Politics
There's A Lot To Learn From PNG
But beware, East Timor warned
A spectrum of the global good and famous showed up for the birthday of East Timor in June. But the most useful guest may prove to have been the representative from near-neighbour Papua New Guinea, veteran politician, Sir John Kaputin.
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His prime gift from the Government led by Sir Mekere Morauta was the invitation to send a technical mission to learn from Papua New Guinea's experience. Timor, one of the 20 poorest countries in the world, can indeed learn a lot from the continuing travails of Papua New Guinea.
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The first lesson is not to depend on resource income.
Klaus Rohland, the World Bank's director for East Timor, was properly upbeat at a donors' meeting on the eve of independence, saying the new country "has a good chance of being economically independent in a few years with revenue from offshore."
Rohland is also country director for Papua New Guinea. He is well aware that Papua New Guinea also has depended heavily on its immense resource wealth to underpin improved living standards. Instead, many of the country's social and economic indicators have been falling over the past 15 years.
Morauta stabilized, with heroic effort, the government's own economic performance, but he needed a full term in office to capitalize on this to turn around the broader economy. The Asian Development Bank's latest forecast has Papua New Guinea continuing in recession/depression through a fourth consecutive year in 2003.
The new Australian Strategic Policy Institute said in its report on East Timor that the benefits of the country's oil and gas revenue "will depend critically on how it is spent. If it is used to fund infrastructure that will encourage private investment, the benefits will endure. If not, it will be wasted".
To see just how "wasted" such income can get, Kaputin and Morauta might take their East Timor guests up to the Southern Highlands, the Texas of Papua New Guinea, which has received more than $A100 million from oil revenues alone over the last decade. Economist Mike Manning, director of Papua New Guinea's only privately funded think tank, the Institute of National Affairs (INA), wrote recently: "For years, the INA has been saying that Papua New Guinea is not the basket case that outside observers say it is.
"It has looked on the bright side and it has always seen the great potential that Papua New Guinea has.
"But the Southern Highlands is an example of how these resources have been wasted and dissipated for the advantage of a few people and the disadvantage of the vast majority.
"For the latter, not only have the new revenues not helped them; the money, converted into weapons, has positively harmed them."
The Australian Associated Press reporter in Papua New Guinea, Jim Baynes, has described the resulting mayhem as "Mad Max PNG-style: tribal warriors armed with M-16s skirmishing with their rivals from the backs of armour-plated utes".
Manning says Mendi hospital is closed, there are no doctors at the district hospitals at Tari and Ialibu, and only one in Mendi, the provincial capital...Mendi High School is closed, roads in Mendi town are almost impassable, and those outside it are also in "a terrible state of disrepair".
He says: "There have been no significant new development projects in the province apart from a seven-story building in Mendi town, which seems to be largely unoccupied. The agriculture and commerce divisions (of the provincial government) have not funded any new initiatives from the Southern Highlands' budget for more than five years."
Technical positions are filled by political appointees. At one stage five people were being paid for the provincial administrator's job at the same time and none was doing the work.
Five years after independence in 1980, production of coffee, tea, cattle, vegetables and even sheep was thriving in the Southern Highlands, employing large numbers of workers. All have gone backwards since then.
Corruption is at the heart of Papua New Guinea's malaise, and East Timor needs to take every possible step to prevent it taking root there too. Adopting as its language Portuguese, spoken only by the elite, is hardly a promising start.
Critics have said of Papua New Guinea that at least it has maintained its democratic structures. And so it has. But signs are emerging that the extraordinary expectations of Papua New Guinea voters are at last diminishing, and that this election may see less mass engagement, and less drama, than for decades.
Except maybe in resource-rich Southern Highlands where, to repeat the phrase applied by Solomon Islands community activist John Roughan to the desperate scene, "politics has become the economy".
East Timor, beware!
