Comments

Thanks Stephen & totally agreed. Time to move beyond symptoms to addressing some of the underlying causes.

"A holistic response addressing some of the underlying drivers and the patterns of violence is more likely to make headway". So true and I think best handled by local expertise. Population pressure on arable land, lack of opportunity for school leavers, inability to earn money by legal means, widening inequality, poor health, education and infrastructure services in addition to the constabulary being "small in size and thin in numbers. In my opinion the opportunity to focus upon and invest in human capital development was been missed from the late 1980s and in a youthful population the situation continues to worsen. Petty crime that escalates into serious violence is more often than not driven by an overwhelming sense of frustration among youth (particularly young men) who believe they have been overlooked and short changed by the development process. And I believe they are right. Without income for bride price they find it hard to get married, earn respect, acquire land, repay extended families and honour forebears? Fighting offers one solution and an outlet for pent up frustration. Extra policing from any source will not solve these issues alone - it is not even a band aid solution. Better health, education, infrastructure and economic opportunity are part of the mix. These issues are regional and cannot be satisfactorily tackled from Port Moresby. Nobody living in an Engan "haus lain" gives two hoots about decisions made in Waigani. Solutions can be found locally to address local needs. One pathway is greater access to Australian and NZ fresh and value added food markets. That is needed now. Something with real economic heft at the population base: centred on provincial receiving and processing centres that inspect, grade and truck finished product to regional ports for shipment to Australia, NZ, Asia. (If USA/Aust are apparently committed to re-establishing a naval presence at Gamadoudou in Milne Bay province after 80 years, then why not a primary produce export hub as well?) PNG is unlikely to achieve any of this on its own. I am of the view that the stability of a demonstrably fragile state of ten or maybe fifteen million people is precariously poised to go the way of Haiti at least regionally, if we, the big Kahuna on the block do not get our act together.

when will the visa be available?

I come from the Highlands. I have been researching and following carbon literature over a number of years. The discussions here are educational. Let me add this: our vast rain forests are virgin. Apart from perhaps hunting, people have not touched these forests. In the coast yes, logging is a concern to preservations but where I hail its virgin forest. Yet, seeing cheats by middle people, am inclined to drop my work for my people. I am targeting infrastructure as the first component. After which monetary payments can be considered. Government has a duty to be on guard with all these I guess.

Plainly stating the challenges ahead. The Ok Tedi model is not working efficiently and effectively as well. I would propose a broad based economic development package tied to the CDA or MOA for the government and the company to fund. It should be independent from the mine so that it will continue to operate without any problem posting mining. Our strategic location is our advantage.

The commentary and the proposals are spot on, and unless well educated and industry experienced leadership are at the helm of those (named local institutions & others) to change the course of the Golden District's destiny, the predicted doomsday is eminent! It is not possible to expect a different outcome by the same people doing the same things done in the last 30 years.

This is an interesting development in the telecommunications industry in Papua New Guinea. It will be important to monitor how this acquisition affects competition, pricing and access for consumers in the country.

Hi Bal, Thanks for your comment again. First, I should flag for readers that I understand that there are some people who do not like the results because they do not align with their own political or personal agendas, and are trying to discredit the legitimacy of the data, which frankly has had more checks and balances in its data collection than the vast majority of datasets in the region. (I will call it data, rather than analysis because that is more what I've shared so far. We are literally reporting the basic new information.) This type of behaviour, in my humble opinion, is anti-science, post-truth, disinformation spreading, and people deserve better. I trust that you can discern these agendas from those trying to understand the situation and use evidence in good faith, which is indeed what we are trying to offer here and a central part of our mission. Caveats are offered where needed, but I am not sure that's appropriate here. I'm giving you a plot of the raw data, describing who it is, and the main new fact is the average at the top. The median, also reported, is my preference though, as it is a measure of central tendency less sensitive to outliers or potential bias in the tails. What is presented above is a super rudimentary descriptive analysis, compared to the type of empirical work economists usually do, when if you read my other research there is no shortage of caveats and checks on the research designs. A four per cent sample is large and puts this survey in very good stead compared to other data we use to think about critical issues. Take the last PNG HIES for example: 4, 191 households, out of a population of... well... I'll let you work out that share given the recent controversy, but it's much, less than four per cent. You can do a similar exercise for DHS, MICS, or any other survey, and you will see that 5 per cent is great, actually. There is a lot you can read up on the basics of sampling strategies should you be interested too, or I could happily provide some introductory texts. Of course, a sample will not be "fully representative", ever. This is an obvious fact; there is always some sampling error. (I'm happy to share what we estimate these to be from the survey design.) As a sample gets larger, this is usually reduced. More importantly here, our sample is not perfectly random. This was impossible in implementation, as we had to work hard to get contacts, lists, and so forth. At the same time, we don't have any reason to suspect any major bias, and the generous number who responded openly certainly helps with this. That our quantitative findings align with large-scale qualitative work done at the same time with often more negatively selected workers and communities is also reassuring. Indeed, one has to have some pretty creative assumptions about the nature of sample selection to get to a substantially different interpretation of the data. One potentially important type of selection is absconders, for example. We have them in the sample. But, naturally, some are not. To the extent that their response values are wildly different from the others (say, they've left because they got no hours) and you would want to include more of them as current scheme workers, then including more of them in your sample would add more "low" values and pull the average down. For it to move it enough to substantially alter the main descriptive findings, say to shift the medians, you might need to make some heroic assumptions though and this would be a different worker sample. Our frame was to try and get a sufficient (to do statistical analysis) number of from each country-scheme pair. I hope that the above information helpful for you to understand it a bit better, and I'm happy to discuss further. We need more surveys like this, as it is important to triangulate what evidence we can get and not just have one single reference. In the meantime, I hope that our new data is a helpful resource for researchers and policy analysts. This is the first survey to cover all three schemes and will be the first longitudinal data for the region once we do the second wave. It's an important contribution to the Pacific data ecosystem, which we hope others are also eager to get the most out of. We'll be posting all the de-identified data and the documentation shortly for anyone to check, and use themselves, when we launch a major report using it shortly. I hope it leads to lots of productive downstream analysis and discussion like this. I wholeheartedly encourage any and all exercises and indeed criticisms comparing or leveraging other datasets to look into these concerns and better understand representativeness and any other reporting issues, as all data have strengths and weaknesses and it's only from an intimate use of them that we really pick all these up over time. Warmest wishes again, Ryan

Ryan, if the methods are as described in the article, then take that it is understandable as read to support the legitimacy of the analysis. However, it does not negate the fundamental issue in that it is a roughly 4% sample. The issue or question raised is a critical one — workers, people and governments in the Pacific are concerned with it. For such an important issue, would you agree it would be responsible research for the paper to admit to some limitation in its analysis and provide some caveat eg surveyed sample may not be fully representative even if one is confident in their data?

I was totally unaware of Colin’s passing until I read this post. I worked extensively with Colin on the AQEP project in Fiji and we had many moments to reflect on our shared Canadian - Australian background. Wonderful man with so much to give.

A fantastic tribute. A great man who made a lasting impact everywhere he worked. Such a huge loss to the education sector in the Pacific.

Thank you for this excellent tribute to Colin. Colin’s legacy is clear. The effectiveness of the EMIS’ he helped to establish and develop demonstrates that the way that we work, with humility, warmth, collegiality, listening, humour and honesty, is equally as important as technical know-how. Vale Colin. You are missed.