While most other Pacific nations take a strong abolitionist stances on the death penalty, PNG is moving in the opposite direction – despite not having executed any prisoners since 1954.
Australia has sent help to its nearest neighbour to deal with its COVID crisis. But to really forge the next chapter in that relationship, we need to understand the history between the two countries.
Our neighbour’s stability and prosperity is in our interests. Surely, there can be no better example of this than the current crisis: what is good for PNG is also good for Australia.
Decision-makers, locally and globally, must balance management of pandemics with a recognition that fish and fishing communities are essential to local well being.
China made a huge splash in PNG in late 2018 with infrastructure investments and loan pledges. But since then, it has struggled to make inroads due, in part, to anti-Chinese sentiment.
A refugee policy built on deflecting the issue, rather than confronting it, is not sustainable. We cannot continue to ‘contract out’ our international obligations.
It’s critical that the Australian government take a new direction in refugee policy and move beyond its tired rhetoric of deterrence as a justification for detaining refugees on Nauru and Manus.
There are the real challenges facing Papua New Guinea, and the current leadership crisis in Port Moresby may or may not not produce a meaningful response to them.
It has often been assumed that Australia was essentially isolated until 1788. But research into the seagoing trade on the south coast of Papua New Guinea suggests otherwise.
Deep sea mining could supply valuable rare minerals to green technology, but one project in the south-west Pacific is invoking the wrath of local spirits.
Professor, Program Director of Health Security and Head of Vector-borne Diseases & Tropical Public Health, Burnet Institute; Laboratory Head, Walter & Eliza Hall Institute; Adjunct Principal Research Fellow, PNG Institute of Medical Research, Burnet Institute