PNG Newswire: Independent down to its very knees

Is time running out for democracy in PNG?
Mary-Louise O'Callaghan reports from Port Moresby

A HEAVY grey mist has hung over Port Moresby for days, as if malevolent gods have gathered above the Papua New Guinea capital to brood -- along with the rest of the nation -- upon the outcome of the anarchy that has so marred PNG's general elections.

Sitting under these same clouds in a squatter settlement not far from Moresby's University of Papua New Guinea is Jon Anaku, 20. A Lutheran and law-abiding citizen, Anaku does not epitomise the lawless youth, known as ``raskols'', in this town -- although the story of his family's shrinking opportunities is typical of the hardship facing increasing numbers of Papua New Guineans. Their story is their nation's and both are just as bleak.

The national parliament is due to sit in just more than a week to elect a new government, but the legitimacy of the political process has been undermined by the violence and cheating of last month's poll. The fracas has been a long time coming.
It's not that the years since independence have been squandered. Hundreds of indigenous teachers, lawyers, doctors, geologists and pilots have been trained. Adult literacy has increased from 32 per cent to 65 per cent and the infant mortality rate pushed down from 93 deaths per 1000 to 55.5.

But the rich seam of natural resources threading its way from Bougainville to the Highlands has not delivered the prosperity that many, including the colonial masters, believed PNG could achieve.
In April 1997, when The Weekend Australian first spoke with the Anakus, life was tough but there was some possibility of moving forward. Jon Anaku's father, Apa (pronounced Arfa), still had a full-time job as a security guard and his wife, Epi, had only just lost her job.

Apa Anaku could still tell with vigour the story of his life with Epi and their daring move to Port Moresby soon after independence in 1975. Two children had been lost to undiagnosed diseases in their Eastern Highlands mountain village and so they had come to the big smoke to find paid work, but mostly to start a family once again in a place where a child, if it were sick, did not have to die.

Just to be sure, when a new son was finally born in 1981, Apa Anaku named him after the strongest person he could think of: Tarzan. And so, with an Eastern Highlands twist, Tarajon was born. It was in this son that all the Anakus' renewed hopes were allowed to dwell.

By 1997, Tarajon was 15 and nearing the end of junior secondary school, although his younger brother, Warren, aged 10, had recently had to drop out of primary school at Year 4 level because his parents could no longer muster the fees.
As for their nation, PNG had just weathered the Sandline mercenary crisis, but the troops had returned to barracks and, with elections due in a matter of months, change was in the air.

Now, five years down the track from that first interview, PNG's wider problems have finally caught up with the Anakus' life plans -- and overtaken them completely.

Disaster, not a fresh wind, had been lurking at the 1997 general elections; PNG's horse-trading politics delivering the prime ministership not to the best man but to the highest bidder. Bill Skate, a populist without an ounce of economic literacy, seized the helm of the good ship PNG and all but ran it aground.
Protected by an 18-month grace period from votes of no-confidence, Skate lasted precisely that long. Resigning in a haze of economic collapse and allegations of corruption, his departure paved the way for his antithesis, a former governor of the Central Bank, Mekere Morauta, to take the reins.
But most of the damage had been done and not just by Skate.

Successive governments had failed since independence to translate the enormous national wealth generated by the extraction of PNG's copper, gold and, more recently, oil and gas into a better life for ordinary Papua New Guineans. Corruption, political instability and a lack of fundamental economic planning meant the delivery and quality of basic services such as health and education declined to a point of non-existence in many corners of the country.

In 1999 Morauta, new to politics but strong on economic management, moved decisively on several fronts to stem the fiscal chaos, stabilise the currency, restore investor confidence and get the message through to people such as the Anakus that the national situation was going to get worse -- much worse -- before there would even be a chance that it might get better.

Two years on, government spending is still not under control but inflation and interest rates have been brought down and, to a degree, the country's foreign reserves have been restored. But this has been at the expense of flattening the economy, stymieing growth and with it any prospect for increasing living standards against the inexorable march of PNG's high birthrate.

The kina, which was worth $1.03 in 1997, has dropped to 49c. A 10kg sack of rice at K18 now costs almost as much as the weekly minimum wage, which was set at K22 a decade ago. Bully (corned) beef, another PNG staple, has gone from K1.99 a tin in 1997 to K5.25 this year.
The cost of this is not simply economic. For Papua New Guinean battlers such as the Anakus and their rural counterparts in villages throughout the country, life is getting harder.

Short and fit in 1997, Apa Anaku looked the 43 years he claimed to be. Now, although recovered from a stroke he suffered in 1999, he is an old man. Last year, he finally lost the last of his part-time work as a security guard; his long-time employers, a local family, found that after half a decade of rampant inflation fuelled by the decline of the kina, they had to let him go. No longer able to support his family and with little prospect of finding another job, Apa looks far closer to the 58 years that is the average life expectancy of a male Papua New Guinean than the 48 he's supposed to be.

Living in Port Moresby's June Valley settlement, with no power or running water, the family just manages to survive, a limp and dusty vegetable patch the chief source of food.

Tarajon Anaku -- now simply known as Jon -- has done his part. An average student, he worked hard at his schooling and, with the help of his father's employer, managed to graduate last year with formal qualifications in carpentry and upholstering, only to find that there was no work to be had for a new carpenter in this moribund industry.

Having fought to be one of the exclusive minority of Papua New Guineans who secure any tertiary education, he is packing soft drink bottles for a tiny wage. ``I am quite disappointed. You spend three years on something for nothing,'' he says. ``It's quite hard, but at least I've still got a job. If I lose that, then I've lost everything.''

And so will have Apa and Epi Anaku, who find themselves, after decades of work, squatting with an in-law in a two-room shack that provides shelter for 16, dependent upon their 20-year-old son's tiny wage to feed them and their two growing children.
In the end it is a fairly simple equation. As the standard of living for Papua New Guineans declines, so does their faith in the institutions of independence.
The high ideals of democratic rule, embraced so enthusiastically in 1975, have proven elusive as votes of no-confidence, constitutional crises and the politicising of the public service have all undermined any attempt at good governance. Meanwhile, an ill-disciplined army and an under-resourced and poorly trained police force have served only to deepen the violent nature of everyday life in PNG.

``Papua New Guineans have every reason to despair and to be angry about the destruction of their country and their lives,'' Morauta said at the time of the country's 25th anniversary of independence in September 2000. ``Personal, political and financial gain have corrupted the young and vibrant democracy that PNG once was. Vested interests have controlled the political process; voters have been cheated of their democratic right to be represented by the parties and the candidates they want. Everyone has suffered except the greedy and self-interested few who have profited from the chaos that they visited upon us.''

And that was before the chaos of the 2002 general elections; the firebombing and destruction of ballet papers, the extensive electoral fraud.

All this seems of little concern to Jon Anaku, his hair plaited to beat the heat of his back-breaking job.
``No, no, I didn't vote for Morauta,'' he says with a soft smile when asked if he had supported the Prime Minister, who won convincingly in the electorate in which the family lives. ``A man, an independent candidate, John Yambu, he came with some food for us, so I voted for him.''

When you are 20 and feeding a family of five on $16 a week, voting for a man who brings you some food doesn't seem such a bad call.
Mary-Louise O'Callaghan is The Australian's South Pacific correspondent.

PNG polling
PNG adopted a Westminster system at independence in 1975. Elections for a unicameral 109-seat national parliament are held every five years.

Despite reforms last year designed to encourage political parties, a record 2874 candidates contested the June election, 1247 as independents.

Controversy dogged the poll from the outset when it was discovered that the newly updated common roll had more than 5.2 million voters registered, despite only 2.5 million people recorded as being over age 15 in the 2000 Census.

As part of the reforms, polling began on June 15 and was to move progressively around the country for a fortnight but heavy rains and violence delayed voting and counting in many Highland seats. An extension was granted to allow polling in these seats to continue and the deadline for the return of writs put back to next Monday. Under new political integrity laws, the Governor-General will then ask the leader of the party with the most seats to form a government, the strength of which will be established with a formal vote of the new parliament due to convene on August 5.

No single party is expected to gain an absolute majority and a multi-party coalition including independents is most likely.

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