Table of Contents
During my 44 years in Papua New Guinea, and especially during the last decade, I have often said that the key to success in dealing with rural people involves contact, contact, and more contact. The government in Papua New Guinea has lost contact with its rural people. In resource-rich areas the vacuum has, to a large extent, been filled by resource developers through their community affairs staff.
One of the greatest assets of the latter days of the Australian administration, retained briefly after independence, was the Department of Information and Extension Services. Using its network of rural workers (kiap, didiman, doktaboi, school teacher, etc.) the government was able to widely disseminate information and conduct activities in the rural areas.
After all the lessons that could have been learnt — but were not — it annoyed me to read, for example, press reports, in early 2003, of Kagua people travelling to Lae in order to press claims of ownership to land upon which one of InterOil’s exploration bores was to be drilled. The company hyped up the ‘prospect’ in the press, which got people from Kerema to Mendi excited as yet again a company, trying to mine the stock exchange floors in Calgary or Sydney,[1] created unrealistic expectations amongst those in whose province some speculative exploration work was to take place. A few days later another report stated that Baimuru people had called for a mass meeting of ‘landowners’ to press their claims to the same ‘new oil field’. The unsuccessful bore was drilled nearer to Wabo than Baimuru and certainly a long way from Kagua. But lack of meaningful contact and communication by both government and company left two groups of people, living over 100 kilometres apart, in a state of confusion and high expectation. Had there been an unlikely discovery the scene was already set for chaos.
Unrealistic expectations are often raised by both the press and some companies. The press overuses the words ‘huge’ and ‘rich’ when reporting, whilst some explorers like to ‘talk up’ their shares. This leads to inflated demands from members of the landowning clans. Even when a prospect matures to a discovery and from a discovery to a project, it is not necessarily huge or rich. Hides, for instance, with its 7 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of proven reserves, is small in comparison to the Australian Northwest Shelf or recent discoveries in West Papua’s ‘Bird’s Head’ region where discoveries of 15 tcf to 30 tcf have been made.