Former UNRE lecturer visits

From left are Graeme and Philippa Hockey, and Dale and Belinda Rogers

Papua New Guinea University of Natural Resources & Environment’s Vudal Campus recently welcomed a former lecturer who once taught at the institution 40 years ago. 

Graeme Hockey from Darwin, Australia, who lectured in cattle farming in 1970 when the institution was known as Vudal Agricultural College, visited the campus with wife Philippa.

Welcoming them, University registrar Henry Gioven said it was good to have former staff of the institution return to see the progress it had made since then.

University vice chancellor Prof Philip Siaguru gave the visitors a presentation of the progress of the institution and its future development plans.

Mr Hockey said he was impressed with the inspiring presentation and the fact that the state asset had been developed and is being looked after.

He said he had not known what to expect because he had left when many parts of the campus grounds were still covered with thick bushes and kunai grass.

Mrs Hockey, who used to work at the institution as personal assistant to the then principal Syd Saville, said she was particularly impressed about the developments that had taken place at Vudal over the last 40 years because the infrastructure at many of the other places they had visited had been neglected.

“Some of the places we went back to didn’t have anything anymore and it was sad to see that,” she said.

The Hockeys said they were proud to be part of the history of the university that was still expanding.

Mr Hockey arrived in PNG in 1967. In 1968 and 1979 he worked as a Department of Primary and Industry officer at Warangoi.

In 1970, he joined the institution as a lecturer specialising in cattle farming, where he met and married wife Philippa. In 1971, they moved to Kagua in Southern Highlands and from 1972 to 1973 they were based in Popondetta.

Mr Hockey returned to Darwin in 1973 to help his father to take care of the family’s cattle farm. In 1977, he joined Northern Territory government and worked for 25 years before he retired.

Currently he works with a tour company and also does volunteer work in East Timor.

The Hockeys were accompanied by Philippa’s sister Belinda and her husband Dale Rogers.

A huge Asian population increase will leave Australia increasingly isolated

By COLIN FRASER in The Australian
AUSTRALIA is on the brink of an offshore population explosion that threatens to change almost every aspect of our lives during the next 40 years. It may well decide who will own our country in centuries to come.
Locked in combat over essentially domestic issues, none of our political parties is seriously addressing or explaining the unprecedented rise in people numbers already happening in Asia and Southeast Asia.
One map on this page records our reassuring atlas's vision of our country: a unique island continent, its importance and security confirmed by its huge land mass.
But the new political reality is revealed in the right-hand map, in which the area of each country in our region has been re-configured according to its population.
As never before, Australia, a Western island in an Asian sea, faces the possibility of becoming a remote outpost in a new Asia-dominated world. Every year the gap between our populations is increasing with extraordinary speed.
The UN and US census bureau say that during the next 40 years Australia's population will rise from 22 million to a minimum 29 million. An Australian Treasury forecast is for 36 million.
Simultaneously, seven or eight already overcrowded countries across an arc to our north are predicted to increase their total numbers by some 1.25 billion, at least 90 times Australia's gain.
Within 40 years, people in Asian countries will number six of every 10 worldwide.
Coincidentally, one of the US's most respected research organisations, the 70-year-old non-profit Foundation for the Study of Cycles, has identified the start of a 500-year geopolitical cycle. It says its result will be a huge and permanent transfer of relative wealth and power from West to East.
Australia faces an urgent need to create a new population strategy that goes way beyond just stemming the flow of a few thousand boatpeople.
We now attract record numbers of approved migrants: 297,000 net in the year to June last year, compared with 97,000 a year 10 years ago. Even on the basis of the UN-US lower prediction of 29 million, our average annual intake must be at least maintained at its present level till 2050.
If the more favoured prediction of 36,000,000 should prove the reality, our intake will need to rise to some 350,000 a year. Comparatively few Australians presently welcome such a prospect. Nor are we prepared for it.
Already, in most of the countries above us, the need for adequate water is chronic, affecting some 40 million in China alone, even more in India. Food shortages multiply while groundwater tables fall year by year.
As populations mushroom, it is inevitable pressure on our borders will come not just from uninvited asylum-seekers, but from northern governments, demanding Australia pull down its barriers and share our energy, ore and agricultural good fortune on practical and humanitarian grounds.
We may argue others don't understand the challenges of our country's great distances and desertified landscape. But in times of great human trial, rationalisation gives way to desperation. History shows that the urge to conquest is rarely far below the surface. It is scarcely a somewhere else phenomenon.
This writer was in Dili, East Timor, and little more than 700 km from Darwin, just ahead of the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific. On the pretext of helping Timor's then Portuguese masters, Japanese military, naval and civil administrators were already outnumbering Europeans four to one. Their interest in Timor was patently, unquestionably, as a springboard for a future move on Australia.
Remembered also is an amicable conversation with a Japanese professor during a seminar coffee break in Tokyo 10 years after Japan's defeat. "You know," he said, "we can't help looking at that big empty country of yours and thinking, 'We would have done it better.' "
Australia has long enjoyed the protection of two of the world's leading powers: for a couple of centuries the British empire, for the past 70 years the US.
It is unlikely that we can now rely on the protection of either. Both have extraordinary burdens of entrenched unresolved debt. Their governments must focus on their own survival.
Economists calculate US unresolved debt now exceeds the combined cost in today's dollars of all its financial crises since 1803, including world wars I and II, Vietnam, Iraq, the Great Depression, the moon landings and the entire NASA space program. And now the government's massive post-meltdown stimulus payments.
As the world's wealth and power moves to the East, Australia's destiny almost certainly lies in becoming the new Switzerland of our region. Despite its size, Switzerland has weathered centuries of surrounding turmoil. It is respected for being economically strong; highly industrious; determinedly independent; self-sufficient according to plainly promulgated principles; technologically advanced and, for a small nation, defensively deterrent.
Australia's future security must be earned similarly.
Our claim to special status lies almost entirely in our Lucky Country's natural bounty: extraordinary coal, natural gas and ore resources; expanding offshore and onshore oil and gas fields; huge areas of unoccupied land; abundant water (but most of it's falling in the wrong places and most running out to sea); vast quantities of uranium (as new technology and safeguards propel nuclear power into a major source of future energy in country after country); and, in our drought-free years, a vital source of grain, livestock and produce to help feed the world.
We must respect the pressing magnitude of our region's challenges. For instance, China and India alone estimate that the global financial crisis threw about 70 million of their citizens out of work, more than three times Australia's total population.
Despite China's disposition for conquest or absorption (Hong Kong, Tibet, potentially Taiwan) it is highly probable Australia's real-politik path will prove to be a mutual benefit and co-operation agreement between our two nations, and a similar one with India.
As with Switzerland, our contribution to such stabilising alliances will be that we continue to provide the things the most powerful countries above us need.
If the new mining tax's effect should be to diminish Australia's perceived reliability as a future supply partner, its biggest unintended side effect may be to accelerate China's and India's search for new sources of alternative oil, coal, gas and uranium.
Certainly Australia holds no long-term monopoly. Billions of serious dollars are being spent to increase production and to prove promising new discoveries in at least 20 countries. China scours the globe to appease its appetite for energy, with no shortage of government funding available to pay for assured supply.
Australia must accept quickly that we cannot refuse to share our good fortune, nor set our own comfortable pace.
China continues to build new-coal-powered plants, each month adding the generating output of Australia's entire electricity network. It is surging ahead with the expansion of its infrastructure, building 30 new high-speed rail networks and thousands of new roads. It is planning 30 new nuclear-based power-generating plants and plans to soon market safe turn-key generators to the world. It is still increasing its network of dams, both in China and beyond its borders in the Mekong.
It is determined, along with India, to become the world's biggest automotive manufacturer and its most profitable and competitive manufacturing power.
By contrast, Australia is perceived to have slipped from its pre-eminence (with Canada) as the nation which entered the global financial crisis with an enviably sound economy, the product mostly of strictly focused policies from the Howard-Costello administration. While China (and India) race to build their infrastructures, Australia has largely exhausted its Building Australia Fund on poorly explained and administered projects (broadband, domestic ceiling insulation, assorted school buildings, emissions trading scheme) at an estimated cost of $8 billion. Many see a desire to make good these expenditures as the principal reason for the estimated $9 billion mining tax.
Infrastructure Australia, a body set up by the Rudd government about two years ago to involve leading businessmen to help attack Australia's ever-growing infrastructure backlog, now calculates its necessary budget at $770 billion.
Of this, Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson has said Australia needs to spend $100 billion to keep power on and avoid inevitable blackouts, brownouts and health and business disasters.
No determined plan appears to exist to finance a solution, nor to save us from repeatedly rising domestic and industrial electricity charges. No co-ordinated plan to build new generating installations for up to 14 million new citizens appears in sight.
As in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, investment in refurbishment of coal-fired generation has been extinguished by fears of carbon particle pollution.
For our northern neighbours, our coal is a humanitarian product. In China, especially, it sustains jobs and powers its manufacturing industry. It also powers the cheap electric pumps that raise groundwater for millions of small farmers. Indian authorities say any loss of cheap coal, or even the removal of its subsidies, would trigger a widespread and chaotic rural revolt.
Both countries regard the discomfort and health effects of carbon particle fallouts as localised problems to be endured for a time in their quest for larger, longer-range economic objectives and not to be confused with the Copenhagen claims that carbon dioxide can permanently and disastrously change the world's upper atmospheres and its future climate.
Few of us welcome the prospect of a surge of millions of new immigrants, but we need to accept their coming presence as inevitable and valuable. They underline our obligation to radically attack our neglected infrastructure. We are not building the housing or infrastructure to absorb them.
The world needs to know that we are leaders in our quotas for immigrants and genuine refugees. But we must also state clearly our tough-cop rules: uncompromisingly no admittance for boatpeople returning to the lowest levels of the Howard years.
We urgently need to find a public consensus about the individuals and families we most want and need to bring to our country, their skills, their backgrounds of hardship, their readiness to commit to Australia's attitudes and values.
As in Switzerland, we need to ensure that our defensive capability is constantly modernised and strengthened. Defence Minister John Faulkner has noted with concern that China is rapidly expanding its naval forces, with plans for new nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.
In modern Australia we must demand an end to incompletely explained and appallingly administered government ventures, initiated without cost-benefit evidence.
The 40 years to 2050 is a heartbeat in the global timetable. Many of our needed responses cannot be readily bought off-shelf, nor can the skills to bring them to life be imported at short notice.
Time now for a rapid overview of the tasks which must be attacked most urgently, their priorities, justifications, employment needs, estimated costs and financial benefits.
The clock is ticking. Too fast for comfort.
Journalist Colin Fraser was sent to Timor and Singapore by Keith Murdoch at age 19. He was Australia's youngest accredited war correspondent in World War II. He held senior editorial and management positions with Melbourne's Sun News-Pictorial and The Herald, forerunners of News Limited's Herald Sun. He was an Australian television pioneer and later national vice-chairman of advertising agency George Patterson.

What should Australia do about Papua New Guinea?

By REGINALD RENAGI

Papua New Guinea got her Independence in 1975.  In that time until today, Australia has for 35 years been propping up PNG's annual budget with free money.  This substantial grant is currently estimated at some A$ 13 billion.  This is free money that we don't have to pay back.  Or do we in perhaps other forms? 

Anyway the free money from Australian taxpayers is meant to develop PNG and improve the quality of life for ordinary Papua New Guineans.  This has not happened and Papua New Guineans since then have in recent times asked: where has all this Australian money gone to? 

A good question with many answers.  One tends to get different responses from politicians from both Waigani and Canberra, including academics, public servants, and private citizens. However, one thing is clear and prompts this next question: why hasn't this huge grant from Australia raise PNG out of its current abject poverty?

We hear in recent times the angry demands from many well-intentioned people both PNG and Australians calling on their respective PM and governments to fix the ongoing problem(s) with Australian aid.

Many efforts have since been made to correct this.  From independent to joint government aid reviews by both countries, but still this nagging doubt: 'how do we improve the efficacy of AusAid' to the mutual benefit of PNG and Australia?

Australia is an incredibly-charitable nation, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of dollars it grants to PNG and other developing countries as foreign aid.  This may sound good to constituents but now it's time for Australia to stop.  Giving so much of its hardworking tax-payers dollars to PNG only props up bad governments our people perceive as corrupt since Independence.

It's high time, new Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard reviews her country's AusAid programme and makes a basic fundamental change that none of her Australian predecessors have done since PNG's Independence. 

All recent AusAid reviews before and after any Joint Ministerial Forum meetings are basically the same.  New changes made are mere cosmetics at best to give the impression to citizens of both countries that new positive benefits will automatically flow on to the PNG people. 

This is a fallacy and has not happened. Because the basic root cause of why the AusAid programme has not been effective to date has not really been addressed with real seriousness by our politicians and its over-bloated beauracracy. 

The reality is when our government complains, Australia rewrites another AusAid policy agreement paper in Canberra for joint signatories at the next Ministerial Forum or some G to G sponsored special event in future.  The basic problem remains until the next time PNG raises another aid-related issue.  Than another policy redraft by Canberra just to make Waigani happy and quiet for a while until another foreign Ministry representation about "some oversight aspect from our last meeting ..." resurfaces later, and so on. 

But Julia Gillard can change all this nonsense starting this year when she later visits Port Moresby.  So PNG might not expect it now but she needs ALP's endorsement to get tough with PNG.  Australia must do this because its aid money is wasted in PNG. 

As 'charity begins at home’, Gillard now needs to also do more for her own poor people, especially the majority of Australian indigenous and the Torres Strait people, instead of sending it north of the 10th parrallel.

While the whole AusAid programme has merits, the basic approach of just giving PNG its taxpayer’s money to be only wasted by our government is fundamentally wrong. 

Julia Gillard must totally cut the AusAid programme down to zero and in its place increase the trade activity volume between Australia and PNG by some 100%.  This in the long run will be more beneficial to the development of PNG and subsequent wellbeing of Papua New Guineans.   

Why must we cut AusAid now? There are many reasons, but for a start: PNG's abject poverty is deeply rooted in government corruption, corruption that actually is fostered by Australia (including other external aid from so-called development partners).

 We should ask ourselves a simple question: Why is private capital so scarce in PNG? The obvious answer is that over the years our country has been ruled by not-very-clever men who pursue ineffective economic policies or try to run a country in a somewhat 'policy-vacuum', laxsidaisical 'bull-in-a-China shop' way.

As a result, Australian aid simply enriches prime ministers and their cohorts, errant politicians, distorts national economies, and props up bad national (and provincial) governments. As a matter of fact, Australia could send PNG next year a warping $1 billion, and this country still would remain mired in abject poverty and supposedly very corrupt as it is now, and getting more worse by the day.

The answer is simply because so many of PNG politicians reject the idea of empowering its citizens from being wealthy, sharing our country's rich resources equally among citizens, being responsive and responsible, accountable, free markets and the rule of law.

Australian aid money enables prime ministers and governments to gain and hold power without the support of the people who today are totally fed up with political corruption since Independence. PNG politicians have learnt to manipulate foreign governments and obtain an independent source of income (especially AusAid), which makes them far richer and more powerful than any of their political rivals; and ordinary Papua New Guineans.

Once comfortably in power and much to the horror of Australian and other foreign governments that funded them, PNG politicians subjugate their own people to a miserable life of helplessness and being dependent on political 'hand-outs'. It is not a good thing to say here, but in reality, AusAid gives PNG politicians the “power to impoverish” Papua New Guineans.

It's time to stop this crime. The bottom line is that despite years of Australian aid, the great bulk of Papua New Guineans than ever are living in abject poverty, which will only get worse in future. AusAid and simply foreign aid does not work, but only fuels more increased levels of corruption, dependency syndrome and misery for PNG; and its people. 

Despite this reality, Australian governments (and other foreign countries) offer to increase aid are always praised for their compassionate and progressive policies.

But what about Papua New Guineans who are suffering here at home, whether from hunger, illness, or poverty? Are their lives and well being less important? Every Australian must now ask themselves this question: Where is the constitutional provision allowing Australian tax dollars to be sent to PNG only to be fretted away by that country's politicians?

Australians should be free to do everything in their power to help Papua New Guineans from suffering, whether by donating money or working directly in our country. But its government foreign aid to PNG do not work, it never has and must now be stopped.

PM Julia Gillard must now direct her DFAT speech writers that she needs a fresh new speech for this year's revised Port Moresby Declaration to be perhaps titled: 'The New Order of Australian-PNG Partnership'.  This must be enduring and clearly spell out: 'What Australia should do about PNG?'

Julia, it's time to cut Aid and increase trade between our two countries. When this happens then watch what happens.  PNG will comfortably pay her way and become less dependent and more prosperous in future.  Future PNG administration will long remember an Australia PM for her toughness to assist our country become more independent, overcome poverty and fight corruption through good governance; and of having a more responsible and accountable government in office.

So the short answer to the title of this article is simple.  Australia should now make PNG truly independent in every sense of the word without Aid.  Australia should now let this country be more of being herself without any strings attached (money or otherwise).

 I hereby invite the public to an open discussion of what Australia should do now about PNG.  The response here should be interesting.  It will undoubtedly allow the Australian High Commission in PNG to better advise Canberra before Gillard pays us a historical courtesy call as Australia's first woman Prime Minister.  When she does, we will welcome her with open arms as we did, Kevin Rudd. 

What Papua New Guinea can learn from Cuba to fight AIDS

By REGINALD RENAGI

The Health Ministry must now plan to send a special government medical team to Cuba to learn what that small Caribbean country does to combat Aids.

Do you know that Cuba is hailed in the world as a shining example of how to combat successfully the HIV/AIDS pandemic? Today, it has an HIV infection rate of less than 0.1 per cent, in a region that has one of the fastest growing infection rates in the world.

Not only have the authorities virtually eliminated the transmission of the virus through blood transfusion and intravenous drug use, but they have also halted transmissions involving newborns at birth.

Let us see how PNG can learn from Cuba better strategies to fight Aids in our country.  Cuba was one of the first countries to take AIDS seriously as a problem, and provide a comprehensive response combining both prevention and care.

This was not always the case.  In the 1980s, Cuba was widely condemned in the world for its harsh treatment of AIDS sufferers.  The government's initial response then was to subject people with HIV to be either isolated or quarantined. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, patients were far away from the "collective" population in sanitariums.  Not only that, but their sexual partners were subsequently traced and tested, including pregnant women and those who had travelled to Africa; were also tested.

However, at the end of the decade by late 1980s, Cubans were more knowledgeable about the epidemic, and they humanely allowed patients to leave the sanatoriums for extended periods of time. 

A few years later, the government introduced its ambulatory care treatment programme, which enabled AIDS patients to choose between living within the sanatoriums or recovering at home with family members (home-care regime).

Today, people with HIV are guaranteed access to free medical care.  They also don't get fired from their jobs because they are carrying the virus.  There is clearly a strong commitment on the part of Cuban political leadership to undertake a wide-ranging and comprehensive HIV/AIDS action plan - domestically as well as internationally.  This is part of Cuba's activist foreign policy.

In 1983, Cuba set up a National Commission on AIDS, before any cases had even been diagnosed, to educate its 11 million people. Sex education programmes were subsequently introduced in schools and TV ad campaigns informed Cubans about AIDS and the need to promote safe sex.

Over the years, the government began compiling a comprehensive database of those infected with HIV, along with their chain of sexual partners. While HIV testing is no longer compulsory, Cuban health authorities recommend it for pregnant women and those in high-risk categories. Those who do contract HIV are required to attend an eight-week education and drug support programme in a sanatorium.

Some time ago recently, Dr Barksdale, the director of the American charity, Cuban AIDS Project, was quoted as saying: "I don't know if six weeks or eight weeks are the magic numbers, but that is certainly a longer time than is given to people in the US. Who receive such a diagnosis? They may get five minutes' worth of education."

 The amazing thing to remember here is for 40-years the US economic embargo against Cuba resulted in no anti-retroviral drugs being initially available in that Caribbean island. But by 2001, Cuba's growing biotechnology sector was beginning to manufacture generic versions of several HIV/AIDS inhibitors.

Admirably, Cuba is now one of the few developing countries that actually provide its HIV/AIDS patients with a full supply of free drugs.  What's more, do you know that Cuba has sent thousands of doctors and nurses to almost every part of the world to help their valiant struggle against HIV/AIDS?

Cuba also helps in some African countries.  In Botswana, which has the highest proportion of people living with HIV in the world, Cuban medical professionals work in several clinics and hospitals to treat AIDS sufferers and to offer suggestions for prevention. For some time now, the Cuban government offers to train - at no cost - nurses and doctors from other Caribbean countries to fight the pandemic.

More strikingly, Cuba has promised to provide anti-retroviral drugs to its Caribbean friends for a cost well below market prices. What's more some countries in Latin America and Africa are seeking Cuba's assistance in their fight against Aids.

 This is even more impressive when you realise that Cuba is largely a poor, developing country locked in an undeclared war with its superpower neighbour only 145km away.

As a relatively rich and developing country, where is PNG's leadership on this critical issue? 

Cuba's approach to the HIV/AIDS pandemic is a major success story. There is much that PNG and the rest of the world can learn from this compassionate Cuban experience.

I am not even saying here that that Cuba has all the answers to the AIDS epidemic. But I strongly believe that PNG has much to learn from this small Caribbean country in many diverse and creative strategies to help us fight against the Aids pandemic here.

Cuba has a lot of potential and will offer us more to improve our national health-care regime in PNG.  Are you reading this, Minister Zibe and Secretary Malau?

I call on our government to now take up the great challenge left to the PNG health profession by former Health Minister, Sir Peter Barter when he left politics to go back to helping his people in Madang. 

So enough procrastination PNG, let's go over to Cuba now to learn something about fighting Aids.  What's more, let Cuban medical professionals (doctors, nurses, medical orderlys and other specialists) come to PNG to supplement our medical people by helping in rural PNG.  That's where the biggest threat is and need for helping our most-vulnerable population.

Numbers game is on in Papua New Guinea politics

Peter O’Neill says government intact, while opps confident of 34 to topple PM

 

THE numbers game is on in the run-up to the sitting of Parliament next week where a vote of no-confidence in the prime minister is likely to be introduced, The National reports.

While the opposition held a press conference yesterday, saying they could muster the numbers to remove Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare, a senior government minister said they were intact and solidly behind Sir Michael.

“The coalition is intact.

“We are fully behind the prime minister.

“The government’s policies and programmes remain on track. The stable environment for business and investment will continue. I want to assure investors and our development partners that,” Public Service Minister and leader of the People’s National Congress party Peter O’Neill said.

The opposition needed a minimum of 34 additional members to give it a simple 55 majority to vote out the prime minister.

However, O’Neill rejected suggestions that one of PNC members, Ken Fairweather (Sumkar), broke ranks and co-signed a statement with Jamie Maxtone-Graham, calling for the removal of the PM.

“Fairweather had assured me he was not a party to that statement being circulated around,” O’Neill said.

Fairweather did not appear in a press conference yesterday, held at opposition leader Sir Mekere Morauta’s residence, where Maxtone-Graham distributed the statement.

Maxtone-Graham claimed the two of them were part of a group of 11 MPs calling themselves the “middle group”, who are siding with the opposition to change the government.

The opposition said they were confident of recruiting 34 government members to give them the simple majority required to remove the prime minister in a vote of no-confidence.

“We, in the opposition, are ready to work with our colleagues on the other side to remove this family dynasty,” Sir Mekere said.

Sir Mekere was flanked by deputy leader Bart Philemon and MPs Francis Awesa, Michael Vincent, Sam Basil, Koni Iguan and Maxtone-Graham.

They claimed they were in talks with people in government, but did not say who they were.

Philemon said the opposition was ready to remove the prime minister who had already lost the plot and an old man who has lost his usefulness.

He said the post of the prime minister was on a clean slate and “anyone in government that brings the numbers is capable of taking it”.

Sir Mekere said it was now time for the elected Members of Parliament to listen to the people and destroy the house of Somare.

But a government spokesperson countered this, saying a number of opposition MPs were expected to join the government and the ruling National Alliance party.

The spokesperson said they were also talking to a political party in the opposition.

The spokesperson denied that there was a rift in the National Alliance which was widening, prompting them to “recruit”.

Meanwhile, on the opposition side, deputy leader of PNG Party and Imbonggu MP Francis Awesa denied rumours of a split.

Awesa said the rumours were being spread by people in an attempt to destabilise the party in the wake of the mooted no-confidence motion against the prime minister.

“A lot of people are claiming that the party is divided, which is wrong. We are all intact.

“The eight members are together in the opposition.”

He also claimed the one key party member had been lured by the government but had refused their offer to stay with the party.

 

 

Aussies consider Manus as possible refugee site

THE Australian government is looking at Manus as a possible site for a regional refugee processing facility, The National reports.

This comes after the government encountered strong opposition to a centre being located in Timor-Leste.

But the Australian government is yet to formally raise the use of the Lombrum centre on Manus with PNG leaders.

Foreign minister Stephen Smith has briefed his PNG counterpart Sam Abal on Julia Gillard’s proposal for a regional approach to asylum-seekers during their meeting in Alotau, Milne Bay, last week.

Australian home affairs minister Brendan O’Connor said they would engage with any of the countries within the region on this matter that were signatories to the (UN) refugee convention.

He said this when asked whether Manus Island, used for refugee detention by the previous Howard government, could be a possible alternative site.

“Papua New Guinea is a signatory to the refugee convention and, therefore, we are willing to engage on that basis, because we believe we need to have a regional approach, one that also recognised the convention in that manner.”

Earlier yesterday, the department of foreign affairs and trade released the transcript of a press conference held in PNG last Thursday between Smith and Abal.

Smith explained that he had briefed his PNG counterpart on Gillard’s proposals but had not sought any indications about particular locations for a refugee processing centre.

Abal said PNG had “the place up in Manus” but had yet to consider reopening it.

A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare said yesterday there was no approach on the matter, and “any consideration would have to go before the cabinet”.

PNG has been housing about 10,000 refugees from fighting across the border in Indonesia for about 20 years in a manner recently commended and applauded by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Manus Governor Michael Sapau had expressed his willingness to have the centre reopened because of the resulting jobs and income for the province.

 

 

Highlands Highway expanding

THE Highlands Highway is to be expanded to a four-lane freeway, Works, Transport and Civil Aviation Minister Don Polye said last Friday, The National reports.

“It will be expanded in stages starting from the Lae-Nadzab section where survey, scoping and design work had commenced.

“Rehabilitation work will continue to Hela’s Koroba-Kopiago and Enga’s Porgera,” Polye said.

He said the government had spent between K700 million and K1 billion on rehabilitating the highway in the past five years.

“Given the highway’s economic significance, the government has given it top priority,” he said.

Polye said on-going maintenance on the highway was being undertaken by different companies funded by different donor agencies in collaboration with the government.

According to a presentation by National Road Authority Planning and Programming Unit manager John Kelly Kaio, there will be progressive rehabilitation conducted on different sections of the highway through the six provinces.

The details of the rehabilitation are:

* Morobe section from Lae city to Yung Creek (Morobe and EHP border) 163km maintained by Transport Sector Support Programme (TSSP);

* Eastern Highlands from Yung Creek to Magiro (EHP and Chimbu border) – 177km maintained by TSSP, Simbu government, national government funding through departments of Works,  National Planning and Treasury and Finance under the Highlands Highway rehabilitation programme (HHRP);

* Western Highlands from Miunde (Chimbu and WHP border) to Togoba junction – 83km maintained by NRA, contracted to Works Department;

* Togoba junction to Nebilyer Bridge – 19km to be maintained NRA through Works Department;

* Nebilyer Bridge to WHP and SHP border – national government contract under HHRP suspended;

* Southern Highlands sections, Kaugel to Kisenapoi – HHRP contract suspended;

* Kisenapoi to Angula Bridge ongoing HHRP contract;

* Angula Bridge to Mendi – no financier;

* Mendi (SHP border) Margarima (Enga border) – financed under ADB to be upgraded under ADB-multi-financing facility (MFF);

* Enga’s Magarima (Enga border) to Kandep – maintained under ADB;

* National government regravelling project to be upgraded under ADB MFF;

* Kandep to Laiagam – regravelling and upgrading under ADB MFF;

* Laiagam to Wabag – 40km maintained under ADB; and

* Wabag to Wapenamanda – reconstruction to be financed by AusAID and Wapenamanda to Togoba, 28km tendered by AusAID under TSSP

The presentation revealed the rehabilitation and bringing of the 1,400km of road to maintainable condition would be carried out in stages over 10 years.