6

A trip to Port Moresby

I thought often of the canny and candid old police officer whom I had met some years back when he requested the trip to Port Moresby in my first few months in Buka. Seasoned from experience of 20-plus years of programs of support to the police funded by Australia and New Zealand, he was both fluent in donorese and honest enough to admit how he just wanted some time away from his old routine. And who could blame him? We had visited his police accommodation in the course of our visit; it had a condemned feel to it: broken windows, damp mattresses, a urinous smell rising from the floors and a drop toilet outside. Clean sheets, free internet access and an all-included breakfast buffet sounded pretty good in comparison. His request was completely rational to me. I would have done the same myself, and there were occasions on which I had. I once lived in New York, working at a think-tank writing up high-brow technocratic research intended, ostensibly, to assist places recovering from conflict, like Bougainville. It was a poorly paid position, and I would often agree to go on trips to access the per diem, money that could help defray the costs of rent and living in an expensive city. A cantankerous boss only made the wisdom of this approach more appealing. There were months in which it was the only strategy I had to pay the rent, and I dreamed up no end of reasons to be away.

It made total sense to me, therefore, that the lure of the trip (and the material benefits it provided) sometimes felt like the defining impetus behind bureaucratic decision-making. Port Moresby, the capital city of the country so many said they wanted to break away from, exerted an almost magnetic pull upon some in the government in Buka. So much energy was spent in either arranging trips to Port Moresby or trying to secure funding for a plane ticket, accommodation and the coveted travel allowance that it was a wonder other administrative tasks were given a look-in.

Going on funded trips also made sense beyond the time-honoured reason of topping up the take-home wage. Often characterised as a ‘joint creation’, the Peace Agreement required joint effort for it to work, and for the system of autonomy to operate and develop as intended. Meetings to hammer out joint cooperative arrangements are a familiar feature of intergovernmental relations all over the world. What always surprised me was how little appeared to come out of this cornucopia of trips. What did these meetings – the meetings everyone was so anxious to hold and attend – actually consist of?

My curiosity got the better of me, and when I was invited to go join the government on a delegation for a Joint Supervisory Body meeting, I resoundingly agreed. The Joint Supervisory Body, better known by its initials, JSB, was conceived in the Peace Agreement as a modest technical body to oversee the agreement’s implementation and resolve disputes between the two governments. There was also self-interest in my wanting to attend the JSB meeting. The winnowing isolation of my new home had got to me after a few months. Some evenings I would go running alongside the airport runway towards the setting magenta sun and feel as if I was close to dropping off the end of the world. The offer of a trip to Port Moresby seemed terribly exotic by comparison. When I arrived and had a cold glass of wine at Port Moresby’s Holiday Inn, I felt as full of wonder as Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee did when he first visited New York. Leaving aside my personal yearnings, however, this was also a chance to experience firsthand how things worked in practice.

Many of the files in my office related to past meetings of the JSB, and these meetings had attained sacramental importance in Buka.

What struck me when I looked through the minutes of JSB’s past was how packed the agenda was every time, yet how little seemed to be accomplished. Issues were habitually punted from one meeting to the next, with public servants instructed to go away and work on issues, then report back with solutions. The fact that such activity frequently failed to materialise or result in actionable solutions did not seem to dampen the enthusiasm for repeated rounds of the same well-worn routine, and I was asked to help prepare the delegation to ensure they’d be ready to participate when the next JSB meeting occurred.

Filled with the naivety of the greenhorn, emboldened with learnings acquired in an online course in organising effective meetings, I came to help a number of other advisers to bring this meeting together. An agenda was worked up, the plan being for relevant departmental heads to develop written briefs outlining the specific issues they wanted discussed and actions they recommended, in order to focus everyone’s attention on moving forward. The papers would then be compiled in a booklet to be sent to NCOBA well in advance of the meeting, the assumption being that NCOBA would by then have their own equivalent documentation, and out of all this a succinct agenda would emerge. The bureaucrats would brief the political leaders, who, in turn, would skilfully advocate and negotiate. It was a bureaucratic wet dream.

I was mugged by reality, just as many of my predecessors had been. The first challenge was how to get some people focused on the specifics rather than fussing over whether they had a room booking. The second challenge was defining the specifics. ‘We must discuss the issues of fisheries before the JSB,’ I would hear from the director of fisheries (total number of people in the directorate: three).

‘OK, great, but what do we want to discuss? What’s the position we want to take? What do we want to get out of the meeting?’ Fisheries indeed seemed like a critical issue to focus on. The Peace Agreement provided for revenue-sharing between Bougainville and PNG for fish caught in the Exclusive Economic Zone associated with Bougainville. There was large money at stake – one rosy estimate, backdated to when the government was established in 2005, was as much as A$600 million¹ – although few seemed aware of this. Then, just as I was hoping my questions would elicit some actionable ideas, up rose the knee-jerk bureaucratic crutch: ‘Um … we need to focus on signing an MoU.’ (A draft document had been written in 2011 and never signed.)

Many of the papers weren’t produced; those that were had the feel of having been recycled from elsewhere. In the end, fellow advisers and I wrote most of the paperwork. What should have been organised and deliberative turned out to be a last-minute scramble.

Why were the papers never written? Bureaucracies run on paper, but not all Bougainville bureaucrats were at ease with writing documents. In dealing with issues that involved financial calculations, many shared my arithmophobia, my unease with numbers. It was clear that not everyone understood the operating system of the Peace Agreement. Not being in full command of the facts and figures (and not knowing the constitutional clauses on which they are based) would put anyone in a poor position to advocate and negotiate for what one wanted out of a meeting.

Chaos of equal proportions beset the PNG side. The NCOBA printer was on the blink, lime-green paper being the only option when it was eventually coaxed back to life. The PNG side had developed a completely different agenda and no papers. What fascinated me the most was that upon discovering this snafu, no-one on the Bougainville side sought to raise an objection. Maybe I was the only one to have realised the error or to have cared. I remember feeling the words forming in my throat to point out the error and managed to stop myself. The meeting itself – all men at the table – ended after a couple of hours and was pronounced a success by all.

As I looked back at the resolutions of that meeting, I realised that they were the same issues time and again: transferring additional governmental powers, reaching agreement on financial arrears the Bougainville government claims are owed to it,² the sharing of revenues from fisheries. Hardy perennials then, they have persisted even to the present. As I was finishing this book in 2022, a friend sent me the agenda for the latest JSB. It looked identical to that of the JSB meeting I attended in 2016.

* * *

I once danced the foxtrot with Queen Elizabeth, you know? I was her bodyguard when she came here in 1974. I told her all about my adventures in the Golden Triangle when trying to apprehend the drug lord Hun Sa. She was very impressed. She was a good dancer. I do wish we’d kept in touch. I liked the Duke, too. He was a bit of a lad. Liked a wine or two. Do you want a wine? It’s happy hour, after all. Me, I’ll stick to the juice.

I knew about Queen Elizabeth being a sassy mover because Chief Ila Geno had told me the story a couple of times before. It was one of his favourites, along with his account of how, when he was deputy commissioner, he had refused an order to deploy Police Mobile Squads to Bougainville to clear a landowner-established roadblock at Panguna.³

He was in his early seventies now. While a constant critic of the government, he was a hallowed eminence within Port Moresby’s elite, still muscular and imposing, but with a soft face and teddy-bear eyes.

We were at the Royal Port Moresby Yacht Club, the place where an Irish writer named Beatrice Grimshaw, whose works I’d been reading, had lived in a houseboat for years in the early part of last century. Grimshaw, who wrote garish romance and adventure stories, was once spoken of in the same league as Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson, and, probably more than any other writer, she did much to seed the idea of what is now PNG as a dark and dangerous place, a place where no travellers would want to go. Or, at least, we were close to where she would have been. Because of land reclamation, the old yacht club that had been her home was slightly farther inland these days, its clubhouse now inhabited by an Australian government program supporting the country’s multitudinous law and justice agencies, a satellite office of which was in Buka. The sign outside the old building that had once blazoned their logos was weathered to the point of obsolescence, and the inside was stuffed full of old boxes of documents detailing more than two decades of initiatives, implementation plans, reviews, posters and requisition forms.

In the ‘new’ yacht club where we were catching up, it felt like the olden days. Sepia pictures of grizzled whitefellas adorned the walls. The head of the yacht club was called the commodore, the deputy captain sail. We were sitting outside on the deck, looking out at hundreds of boats bobbing in the marina and some joggers labouring along a dusty path behind a wire fence along the outskirts of the grounds. Ringed by a security fence, it was one of the few outside spaces in Moresby deemed safe enough to run solo without a security car trailing behind. On the table beside us, three Aussies in singlets were haggling loudly over the price of an outboard motor. It was always the place where Chief Ila Geno wanted to meet. Independent Papua New Guinea’s new elite felt quite at home sitting in the chairs of old commodores. It reminded me of the time we met the old tyrant Mugabe at State House in Harare. More than two generations after both countries became independent, echoes of the colonial ambience of long ago didn’t feel too far away.

My wine arrived and tasted as if a blowtorch had recently been applied to it. Ila had made the wiser choice with his orange juice. He wasn’t much of a drinker, and besides, he had an official meeting to get to after ours. ‘What will anyone think if I arrive smelling of wine?’ he asked. The juice exemplified everything about Ila: professionalism would always trump any personal excess – that, and his underlying spine of ethics and probity. Not even for the Duke of Edinburgh was he going to let those principles drop.

By the time the royals arrived in 1974, Ila was an up-and-comer rising through the ranks of the police as the country prepared for independence the following year. I had seen some pictures of him in the newspapers: black hair, upright, sombre look, never too far from the Queen. The monarch visited in a year when everything seemed promising. Independence was a year away, and the country-to-be was flourishing with possibility. A young John Momis was leading a Parliamentary Constitutional Planning Commission and had been traversing the country, developing ideas to put into a new constitution. The founding document bespeaks an optimistic, idealised vision for the future nation, steeped as it was in liberation theology, social justice and belief in the self-actualising power of the individual. It was a long document but written with none of the vague verbosity that characterised so much contemporary government phraseology. ‘The success of a nation, we believe, depends ultimately on its people and their leaders,’ the framers wrote. I had written out some other quotes from the document in my notebook, among them:

No amount of careful planning in governmental institutions or scientific disciplines will achieve liberation and fulfilment of the citizens of our country unless the leaders – those who hold official positions of power, authority or influence – have bold vision, work hard and are resolutely dedicated to the service of their people.⁴

The constitution that eventually emerged from their deliberations is considered among the most comprehensive in the world. At face value, there is much that is familiar, the PNG government having inherited institutions from Australia: a parliament modelled on the Westminster system that elects a prime minister, who chairs a cabinet, which is supported by a bureaucracy. There is much that is visually familiar, too. Wigs still retain persuasive ritual power; judges and barristers sport them on their sweltering heads. The speaker of Papua New Guinea’s parliament is weighed down by a thatch of horsehair of such length and weight that he resembles a Dickensian magistrate. It felt similar to those parts of Zimbabwe in which the clocks seemed to have stopped, replicating colonial administrative features that despite the heat and incongruity have always been expected to travel and be instituted intact, features that stayed long after new flags were flown.

On the face of it, the types of leadership that the founders of the PNG Constitution foresaw were rarely present. Some political leaders owned houses and share portfolios in Australia that seemed hard to square with modest parliamentary allowances.⁵ The secretaries – heads of government departments – were always prominent in the newspapers, announcing one thing or another. The country clung happily to the formalisms, bureaucratese and appurtenances of old, but with little notion as to where to go next. Bougainville struck me as a facsimile, many of its own institutions mini-versions of Papua New Guinea’s.

Ila’s speciality through the rest of his years was to avoid doing the easy thing. He ascended to the rank of chief of police but resigned rather than follow a prime ministerial directive to make particular personnel decisions. He had been an unquiescent chief ombudsman but found it harder to find success in electoral politics. In the past two elections, he and his party had fielded a slate of candidates running on an anti-corruption platform. Only one was successful. When I was in Buka, he was working on a number of projects, including one as a pro bono member of a board of inquiry for the Bougainville government. The role was prescribed in the Bougainville Senior Appointments Act (2014),⁶ and it came with a sting: should a senior bureaucrat be referred for wrongdoing, a board of inquiry had to be formed to investigate, and its findings would be binding. Ila’s first job in the role was to investigate the chief secretary, whose suspension I became aware of when I arrived. Although we didn’t know it at the time, Ila would be kept busy by investigations in the years to follow. More of that later.

Too scrupulous to disclose the particulars of specific cases, he was nevertheless persuasive as to where the heart of the issue lay. For Ila, the difficulty related to the difference between what he called ‘office culture’ – working in a modern bureaucracy to implement technical plans based on standard systems and procedures – and ‘custom culture’, which was replete with a wide set of familial, religious and clan obligations, and in which leadership and authority come from acquiring resources and then distributing them. As he said, the idea of the state was new here, a house whose rooms still needed to be filled.⁷

Anthropologists chose to come here at the turn of the 20th century for their fieldwork precisely because of the effective absence of formal administration. Two dominant features emerged in their writings: one, of obligation between small groups as the glue holding these societies together, and the other the phenomenon of the bikman (big man – they are almost always men), where leadership is associated with the ability to acquire and duly distribute resources to followers.⁸ Leadership, power and influence are accumulated or acquired through personal actions, ‘public oratory, informal persuasion, and the skilful conduct of both private and public wealth exchange’, rather than through diligent perusal of corporate planning documents.⁹ In some of Bougainville’s matrilineal societies – examples include the Nagovisi and Selau people – ‘big women’ are also recognised. This is not the case in most other parts of PNG.

Big men rely on personal relationships and access to resources to establish obligation and fealty. Leadership is fluid; this is not a context in which a big man can rest on his laurels. Forever looking warily over his shoulder lest he be trumped by another, it is imperative that the big man continue to amass and distribute resources, for it is only through this process that political power can continue. These rules of the game – driving action through relationships and the distribution of resources as fundamental blocks of political power – characterise Papua New Guinea’s politics, notwithstanding the formal edifices of the received Westminster system and bureaucracy modelled on that of Australia. In the evocative phrasing of Francis Fukuyama:

It takes only a couple of hours to fly from Port Moresby to Cairns or Brisbane, but in that flight, one is in some sense traversing several thousand years of political development¹⁰

Hard to construct a governance plan adhering to neat timetables out of this. Toggling between these two cultures – and navigating the obligations and often conflicting values of each – was challenging for bureaucrats, politicians and aid workers alike. Even fluent second-language speakers find it easier to revert to their first language. Ila was a man with an unbounded faith in rules, policies and procedures. His bureaucratic career showed its possibilities and its limits. His political career, and the nosedive it took, showed its limits more than anything and brought to mind the endeavour we were engaging in. As George Orwell wrote: ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’¹¹ No wonder it was easier to think of things in terms of long-range plans than to try to acknowledge the very different rules of the political games going on right in front of us, rules we as outsiders scarcely understood.

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