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Some say that in PNG rule of law is a joke. The Dr Albert Schram incident is to be expected given the trends of recent years. It's no surprise really. There are claims that PNG is ruled by a Mafia and that it is even turning into a Mafia state. Dr Schram's treatment by an apparatus of the state - the police - and the injustice meted out to him supports claims about a Mafia-like state. But this is not just about Schram. it far bigger than that. It's a reflection of the serious situation that the country is in as the rule of law deteriorates.

This is embarrassing for all stakeholders.

Loud & Clear! Thank you Mr. Stephen Howes

Thank you. A very thought provoking article.

Why does AU contunue to ignore that a Vanuatu private sector led initiative is already building a cable to SI without aid support? VU has awarded the cable supply contract to a USA supplier (not China). The enormous AU cable grant to SI and PNG is distorting the market.

Very well written, thank you. Self-awareness is one of the most important skills for an aid worker.

Excellent article!

I’ve been waiting for an article like this! Thank you especially for your explication of the immorality of non participatory development and for noting that the NGO sector repeatedly called sex workers in Haiti ‘prostitutes’. You are right, we weren’t shocked by Haiti but I was genuinely shocked by the sector’s representation of the women being ‘used’ by their staff. It was highly offensive and extremely disappointing from a feminist perspective.

To add to Peter's aid 'success' examples, microfinance has over more than 3 decades, developed into a widely used method for moving people out of poverty. By making small collateral free loans available to even the poorest people, families are given a dignified self-employment opportunity. It has been shown over the years that microfinance clients – mostly women - improve their living standards, educate their children and become respected members of their community. With persistent encouragement by NGOs, Australian aid has supported microfinance programs. I wonder if it still does?

Can I suggest a somewhat different slant to that question, which I do suggest should alternatively read: "when will the Australian public believe in the merits of Australia's aid" ? The big picture surely is the excuse given by the very Minister in charge of the aid budget - no increase, because the Australian people don't believe in it. Thus abrogating her role to argue in favour of her responsibilities. There does seem somewhat of a disconnect between the people who believe in aid and those who decide the aid budget, with the unbelievers seemingly in between. Result is - the aid budget keeps being cut, despite the appropriateness of your original question. There is rarely good news about successes in the outcomes from our aid budget - either from the Foreign Minister or her junior. Much less from the NGOs actually in the field spending money from Australia's aid budget. And by "good news", I mean publicly - in the media and other places where the voter can be informed. Not quietly circulating in NGO offices or DFAT cabinets. I once helped fund an AusAID program in Afghanistan - training women to be paralegals and act as defence counsel in domestic violence cases. I appreciate the security situation affecting civilians in that country, but that is just one example of what I would call success. At the time of the World Summit for Children in 1990, 40,000 children were dying each day from preventable causes. In 2016, UNICEF estimated that figure to be 15,000 https://www.unicef.org.au/about-us/media/october-2017/7-000-newborns-die-every-day-worldwide-despite-st Still preventable, but that does represent progress and results, by aid donors and aid recipients - over a long time. That's what's lacking in your comments above - bringing about changes for the better among the people of our world.

Thank you Julie and Nicola for helping us. Personally, being part of the process of this partnership initiative two years ago has helped me to understand my new environment now in a regional program that face the same situation like we had in 2015-2016. best

Will I craft a fine essay to say how vast numbers of Papua New Guineans (not just Engan judges) construct an imaginary PNG in the image of the own village, I wonder? Narokobi certainly did so ('Take a typical village, let's say Wautogig …'). I met a Roro person in a far flung corner of PNG who asked me if the work of anthropologists was not simply to talk with 'tribal chiefs' (Roro is well known for having four kinds of chiefs - let Roros say if it is 3 or 5)? The Eastern Highlands Governor, Julie Soso, came to ANU and in her speech said that all mainland PNGeans were patrilineal (like Goroka) and the islands region people were all matrilineal (sorry ye Trans-Fly dual-organised 'mipela i gat tupela kanu' people, ye Owen Stanley optional bilaterals, ye Hela multilaterals …). Cue outrage … I'd love to but what's the point. I have done enough social mapping to learn that no matter how brilliantly you design the process, the only people who know you've nailed local custom and satisfied local aspiration are (some) locals - and since their leaders take over at Forum time, and have their own agendas, you cannot look to them to say so. As Colin says, knowing what the social mapping says - if one is lucky enough to get that far - is one thing and translating it into Forum outcomes is another. His Gobe experience in 1994/2016 is particularly instructive as its timeline more or less mirrors mine at Hidden Valley 1995-2001 and as picked up again 2010-2012. When the Hidden Valley mine gained its approvals in 2005, the mine landowners were a 100% known quantity. They had previously said their social systems were far too complicated for any outsider to understand, and that they would draw up their own genealogies so as to make it possible to figure out exactly who was who. They did this and were then good enough to share it with me. It took six years to finish this process, capturing how the communities wanted to represent themselves in a database. I printed out the results on big charts, we checked them, and I put the charts on map hangers in a safe map cabinet in the community relations office in 2001. At their 2004-2005 Mining Forum, the Hidden Valley landowner executives negotiated an MOA for the general terms of who was entitled to what and for a 'Consultative Forum' to decide more precise on eligibility lists. A construction manager, fresh off the boat from another country, came to construct the mine and now asked who could be employed to do this. No-one - neither the leaders playing their own games, nor the new under-managers (they were under him, but they also under managed …), thought to mention the six years of toil the communities had put into creating a pretty decent representation of themselves. This important boss now worked with the four key executives (men only) to draw up a new list of who could be employed, starting with primary ('Tier 1') landowners. The result was a 39 page document produced in 2009, signed at the bottom of each page by the boss and the four executives. The preamble stated: "I would now ask Nakuwi executives to review the list and sign off below to attest to the following points: * The list is an accurate and complete record of all landowner Tier 1 … candidates to be considered for employment at Hidden Valley in accordance with the MOA. * That the allocation of Tier 1 … status is accurate … * That this list is now final and will not be subject to further modification, without written consent of the full Nakuwi Executive to add further Nominees as a result of Marriage or attainment of employment age." Brilliant! Except that in 2012 I found that 50% of those whose status was given as Tier 1 landowners were nowhere to be found on the charts/database made up previously, and were unknown to the longest serving community relations staff. Worse, of the five landowner villages endorsed by the Department of Mining in the 1990s, two had almost no-one employed at all. The strong suspicion is that the executives solicited payments under the table from willing non-landowners to be put on the master list. Pointing this out to the mining company made me few friends. Colin says of Gobe: "I doubt that my report would have made much difference to the resolution of this particular dispute. But the point of interest here is that PNG's judges* do not even recognise the possibility that anthropologists or other social scientists might produce evidence relevant to the resolution of disputes about the identity of the 'true landowners' of any piece of customary land." * or anyone else, including all commentators. This is repeated over and over at PNG mining and oil & gas projects. In addition to the fact that the elders who really hold the knowledge have a habit of growing old and dying before the project really get going, it is sad to say that, of my best social mapping collaborators over the years, at least three have died of preventable illnesses, one was lost at sea, and two were murdered between 2012 and 2017. In sum, perhaps we can say we have now proven the existence of the following Immutable Laws of Social Mapping: (1) The regard that decision-makers have to social mapping exercises is in inverse proportion to the product of the time spent on them and their intrinsic accuracy. (2) The probability of local social mapping experts coming to a sticky end before they can denounce the poor outcomes achieved by their leaders is in proportion to the degree of expertise they can bring to bear during social mapping exercises. (3) Gresham's Law always applies (quod vide). I cannot see that the production of full-scale SMLI reports / a database of landowners for the PNG LNG project would have posed too much of a problem if both the developer and the state had committed to the process in the Feasibility Study period 2006-2009. It is true that the project's footprint was larger than seen previously, but it is not larger that the combination of the 10,000 Porgerans, 17,000 Lihirians, 12,500 Hidden Valley area people, 17,000 Torres Strait Islanders, 8000 Kokoda Track people and others for whom I have been invited to do social mapping and, in Australia, for whom I have written Connection Reports over the years. But the developer and the state were not committed to such a process, as Colin has explained, because the possibility of it is completely invisible to them.