By WILL GLASGOW, MARGIN CALL EDITOR & CHRISTINE LACY - The Australian Business Review Peter Dutton has handed the controversial operator of the Australian Government’s refugee services Paladin Holdings a $110 million six-month extension to its now almost $445m, 22-month contract. Dutton’s Home Affairs department will pay Paladin — which is now domiciled in Singapore — another $18.25m-a-month, or $4.2m-a-week to run its East Lorengau Refugee Transit Centre as well as other sites in Papua New Guinea until the end of December.
The group signed the contract extension on June 29, but details were only published on a government tender site on Monday. Details of the $110m, six month extension comes as new PNG Prime Minister James Marape this week visits Canberra to meet with PM Scott Morrison, with the future of Australia’s refugee processing facilities on the agenda. Over the life of the deal it will be worth an average of $20.15m-a-month to the group, which is run by former Australian Defence Force soldier Craig Thrupp and Adelaide-based businessman Ian Stewart. Paladin has run the Government’s refugee facilities on PNG’s Manus Island since September 2017 via a series of contracts. The latest almost $110m hike in the value of their deal with Dutton and Mike Pezzullo’s Home Affairs department will take their total revenue from the service provision to about $543m.
Papua New Guinea's leader has told Scott Morrison he wants a timetable to end asylum seeker processing and get all those involved off Manus Island.
But the Australian prime minister continues to reject an offer from New Zealand to help resettle refugees, despite PNG being open to the plan.
PNG prime minister James Marape used a joint press conference alongside Mr Morrison to call for a "mutually workable" timetable on wrapping up Australia's offshore processing regime.
PNG prime minister James Marape used a joint press conference alongside Mr Morrison to call for a "mutually workable" timetable on wrapping up Australia's offshore processing regime. (AAP)
"We need to establish a schedule and timetable towards full closure of the entire asylum process," Mr Marape told reporters in Canberra on Monday.
"Both governments will both work in bringing this to a conclusion which is mutually beneficial."
Mr Morrison said enormous progress had been made during the talks on Monday.
"We're just going to continue to work through the issue pragmatically as we have," he said.
Mr Marape said the refugees should be resettled and those asylum seekers who had not been found to be refugees should leave PNG and return to their home countries or elsewhere. (9News)
Mr Marape said the refugees should be resettled and those asylum seekers who had not been found to be refugees should leave PNG and return to their home countries or elsewhere.
Mr Morrison agreed, saying those who were not refugees "shouldn't be in Papua New Guinea, Australia, or anywhere else".
However, the PNG prime minister shied away from the suggestion his country could take up, independently of Australia, New Zealand's offer to resettle 150 refugees a year.
The Morrison government has refused to take up that offer for fear it would be marketed by people smugglers as a backdoor entry.
Labor says while it backs offshore processing, that comes with regional resettlement too and shouldn't turn into indefinite detention.
"Prime Minister Marape is calling for the same thing Labor has been calling on for five years - to resettle eligible refugees in third countries as a matter of priority," opposition home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally told AAP.
James Marape said he wants a timetable to end asylum seeker processing and get all those involved off Manus Island. (AAP)
"It's time for Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Dutton to take action."
Greens immigration spokesman Nick McKim said he understood PNG's desire to maintain a good relationship with Australia.
"I would urge prime minister Marape to play a constructive role and do everything he can to ensure that Australia accepts the New Zealand offer because that is the quickest and simplest way to get refugees off Manus Island, which is what he says he wants to happen," he told AAP.
Manus Island governor Charlie Benjamin said if Australia would agree to the New Zealand offer, there would be no problem.
"My view is for them to go to a country as soon as possible ... but it's really Australia (that) has to step up and take those hard yards," he told reporters in Canberra.
But he didn't see moving people from Manus Island to Nauru, where Australia also has immigration facilities, as a solution, saying that would essentially be the same as staying put.
CANBERRA — Papua New Guinea's prime minister said today his country's relationship with China is not open to discussion during his current visit to Australia.
Prime Minister James Marape is making his first visit to Australia since he became leader of its nearest neighbour and former colony in May.
His visit comes as Australia attempts to counter China's growing influence in the South Pacific by teaming with the United States and Japan to finance infrastructure in Pacific island states that the Chinese have aggressively wooed with loans and aid.
Marape said before his meeting with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Monday that China's relationship with his nation was none of Australia's business.
"We'll discuss PNG-Australia relations with Australia and we'll leave the PNG and China relationship with our discussions with our counterparts in China," Marape told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"So it's nothing to do with Australia. Australia has good relations with China. We have relations with China. ... We will deal with them to the best of our ability so that PNG wins," he added.
Chinese President Xi Jinping made his first visit to Papua New Guinea last year when Pacific Rim leaders met in the capital Port Moresby for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
The South Pacific island nation has eight million people, 80% of who are subsistence farmers.
The United States and Australia committed to redevelop a Papua New Guinea naval base on Manus Island in an agreement with the previous prime minister, prompting China to caution against ‘Cold War’ thinking. China reportedly wants to establish a naval base in the South Pacific.
The United States is expanding its Marine Corps training hub in the northern Australian city of Darwin — 1,600 kilometers southwest of Port Moresby — as part of its strategic pivot to Asia.
The US ambassador to Australia, Arthur Culvahouse Jr, calls China's lending in the Pacific "payday loan diplomacy."
The pictures that came out of a remote highlands village in Papua New Guinea two weeks agowere not, at first glance, particularly graphic: bulging cocoons of blue mosquito nets hanging from wooden poles propped along a roadside.
But the story they told was gruesome.
The nets, said the health worker in Karida village who supplied them, held the remains of 10 women, six children and two unborn babies, all hacked to death with machetes sometime before dawn on 8 July. The health worker told the Guardian they had not been able to work out which body parts belonged to which person.
The slaughter, which occurred in the mountains of Hela province, about 600 kilometres north west of the PNG capital of Port Moresby, followed the killing of three women and four men in a neighbouring village the day before.
The photographs showed the remains being watched over by a pair of elderly women waving branches – fending off flies in the tropical heat. This small rite of respect required immense courage. The killings scattered hundreds of terrified people into the surrounding bush, where many remain today.
“I am so worried about my women,” says Janet Koriama, president of the Hela Council of Women over the phone from the local capital of Tari, having just spent a night near the scene of the massacre. “Families have lost everything,” says Koriama – their food gardens, shelter, clothes. Last Wednesday, Koriama says another woman was killed “and one had her hand cut off while looking for food to feed their hungry children”.
Koriama is desperately trying to enlist defence forces to bring around 2,000 women and children displaced by tribal fighting into shelters she’s coordinating with local churches. But reports indicate that while soldiers have been deployed as promised by prime minister James Marape, who is also the local MP for the area, their mission is focused on capturing the killers, dead or alive.
Even if they succeed, this will be of little comfort to Koriama and other local leaders fearful about what this massacre signals. While tribal conflict is deep rooted in Hela, they describe what happened in Karida village as unprecedented in lore or memory.
Police Minister Bryan Kramer declared his concern that the killings “changed everything … that it will become the new trend”.
Close observers of events in Hela are similarly appalled, but rather less surprised. The killings follow years of escalating violence in a landscape untouched by Europeans only 85 years ago, but which is today the powerhouse of the nation’s resources economy.
Australian National University anthropologist Dr Chris Ballard, who has spent many years living with and researching the area’s dominant Huli population, agrees with local observations that the massacre falls outside even the eroded rules of tribal warfare. Before European contact, these constraints “managed fighting quite effectively,” he says.
“Even in the worst cases of warfare where entire clans were forced off their territory, casualties were pretty minimal and they were almost always fighting men.” Given dense webs of social connection and strict requirements around paying compensation for deaths, random killing were considered “truly dumb”.
“Nobody was interested in mass death. The cost of having to fork out pigs for compensation for death placed limits on what people were prepared to even envisage.”
Explosive anger over broken promises
Today locals live in constant fear and Hela is a virtual no-go zone to outsiders despite the fact that the recent atrocities played out barely 30 kilometres, as the helicopter flies, from the fortified compounds that are the heart of the nation’s largest resources project, the $US19 billion Exxon-Mobil led PNGLNG (Liquefied Natural Gas).
There is widespread distress in the highlands over unrealised promises around this enterprise and explosive anger at the failure of royalties to flow to landowners in the gas fields despite five years of operations. The Huli, famous for their elaborate wigs and face paint, are also fearsome fighters. Sharing, caring and loving, says Janet Koriama – just don’t take what is ours.
The maelstrom of the LNG fallout, old enmities, new jealousies, deteriorating basic services and, last year, a devastating 7.5 magnitude earthquake, underwrites a spiralling social emergency in which tribal fighting has razed villages, closed schools, displaced communities and caused an unknown toll of casualties.
The old rules constraining warfare have broken down in recent decades, , Ballard says. By 2008 – when the PNGLNG building phase was at its height – Medecins Sans Frontieres installed a surgical team at Tari Hospital because casualties from tribal and family violence were equivalent to a war zone. Janet Koriama says traditional protections for women have eroded notably over the lifetime of the LNG project.
Peter Botten, PNG resources veteran and longtime chief executive of Oil Search – the junior partner in the PNGLNG – has argued that blaming resources projects for rising violence in the highlands is too simplistic. He points to myriad changes, from the arrival of mobile phones to rollercoaster modernisation, but says most fights are still about women and pigs. Koriama says that the massacre at Karida is linked to a four-year war which began over a girl and which has now amassed a body count of 80.
“It is part of the story, part of the landscape. The politics of the LNG, and the ramping up of political rivalries, has certainly augmented the flow of weaponry into the Tari area.”A spokeperson for Exxon-Mobil said the recent killings “occurred outside of our operational areas”. Ballard argues that while there may not be straight lines of connection between fallout from the gas project and specific outbreaks of fighting, it’s impossible to disentangle the two.
Tensions in Hela are underwritten by a massive arsenal of high-powered guns, many trafficked across the border from West Papua.
“Warfare and conflict kind of tailed off in the early days of the project, and everyone just kind of hung back and went, ‘well, maybe this is the promised land’,” says Ballard. “And now that nothing’s flowed, nothing’s changed in people’s circumstances and if anything services have contracted even further, there’s a profound disenchantment. That general mood certainly would contribute to conflict.”
A boy walks on the Exxon Mobil LNG pipe in Papua New Guinea Photograph: Ian Shearn
“There is a history to this fight [around Tari] which also needs better understanding so as to map a way forward,” says Dr Fiona Hukula, senior research fellow and leader of the Building Safer Communities program at the PNG National Research Institute.
Data is patchy, but violence against women in PNG in various forms – family, social, tribal – is among some of the highest rates in the world. Reports of the torture and murder of women accused of sorcery also appear regularly in local media.
“What is lacking is enforcement. This to me is a key hindrance to really seeing change in terms of sending a strong message about violence against women and violence in general,” says Hukula. “Having said this, it is extremely difficult to police rural and remote PNG due to lack of resources and geographical constraints. This is where the role of village courts and community leadership is vital in local dispute resolution.”
One of the continuing tensions in Hela is that specialist police squads are assigned to secure the PNGLNG facilities. “We currently have only 40 police for the whole province,” said Hela Provincial Administrator, William Bando, in the aftermath of the massacre. “Our Tari-based MS9 [police mobile squad] were taken by Exxon-Mobil to provide security, while our people are dying.”
By BRETT MASON, ROSEMARY BOLGER - SBS News Refugees on Manus Island have urged Papua New Guinea to step up the pressure on Australia to close the island's immigration detention facilities. PNG Prime Minister James Marape pushed his Australian counterpart Scott Morrison to act on the issue during a meeting in Canberra on Monday morning.
While no deadline has been set for the closure of immigration detention facilities on Manus Island as Mr Marape has demanded, the two countries have agreed to develop a timetable to achieve it. "We will ensure that we have a mutually workable timetable and closure program that is healthy for all of us – but more importantly, healthy for those people who have been part of us in Manus and PNG," Mr Marape said.
Manus Island refugee Behrouz Boochani said it was crucial PNG work with Australia to resettle about 350 men who have been on the island for up to six years. “What is important is that the people in PNG and the authorities clearly send this message and ask the Australian government to solve this problem,” he told SBS News.
Australia reached a very dangerous place when the PM can look at the camera and blatantly lie that Manus prison camps don’t exist anymore. If they don’t exist how could they prevent @NickMcKim from entering the prison camp?
The PNG MP is talking about the future, PNG has no future while Australia uses your country as a cage for innocent people and a place to hold hostages. PNG has no future while Australia is playing with its reputation.
He said the only solution was to allow them to be resettled in other countries.
Governor of Manus Province Charlie Benjamin, who was also in Canberra for the meeting, stepped up pressure on Australia to accept New Zealand’s offer to resettle up to 150 refugees from Manus and Nauru.
Governor of Manus Province in Charlie Benjamin wants Australia to accept the New Zealand deal.
AAP
“My view is for them to go to a country as soon as possible. This journey has to come to an end, I think Australia really has to step up and take this idea,” Mr Benjamin said.
Mr Marape said PNG would prefer to work with Australia rather than approach New Zealand to do a deal directly.
“Not yet New Zealand, but we are working with this. This is a matter between Australia and PNG so we both must agree on what is the timetable going forward.”
In a joint press conference with Mr Marape, Mr Morrison stressed the progress already made in reducing the number of people left on Manus Island from the peak of 1,353 under Labor, including the resettlement of about 260 in the United States.
“We have made extraordinary progress," he said.
He denied that the camp where refugees and asylum seekers are housed was a detention centre.
“I think it's important that Australians are no longer told that somehow there is a detention centre that's operating on Manus Island.”
Greens Senator Nick McKim, who has just returned from a trip to PNG to try to visit the immigration detention facilities, accused the Prime Minister of lying.
Greens Senator Nick McKim met Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island last week.
Supplied
“That would be the place with barbed wire on the fence, that'd be the place with guards at the gate preventing me from going in, that'd be the place that locks its gates at 6pm every day and detains every single person in it until 6am the following morning.”
Pacific analyst Tess Newton Cain said the agreement to develop a timetable to close the facilities on Manus Island indicated Mr Morrison was listening to PNG’s demands.
“It sounds to me that Mr Marape's been quite assertive in saying that he wants this brought to an end and that he wants a timetable.”
She said the commitment would give Mr Marape something to take home.
"There's a growing sense in Papua New Guinea that being involved in this - in the regional processing centre - is not something that is benefitting Papua New Guinea very significantly.
“It doesn't have a very significant economic affect, unlike the case on Nauru, and it certainly has some quite damaging effects on Papua New Guinea's international reputation.”
By Hon. James Marape - PNG Prime Minister via Facebook I am in Australia now upon invitation by PM S Morrison to discuss on how we can better relationship between our two countries shifting away from just being a donor giver and recipient relationship to a truly economical relationship that can benefit both nation.
Without reservation and at all meetings with PM , with Ministers and officials and through Media, Australia knows of my intention to make our country truly economically independent.
I found PM Morrison and his lovely wife Jenny to be not only warm to myself and my wife Rachel and our delegation but his government is friendly and receptive to better understand and relate to contemporary PNG and Pacific.
We both have instructed our Ministers and officials to amalgamate all existing agreements, treaties, MOUs and MOAs into a unified single document that can be a modern blue print of how PNG and Australia can relate going into the 2020s and beyond.
This new direction will be geared towards realizing our shared economic aspirations. Iam presently in Australia selling our country’s fullest potential including pointing towards agriculture ( including livestock and horticulture), tourism, sustainable forestry and fisheries plus secondary industries and downstream processing in all our resource sectors including mining, oil and gas sectors too.
Investors we looking for must be genuine investors including their show of genuineness by fulfilling a new IPA requirement I will issue that will require them to come into our country with minimum $10 million to show us they are genuine company with serious intentions for business.
This Thursday in Sydney I will address lowy Institute and I will attend a breakfast business executive meeting on Friday to point good serious investors our way. I will also be visiting other countries for greater economic partnerships too and in search of genuine investors who will want to give better returns to our land owners, our provinces and our Nation.
We truly have long way to go , but a journey of a thousand miles starts with a first step, we are making few steps now. I have dreamt the highest any one can dream for his/her country, I am willing to burn mid night oil to make it happen.
Save your thank you or criticism to 2029. In 10 years I am to make our nation change for the better. I intend to work with my open and free thinking colleagues to make it happen.
This September 16 my manifesto will come out on the path I intend to take that should lead PNG to become the richest black Christian nation where no child is left behind. It is this hope and vision that drives me on.
May I thank PM Morrison , his lovely wife Jenny and all Ministers and officials of Australia Government for making our stay meaningful and my wife Racheal and I look forward to hosting them next year when they return a visit us in PNG.
