Comments

Thank you for sharing Anon. This is such an important conversation to start having and it starts with the courageous people like yourself and those who have also shared here. My comment/ story is about the role of power imbalance and hierarchy in perpetuating sexual harassment and assault. I hope it helps others. Within weeks of starting my job in this sector I had a manager who started making inappropriate comments about my appearance. This escalated over time to exposing himself in the office in Australia and overseas. I was very young and found the pressure of this behaviour coming from my boss extremely hard to navigate and understand and I did not know what to do or how to respond. It went on for seven years. When I gained more confidence and pushed back it escalated and became physical. Eventually, I discovered that there were many other women in the office this was happening to. When the organisation finally recognised there was a gender imbalance and hired a woman in a senior role (there had barely been a female past manager level for 40 years) women started to come forward. He left and continues to have a successful career in PNG. He is widely regarded as charming and popular. His behaviour was in many ways manipulative and when I spoke to the other women it was apparent there was a clear and common pattern of behaviour. It is never ok for someone in a position of power to take advantage of others in this way. The use of power over others to acquire sexual gratification is a huge problem in our sector and it must be stopped. Thankyou Anon for starting this conversation and sharing your story. We really do need to keep up the momentum if we are to achieve change.

It could be good and better for PNG Govt to import vaccines into the country because when everybody is affected, nobody will control. It's definitely gonna be out of control.

From Peter Dwyer & Monica Minnegal Thanks James. We agree, there is a high probability that the virus is already working its way through communities in the south of Western Province. But the desirability of a cross-border approach has not just emerged. The Australian island of Boigu is 205 km east-south-east from Merauke in the Indonesian province of Papua or 120 km east of the PNG-Indonesian border. That’s a lot closer to Australia than either the Ok Tedi mining town of Tabubil or Port Moresby. In late November 2020, the Merauke catchment had recorded 188 cases of Covid-19. On subsequent trends in Papua as a whole, the count now may well exceed 400. Official bans on international travel did not effectively curtail Indonesia-PNG border crossing by either land or sea through 2020. Some traders from Indonesia reached Gulf Province in this period. It is possible, even likely, that the virus lurks in the south of Western Province and it is therefore desirable that, on behalf of PNG, Australia checks this out. But we have known for many months of a real, not imagined, risk from the west yet have not acted to protect Torres Strait islanders from that. A little odd!

From Peter Dwyer & Monica Minnegal Thanks Michael. With the crisis that is unfolding it is crucial to get the information out to countries, like Australia, that are in a position to respond rapidly, appropriately and with no strings attached. It is also now becoming critical to enhance awareness at the local level and counter the outbursts of flawed information and conspiracy chatter that may appear on social media. In this regard, the recent Facebook posts from politicians Gary Juffa, John Rosso, Bryan Kramer and Allan Bird are particularly valuable. They describe their experiences when infected by the virus, advocate strongly for adherence to the ‘new normal’ and, at least in Bird’s case, stress the individual and group benefits of vaccination. These posts received many comments and much informed discussion. More commentary of this kind needs to reach the broader population. The Leader of the Opposition, recently questioned the value and need for vaccination. Many agreed with him. It would be to everyone’s benefit, we think, if the Prime Minister countered that opinion and, through social media, spoke very strongly in favour of vaccination.

Looking forward to hearing this week's podcast, and really appreciate your key insight at the end there, that it's this friction between secular and faith-based frameworks for understanding life itself that sits underneath much of the difficulty in generating mutually beneficial development partnerships. Jeremy's words on the cultural gap area really helpful there.

This is of concern. There were 5 reported deaths on Wednesday, lifting the total from 16 to 21. There are a reported 84 new cases on 11 March. On local Whats App groups in PNG, the grim statistics are usually immediately followed with videos espousing old conspiracy theories (videos claiming Bill Gates is trying to kill us all through a vaccine). The PNG Department of Health COVID-19 website has not been updated since March 2020. The official COVID-19 website from the National Control Centre is now fortunately back up again - it wasn't 30 minutes ago. A year ago, when doing planning on the potential impacts of COVID-19, the fear was of an outbreak that could kill tens of thousands in the country. At that stage, the prospect of vaccines being available within a year was considered remote. Fortunately, with a vaccine now available, I do hope that there can be co-ordinated action with urgent international support to prevent the worst scenario occurring.

Thanks for putting all these together.

Thank you for this article, which adds nuance to the COVID picture in PNG without taking anything away from the urgency of the need for Australia to step up. The map is especially useful as a guide, but it's worth noting that the parlous state of the health system in the south of Western Province makes it quite possible that the virus is present there, undetected. Of course this only strengthens your argument for a cross-border approach! This article and Jonathan Pryke's piece in The Australian and on Lowy today both call for Australia to step in urgently - and we should. But this is clearly a situation that would benefit from a larger, more coordinated approach than we can offer on our own. What might be achieved through cooperation with India (who are donating vaccine), Indonesia, the US and even China? I've tried and failed to find a global risk analysis for COVID management but even if the risk to the Torres Strait is minimal, the impacts of an uncontrolled outbreak within PNG, and the risk of transmission east to the Pacific islands marks PNG as a critical piece of the puzzle. A concerted international effort might also be effective in countering the low levels of concern and growing vaccine hesitancy which seem to be widespread in the country.

Richard Curtain: Thank you for your invitation. For what it is worth on job seekers. Jobs are scarce and competition will continue to be high and others are doing what the graduates should be doing. So during training some emphasis should be placed on trainees to think about about how they can create their own employment out of the skills they gain through APTC. PNG Government's policy is five hundred thousand 500,000 SMEs by 2030-50. This presents an opportunity for anyone who is willing to make a positive difference in their own lives and those others less fortunate. Tertiary institutions are being encouraged to offer assistance to make real the government's aspiration of growing the economy through small and medium size enterprises.

Hello Ian. I was one of the interviewers in the DHS 2016. I definitely appreciated your comments and I considered your thoughts a fair justification to policy making in PNG. PNG as i know has some very good policies however most of it gather dust on a shelf. Considering that, i believe that primary information like this is the backbone to a relevant project proposal and if so better project monitoring and evaluation. The stakeholders in doing this survey must be applauded especially AusAID for funding. I see a need for relevance as a main factor and DHS is one. It was done by NSO and so i do think it's not bias as it does not come from NDOH. The government of the day has to decide which areas of concern to address. Most projects planning and design stem from logical framework approach in that case DHS is the great way to access that information. Regards Wellington Panta

Thank you Anonymous. I’m sorry that this happened to you but unfortunately it is so common in this sector. Many years ago somewhere in the Pacific a fellow expatriate tried to break in to my bedroom after I rejected his extremely forthright and intimidating physical advances. I reported the incident to my two male managers, who told me that tensions were raised because we were in a conflict environment and that I would react differently otherwise. I understand that the perpetrator went on to physically assault a local woman and suffered repercussions from her wantoks before leaving the country. Well that’s what one of the male managers told me when he recounted these events to me with humour. Of course I was living back in Australia by then while the said two managers went on to have illustrious careers in the sector. Fifteen years later and I still feel angry about this.

Hi Fredrick, thanks so much for this insightful analysis. I just wanted to follow up on the figure you've quoted for SIP funding in the PNG 2020 budget. You've said that K2,573.4m was allocated to SIP in 2020. I'm looking at the 2020 Budget, and it looks like K2,573.4m was allocated to PIP (Performance Improvement Program) while K1,110.0m was allocated to SIP. Do you have a sense of which figure is correct? I'm looking at page 68 of the 2020 Budget: https://www.treasury.gov.pg/html/national_budget/files/2020/2020%20Budget%20Volume%201.pdf