Australians in the Land of the Unexpected

It was reported a few months ago that a group of Australian Federal Police officers may move to Papua New Guinea to act as advisers to the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary. One comment suggested that these men and women could end up sidelined due to resentment within the RPNGC at “neo-colonial intrusion”.

The police mindset may perhaps manifest itself in this way, although the AFP’s Assistant Commissioner Frank Prendergast has been quoted as saying, “Developing the relationship between the AFP and the RPNGC has been critical in the scoping phase to ensure that the RPNGC … is comfortable with future programs of support.”

Any new program is in any case dependent upon inclusion in the Australian federal budget of 2010. There is no firm promise as yet.

But if more Aussies are seconded to Papua New Guinea by the AFP and regardless of the fact that Papua New Guinea’s public at large as well as some sections of the RPNGC may welcome the move, there’s another possible and more insidious trap waiting.

Papua New Guinea supports an inappropriately large, expensive and inefficient public service, of which the RPNGC is a part; a public service which in the form it has taken over the years constitutes a huge self-help shop supporting tens of thousands of members and their extended families, rather than a service-provider to its owners, the public. This needlessly costly situation would be ended if conditions of “a full day’s work for a day’s pay” were enforced and numbers were reduced to a realistic figure, quite aside from aspects like better and further training.

In defence of the conditions that nourish them (much like the relationship between sago-grubs and a fallen, rotting sago-palm, a cynic might say) individuals are known to formulate clever concealing strategies when overseas reformers show up with a mandate to ask questions. Cover-ups of a high level of sophistication can ensue.

In the late 1980s, the totally ineffective yet very expensive Assistance to Papua New Guinea Police program was launched. It was funded by Australia’s aid agency AIDAB (as AusAID was then called). In the province where I was working, the handful of Australian policemen deployed by the project were greeted with friendly expressions. An sense of comradeship was immediately established at provincial police headquarters. A spacious office had been vacated, repainted, refurnished and provided with its own fridge. An attractive and competent secretary had been identified by the Provincial Commander and instructed to help the new arrivals fit in.

On the first Saturday morning, in the interests of further edification and bonding, an overweight and hung-over headquarters force of other ranks was compelled by the commander to parade in dress uniform with rifles, so they could be ceremonially inspected by the White Men and express, in turn, their happiness at the arrival of their Australian benefactors.

The new men were quickly adopted into the small pool of local and expatriate business and professional people. They were showered with hospitality and offered membership of the limited but lively club and social networks. Desperate for better service from the police and laden with high expectations, the local men of influence opened their hearts, doors and social milieu to the newcomers. The result was a level of after-hours carousing, intimate friendship and sporting and cultural encounter which fairly spun the heads of these decent Sans Souci sergeants and Cunnamulla constables, enabled as they were by munificent tax-free salaries to return the hospitality with a lavish hand.

Back at police headquarters the new men were encouraged to participate in areas in which each had a particular interest. In one case, where a marijuana-packing and shipping enterprise was suspected to exist, one of the Aussies, an experienced drug squad man, took the case in hand. He soon located and questioned a witness who confirmed that what was rumoured was in fact occurring and provided a tip-off of an expected shipment by sea from a coastal town often visited by foreign yachts. The Aussie drug specialist, accompanied by local detectives and the witness, travelled by road to the relevant port, a day’s drive away. There they planned to secretly encounter an overseas agent in the smuggling chain, a yachtsman, who they’d spring as he took delivery from an identified middleman.

The deal went sour when it was found that the star witness had adapted the venture to his own purposes, having secreted a carton in the vehicle in which the group had travelled. Ostensibly a branded consumer product, the carton actually contained compressed dry marijuana. The witness attempted to contact the yachtsman to make his own sale for cash and to warn the foreigner of the planned arrest. However, he mistook yet another Australian consultant-policeman for the yachtsman. This Aussie understood enough Tok Pisin to get the message and act forthwith.

The case against the suspected drug-packager was dropped on the recommendation of the Provincial Commander on the basis of insufficient evidence to proceed. The yachtsman, if he existed, sailed away. Once the story began to circulate, the abashed Australians confined themselves to in-house training programs, accompanying RPNGC members by invitation on raids against highway bandits and other known criminals, but leaving investigations to those who they now felt knew best. Life proceeded pleasantly enough in this way for the balance of their term of contract. The Aussies, with jobs waiting for them at home, left, taking with them the means to pay off housing loans, with a bit left over, and with a fund of good stories which would last them for the rest of their days.

Locally, though, there was much speculation. The drug affair had generated too much smoke for all to believe that there was no fire at all. Many suspected that there was far more to the story than had been revealed. Locals generally believed that the White Men had been both compromised and neutralised by the “window-curtain”, as they put it, drawn quickly over the affair, an action which, they believed, allowed the White Men to preserve some self-respect and prevented the whole thing from blowing up into a media story.

The truth will never be known; the project is long dead, to be followed years later by the Enhanced Co-operation Program, and now, perhaps, by a further program launched by the AFP itself.

Reports of these Australian aid projects are never readily made public. The clique of Canberra bureaucrats and consultancy staffers who together create, monitor and oversee aid projects holds its cards close to its chest. Summaries and debriefing reports are seen only by the officials and principals who head this clique. In this way, aid-supported projects tend to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.

On one occasion I was invited to dinner to meet two of the most senior managers involved in the Australian police project. They were pleasant people, a man and a woman in their mid-fifties; the man was an ex-chief stipendiary magistrate and the lady a very senior commissioned officer on loan from her state’s police force. As conversation proceeded I realised that neither seemed to have the necessary intellectual depth. They showed remarkable naivety in the remarks they made about Papua New Guinea, its culture and the nature of the RPNGC and its failings. For their part, the policeman-consultants worshipped the ground the pair walked upon.

A year or two later I was invited again to the same hotel to have dinner with friends. While I waited for them I struck up conversation with a group of RPNGC commissioned officers, of whom there were many in the bars and the hotel’s casual bistro dining area. The men told me they were participating in an AusAid-conducted training seminar, and that they had been brought together from all of the nineteen provinces. I noted that there were no whites among these groups of policemen. Later, in the a la carte restaurant where my friends and I sat down to dine, I noted six white men sitting together, strangers in town, obviously enjoying themselves. I went over to them and asked them if they were connected with the police seminar. One replied that they were running it. I asked them if they thought it appropriate to dine apart while the subjects of their seminar, all senior serving commissioned officers, were left to fend for themselves outside. They glared at me, then one gave me a business card and they turned their backs on me.

How was it, I reflected, that professionals at the peak of responsible institutional careers could remain so unfeeling, or so ignorant of social obligation in any setting, especially in a land where the sharing of food between comrades, and even between enemies at certain times, has immense significance? Was it perhaps a lack of confidence? Insecurity is often at the base of arrogant behaviour by foreigners in Papua New Guinea.

Over many years, suggestions that Australians appointed to serve their country in Melanesia and the Pacific might benefit from a pre-deployment orientation course have gone unheeded. The ANU’s Crawford School, where there is a resource of committed and mature people with much in-depth knowledge of the region, including one or two Papua New Guinea nationals, would be well placed to run such a course. Over two to three weeks the course might cover Melanesian and Pacific culture, tribal ethics and interlocking traditional systems, some history, geography, laws both constitutional and customary, languages, and a guide to what to expect in social and workplace encounters.

Having made such representations several times over the past twelve years, I have received no more than one or two notes of acknowledgment. Other people have reported the same sort of response from Australia’s complex of diplomatic and aid functionaries. This tower may be made of a baser material than ivory, but it remains, nonetheless, a bastion of exclusivity.

Papua New Guinea is a country of paradoxes, deserving in so many ways of its unofficial title as “The Land of the Unexpected”. It is no place for the newly-arrived and unprepared consultant, medical or education or police professional, imbued or not with missionary-like zeal. Its culture has always been highly complex, and it has moved far beyond any falsely-perceived colonial-era pliability.

Papua New Guinea accepts and needs Australia’s help in a number of areas, but does not share all of Australia’s ideals and values, even though the two nations have many things in common. Australians in general don’t reflect upon the fact that Papua New Guinea and the Pacific nations have re-invented themselves at unprecedented speed. Papua New Guinea, which just over a century ago was a pristine neolithic culture, has been transformed into an independent nation-state with its own laws, its own government, its own foreign policy and several universities. Australia was involved throughout that time, and if Australians thought for a minute or two, they would be happy to take credit for Australia’s large part in all this; happy to put their hands up, as well, to one or two stumbles along the path; and to accept Australia’s long-term role as brother or sister to Papua New Guinea, rather than that of rich uncle who would like to see Papua New Guinea’s problems vanish overnight, and is angered that they don’t. But most Australians have no idea of what has gone on in Papua New Guinea since 1884.

When one understands the nature of these changes; when one is aware of the huge social pressure Papua New Guinea has coped with and continues to cope with whilst remaining largely a smiling society, its many problems notwithstanding, one cannot but feel a little humbled.

These are our friends and our nearest neighbours, and they must always remain friends, regardless of occasional spats at a leadership level. It behoves us in Australia to be true friends to Papua New Guinea, and to use our brains, and not just our wallets.

John Fowke has spent most of the past fifty years living and working in rural Papua New Guinea. He is the author of Kundi Dan: Dan Leahy’s Life among the Highlanders of Papua New Guinea.