5

Have licence, lack engine

‘Let me explain the central problem of my job using the metaphor of a driving licence,’ I said, as an opening to thoughts more complex. Simon and I were sitting in the Hot Rooster fried chicken shop in Buka, adjacent to another Chinese-run enterprise, Boots Camp Trading. The logo of the plump and happy-looking chicken with his or her thumbs up always reminded me of Los Pollos Hermanos, the chicken restaurant that was a front for Gustavo Fring’s drug importation business in the TV series Breaking Bad. It was Friday lunchtime, and trade was brisk, Bougainvilleans at the kitchen broilers taking out fried chicken and chips and shovelling them into yellow and green boxes, while the young Chinese proprietor in a webbed singlet straight out of an 80s Pet Shop Boys video cross-checked each cash transaction being performed by the unhappy-looking counter staff. Unusually, he wasn’t sitting on a high chair. In other stores in Buka Town, the Chinese sat on high chairs so they could watch over the tills like a tennis umpire at the net.

Observing the workaday process as we waited, I couldn’t help but think how Chinese migrants were pioneering types. For all the fevered ‘yellow peril’ talk that occasionally bubbled up in Australian media,¹ I often thought Chinese traders in outposts like Buka were more in the business of trying to scratch out a living than of quarrying away with malign intent. Unlike me, they didn’t have the prospect of a flight out every now and then. They were of hardier stock. ‘That’s the problem with you white men,’ a Papua New Guinean bureaucrat who headed a government department told me once. ‘You’re not prepared to do the hard work. You guys want toilet paper; the Chinese will happily wipe their arse with a leaf.’

We paid for our chicken and received chewing gum as change. There were rarely any coins or notes of small denomination in this or any other establishment; little orange packets of PK chewing gum were given in lieu, which I preferred anyway because they were useful in helping dispel the salty-mouth hangover that I knew would follow this fowl repast.

Simon was the head of the branch of the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby responsible for Bougainville. He didn’t look like he regularly frequented fried chicken joints; he was lean and spry, and had recently returned from hiking the Kokoda Track. I liked Simon; he appreciated more than many of his colleagues that all these programs being undertaken were not the be-all and end-all of success in this country. In fact, they were rather insignificant. The total Australian aid program to PNG was around A$500 million per annum,² which seems a lot until one remembers that at the time, this amount was also the annual budget for an average medium-sized Australian hospital and just a small fraction of the total national budget of PNG. He was a man one could level with. At the same time, I was aware that wailing a litany of X-rated despair before we finished our first indeterminate part of the chicken might not be a smart move in prolonging my tenure.

Government officials such as Simon are often prominent on the performative centre stage of aid – cutting ribbons at school openings, launching corporate plans and heralding yet another MoU, often in the company of a colourful troupe of singsing dancers. There was at least one picture of such an activity per day in the copies of the Post Courier that arrived in Buka on the daily flight, and I often thought that the hardest working people in all of Bougainville were those in the 20-person bamboo band hired to appear at each event.

Despite their prominence, these officials are not those who build the schools, write the plans or try to give life to signed documents. Aid delivery is contracted out, implemented by organisations that remain firmly backstage, such as the ones I worked for. These groups included commercial companies, international non-governmental organisations and smaller, more boutique outfits. In the course of my years spent working in PNG and Bougainville, I was contracted to work for several such organisations and companies.

It is precarious work. In contracting terms, the Australian government is the principal and these companies their agents, with the power dynamic between them reflecting this hierarchy. Companies run on contracts, and the key determinant of success for a project can be whether those funding the project deem it a success. Accordingly, organisational incentives for contractors are yoked with the continual provision of broadly favourable information and the need to account for funds spent. A lot of effort went into presenting a cheery version of reality to people like Simon.

We had arranged this chicken lunch to discuss progress (or the lack thereof) on my assignment to facilitate the ‘drawdown of powers and functions’ that was spelled out in my elaborate terms of reference. While I may not have come expecting invigorated bureaucrats earnestly sharpening their pencils while I shuttled drafts, it did surprise me just how little oomph there was about the place. I was starting to feel as if my job description had been developed in a laboratory of wishful thinking.

Magical powers were ascribed to the term ‘drawdown’, and many Bougainville government bureaucrats would make it out to be a thoroughly seamless process – little more than ‘Click your fingers and it’ll happen’ – but, when I pressed further, no-one actually knew what the term meant.

I explained the ‘drawdown’ process to Simon over our second piece of chicken, a luscious breast for him, a scrawny leg for me (Were the Hot Rooster staff favouring him because they knew he was of importance?). I began at the beginning, the Peace Agreement, and how the compromise over the region’s political arrangements was intricate and unique in that they provide for autonomy on a progressive scale. (The design of the Peace Agreement is lauded for the sophistication of its constitutional construction.)³ I noted how a number of governmental powers and functions were vested in the ABG upon its establishment, and how the Peace Agreement provided frameworks whereby the ABG could acquire additional powers and functions for topics as diverse as cemeteries, lotteries, health and education. Although the term ‘drawdown’ was an evocative one, the reality of the process was mechanistic and dry. It required Bougainville to prepare a request based on the criteria laid out in the Bougainville Constitution. This request needed to focus on issues with the potential to bring about an economic dividend, and the ABG was expected to specify its resourcing needs to exercise the power or function. Moreover, the two governments were required to develop joint plans. Papua New Guinea was tasked with paying for costs for the personnel, construction and whatever else was necessary for Bougainville to exercise the new powers. Little of this had happened.

Simon asked me about the laws, which, as my earlier experience had already revealed, seemed to be the obsession of many a Bougainville bureaucrat. Recalling my attempts to discover the progress of land laws, I told him how every official appeared wed to telling me, ‘What we need is a law’, as if that were the just-add-water solution to every problem. Opining how this simplistic solve-all might have rung true in theory, I pointed out that the statute book was full of unimplemented laws, giving the lie to magical hopes for law as action. A plethora of legal ‘solutions’ from the Inward Investment Act (2013), which created a set of offices that were never set up, to a Physical Planning Act (2013) that planned not much, all evidenced that laws alone were incapable of providing a wand-waving remedy. There were, however, important exceptions to this seeming inaction. It is important to note that the ABG has successfully conducted three [now four] general elections, passed 50-plus pieces of legislation, and established its own public service structures and financial management system separate from those of PNG. The ABG had drawn down the powers over mining, developed new legislation and set up a new department for Mining and Energy Resources with World Bank support.

Fired up now by the MSG in my drumstick, I alluded to my discovery of the further obsession of bureaucrats with signing off on MoUs and extolling them as the prerequisite for everything and anything, even though, in legal terms, they amounted to little more than a gentlemen’s agreement. Drafted in vague and faux-legal language, these MoUs committed the ABG and PNG government to programs of cooperation but failed to provide any of the funding needed to operationalise them. Drawing down powers via an MoU had given Bougainville a lot of ‘on-paper’ powers without any additional funding to give them meaningful effect. In reality, I told him with some despair, the Bougainville government assumed additional responsibilities without commensurate resourcing. This led to my explanation that a suitable analogy would be that of a driving license for a motor vehicle: via the MoUs, the ABG had been awarded a driving licence, yet was awaiting the skills needed to drive, while neither a car nor the costs of petrol had been forthcoming. I concluded by stating emphatically that it was a strange strategy: there’s not much point having a driving license if you can’t drive, don’t have a car and have no petrol. It was administrative decoration, at best.

‘There’s no obvious easy way out of this, is there?’ he asked. There was not; and even if there had been, it could not have been packaged into time-bound terms of reference with a clear beginning, middle and end – certainly, nothing that could easily be assembled IKEA-style or tweeted about. I shared with Simon a Tok Pisin expression I’d heard that seemed to sum up the work of the programs such as the one I was working on: brukim bus, translated literally as ‘to cut one’s way through thick bush’. I had heard it used before as a metaphor for the business of government or administration: to hack one’s way through the thicket of one issue, only to find oneself immediately confronted with another piece of impenetrable foliage straight after and to have to start all over again. It is a common phrase, one adopted by Theodore Miriung, a man often regarded as a ‘lost leader’ of Bougainville.⁴ A politician, he was assassinated during the conflict, his killers suspected to be members of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force and the Bougainville Resistance Force, a pro-PNG home guard. Another Bougainville leader, Joseph Kabui, the ABG’s first president, often used the same term, brukim bus, to describe the efforts he led from 1997 onwards to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

To be sure, there were reportable accomplishments, but in many ways the greatest value of the support from people like me was in ensuring continuity of purpose, enabling longevity and tenacity, in simply being there and being of use for whatever problems were at hand, few of which were either grand or sweeping. The problem, however, with the muddling-through, steady-as-she-goes gospel of brukim bus is the lack of an obvious metric for determining value. This work was dull trudge with little fortune or glory attached and not much to announce. Between Simon and me there was also another problem, unsaid, as to what our role here was: to prepare a state-in-waiting or just to keep a part of PNG bumbling along? Australia’s policy on Bougainville was a six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-the-other, ‘We’ll-support-whatever-the parties-agree-to’ bit of equivocation. Before the year 2000, Australian policy had been to regard Bougainville as an integral part of PNG.⁵

Did Australia really want a new Pacific neighbour? Did anyone? This was the political setting within which the program I was part of worked. However, I decided that bringing up that topic with Simon might be as impolitic as mentioning the presence of the rat that scurried across the floor.

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