Karen Fredericks
The Coalition government will start deploying Australian police to Papua New Guinea from early September. This follows the Papua New Guinea parliament's decision on July 27 to finalise legislation giving the 230 Australian police and 64 public servants who will be installed in key legal, financial and border security positions in the Pacific nation immunity from local law. The Australian government insisted on this before allowing an $800 million Enhanced Cooperation Package (ECP) through.
According to a July 28 Radio Australia report, the first Australian police will arrive in Bougainville in early September, after a week of training in Port Moresby. The first operational police will begin work in the PNG capital in November, and all the police and officials will be in place by March next year.
The ECP was first announced in December 2003 at the 15th Australia-Papua New Guinea Ministerial Forum in Adelaide. Since then the PNG government has been under intense domestic pressure to resist Canberra's demand that its package of police, judges, lawyers, accountants, economists and customs and immigration officials should operate under Australian, not PNG, law.
At a rally in March, Morobe Governor Luther Wenge tapped into a deeply felt sentiment when he declared: "We [Morobe] are prepared to declare independence [from PNG] if the white men interfere in the running of our country and province's affairs."
While PM Michael Somare has used less loaded language, he too has publicly resisted the colonial policy. "We are also a sovereign nation", he told the ABC's PM program on March 10. "If we employ anyone, Australian, American or British, if they are under our public service they come under the confinement of our constitution ... and likewise if our people were working in Australia, our job would be confined to Australian conditions."
But with more than a third of its total revenue sourced from foreign aid, and the lion's share of that from Australia, the PNG government has not been able to resist Australia's demands.
Despite initial assurances from AUSAID that the Australian personnel would "work within the organisational structures of the agencies where they are placed and be answerable to Papua New Guinean agency heads", the final joint treaty provides that the Australian personnel will take their orders from Australian superiors, will be subject to Australian procedures and codes of conduct and will not be subject to PNG disciplinary regulations, authorities, courts or tribunals.
The ECP is part of what foreign minister Alexander Downer recently described as a "significant shift" in Australia's relationship with South Pacific nations. On July 5, he told the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London that the installation of Australian personnel in key positions in the South Pacific was a necessary step in the so-called "war on terror" because "weak states" are "potential incubators of future [terrorist] threats".
"Countries active in the international arena have a responsibility to promote good governance and encourage the development of states capable of dealing with transnational crimes and denying safe haven or safe passage to perpetrators", he said. Downer argued that the package would deliver a bonus side effect to the Pacific Island countries because, by bolstering their legal and political systems, investor confidence would improve.
There are critics of the Coalition government's shift in the mode of delivery of Australia's "aid" away from competitive tendering among private "aid corporations" and towards the direct employment of public sector employees. Craig Sugden of Focus Economics, in an article in the April edition of the Pacific Economic Bulletin is one of those wondering why the Australian government has chosen to deploy Australian public servants rather than engage private consultants.
Sugden pointed out that the ECP does not fit the "new public management" model (that anything private is better than anything public), which has long been touted as the only road to "good governance" in the developing world. Sugden is also concerned that none of the usual contract management tools are in place to scrutinise the effectiveness of the ECP.
He calculated that the average level of funding required for each ECP officer (including wages, equipment and on-costs) is 1.8 million kina (A$720,000) per annum, compared that with the average cost of each PNG public servant at approximately K22,000 per annum (A$8,800) and concluded that for the ECP to be "cost effective" (a central tenet of the management model) a single ECP official must produce more value than 100 local school teachers or 80 local medics.
But the ECP was never designed to deliver the kind of value that thousands of teachers or doctors could provide in PNG. It is an instrument of the Coalition government's "war on terror" in the Pacific, and the laws of public sector finance are usually suspended in times of war.
[Karen Fredericks recently worked in PNG for two months.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 4, 2004.
Visit the