Felix Marwick
OPINION: PORT MORESBY (Newstalk ZB/Pacific Media Watch): It has to be said dire warnings were issued to the Kiwi media contingent ahead of the trip to this year’s Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in Papua New Guinea.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) official advice mentioned such wonderful things as muggings, car-jacking, and even gang rape (we especially liked the specificity on that last one). Add to that the mentions of dengue fever and malaria and we had a nice category of horrors on our plates.
And speaking of plates, we were even told to avoid the food at formal functions to avoid the dreaded food poisoning. It was enough to make a puny white boy (i.e. yours truly) feel a little apprehensive and wonder if it might not have been a better idea to let my colleague Frances Cook take the honours on this trip.
The truth is it’s been nothing like that. Granted things have been glossed up a lot for the visiting dignitaries, it is after all a valuable practice run for the APEC conference the city’s due to hold in 2018, and as part of an official delegation the media are really only see very little of the environs.
But the little we’ve seen suggests Port Moresby is, in some respects, getting a bit of a bad rap.
The Forum itself appears well run. Everything works – this is not something that one normally associates with covering the annual event. For a journalist Forum meetings tend to be a never ending battle between deadlines, internet dropouts, overly judicious officials, and an interminable struggle to find out exactly what is going on.
Generally by the day of the leaders retreat we tend to be on a knife’s edge and just one problem away from a complete mental collapse. There’s nothing quite so sad to see as a reporter on deadline whose internet connection has crashed for the 17th time.
Pleasant Forum
Well that’s not been the case in Port Moresby. It has been one of the most pleasant Forum meetings I have ever attended. It’s always nice when the local Prime Minister (Peter O’Neill) sticks his head out a door and asks if the set up for a photo opportunity is to everyone’s satisfaction. (I’d hazard that John Key might do this, but I can’t really picture the same with Tony Abbott).
In fact, I’d go so far to suggest that Australia, whose security verged on the paranoid at the 2009 Forum, could take a valuable lesson in courtesy from their PNG counterparts. With the city due to hold the APEC meeting in 2018 this bodes well.
This is not to say that Port Moresby doesn’t have problems. The prevalence of four-wheel-drives with solid metal grilles over broken and chipped wind shields clearly shows all is not well.
Some media colleagues also had a bit of a run in when they went off the beaten path the other day. A hasty retreat was required when they discovered someone was trying to block them in on a narrow road.
But when you talk to the locals they will tell you that, while Port Moresby has its problems, incidents have a habit of being blown out of proportion. In fact one local reporter was quite emphatic that the city is not that bad a place.
Still it has to be said the spiked steel fences that encircle the hotels, and even the shopping malls, suggest that some of the city’s critics might have a point.
Poverty is clearly evident here too. It can be clearly seen in the conditions in which a fair proportion of the city’s residents live. But this is juxtaposed against what appears to be a quite impressive urban infrastructure.
The country’s mining wealth has obviously paid dividends in some areas. It can be clearly seen in the quality of the roads, its sports facilities (I write this from a sports stadium many provincial NZ sides would kill for), and also the Parliament.
Let me say this, the PNG Parliament is an absolute jewel. If politics could be as fine as the building Papua New Guinea’s MPs work in, no one would ever have to fear for democracy again.
Pacific Media Watch Forum coverage
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Pacific Media Watch
