It is an important set of meetings, and not only because these prime ministers and ministers meet not nearly often enough. PNG has recently had a change in government, and although it will not be long before the country goes to the poll next year, the new O’Neill government has a unique opportunity to get the country back on track after years of an increasingly corrupt and paralysed government under Michael Somare. One of the mistakes the previous PNG government made was not making enough of its relationship with Australia. It is encouraging to see PNG’s new prime minister come to press his country’s case.
What should be on the agenda at the meetings? Here are four suggestions: one big and three small.
The big one is that both governments should declare time on the 1999 PNG-Australia Development Cooperation Treaty. As leaders on both sides of the relationship have recently remarked, the PNG–Australia relationship has become much broader than simply an aid one, so it makes no sense for it to be underpinned only by an aid treaty. As the 2010 PNG Aid Review noted, aid from Australia to PNG and trade between the two countries were about equal at the time of independence; today, trade outnumbers aid ten to one.
The foreign ministers of the two countries already agreed back in July 2010 to ‘explore an umbrella economic cooperation agreement encompassing development assistance, trade and economic cooperation’. Under that agreement, proposals should have been ready for consideration more than a year ago, but progress seems to have stalled. Now is the time to take the next step. The aim should not be a free trade agreement — that could come later. For now, the model should be something like the 1976 Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between Australia and Japan. The aim should be a broad statement of principles, citing the two countries as partners in growth and development, aspiring to closer integration. An agreement along these lines would be an important signal that the relationship has at last matured beyond that of donor and recipient. But the politics of symbolism can only take you so far. Some practical measures are also needed to move the relationship forward and to tackle real problems on both sides of the relationship.
The first is an agreement on the aid program, which should not be the whole of the relationship — but nor should it be allowed to drift. The PNG Aid Review has been broadly welcomed, and last year the foreign ministers agreed to respond to its recommendations. It should not be hard at this meeting to agree on a set of principles that would guide the aid program in the more focused and practical direction the Aid Review recommended.
The second is the release of the Garnaut-Namilau Report on Higher Education. An initiative of Rudd when he was prime minister, and jointly launched with Somare, this report was completed in 2009 but has not been released. No one can deny that revitalising PNG’s higher education system is critical to the country’s future — but it won’t be an easy task to implement. Commissioning that report was a good first step, but it has since been undermined by an inexplicable delay in the document’s release.
The third quick win would be Australia’s undertaking to review and relax the visa regulations which currently make it so difficult for anyone from PNG to visit Australia, including PNG citizens visiting their Australian relatives. This is making Australia highly unpopular — and for no good reason. These onerous visa restrictions undermine the very goal the Australian government claims to support — closer ties with PNG and the Pacific — and should be overhauled.
Currently, Australia is only just scratching the surface of the potential of its special relationship with PNG, which is closer to Australia than New Zealand, has a bigger population and is growing faster. Australia–New Zealand is the right kind of vision for Australia–PNG. Australia might not get there straight away, but it could eventually if it starts moving in that direction now, through steps both big and small.
Professor Stephen Howes is Director of the Development Policy Centre, Crawford School of Economics and Government, the Australian National University, and was an author of the 2010 review of Australia’s aid to PNG, commissioned by both governments.
A version of this article was originally posted here on the Development Policy Blog.