Alison Jane

Your lost in space mate!

Your ho hum excusing of Australian government cowardice, rank hypocrisy and greed, is pathetic.

So you say PNG corruption is worse than Australian government corruption.
No it's not!

The difference is entirely in its level of sophistication. That is the only difference!

Dan

diver dan,

You need to keep in mind that Alison Jane is in the pro-China camp.

She has vested interests in a China-Australia compact so you won't win any arguments with her.

Mr. Opinion,

Do you really trust a government that only just now "wakes up" to what many, many people - not just people like us, but professionals at the game - have known for years? These clowns actually thought that that allowing the CCP into the WTO would change them. It did. They have become even worse.

AJ,

Right. PNG wasn't ready for independence. It is still not ready for independence. Racism? Well, tough.

ttbn,

One thing for sure their dalliance with China has definitely come back to bite them on the bum.

How long have I been trying to warn people about the Chinese.

How many Chinese agents and PLA operatives live in Sydney and Melbourne? Maybe we can pop in and have a cup of afternoon tea with them - won't that be lovely!

I Agree with Chris!

Moreover, where we can influence anyone in the Pacific region? It has to be with two things as gifts from the lucky country as gifts that just keep on giving for decades.

Those gifts would be Shipping container-sized, MSR thorium and destination dialysis desalination modules! To provide two things. The world's cleanest, cheapest, safest energy, the world's most affordable desalinated potable water and with the latter cost-effective broad-scale irrigation should they choose that option.

Moreover, energy that cheap would enable many industrial options, i.e., recycling, (steel aluminium) Also e.g., Hydrocarbons created from seawater. And with that, endlessly available fuels, fertilisers and a range of also endlessly sustainable plastic products and plastics so durable as to allow a small craft building industry? Furniture, packaging, etc?

And or plastic septic systems that as the locally invented, two tank, closed cycle, smell free, system, would produce all the cooking gas any family would ever need, indefinitely.

Our goal should be to create indigenous self-reliance with no strings attached, even as China seeks almost the opposite? Then as the one paying the piper? Seeks to call the tune?

I think we should allow a hugely indebted China to overreach herself to an enormous economic downturn. And then face her people, civil rebellion and bloodbath reprisals against the communist party!

In the interim, let's not succumb to the economic blackmail that PNG are trying on? That if they do deals with communist China, then they can kiss our current aid budget goodbye!

If the want a fishing industry? Let's not have it in already hugely over-harvested oceans! But rather as onshore fish farms! And we could help with that as facilitators and customers.

However, if they want it the other way? Those Chinese fishing fleets could dock in their Darwin harbour? And offload there. Thereby, bypassing PNG completely?

And when the cost of the fuel outweighs the fishing returns? As it will in already over-fished oceans? What then of a less than well thought through plan? Even as those fishing fleets turn out to be gunboats pursuit gunboat diplomacy?
Alan B.

PNG, like us, are still suffering from that idiot Whitlam. It was his idea to give PNG it's independence at least 25 years, & probably 50 years before it was ready for it.

A prime example was a day when I was asked to drive out from Rabaul New Britain to check out a noisy boor pump at a mission copra plantation & school, 15K out of town. On the way I passed a truck loaded with sacks of copra on the harbor side of the road. Two boys, [PNG plantation workers}, were sitting on top of the load gazing out over the harbor.

At the mission I found the pump boy had been adding water to the pump sump as it used it's oil. He knew he had to fill the thing to the mark, but the boss had let the oil run out. The boy could not ask the boss for more oil, as such things were above his station.

The boss was a new chum from Australia, who had no idea the boys would not ask for more oil when needed. It was lucky it was only the pump wrecked. The tractor boy needed oil, as did the power house boy, & it's expensive big generator.

With the new boss now a little wiser about the ways of PNG, I drove back to town 4 hours later. I was only slightly surprised to see the same 2 boys still sitting on the same truck beside the road, still gazing out over the same harbor.

That was typical of PNG at independence, & probably still is