Norm Dixon
On May 13, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled that legislative provisions granting immunity from prosecution to Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers and seconded Canberra bureaucrats in PNG were unconstitutional.
In response, Canberra has been forced to rapidly withdraw its 160 AFP officers deployed to PNG as the spearhead of the Australian government's neo-colonial Enhanced Cooperation Program (ECP), under which Canberra had begun to take direct control of PNG's policing, justice and economic policies.
The PNG government agreed to the ECP in December 2003, after being bullied into it with the threat that the Australian government's annual aid payments, which next financial year will total A$492 million, would be cut off.
Canberra's insistence that Australian personnel deployed as part of the ECP must be exempt from PNG law aroused popular anger in PNG. Morobe province governor Luther Wenge campaigned for the PNG parliament not to ratify the ECP. (It was Wenge who successfully challenged the legislation's constitutional legality in the Supreme Court.)
PNG Prime Minister Michael Somare verbally resisted Canberra's demand for immunity from prosecution for its operatives, but succumbed when Canberra again threatened to withdraw its aid.
The PNG parliament finally passed legislation enabling the ECP in July 2004 and the first Australian police and bureaucrats began work in November.
Under the five-year, $1.1-billion program, a total of 210 AFP officers were to be deployed in Port Moresby and Bougainville immediately, and to the Highlands in 2006.
At least 60 Australian bureaucrats were also to be placed in senior positions within vital PNG government departments. According to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, this includes "about 36 specialists working within key PNG economic agencies including the Departments of Treasury and Finance, National Planning, Personnel Management , as well as key spending agencies".
Despite the PNG elite's cave-in, many ordinary Papua New Guineans are angry at Canberra's mafia tactics. This was reflected in the reaction to the humiliation of Somare by Brisbane airport security in late March. Somare was ordered to remove his belt and shoes in front of other passengers. The Australian government has refused to apologise.
On March 31, hundreds of people marched to the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby waving placards reading "Our chief is not a terrorist". Steven Mera, a protest organiser, told ABC Radio: "We want to Tell Australia to stop patronising us, we're not a colony of Australia."
On April 18, at least 7000 people marched in Lae, PNG's second-largest city, to demand an Australian apology.
On May 5, some 300 PNG police union members, angry at the Australian cops' high pay, unwillingness to perform mundane or dangerous duties and their racist attitudes, rallied in Port Moresby to demand that Australian police leave PNG.
Canberra does not trust PNG's elite to be unwavering in implementing the harsh economic austerity and privatisation programs it demands. It also fears that recurring mass opposition to Australian and other Western corporations' plunder of PNG's natural resources cannot be adequately controlled without direct intervention.
Australia seized the opportunities opened by the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US to justify an openly interventionist policy. Under the guise of leading the "war on terror" in the Asia-Pacific region, Canberra felt it could more effectively enforce its economic and security dictates. Australia openly proclaimed itself the "deputy sheriff" for US imperialism in the region.
Right-wing press pundits and ruling-class "think tanks", most importantly the defence department-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the corporate-funded Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), prepared the ground to justify and encourage Canberra to launch direct paramilitary and political interventions in the affairs of its Pacific neo-colonies. Pacific island countries were branded corruption-ridden "failed" or "weak" states, in which "law and order" had irreversibly broken down and were becoming havens for "terrorists" and "criminals".
In June 2003, the ASPI released Our Failing Neighbour, a report that declared the Solomons a "failed state" and bluntly stated that this was "depriving Australia of business and investment opportunities". The ASPI urged Canberra to insert Australian bureaucrats to take over the running of key Solomons' government departments, to give them a "strong focus on stimulating private enterprise".
Just a few weeks later, the first contingent of some 150 AFP officers and 1500 Australian soldiers, including 200 combat troops, departed for the Solomon Islands' capital of Honiara. While the Australian government and the big business media loudly proclaimed the expeditionary force's goal as being to put an end to "ethnic militia fighting", "lawlessness", "chaos" and "violence" (the scale of which soon proved to have been deliberately exaggerated), little attention was drawn to the fact that around 100 Australian bureaucrats had taken charge of strategic positions in the Solomons' public service and central bank, in effect putting Canberra in control of the country.
With that important precedent established, advocates of the reassertion of Australian imperialist might in the Asia-Pacific region moved their sights rapidly to PNG — a far more significant target for Australian big business. PNG's economy is dominated by Australian big business, while Australian capitalists, along with Canadian, South African and other Western corporate partners, have billions of dollars invested in its lucrative mining and oil industries.
As early as March 2003, the CIS, in its publication Papua New Guinea on the Brink, asserted that "PNG shows every sign of following its Melanesian neighbour, the Solomon Islands, down the path to economic paralysis, government collapse and social despair" and urged Canberra not to fear charges of "recolonising" PNG and dispense with its "longstanding 'hands off' approach of respecting PNG's sovereign right to make its own choices".
The Australian government, backed by strategically placed press "commentaries" by ASPI, CIS and other ruling class propagandists, dishonestly alleged that Australia's aid to PNG was being misspent because of a lack of "good governance".
In August 2003, a letter was sent to Somare demanding that Australian officials be placed in key PNG government departments. For several weeks Somare publicly objected to Canberra's outrageous proposals but was forced to back down in September after Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer arrived in Port Moresby to deliver an ultimatum: Australian intervention or no aid at all. The ECP was the result.
In July 2004, Downer told the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London: "We are now prepared to get more directly involved in cases where believe this will have a positive impact,"
According to the July 6, 2004, PNG Post-Courier Downer went n to say: "Our work with the Solomon Islands, with Papua New Guinea ... mark a specific and significant shift in our dealings with the South Pacific... We must take a practical, activist approach to ensure potential incubators of future threats — weak states — are pulled back from the precipice."
However, Downer let slip the true motive behind Australia's drive to take direct charge of its "sphere of interest" when he told the audience that this approach would give "businesspeople and investors confidence to go about their work".
From Green Left Weekly, May 25, 2005.
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