The COVID crisis on our doorstep cannot be ignored

Australia has broadly committed to providing free vaccines for the whole of Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific. For once China is on the back foot.

Vaccinating a population that is 80 percent located in rural communities, many of them remote and coastal and island communities across the nation, will be a massive challenge on its own.

That is going to be a major challenge for Australia and countries such as New Zealand.

But there is a more urgent challenge.

We have an escalating pandemic on our northern border. It clearly will get worse before it gets better.

It requires bold, innovative and multi-faceted solutions.

But even as we do so we must accept that while what we have done since Independence has been welcome, the ways of the past 45 years are simply no longer adequate.

We must respond to the crisis in a way that focusses on "people", and especially highly experienced doctors specialising in disease management and other support

And our response needs to engage in new partnerships with the churches, with NGOs, and the health sector, to help our closest neighbour through a crisis that is simply not going to go away, and is overwhelmingly in the "Australian national interest" to help address.