The Australia - Papua New Guinea relationship … time to lift our game

Until 1993, relations between Australia and PNG were handled by the Foreign Minister. After the 1993 elections, the Keating Government effectively transferred responsibility for the day-to-day management of the relationship to a Junior Minister, the Minister for Development Assistance and Pacific Island Affairs.

This was regarded by PNG’s leaders as an insult, coming from its closest neighbour, former colonial power, and major trade and investment source. Both Prime Ministers during the second Keating Government, Paias Wingti and Sir Julius Chan, were more than irritated with the change, believing it represented a down-grading of the PNG Australia relationship.

When the Howard Government came to office the relationship was downgraded - in the eyes of PNG’s leaders - even further when day-to-day responsibility was given to the Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Just how much lower could it get?

We need to "lift our game" in how we treat our relationship with our closest, and arguably, our most important, neighbour, and let the Parliamentary Secretary lick the stamps and sign the correspondence, but have our links with PNG handled by the Foreign Minister, as it used to be, and as it ought to be.

But to return to how we seem to have been taken by surprise by Bill Skate’s latest escapade. The PNG Foreign Minister, Roy Yaki, has made at least two attempts to get the PNG Cabinet to recognise Taiwan over the last 18 months or so, only to be rebuffed by the wiser heads in the Cabinet, men like Sir Mekere Morauta, Sir Rabbie Namaliu and Masket Iangalio.

When he tried again at a hurriedly called Cabinet meeting on July 1, Sir Rabbie Namaliu was in Australia for talks on the gas pipeline project, and Sir Mekere Morauta and Masket Iangalio were no longer Ministers, and were busily working to bring Bill Skate down.

If Australia had been "up to speed" we would have realised weeks ago that the increasingly desperate Skate Government would revert to the "Taiwan option" to try and bail itself out of the fiscal and economic crisis it faced.

Our panic reaction - a less than subtle media leak - bears remarkable similarities with what happened when the Chan Government brought in the Sandline Mercenaries in 1997. While that "leak" exposed the move, it did nothing for the Australia-PNG relationship.

We have a vital interest in seeing Papua New Guinea develop as a stable, economically and politically secure, democracy. That interest is best served when the relationship is handled by the Foreign Minister, just as it was between 1975 and 1993.