Economist proposes an open New Guinea

Transcript

A Papua New Guinean economist has put forward a proposal to open up the whole island of New Guinea for trade purposes.

Charles Yala is the director of the National Research Institute, a PNG government funded think tank, based in Boroko.

His opinion piece argues that both Indonesia and Papua New Guinea would benefit from opening up their land borders for trade purposes.

He spoke with Koroi Hawkins about his idea.

CHARLES YALA: Knowing very well that there are social? political, cultural, environmental, topographic engineering challenges and the funding to do that, I just decided that look, let me put out this idea and see what the public thinks about it and see if its possible and generate a discussion and as you may have seen in the paper, I realised within the region we have Australia pushing what they call the Northern Australian policy and then we have China pushing the Maritime vote, so why not now we have this North/South Road, we have easy access to the northern part of Asia, from the middle we have direct link to the middle part of Asia and then South East Asia and Australia and New Zealand so that sort of promotes an integrated economic trade connection.

KOROI HAWKINS: YES, do you think there would be an imbalance in terms of who would benefit more from opening up those borders putting aside all the cultural security concerns?

CY:I don't think there will be an imbalance in fact, the starting point for both countries is not the same. As you correctly pointed out the Jayapura side is far more developed than Vanimo you see and a lot activity takes place in Jayapura and nothing much in Vanimo. So this will put both countries on an equal footing on both sides of the border and create opportunities for both sides of the border and in terms of the short linkage that you are talking about you can see, so restricted - Vanimo is too far to connect with the rest of PNG so half the people bringing things from Jayapura to Vanimo. So that's why I'm talking about opening up this island.

KH: Looking realistically now could this be achieved given the current security concerns, the cultural concerns in West Papua and would Papua New Guinea, or Indonesia for that matter, ever consider opening up those borders?

CY: This is the very reason why I've put up this argument and you see in the paper I made it very clear, this has very good potential. I have serious faith in the technical feasibility of the project and the economic benefits of it. The politics, the social, will determine as you correctly said whether its feasible or not.

KH: What kind of feedback have you been getting?

CY: There's some feedback which is more West Papua, you know look, we have a West Papua issue, what are we going to do?  You're trying to create another problem? Or that kind of issues you raised. One or two comments talking about the engineering side of the issue, the others were realising and saying that this is an interesting idea we've never thought about, it's worth thinking, and discussing and lets have a talk through. When I first presented the idea of township development, they called me a communist in 2002, so I still have that memory, but you know the current prime minister, the current government is actually pushing township development and he's actually set up four cities now, going for a city approach - Hagen City, Lae City, Kokopo City, he's actually pushing a township. I'm not saying that I've directly influenced [it] but my writing and my ideas have been around and people have seen it and there's a couple of people starting to realise that there's no way we will cover each of these parts of PNG trying to deliver health, education, electricity, all of that. What we need is a cities approach, and effective mobilisation of land around those and promoting integrated living. So that's why I'm now elevated. Look if we try to promote this then we need international connection, we need to be connected to the fastest economies of the world and the developed economies.