According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Downer “met resistance” and encountered claims of “neo-colonialism” when he presented the proposal in Port Moresby last September. The report added that a senior Australian official said that “some aid programs may be cut if PNG did not agree to the initiative.” The Australian government earmarks A$350 million every year for the Papua New Guinea government, or one-fifth of the latter’s revenue (A$1=US76 cents).

Representatives of the Liberal-National coalition government claim that the assignments are necessary to prevent Papua New Guinea “from descending into anarchy and corruption,” in the words of the Australian daily. Downer said the intervention, with $800 million allocated over the next five years, would “make a decisive difference to the law and justice, and the law-and-order situation in Papua New Guinea, and be crucially important for investment in the country and business confidence.” The Australian government is demanding immunity for its forces from prosecution under Papua New Guinea’s laws. Some 5,200,000 people live in Papua New Guinea, most of whom continue to live in the countryside as subsistence farmers on clan lands.

On March 1, some 2,000 people rallied to oppose these plans in Lae, Papua New Guinea’s second city and main port, in the most significant public protest to date. The rally was called by Luther Wenge, the governor of Morobe province, where Lae is located. According a report in the Australian Financial Review, Wenge declared that Australia was trying to “invade PNG” through the deployments. He called on the crowd “to visit all government offices” in the city and “chase away any Australian officers employed there.”

Wenge said that Morobe should declare its independence “if the white men interfere in the running of our country and province’s affairs.” Under the agreement Australian police will be posted to Port Moresby and the island of Bougainville, along with Lae and the Highlands town of Mount Hagen. They will also be stationed along the Highlands highway linking this resource-rich region to Lae.  
 
Australian officials in government
According to a December 12 report in the Australian, “almost 20 Australians will be posted to Papua New Guinea’s law and justice agencies, including the position of solicitor-general, and five prosecutors.” Thirty-six Australian federal officials are also to be placed in “key economic, finance and spending agencies” to exert control over Papua New Guinea’s budget, the big-business paper reported, with a further 10 officials assigned to “streamline PNG’s immigration and improve border and transport security.” Canberra’s plans include the elimination of two-thirds of government jobs . .

Writing in the January 14 Herald, Hugh White described the intervention as “a major national undertaking which will stretch over decades and cost billions.” White is the director the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a government-funded think tank that has helped formulate the government’s political rationalizations for intervention in the South Pacific.

In an earlier article White declared bluntly that “a team of 200 or more Australian officers injected into a force of 3,000 PNG police is not simply an advisory mission. It is more like a takeover.” He added, “A functioning police force is no use without effective courts and an efficient prison system. It seems like that we will soon be drawn into a central role in these areas as well.”

Such officials must be backed by an Australian government “that is willing to press hard to persuade reluctant political elites to accept help,” White said. Such intervention, he said, was needed to prevent “outsiders moving in to exploit the situation, and a consequent descent into …badlands of violence, deprivation and transnational crime.” .

By contrast, Julienne Kaman, spokesperson for the Melanesian People’s Forum, said that the cop deployment was “a deliberate move by Australia to take control of critical posts in this country” and represented the “return of [the] Australian colonial masters.” Far from having anything to do with the interests of Papua New Guinea, she said, it was aimed at securing Canberra’s “own political and economic interests.” It is “our forests, our fishes, our land, our gas, oil, copper, gold and our people that Australia wants and depends on to prop up its economy,” she said. Canberra fears “an uprising from the masses” because “the majority are denied their basic rights of survival,” Kaman wrote. Her statement is being circulated in Australia by the PNG Solidarity Association.

In June 2001 thousands of working people joined students in protests against austerity measures being imposed by Australia and other imperialist powers through the IMF and World Bank. The protests were not quelled until riot police shot four people dead on the University of PNG campus in Port Moresby.

The government in Port Moresby has demanded that Canberra allow citizens of Papua New Guinea to enter Australia legally under short-term visas to work as agricultural laborers in Australia’s tropical north and elsewhere.

During the decades of the official “White Australia” policy that lasted up to the 1970s, and continuing through to today, there has been virtually zero migration from Papua New Guinea to Australia. This is despite its close proximity and its history of colonial domination and exploitation by Australia’s rulers.

The Australian government today maintains an immigration jail in Papua New Guinea at Manus Island. Several hundred asylum seekers, mainly from the Middle East and Asia, were imprisoned there and on the island of Nauru in 2002 after they tried to enter Australia.  
 
Troops in Solomon Islands
The intervention in Papua New Guinea comes within a year of Canberra’s deployment of 1,200 troops and 300 cops to the Solomon Islands, heading up a regional force including soldiers and police from New Zealand—the other imperialist power in the region—and Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. Their stated goal was to re-establish “law and order,” rebuild the “justice” and prison systems, and reorganize government finances.

The occupying forces built 16 police stations around the country and arrested several hundred people. Hundreds of Australian cops and officials are slated to remain in the country for many years to come.

Australian prime minister John Howard announced in February that his government was prepared to send 100 cops to East Timor on a long-term basis—an alternative to a proposal by United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan to garrison 300 troops there. The Howard government intervened in East Timor in 1999 with 3,600 troops under UN auspices, as the East Timorese fought for independence from Indonesia.

Today there are also some 850 Australian military personnel deployed as part of the imperialist occupation forces in Iraq.  
 
 
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