The case for war with PNG

So, we pay once to prop up the PNG economy. Then we pay twice by sending aid. Then we pay three times by trying to make up for all the stolen aid. Then we pay four times by building an Australian colony there for unlawful economic migrants.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more fun to go to war with Papua New Guinea, annex the place as a colony, and start again from there? More to the point, was this really Bob Carr’s secret plan as Foreign Minister – a sort of human Zimmermann Telegram?

I can see many advantages to this forward-thinking foreign policy program: 

• tremendous economic stimulus across all sectors
• nation-building: nothing unites like a common enemy, and for once it isn’t Tony Abbott
• probably workable as a bipartisan approach
• huge nostalgia kick for tiresome-but-youthful lefties, who can have their own moratorium experience, go to demos, and talk about it for the rest of their lives, thus distracting them from other issues,…