Struggling with a a fragile healthcare system, remote populations and widespread fear of the vaccine, COVID is running rampant in PNG. Australia has done much to help, but is it enough?
David Gaveau, International Union for the Conservation of Nature dan Douglas Sheil, Wageningen University
Many are concerned that the highway is being built to benefit powerful commercial interests and not Indigenous people and will accelerate forest loss as seen in Sumatra and Kalimantan.
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.
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