3

Make-work and workshops

I found myself in ‘make-work’ mode after a week or so in Buka. The feeling reminded me of how I had felt occasionally in Dili when there was nothing to do, in a combination of enervation, ennui and Catholic guilt at being monetarily compensated for not doing very much. But Dili had been a big enough place that if one didn’t have something to do immediately, there were plenty of ways to pass the time. In Buka, with a population about one-hundredth the size, there was not. My job putatively gave me a roving brief, but it was difficult to locate people to work with. The government was made up of 14 ministries with grandiloquent titles – ‘Personnel Management and Administrative Services’; ‘Lands, Physical Planning, Environment and Conservation’; ‘Police, Corrective Services and Justice’ – but there were often fewer people inside the offices than there were words in the title of the department. The government was stone-broke: grants received from PNG covered salaries but not much else. (In the years I worked in Bougainville, the government itself generated less than 5 million kina [about A$2 million] per annum of its own revenue.)¹ The sliding gate to the entrance of the main government office block was off its runners, and driving in and out of the small government complex necessitated navigating a cavernous pothole. In the offices of the Department of Primary Industries – responsible for, among other things, the forestry industry – there was a gaping hole in the wooden floorboards of the second-floor conference room.

The creation of this government was one of the features of the Peace Agreement that ended the Crisis of 1988–97, the longest-running and most deadly conflict in the Pacific since the Second World War.² The parties agreed³ that Bougainville would be granted a special political status – autonomy – in the interim, leading to a constitutionally guaranteed referendum on Bougainville’s future political status. The referendum was to happen no less than 10 and no more than 15 years after the establishment of the autonomous government on Bougainville, which meant it had to happen before the middle of 2020. The result of the referendum would be non-binding in nature, final decision-making authority resting with the PNG parliament.

Hundreds of copies of the Peace Agreement sat around the government offices, some still reposing in the cardboard boxes they had been shipped in. Other boxes contained the amendments to the Constitution of PNG and an Organic Law on Peace-building in Bougainville – Autonomous Bougainville Government and Bougainville Referendum (2002) that gave effect to the agreement, as well as a separate constitution for the region. The documents are written in precise, necessarily detailed legal English. Edward Wolfers, an academic and adviser to the PNG government during the peace negotiations, tallied the documents he believed were required to be understood to gain full familiarity with the autonomy arrangements; when I printed them all, they came to nearly 400 double-sided pages.⁴ There was limited understanding of this complex system: the autonomy arrangements reminded me of having an old computer, not understanding the operating system, and never getting around to reading the manual. Moreover, because of the passage of time, many of the political leaders from Bougainville and PNG⁵ who crafted the Peace Agreement had since left the stage.

While there was a heavy focus on ‘which’ new institutions were to be created, there seemed to have been less of a focus on ‘who’ and ‘how’, namely, the people and skills required to animate these institutions.

Giving a title and nameplate to a government department is easy; finding the people who can discharge the functions expected of it is not. People can’t just be magicked up with the skills to manage human resources, design and direct infrastructure projects, manage financial grants and churn out papers. As Sue Ingram writes in her doctoral thesis: ‘The public service was hollowed out by the conflict: senior public servants and many well-educated Bougainvilleans fled and remade their lives elsewhere, leaving a lasting skills deficit.’⁶

The everyday effect of this sometimes felt like inertia. By the time I gained access to my office, I felt as if whatever energy had been metabolised into my job description was like last year’s trade wind, long since passed.

Ingram writes that ‘much of the governance machinery … remains to be built, and most of the available functions and powers are yet to be exercised’.⁷ In such a condition, how could this administration be supported?

The question placed the program I was working on, and others like it, in a distinct bind and indicated the limited extent to which money alone – the only currency at our disposal – could address the matters at hand. Officially, I was working as part of a funded ‘partnership’ between the governments of Australia, New Zealand, PNG and Bougainville. Australia put in most of the money and New Zealand a little, the other two governments contributing via a process of voodoo accounting that I never fully understood. We were allocated an annual budget, and our job was to help the governments develop projects geared towards improving their effectiveness. Easy to say, very difficult to do. For some in the Bougainville government, at least, our project was correlated with elaborating fulsome requests to travel to Port Moresby for the purpose of holding meetings. Paying for costs of meetings is easy. It is much harder to find the currency that can nudge development of the critical thinking skills required to grapple with the mundane complexities of government. Such support is difficult, time-consuming and unglamorous, and no-one has yet worked out what effectiveness looks like. Having funds around also created a ‘honey-pot’ effect, advertising that donor aid was there to be accessed and benefited from. This was a long-standing practice. During the peace process, AusAID, Australia’s development agency (now part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, DFAT), had become a Tok Pisin expression for ‘easy money’.

Another problem, one not peculiar to Bougainville, was how programs such as the one I was working on could predict what would occur and when. Aid is a managerialist business; problems are pre-identified, outcomes are pre-specified, the time frames in which they are to be accomplished rigidly set, the number of days in which an activity is to take place noted with actuarial precision, with activities to be mapped out in month-by-month boxes. Unacknowledged was the fact that the most difficult thing to predict is the future. Papua New Guinea confounded those trying to plot a rational course or elaborate a grand strategy, which made it all the more bewildering that everyone seemed so obsessed with developing long-range plans. Even though Papua New Guineans referred to their country in a fatalistic, gallows-humour way as ‘the Land of the Unexpected’ – it was even their tourism campaign’s catchphrase – this nod to uncertainty failed to permeate aid programming. Some aid plans would be worthy of the Supreme Soviet; when I checked ‘Properties’ for the metadata settings on one of our documents, the original author was revealed to be a program in Communist Vietnam.

I spent a few days in my new office delving deeper into the work of my predecessors. I came across a cutting from a New Zealand newspaper about a volunteer from the country’s aid program, a middle-aged woman named Donna, who had been helping to develop a lands policy and a land law for the region. The story was written in the boosterish style of the small-town feature writer but provided firm evidence that a lot of work had been undertaken. As part of her volunteering, Donna assisted in organising a ‘lands summit’ a few years prior to my arrival. A weighty report from the summit sat in the files, complete with pictures, charts and details of further steps. This was worthwhile and important work: land use had been among the issues driving the Crisis,⁸ and the Bougainville constitution⁹ specified that one of the jobs of the government was to develop a new lands policy and land law. Going by the reports, a great deal of time and effort had clearly been invested, so I went to the relevant department to see how much of it had seeded, and if there was anything I could help with.

The office was behind a trade store and consisted of three partitioned rooms. In one of the rooms I found the department’s secretary in his office; in familiar form, the office was crammed full of old filing boxes and mouldered newspapers, as well as computerised maps of Bougainville showing the two main islands, the atolls and the islets that made up the region. The maps were the work of a new volunteer, who was seated in one of the other rooms and working on what I presumed was a new set of maps.

The secretary’s name was William. He was in his mid-sixties, had tightly cropped hair and wore a short-sleeved shirt with a small penguin insignia. He had an easy explanation for why, four years on from the summit, there had been no progress. ‘It’s simple,’ he said. ‘We have no money. If there was funding, we could do lots of things. Donor partners need to be supporting us.’ ‘Donor partners’ was one of the phrases used frequently, and, speaking to William, I felt as if all the work of volunteer Donna had vanished. I was to hear a variant of this remark repeatedly from several people during my time in Bougainville, this rusted-on sense that money was needed to progress all activities. Some bureaucrats, but by no means all, ascribed a very specific meaning to ‘money’. It did not connote paying for a computer system, software licensing or training courses in relevant subject matters. Money was correlated with having meetings, with personal benefit accruing: paid-for travel to meetings, and catering allowances.

Fearing more idle days ahead, I suggested that we crack into the funds I had at hand. ‘We’ll pay for food, and let’s have a half-day meeting to figure out how to progress this lands policy,’ I said, hoping that offering lunch might generate some energy. William was amenable to the idea, if not exactly aflame about it. He asked me if there was any funding for a trip to Port Moresby or a study trip to Vanuatu instead – I’d mentioned that this neighbouring Pacific country had recently revised its own land law.¹⁰ Despite William’s preference for something more ambitious, a meeting was duly arranged in Buka for a few days’ hence, to be held in another thinly peopled office in the Department of Education, next door to the Australian-built court complex.

I was a bit worried to begin with because no-one was there at the start time, but people began trickling in after about half an hour, an early indication of the elasticity of time here. (Only Catholic masses ever seemed to start on time.) Along, too, came the minister, a softly spoken man called John Tabinaman, who told me that this day, St Patrick’s Day, was an auspicious day to begin this event, given my provenance, and that he’d been taught by Irish missionaries. They’d taught him about the wonders of independence, he said. ‘They’d always spit when the national anthem was played and refused to say “God Save the Queen”,’ he said, smiling.

We began with a prayer; then the minister spoke. He acknowledged that progress on the land law had been slender over the last few years, but that he hoped this meeting would rejuvenate matters. He then set everyone the task of completing the whole process of developing a land law by the middle of the year. His time frame flummoxed me. Nothing had happened for years, and suddenly an arbitrary and fantastical deadline was plucked from the sky.

I had offered to facilitate the meeting as part of a desperate attempt to try to be useful and had brought along a flipchart, some marker pens and a can-do attitude. I told the assembled who I was, how I was in no way an expert on Bougainville lands policy, and that my role was simply to ask a few directive questions and be a scribe for their thoughts. To help them focus, I had printed off copies of the report from yesteryear the previous day and dropped them off at the office.

I thought I’d start with a gentle warm-up question: ‘What is a policy, and why is it important?’

Silence; no response from anyone. No-one seemed to have brought the report to even leaf through, which was evidence for my supposition that nobody read this stuff. However, such an epiphany was not helpful for the purpose of pushing along conversation. William folded his arms, a few staff members started writing on the notebooks, and one began playing on his phone. The silence surprised me – for the month I’d been here thus far, and on the occasions when I could locate relevant people in their offices – the provision of new ‘policies’ and ‘laws’ had been constantly touted as the solution to all problems.

The air conditioner had clapped out by now, and I could feel the trickles of sweat on my skin becoming a stream, amplifying the ticking of the clock, the sound of which was cacophonous in this silent room. I felt like a comedian who didn’t realise how uninspiring his prepared material was until he bounded up on stage.

I tried a different approach, recalling something I’d read – namely, that people work more effectively when they are organised around solving specific, definable problems rather than creating abstract treatises. ‘Let’s try to list all the problems involving land in Bougainville,’ I suggested. This approach inspired responsiveness. Thank Christ! ‘No rules around building in Buka Town,’ said William, referring to the laissez-faire approach to construction that seemed to prevail. I wrote this down on the chart. ‘No clear rules for customary land,’ said Zoe, a young woman with doe eyes and a can-do sense of enthusiasm. More than 97 per cent of the land in Bougainville (and all parts of PNG) was customary,¹¹ held and dealt with according to customary rules, as defined by the local community.¹² ‘No means to register land ownership,’ said Rooney, a recent graduate. ‘No computers,’ said another, a valid point. We talked about the platforms and systems that would be needed to solve these problems. The group was fired up. Ideas flowed. Time moved quickly, and we had a short lunch before continuing into the afternoon, past even the peculiarly precise mandated public service finishing time of 4:06 pm, the time it had been under the Australian colonial administration.

By the end of the session we’d chunked down into three pages the problems bound up with land issues in Bougainville, a long list of what were called ‘burning issues’. I suggested that the fabled process of policymaking was nothing magical but merely a step-by-step iteration of a response to each of these issues. It didn’t have to be a long or windy document, just an itemised listing of how one could respond to each identified problem: it could involve using an existing law better (PNG law prevailed until Bougainville developed its own) or it could be logistical, such as improving office organisation. The next day, we mapped out a series of necessarily boring next steps: who was going to do research on what; who was going to attain a better understanding of what the land law said on this or that matter. It was stimulating and motivating for us all and seemed to be the start of something worthwhile. We held a subsequent meeting the following week in which we honed plans. The meeting again ran past time and included 25 boxes of chicken and chips ordered from the Hot Rooster shop to give everyone the energy to continue.

At the beginning, I felt I was witnessing the trajectory I’d read about time and time again: initial enthusiasm, bursts of effort and then … utter stillness, until the idea itself descended into its own dusty folder. About six months later, a letter came in on government letterhead requesting funding for a trip to Vanuatu to study the land law there, and a month after that, a proposal for a new building.

Then, in the months and the years ahead – just as I was starting to feel forlorn, careworn and cynical – the ideas we talked about during those days reared up unexpectedly and unbidden, like one of the dolphins cavorting in the Buka Passage. In the months and the years to come, we had more sessions to help progress the lands policy, to break down the lunchtime ‘burning issues’ into practical solutions. A new secretary called Raphael came in to replace William, who had reached his retirement age. Other advisers took up the baton: a former Papua New Guinean magistrate and an Australian who replaced the lawyer with the Johnny Cash couture. In 2021, long after I left, long after it was promised in the work-plan, the lands policy was finalised and a law was being drafted. Things happened, but not according to a timetable I could control, and almost always when it was unexpected.

This pattern of rise and fall, and sometimes rise again, recurred frequently throughout my years in Bougainville, such as when I tried to set up a board to regulate the price of commodities, or strove to improve the efforts of the government to collect the one tax it was responsible for. The pattern characterised my work on fisheries management and my attempts to create a licensing scheme. There would be a pledge to work ‘around the clock on an issue’, a flurry of meetings, and a dawning awareness of the long-lasting and difficult tasks bound up in progressing even a sliver of the task. Then the issue would recede from view, like a cargo ship silently sailing over the horizon, to return someday – maybe. On some days it felt like I was living inside what Harvard scholars called a capability trap, in which ‘they [in this case, government employees] cannot perform the tasks asked of them, and doing the same thing day after day is not improving the situation’.¹³ I would also recognise that in this scenario there are elements of what Max Everest-Phillips calls ‘bureaupathology, or the condition of anxiety and insecurity due to alienation, limited promotion prospects, less-than-adequate pay and conditions of work, pessimism, sense of powerlessness’.¹⁴ The public servants were to be saluted for staying the course.

But there were other days on which it seemed that the people within this administration were capable of accomplishing the most unexpected things.

As I was writing this book I came across an article by Alex Golub about the bureaucracy of Papua New Guinea’s police force that encapsulated what I was experiencing:

Much of what counts as … ‘functioning institutions’ in Melanesia owe their success less to bureaucratic regularity than to the hard work of local actors […] Local actors do not fail the State, the State fails them – and it is only due to their hard work that they are able to keep it ticking over.¹⁵

I went on to write an article with a colleague from The Australian National University about these hard-working and dogged bureaucrats who leverage their histories, connections and affiliations to get things done, just as these bureaucrats did when trying to tackle land issues in Bougainville, which felt at times like the stickiest of bureaupathology problems.¹⁶ We are too silent on the importance of these individual actors. Let’s name them and give them at least the acclaim that can be acquired in a book. There is Zoe, there is Rooney, and there are others like them, trying their hardest in exceptionally difficult circumstances.

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