PNG deserves all our help in their hour of need

Tragically, PNG’s health service has in recent decades suffered severely from corruption.

COVID-19 is savagely testing Papua New Guinea’s general health and its political wellbeing.

It is failing both tests.

This matters to Australia. Our closest island, Boigu, is a mere 5km away, an easy canoe ride. More importantly, Papua New Guineans matter immensely to us.

They are our closest neighbours. And they are largely defenceless in the face of this deadly pathogen.

The relative isolation of those who live in remote mountain valleys and on the islands will help protect them. But most of PNG’s nine million people are now in towns, cities and villages connected by roads, regular flights and boats — the crucial connections to markets and modern living that have now been turned also into COVID infection highways.

Tragically, PNG’s health service has in recent decades suffered severely from corruption. Half a dozen years ago, for instance, Australia pulled back its $38m program for supplying medicine to PNG health centres over widely held concerns about how PNG was dispensing drug contracts.

The country ranks 155th on the UN’s Human Development Index, out of 189 countries. Yet PNG has produced generations of remarkable, skilful and self-sacrificial doctors and nurses and other health workers — all now terribly exposed to COVID-19.

A friend, Jelilah Unia, who died three months ago, was a great ­example. After becoming a registered nurse, working in rural PNG, she became the first Papua New Guinean to be appointed matron of a hospital, aged just 28. She battled for more resources for the sector as president of the PNG Nurses Association, then became briefly director of human resources in the Health Department, wrote the widely-used manual for village health volunteers, worked for NGOs, and played an especially important role in the campaign against the last deadly pandemic in PNG — HIV-AIDS.

Jelilah, and her peers, have been let down terribly by politicking that has diverted elsewhere ­resources that PNG should have prioritised for health, as well as for education. A massive proportion of the budget is now deployed to programs controlled by MPs.

Last July, church-run health services were forced to lay off workers when the government ­reduced funding, blaming the cut on COVID-caused constraints.

Prime Minister James Marape has vowed to make PNG “the richest black Christian nation” in the world, and to “take back PNG” by seizing control of resource projects — for instance, last year closing the Porgera gold mine with the loss of 2600 jobs. It remains shut.

Last June, Marape ended PNG’s COVID state of emergency after just 85 days, thanking those who had “fasted and prayed for PNG not to be ravaged” by the pandemic, compared with “many established countries”.

In October, he announced the government would divert millions of dollars to Niugini BioMed, a local company that claimed it had found a treatment for COVID.

On Tuesday, introducing a ­national isolation strategy, Marape said it would not be “a total lockdown”, while admitting “the health system we have is not adequate to sustain a full outbreak”.

The help PNG needs ranges well beyond money for vaccines. It ranges well beyond competing with China’s growing involvement. It demands the deployment of some of Australia’s best health professionals and administrators.

For just as it has lost Michael Somare, PNG has stumbled into its time of greatest need. And ­Australians must demonstrate we are true neighbours and friends.

Rowan Callick, who worked in PNG for 10 years, is a fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.