Australian imperialism in Papua New Guinea: past and present

The fiftieth anniversary of Papua New Guinea’s independence this month was marked by the announcement of a proposed major joint defence treaty between PNG and its former colonial power, Australia. “We’re talking about totally integrated forces,” PNG’s Defence Minister Billy Joseph told the ABC on 15 September, “Australian Defence Force and PNG Defence Force using the same equipment...fighting together, defending our sovereignties as an integrated force”.

So much for independence.

Albanese might pontificate that Australia and PNG are “neighbours, partners and equals”, but this military agreement shows how things really are. It continues Australia’s 120-year domination and exploitation of PNG.

From 1906 until 1975, PNG was a colonial possession of Australia. School history curricula in PNG acknowledges this, but for Australian students, this nearly 70-year long period of domination likely comes as a surprise.

In their 2024 article “‘The Moat of Oblivion’: Australia and the Forgetting of Papua New Guinea” academics Helen Garner, Jonathan Ritchie and Brad Underhill suggest that that in the nineteenth century era of White Australia, politicians did not try to integrate PNG into the Australian national identity because most Papuans were, and are, non-white.

The Australian state did not want to launch a genocidal frontier war akin to those waged against Indigenous peoples on Australia’s mainland and Tasmania, or to encourage migration of whites to PNG. Instead, PNG was shunted “somewhere else” in Australia’s nationalist and cultural mythology, as an island that belonged to Australia, but was not occupied by Australians. This political separation underpins the exploitative nature of Australia’s engagement with PNG.

While ostensibly an Australian territory, from 1906 onwards Papuans were denied democratic rights, including the right to vote. Even after being incorporated as Australian citizens in 1948, Papuans required permits to travel south. Many Papuans who left the island were ensnared in “blackbirding”—a slave labour system where Pacific Islanders were forced to work on Queensland plantations.

Sequestering Papua New Guinea also smashed up the migratory traditions of Pacific Islanders. As Gardner et al describe: “The six-kilometre stretch of water between the northernmost Queensland Island Saibai and the Shore of Papua was both a physical and conceptual barrier between continental Australia and the island of New Guinea in the minds of white Australians—but not those of the Torres Strait for whom it had always been a pathway rather than a boundary”.

The Australian state imposed both English and Christianity on the people of PNG in its colonising drive, attempting to force national cohesion along Western capitalist lines on highly differentiated peoples. To this day, PNG is the most linguistically diverse place on earth, with more than 800 recognised languages.

Australia’s interest in PNG has always been imperial. Viewed through military eyes, the island is Australia’s gateway to (and from) the Asia Pacific.

The theatre of imperial conflict expanded from Europe towards Asia in World War II, and with this shift, warfare came closer to Australia’s neighbourhood. In January 1942, Japan invaded Rabaol—a township on the PNG island of New Britain—with the intention of capturing the capital Port Moresby. Had this occurred, it would have represented an incursion upon the northernmost flank of Australian, and therefore US, influence.

The ensuing Kokoda Track campaign, which repulsed the Japanese invasion, has been incorporated into nationalist myths as an epic chapter in Australian war history. Papuans—whose own homes were besieged—are remembered only as helpful sidekicks in this mythos, as “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” tending to wounded soldiers.

Ironically, Australian politicians were motivated to abandon PNG as a colony in order to ensure their ongoing imperial influence. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, Australian politicians realised that holding formal colonies was no longer tenable, as major social struggles for national liberation took place in Asia and Africa.

Australian politicians feared PNG might fall under Communist influence, like many other national independence struggles at the time, without a negotiated transition to independence. Jon Piccini argues this in his 2024 article “‘Time is Against Us’: Anti-Communism, Decolonisation, and Papua New Guinean Independence” in the journal Australian Historical Studies. Catholic organisations worked to foster anti-Communist attitudes among the small PNG elite—and leaders of the trade union movement—as part of their attempts to cultivate a future ruling class loyal to Western capitalism.

Piccini quotes Richard Krygier explaining that his organisation, the Catholic anti-communist outfit Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, intervened in PNG to “pre-empt the field before the Communists and their friends emerge on the scene”. Whether and on what terms the people of PNG wanted independence was of marginal concern in these circles.

Preparations for PNG’s independence began in the 1960s under a series of Liberal and Country Party federal governments. In 1964, Australia’s Department of Territories cut the pay of PNG’s public servants to that of 40 percent of Australians doing the same work—supposedly as a precursor for dealing with fewer resources in an independent state.

Whitlam’s Labor government, elected in 1972, accelerated the move towards independence. In 1973, PNG transitioned to “self-government”, and on 16 September 1975, became fully independent. Gyngell describes that PNG’s first governor-general, Sir John Guise, noted during independence ceremonies that “Papua New Guineans were lowering the flag of their colonisers, not tearing it down”. Typical of paternalistic colonialism, these events have been remembered as examples of Australia’s benevolence towards PNG.

But as even former Australian prime minister Paul Keating admitted in his memoirs, this “benevolence” brought limited benefits to the people of PNG. “As colonialists,” he wrote, “Australia’s army has been generally benign but I’m not sure we were much good at the task. Not least, we had bequeathed Papua New Guinea a public sector and a military force, modelled on our own, that were expensive and quite unsuited to the needs of a developing country”.

Since independence, PNG has experienced endemic poverty. As of 2022, fewer than 20 percent of households had access to safe drinking water and fewer than 10 percent safely managed sanitation.

Australia has never been motivated by humanitarian concern for Papuans. It is not concerned with poverty, the education of girls, corruption or rising sea levels, whatever its official statements on Pacific relations might say. Since independence, successive governments have worked to maintain Australia’s economic and military domination of the region.

According to the Australia—Papua New Guinea Development Partnership Plan of 2024-2029, Australia is Papua New Guinea’s largest trading partner, allocating $637.4 million in loans and grants, and $2.56 billion in budget support loans. Australia has more or less taken for granted that PNG’s economic reliance on Australia will ensure their political affinity to Western capitalism and therefore pliancy to its military presence.

As imperial tensions between the US and China have steadily heightened, Australia has worried about waning influence. A 2023 naval security agreement launched between China and the Solomon Islands—typically seen as safe in Australia’s sphere of influence—gave the Australian establishment a scare that China’s economic leverage might win them more military allies in the Pacific.

Albanese’s Labor government has doubled down on their real ambition: reliable, no holds barred military access to PNG. In August, Defence Minister Richard Marles announced that $500 million would be spent on the long-expected expansion of PNG’s Lombrum naval base.

Should the proposed mutual defence treaty between Australia and PNG materialise, it will represent a formalisation of the existing state of affairs, as well as a guarantee—from Australia’s perspective—that PNG will remain in the Western camp.

From colonisation, to independence, and after, Australia has never cared about the rights and wishes of Papuans. Their intention has always been to dominate the region economically, to secure military acquiescence.