Pearls and Irritations

As the US presidential election contest heats up, there is bemusement in Papua New Guinea.

In May 2023, I was approached by media sources for a comment on the cancellation of President’s Biden’s intended visit to Papua New Guinea (and Australia) while travelling to attend a G-7 meeting in Japan – a cancellation prompted by a domestic crisis resulting from the failure of Congress to pass the budget. Would Papua New Guinea be offended, I was asked; would this impair the US’s efforts to establish closer relations with Papua New Guinea?

I declined the invitation to comment, suggesting that, of those who were aware of the planned visit, perhaps Prime Minister Marape and some of his ministers might be a little disappointed though many might be relieved to avoid the expense of a visit and the hassles of dealing with the security issues of such a visit in conjunction with the president’s security detail and media entourage.

In any case, Papua New Guineans understood the primacy of domestic issues over international diplomacy.

But what did have some impact, on politicians and officials frequently being lectured to on ‘good governance’ by the World Bank, donor governments and others, was bemusement at the fact that the President of the United States of America should have to cancel an international visit in order to deal with a domestic budgetary problem.

There was however some hostile reaction to President Biden’s offhand remark early in 2024 that his uncle may have been eaten by cannibals when his plane was shot down in New Guinea during World War II.

In the meantime, as part of its ‘Pacific pivot’, the US government had included Papua New Guinea as one of nine countries to receive assistance under its Global Fragility Act initiative, highlighting electoral violence in Papua New Guinea and the country’s ‘importance in a vital geostrategic region’.

Almost two decades earlier, Papua New Guineans had taken strong exception to Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s references to the arc of instability in ‘Australia’s backyard’ and to Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s description of Papua New Guinea as a ‘fragile state’, but there was little apparent objection to the American initiative in 2022.

(In a draft review of the year in Papua New Guinea for the ANU’s East Asia Forum, I suggested that perhaps Papua New Guinea might reciprocate by offering the US advice on such good governance issues as judicial integrity and electoral systems – Papua New Guinea having transitioned from first-past-the-post voting to limited preference voting while the American Fair Vote organisation continues to press for what it calls ranked choice voting in the US. [The EAF deleted the suggestion!])

Indeed during 2023, Papua New Guinea went on to sign several agreements with the US, including an enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (negotiations over which had begun in 2016) and to receive visits from the US defence secretary and the USAID administrator. Within the US defence establishment there seems to have been a view that this was a significant gain over China in the contest for ‘influence’ over Papua New Guinea.

Marape, however, emphasised that ‘PNG will not be a military launching pad’ and at a subsequent Pacific Islands Leaders’ Summit in Washington, chaired by President Biden, Marape expressed a wish for the US to focus on trade and development with Papua New Guinea ‘instead of focussing only on security and politics’. And the leader of the parliamentary opposition challenged the DCA and applied for a Supreme Court interpretation on its constitutionality.

Now, as the US presidential election contest heats up there is further bemusement in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guineans take elections very seriously, and they are used to watching big men with big egos confronting one another. But a contest for leadership, in what most Americans think of as the world’s greatest democracy, between an old man clearly past his peak and a bombastic convicted felon? Whatever happened to good governance?

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