It is trendy and particularly lefty for Australian self-haters to blame their own country for anything amiss in countries with which we have been associated as “colonialists”. Carefully ignored, of course, is the fact that these countries have bludged on us for years, got their independence, and then continued to bludge on us, while putting the quality of their governance on a par with the performances seen in spaghetti Westerns.

Now, for heavens sake, we have a foreigner from piddling little New Zealand flapping his wings.

So low is this man’s opinions of people whom he tells us we have taken advantage of, that he felt the need to speak up for an adult person from New Guinea, obviously sure that the man wasn’t capable of speaking for himself. It’s OK for him to treat some people like idiots, apparently. Maybe the ‘native’ already knew of the airline policy and had learned to live with it.

While their might be some truth in what the author claims concerning Australia’s past relationship with New Guinea, the country has had it’s independence long enough – with the help of aid – to have done something about any past wrongs, real or imagined.

Perhaps they are not capable of it. And, it’s all to easy to blame someone else

Could not agree more Leigh. It is amazing how many want to blame all the uncivilized world's problems on the civilized. When are we going to wake up to the fact to continue to give everyone except white Australia a victim mentality results in them never taking responsibility for their own actions. It won't be long before the East Timorese are blaming white Australians for their ills. I wonder if you have to have these self hating views in order to become a professor at our major universities.

“I wonder if you have to have these self hating views in order to become a professor at our major universities.”

I think that would be the main qualification, Runner. Did you see that McConvill has resigned from his university because the very people who hired him to counteract feminism and leftism have turned on him because they think he is too far to the right?

I have always thought his contributions to OLO have been middle of the road

Thanks Ron for reminding us of the antecedents to Australia's rapidly burgeoning problems with our neighbours. The comments thus far simply demonstrate their authors' obnoxious prejudices and complete ignorance of the geopolitical historical context of the current debacle(s).

Those of us who've actually worked in the area are perfectly aware that our chickens are coming home to roost - and our current government hasn't got a clue about how to deal with them.

"And all this time Papuans were Australian citizens and had been since 1906, since Britain required that."

Wasn't Papua a German colony until 1914?

Anyway the article was very one sided and all it proved was that the author could find bitterness in a bag of lollies if he look hard enough!

Easytimes

The Territory of Papua was a de facto Australian possession comprising the southeastern quarter of the island of New Guinea, existing from roughly 1902 to 1949. It had previously been administered from London as British New Guinea and remained a de jure British possession until 1975 when Papua New Guinea was granted independence by Australia. The territory now forms the southern part of Papua New Guinea, and makes up roughly half of that country.

In 1883 Sir Thomas McIlwraith the Premier of Queensland ordered Henry Chester (1832-1914), the Police Magistrate on Thursday Island to proceed to Port Moresby and formally annex New Guinea and adjacent islands in the name of the British government. Chester made the proclamation on 4 April 1883, but the British government repudiated the action.

The next year, after the Australian colonies had promised financial support, the territory became a British protectorate on 6 November 1884.

On September 4, 1888 it was annexed, together with some adjacent islands, by Britain as British New Guinea.

The northern part of modern Papua New Guinea, then known as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland and part of the colony of German New Guinea, had been under German commercial control since 1884 and passed to direct rule by the German government in 1899.

In 1902, Papua was effectively transferred to the authority of the new British dominion of Australia. With the passage of the Papua Act of 1905, the area was officially renamed the Territory of Papua and Australian administration became formal in 1906 although Papua remained a de jure British possession until the independence of Papua New Guinea in 1975, an anomaly which has continuing minor legal significance with respect to certain statutes which have force in the former Papua but not the former Australian New Guinea.

EasyTimes,

You open a can of worms with your quote from Ron Crocombe's article and subsequent questions.

An extended quote is"And all this time Papuans were Australian citizens and had been since 1906, since Britain required that. Australia had made them citizens without consultation, but would not allow them to enter the country of which they had been made citizens, nor any of the rights of citizens, nor any citizenship of their own."

The whole issue of so-called Australian citizenship is fraught with misunderstanding, and, I suspect, some misrepresentation. Without claiming the status of an expert, I would point out that the history of Australian citizenship only commenced with the Citizenship Act in 1948. (Even that legislation may be of questionable constitutional validity so far as it applies to Australians by birth and British subjects who have migrated, subject to Australian law, right up to the present.) In 1906, the inhabitants of Papua would have been British subjects. That status alone, however, would not have entitled such to automatically claim right of entry to, and residence within, Australia. The only consultation even necessary was that between the Imperial government and the Commonwealth as to the exercise of jurisdiction, jurisdiction transfered by that government to the Commonwealth and accepted thereby, and it made no difference to the citizenship status of Papuans. Papuans remained British subjects until at least 1975.

You have been too long unfamiliar with the map of empire, upon which the sun never set! Imagine the island of New Guinea divided N-S in half. The western half, in those days, was Dutch New Guinea. Imagine the eastern half further divided E-W; the northern, up until 1914, was German New Guinea; the southern, British to 1906, then subsequently, (to 1975) Australian, Papua. German New Guinea was transferred under Mandate after WWI to Australia: neither President Woodrow Wilson nor the Son of Heaven liked that (Japan wanted New Guinea, and Wilson wanted them to have it). Where it counted,although deaf himself, Billy Hughes was heard. Australia kept New Guinea in peace, and later in war.

Very interesting article...

Easy Times, New Guinea was a German protectorate until after the First World War. However, Papua was annexed by Qld parliament in 1884, much to the consternation of the British government. Basically, imagine lines drawn on maps by imperial powers.

Holy Bebop; this is politicised. I suppose blaming "incompetent natives" is easier then critical introspection of the effects of our past government attitudes to Papua New Guineans, who as the article points out, were technically Australian citizens for a long time.

Papua New Guineans I have spoken to have generally admitted that PNG was not 'ready' for independence, but I suppose it was easier to leave them to it under the veil of ending colonialism, rather than redress nearly a hundred years of exploitation and try to bring their living standards and political rights on par to that of Australia and Australians.

Thank you for this excellent piece. How many Australian's know even a fraction of this history?

Steve Madden Forrest Gumpp Cocaine-Kola-Nut thanks for the history lesson. I know I had heard something about the Germans in PNG and I know Australia sent troops there in 1914 but I did not think it was official under Australian control until 1914. Point conceded.

Yet another jaundiced opinion piece posted in the backdrop of the current bitter spat between SI/PNG and Australia, which does nothing to assist the achievement of outcomes that might actually benefit the people of these Pacific nations. 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing and allows the redefinition of history to prosecute the case that everything that is wrong with Melanesian governments today is entirely attributable to Australian (mis)management prior to 1975.

I can never understand why eminent academics, retired or otherwise, resort to flogging Australian governments past and present, when they could gain far more respect by offering positive support through applying the wisdom of their experience to providing solutions to these very serious and difficult issues.

Both Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea face chronic problems that can only be solved through a combination of strong leadership and sensitive management by all the parties, including Australia. Good governance that is corruption free is a fundamental pre-requisite and unless all sides recognise this and make this their common objective there is little prospect of a change for the better.

NG was split in three, the western half was dutch, the north east german and the south east british. At the end of WWI the two eastern parts were joined into an australian protectorate. NG highlands were also very remote and isolated. Many highland tribes were only "discovered" until someone flew a plane over it in the 1930's.

Apartheid was a standard feature of colonialism, no different from the dutch east indies and many other colonies. Only the Portuguese encouraged miscegenation in their colonies.

Unlike the Europeans the Americans did not intend to keep their colony, the Philipines, and on acquiesence in 1898 set out on a 50 year program to prepare it for independence.

Bad governance is not limited to the south pacific. Several Caribian islands have refused independence as they know the first president will steal all the money and leave them in poverty.

Newly sovereign nations tend to be highly sensitive about their sovereignty and so issues like the PNG's PM's shoe affair and the demands for Motti's extradition could be handled more diplomatically and out of the public eye. Specially the raid on the Solomon's PM's office was bound to be senstitive even if fully justified. Imagine if Asio with CIA advisors raided an australian MP's office.

By accepting large amounts of foreign aid with strings attached the south pacific nations are trading in part of their sovereignty. Everyone knows that but there is no need to rub it in publicly. The whole Motti affair could have been handled outside the media.

What chance does he have of a fair trial? How would the government look if he were acquitted?

Tambu,

May I suggest an explanation, at the risk of tarring an innocent few with the same brush, to your question about Australian academics? Many are filled with self-loathing and resentment, and have been pursuing an agenda of hate against their own nation that has had as its aim the refashioning of Australian society in their self-image. They are, in large number, guilt pedlars. So much the better for them if there is a substantial element of truth in their reports of the now seen to be reprehensible official attitudes and policies of former days. Their aim has been to peddle paralysing guilt to present day Australians, and they could not, nor did they ever, give a toss about how that might adversely affect Papua New Guineans or Solomon Islanders in the course of their Jihad.

For all the arrogance, insensitivity, and fake racial superiority that may have typified the Australian colonial regime, that regime delivered largely good governance that was corruption-free. Those official attitudes were, even in pre-WWII days, not truly representative of the attitudes of the large majority of a population of overwhelmingly British origin that had (and still has) a British constitutional heritage.

The term 'multiculturalism' has come from academe, and it has been designed to deliver a payload of paralysing guilt to the vast majority of ordinary Australians every time it is proclaimed. Its real meaning is anti-Britishness. People have migrated to Australia from all over the earth in recognition of the existence of this British heritage and identity. This product of the academe you observe, Tambu, is what has helped to cheat migrants, native born Australians, and perhaps your own people of the good governance we all need. That as a sub-culture Australian academe has prospered as it has may well be due to the outworking of a long-running sophisticated unobtrusive form of electoral fraud. You may well, through bitter experience, now be able to more easily conceive of this possibility than most Australians. It may explain your situation, and ours.

Totally agree with Leigh and ForestGump.Ron Crocombe is aptly named.It is definitely a croc of the proverbal.

Very recently John Howard and Julie Bishop gave the entire country a lecture about the poor state of Australian history teaching. JWH, while reviling the "black armband" brigade, has called for history teaching to be based on facts.

Why is it so hard to face up to our history? No one seems to be disputing the facts of the article. I'd say most are undeniable, enshrined within legislation.

Why can we not, as JWH suggests, look at the facts. I think they speak for themselves. We as a nation, are culpable for some of the wrongs of the past. Many of these acts still echo today.

This does not mean that Australia has not done good things in the past. It doesn't mean that nothing has changed since. But to say that Australia's history is has been nothing but smiles and flowers is to deny the truth.

The "black armband" brigade at least has the courage to call a spade a spade, and to acknowlegde the wrongs of the past. It's about time we took history seriously

Labeling Ron, as a self-hater is cheap and reeks of inflated egoism and lacks depth in issues of “only yesterday”. How can any thinking person shrug it off like that?

One wonders how and under what criteria, the keenly and oft quoted “Australian values” was coined.

My Prime Minister, (Sir Michael Somare) a straight shooter that he is was spot on to label Howard and his crew as "hypocrites" at the Pacific Islands Forum meeting yesterday. A fitting description, I reaffirm.

A statement that I posted earlier on another thread, is worth restating here.

Australia has advanced in practically everything that there is to pursue, but unfortunately John Howard and his crew have been overdosed by an expired foreign diplomacy pill that that is sadly making them look more and more foolish each passing month. The sooner the 21st century cupboard of pills is exploited, the better it is for Australia. Otherwise, prepare not to despair.

Thank you Ron for telling it like it is. You're a real man and a rare great friend.

Talk about a one sided article! Papua was very primitive economically when it became an Australian protectorate. Bits of it were still lost to the outside world - they had never been visited until planes were able to fly overhead in the 1930s. There's no way that you could suddenly go from this condition to an advanced capitalist economy. Under Australian protection some of the first steps were taken: contact was made, a system of justice (including native police) was instituted, plantations were established, roads were built, Port Moresby was established.

Some great personal sacrifices were made just to get this far. Some of the Australian patrol officers endured very difficult circumstances to carry out their pioneering jobs; some died attempting to do so.

In the records left by these patrol officers there is often an expression of interest in, respect for and protectiveness toward the native Papuans.

I get the feeling that some of the Melanesian and Polynesian nations are now looking to Australia for solutions to their economic problems. If so, such nations should first ask where they themselves have gone wrong in economic policy, and what they can do to improve their economic performance.

The strategy of arguing that "the evil white man is responsible and must now make amends" is not the most dignified path to follow - and will be very difficult to justify except in the most biased renderings of history.

Yes, the Pacific Islanders are aware of what Australia did during those times including Lyall Howard’s dummy racket in plantation business in Karkar (Madang Province in PNG)

No Pacific Islands countries are sweating hard to frame up strategies to blame "the evil white man" for his responsibility in the grand "failed states” agenda. Nor is anyone of them begging them to make amends" by soliciting insipid so-called AID funds.

What we the Pacific Islanders are telling the "dummy racketeers" son and his crew is to stop lecturing to us and inflate their ego by over publicizing AID. The Aid a smokescreen and a clearly engineered strategy to suppress and treat PNGeans and other Pacific Islanders just the way his father did to his native plantation laborers in PNG.
Any when his intentions are challenged, the usual old tactics of blackmailing is dished out. The same old tactic repeating itself in a subtle disguise of alms. Come off that skewed and flawed attitude. This is 21st century for heaven sake. The unabated gut kicking of us is even no longer acceptable.

Many of Islanders can survive as a nation without Australia's aid. The world is open for business and it is indeed bigger than what Australia would have us believe.

We’re simply fed up. Cut your AID. It will make infinitesimal difference. The notion that PNG is surviving because of Australia is a faulty and inaccurate belief.

The glaring history of rot should not be repeated (as is the case now) but treat the Pacific Islanders like a 21st century self-proclaimed saviour.

there is no doubt that Austrlia's position in the region is an aparthied...maintaining the position of a privileged racial group in the region... an antipodean settler community... that can only be over come by learning to trust the rest of the region... but thats hard when Australians are badly served by their own leadership and media.

The media and leadership fails to tell Australians that Moti's release was probably paid for by the Taiwanese... K20,000 to each of the pilots and load master, K90,000 to the defence force for fuel K150,000 all up there and

the there would have to be a major pay-off to the political lesdership but no mention of any of this in the media... the names of who paid the money are known to the media

the problem here in PNG is corruption, just like it was in the 80s in Queensland..

Forget all the other debates this evokes: it's true, and it's true that it's hard to keep in mind how many people over here (the insular Pacific) recall these things as part of their experience of Australia. And a lot of them are still in power, not least almost the whole PNG governing class.

Of course it matters that Somare, he of the sensitive feet, grew up with this stuff. Downer & Howard may see things on a sort of post-1980s horizon, if even that far back, mostly because politics in Aussie moves pretty quickly. It's a dynamic democracy. In PNG politicians leave the picture when they die. So the whole crew over there, their picture is continuous from the 1970s...

Thank-you Ron for the anecdotes to keep in mind while watching Somare et al. I don't think any better of them, but I better understand them. (And bring on the next generation...yeah, I know, like Bill Skate and the unspeakable Sogavare...)

PNG's many problems resulted from both, Australia's and PNG's, past policies until now. The blame cannot be entirely Australia’s.

Most of what Ron said is true, but that’s not a reason for PNG to blame Australia, Australia can blame itself. PNG should learn from that and move forward.

PNG’s leaders have been running this resource-rich nation in-effectively, making PNG so aid-dependent and aid-expectant year-in-year-out; making our leaders incapable of thinking outside the box.

All people are prejudiced towards certain people or issues. Australians are not an exception; even PNGeans have ethnical issues against each other.

That’s the case way back with Australia as Ron wrote, its the case today but in a different form, my opinion AusAid funding is one of those things keeping us back. Australian taxpayers money is not helping at all with its good intensions and the aid-package-dictating approach used by Australia is not working.

Remove all aid bit-by-bit or at once, PNG will suffer initially but can build up on that, if a tiny nation like Cuba, sanctioned by US is still around, why not PNG, they have nothing resource wise, unlike us.

PNG needs a better leadership management and a committed civil service. May be cutting aid will open the eyes of our leaders of how dependent we are, so that PNG may come up with better alternatives than relying too much on Australia.

I’m not against Australians; hey we are all neighbors for safety's sake. But am against those who come up with policies etc. knowingly or ignorantly without proper consultations/feasibility studies etc. that have always kept us on the back foot.

I’m also angry at PNG politicians/bureaucrats for not learning anything from our past. For being corrupt and making in-effective decisions and miss-managing resources.

PNG people should also be responsible; they knowingly or ignorantly keep on voting politicians in time and time again, even though we've seen their true colors.

I love my country PNG and am sick of seeing it going down the drain. There’re many young like-minded PNGeans and changes needs to start taking place for a better future