The re-emergence of a global women’s movement coincided with the birth of Papua New Guinea as a nation-state. This has proven to be fortuitous for female citizens. Two major government documents refer to women’s equality: the Eight Point Plan (1973) and the constitution of 1975. The preamble to the constitution reaffirmed what had been the seventh point of the Eight Point Plan in stating its second goal to be: ‘for all citizens to have an equal opportunity to participate in, and benefit from, the development of our country’ (King, Lee and Warakai 1985, Appendix A, 453–4). The constitution formalized the relationship of women with the new state, surviving what had been a male-gendered colonial state (Dickson-Waiko 2001, 52–56).

The seventh point of the Eight Point Plan or Eight Aims, provided official recognition of women’s disadvantaged position in society in calling for a ‘rapid increase in the equal participation for women in all forms of economic and social activity’ (King, Lee and Warakai 1985). This public statement generated a lot of interest among women in the urban areas between 1973 and the early 1980s, when educated women began to see themselves not just as members of families and clans, as in the Melanesian cultural context, but as individuals and, from 1975, citizens (King, Lee and Warakai 1985, 2–10, 32–177). Unfortunately, this early interest in women’s rights and issues, also expressed in government documents describing women in typically WID terms as ‘both beneficiaries and agents in the development process’ (see Women’s Policy 1990), did not lead on to the emergence of a women’s movement. Women have become more vocal about issues which affect them, but we have yet to witness an effective women’s movement.

Despite official recognition of women’s subordinate status in society, in concrete terms development for the female citizens of Papua New Guinea can be best described as having a very low priority. For example, a review of the National Public Expenditure Programme (NPEP) found that between 1979 (when the first government funds were made available for women’s projects) and 1982, the share of total NPEP funding for women’s projects declined from a low 1.5 per cent to a mere 0.2 per cent (Department of Home Affairs n.d., 5). The Women’s Division has since moved away from designating women’s projects to be funded under the NPEP or Public Investment Programme (PIP), relying solely on donor funding and the annual departmental recurrent budget, which has been on a downward slide since 1990. The fact that the Women’s Division (though renamed Gender and Development Division) is still located in the Department of Social Welfare and Development illustrates the fact that nothing much has changed since 1969. The adoption of WID by the United Nations and most countries around the world has seen the creation of separate Women’s ministries/departments/machineries in many countries. Discussions were under way in 2005 for a Gender Unit to be located in the prime minister’s department. Its main functions were expected to be policy development, research and monitoring (Kajoi, personal communication 2005). The link between the proposed new entity, the Gender Unit (formerly the Women’s Division) in the Department of Community Development, and national and provincial councils of women remains unclear.

In the late 1980s the National Council of Women (NCW), under the presidency of Buntabu Brown, was working towards replacing the NCW with a National Commission for Women. This progressive move was frustrated by some better-educated women members of the group, Women in Politics (WIP), headed by Maria Kopkop, and women officers from the Women’s Division, Department of Religion, Home Affairs and Youth. At the NCW convention in Lae in 1990, they managed to disrupt proceedings and oust the Brown executive (personal communication Au Aruai and Ume Wainetti; see also Times of PNG 4 January 1990, p19).^[2] The ‘women’s movement’ has never quite recovered from this experience.