighbours is immense, despite our geographic closeness – Australia’s Saibai Island is only a 3.75km canoe paddle from PNG – and despite the exalted ambition of PNG Prime Minister James Marape to make his country “the richest black Christian nation in the world”.
The latest UN Human Development Index rates PNG at 160th, just below Rwanda. Australia is seventh.
A core reason can be adduced from Transparency International’s corruption index, PNG languishing at 127th, alongside Djibouti. Australia is 10th.
Glen Mola, a naturalised PNG citizen since 1975 and doctor who has worked in PNG through its independent life, says: “Because the bar of expectations was set so high at independence, it was very difficult to achieve what people were hoping for. The view at independence was ‘We’re going to heaven’, not ‘We’re going to be on our own in the world’. But everyone has their own agenda, and those with the loudest voice and most money win the day.”
That disappointment gap between hopes and realities is typified in the Noble Centre, a 23-storey tower that dominates the downtown Port Moresby skyline. Built by state-owned China Railway Construction Engineering Group, it was hailed as a symbol of China-PNG friendship.
Completed in 2023, it stands empty because the National Capital District Building Board has identified massive faults from materials to fit-out, barring it from being tenanted, with remediation difficult and costly. One described in adverts as “gorgeous and glistening”, today in receivership, the tower is now called “Chernobyl House” by wags.
But PNG readily shrugs aside such missteps – nothing to see here – as with the 2011-12 period of two rival prime ministers, or the half-hearted military “bar-b-coup”.
Paul Barker, a British economist who has worked in PNG since 1978 and is executive director at the Institute of National Affairs, says: “Leading up to independence many predicted chaos, economic collapse and early dismemberment of the nation, but despite the trauma of the Bougainville crisis, brutal conflicts in some Highlands areas, increased lawlessness in places and a pretty rocky economic performance over the years, PNG has held together.
“The vision, structures and systems put in place in 1975 have been its bedrock, in 50 years during which many other developing countries imploded in one form or another.”
But some institutions have struggled.
Massive corruption was revealed in the forest industry from the mid-1980s, steadily spreading through government, accelerated by cronyism euphemised as “the wantok system” for favouring relatives and fellow tribespeople.
An Independent Commission Against Corruption was established in 2020 but it made its first arrest only this year. Its three foreign appointed commissioners, intended to shield the commission from wantok or political pressures, have been suspended following infighting, with mutual accusations of corruption.
A meticulous 812-page report commissioned by parliament detailed how a cabal of top bureaucrats and lawyers, including the then finance secretary and solicitor-general, had stolen more than $300m from their own government via sham compensation claims and recommended that 57 named figures to be charged.
But it took 10 years after the report, to 2024, for a single person to be held to account – lawyer Paul Paraka, jailed for 20 years, while the stolen money remains missing.
Such corruption, the loss of production from the Bougainville copper mine, uneven revenues from resource projects and a series of booms and busts left expectations shattered and state coffers depleted by the time economist and prime minister Mekere Morauta launched overdue economic, governance and political reform, including through privatisations, says Barker.
Many view Morauta, who died in 2020, as the best of PNG’s eight prime ministers, yet his three years in power from 1999 to 2002 were insufficient to bed down his program and there has been little appetite for deep reform among politicians since.
But among the balancing PNG positives today, Barker says, are its young people, “and increasingly the young women in leadership roles in civil society and business, wanting to make a difference”.
But women struggle to gain a foothold in public life. The parliament of 118 members has just two women, and only nine women have been elected in 50 years.
And in some dark places things are getting much worse, for PNG has developed a horrifying new acronym, SARV, for the wave of shocking sorcery accusation related violence – almost always with women the hapless targets.
A particularly horrific example is that of Rosa Yakapus, a mother of five who lived in a rural corner of Hela, Marape’s home province, in the Highlands.
In July, a gang of men claimed her estranged husband had died because she had killed him by sanguma – sorcery – removing his heart and eating it without leaving a mark on his body. Yakapus was stripped naked and interrogated by gang members in public, her legs tied to poles and spread over a fire, and after three days she was shot dead in the head – the horror all recorded by phone and the graphic videos posted on Facebook and WhatsApp.
Eight suspects were arrested by police but then released when Tari National Court found that inadequate investigation meant formal charges had not been laid. Police commissioner David Manning has since ordered the eight to be rearrested, adding that further suspects were being sheltered by the community.
Tribal fighting remains a scourge. Manning has said: “Tribesmen going out with guns and bush knives are being manipulated by politicians at all levels”, whom he describes as “puppeteers” who “wear a suit and tie by day, and abuse cultural beliefs and manipulate tribes by night”.
Other forms of crime also have increased as towns and cities contain large numbers of frustrated and unemployed young people.
Barker says, “Few job opportunities are available and many of these young lack the education or skills to access opportunities. Public transport is poor, still lacking schedules, with most services discontinuing around 6pm, partly for their own security” – making starker the sad shortage of regular entertainment, including through music or sport.
Enter Albanese again. He initiated the deal through which Canberra will give PNG $600m across 10 years towards a team in the National Rugby League – PNG’s biggest sport, with fervent excitement around State of Origin games.
A PNG team – its name revealed on Independence Day – will join the league in 2028. Inevitably, there have been challenges already, including chief executive Andrew Hill leaving for Penrith Panthers and PNG bid chairman Wapu Sonk, managing director of state-owned Kumul Petroleum, standing down over non-NRL-related corruption allegations.
But the initiative is highly popular and Albanese’s Pacific Island Affairs Minister, Pat Conroy, says “We are using rugby league as a tool of soft-power diplomacy” – which PNG’s political elite also is doing, gaining electoral kudos while leveraging Beijing’s constant influence efforts to boost Australian funding.
A core condition for the NRL deal is that PNG will not host Chinese security forces.
On Monday this commitment will be reinforced by the security treaty with Australia, including making Papua New Guineans eligible to join the Australian Defence Force.
Canberra has already spent $500m on upgrading the Lombrum naval base on Manus Island, which faces directly on to the “first island chain” off East Asia, although its extended wharf remains too small for larger Australian ships.
People in Port Moresby have become excited in recent days about this new-found military engagement – with fly-pasts, a fleet review of five nations’ naval ships and a military tattoo, and in Lae with the closing ceremony for Exercise Talisman Sabre, involving US, Australian and PNG troops.
In contrast with such excitements, key development issues remain unaddressed.
Mola, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of PNG’s school of medicine and health sciences, says the emergency department at Port Moresby’s General Hospital “just can’t cope with the flood of people every day and night”. Last year 17,000 women gave birth in its labour ward. “One response of some people to the health work overload is simply not to come to work – which just makes it more difficult for the rest,” Mola says.
One night last month there was just a single midwife in the labour ward and 30 women in labour.
However, Mola says, “This government is very smart, seemingly very responsive to dissatisfaction in communities, the Prime Minister is very personable and an expert in managing the masses, lots of smiles.”
And in managing VIPs, especially donors. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres was in PNG for three days recently, his visit focused on climate change and saving rainforests, of which New Guinea island has the largest in the world beyond the Amazon and the Congo. Marape attended closely.
But despite rainforest timber being extracted from extraordinarily challenging PNG terrains, only this year has the government connected the national capital with significant population centres by road.
Money and concrete now are being poured into a Connect PNG project linking Lae – the coastal city at the start of the Highlands Highway – with Kerema, the Gulf provincial capital, and Port Moresby with Kerema and with Alotau, the capital of Milne Bay. This is creating a massive new cross-PNG highway.
Crumbs – or whole loaves – of the funding for such projects drop off en route. It is estimated that up to 30 per cent of revenues that should reach the Treasury never do, and that almost as much of funds allocated for government services are also siphoned off along the way.
In 2023 10 per cent – about $862m – of PNG’s budget was given directly to the MPs to spend. But 70 per cent of MPs’ acquittals for such funds across 2013 to 2016 were still outstanding in 2019.
The best hopes for the rural communities for whom this money was intended often lie in agriculture, with higher prices recently driving fresh plantings of coffee and cocoa.
Modern communications and power are needed, though, to leverage PNG’s agricultural and resource wealth sufficiently to provide the jobs that young people seek, including in downstream processing.
Irish telco Digicel introduced mobile phones to much of the country remarkably rapidly after 2007, though 20 per cent remains beyond contact.
And when the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation leaders met in Port Moresby in 2018, Scott Morrison as prime minister announced that Australia, backed also by the US, Japan and New Zealand, would boost PNG’s households with access to reliable electricity from 15 per cent to 70 per cent by 2030, saying: “It’s time to power up PNG.”
But very little has resulted since. For most people, fridges, electric tools for trades and light for children’s studies remain beyond reach.
In the latest throw of the dice, the PNG government is partially privatising troubled state-owned PNG Power Ltd, which has suffered from a government-imposed tariff freeze for 11 years.
About 20 per cent of power is estimated to be siphoned off by illegal connections.
The ABC’s PNG journalist Marian Faa, who has conducted a lengthy investigation, says PNG Power is trading insolvent, owing more than $1.5bn, and has had four chief executives in the past year. She interviewed upset business owners who have suffered crippling blackouts, now relying on their own generators.
All power, in a political sense, is today in the hands of Marape. He is a Seventh-Day Adventist elder with six children, affiliated serially with three other political parties before becoming leader of Pangu, co-founded by Somare. His government seems secure through to the 2027 election, winning 89-16 a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April.
But Marape’s biggest challenge awaits – and indirectly it’s one for Albanese, too: Bougainville.
Bougainvilleans voted in a 2019 referendum overwhelmingly – 97.7 per cent – for independence. Since then, prevarication has prevailed. More than 90 per cent of the island’s budget is provided by Port Moresby, while the Autonomous Bougainville Government, whose elected president is a former independence fighter, Ishmael Toroama, now owns 72.9 per cent of Bougainville Copper Ltd. It hopes reopening the mine shut by the civil war can provide core income and has hired Australian financial consultants Grant Samuel to seek joint venture partners.
Bougainville leaders have set September 1, 2027, as the target date for independence but the PNG parliament has not seriously considered the issue yet.
Overall, unsurprisingly, Papua New Guineans are split about their 50th anniversary.
Mola says: “Some are asking if we should celebrate at all, while others are driving around town in cars draped with mega PNG flags.
Some are saying that PNG is fantastic, with an important place in the world, others are keeping their heads down and asking what on earth we’re celebrating. But on Tuesday there will be big celebrations all over the country.”
Rowan Callick, an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute, worked for 11 years after independence in PNG, whose government recommended his award of the OBE for services to journalism and training journalists.
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