Transcript
PAUL BARKER: Well in principle it's a sound concept and it's certainly been the direction that all aid donors around the world have in principle have sought as a more efficient mechanism that harmonises the aid with the priorities of the country. But in practice, it's clearly dependent on a whole range of governance criteria being in place and meeting adequate levels of accountability and synchronisation of priorities.
DON WISEMAN: Papua New Guinea, in that regard, can't present a very good case to Canberra, can it?
PB: Not really. The government and the planning minister, who was putting it forward in those ministerial talks, has certainly been pushing for trying to get the government budget much better aligned with the development priorities within the country, aligned with a set of frameworks right down to the local level that require facilities and public goods such as health services, schools, roads and so on to be financed and accessible to the public. But as we know, the reality - and this is a concern that stretches across the country especially when you move out of the national capital, into any of the provinces - they see the money having been concentrated, expenditure having been concentrated in the national capital in a range of infrastructure projects, some of which are finished others are not - in the national capital while the rest of the country is struggling to maintain basic access facilities and other public goods which have extensively seen over the last period of time, teachers being unpaid, healthworkers likewise and inadequate funds to meet even the commitments the government has made in terms of free education and free health services and so on. So, yeah, there is a big gap between the rhetoric and the reality.
DW: The New Zealand government, with its aid over the last three or four years, has been putting money - with a number of Pacific countries - has been putting it directly into the budgets. I imagine Australia is doing this as well in some of the smaller Pacific countries, and I guess that's the fact: they're smaller, easier to manage, easier to keep an eye on where the money goes. But the problem for PNG is the complexity of the country.
PB: Well yes, up until the beginning of the 1990s, the Australian government did put the funds through direct budget support and that came under a certain level of concerned criticism within Australia that the money was increasingly being diverted in odd directions as more, you might call them slush funds, developed in PNG and funds seemed to be becoming less accountable - managed less accountably. So, yes after the Australian assistance increasingly moved across to project aid, yes the management did become more cumbersome and you did get a lot more bottlenecks and more staff having to spend their time focussing on planning, mid-term reviews and this, that and the other, and development outcomes from all that probably are very mixed. Yes, if one can get the government systems up and running, effective and accountable, and certainly the Australian government is trying to assist with improving governance mechanisms including training for the public service and so on. That's all well and good, but as we know it doesn't sort of happen overnight and there has to be that sort of fundamental commitment to good governance, addressing accountability and although we see it in some individuals, we're not seeing it effectively right through the government system here yet. If all players can work together - civil society and government working together to try and address the issues of governance - then in the course of time, that would hopefully be addressed. But in a forum that we were in last week in the Highlands, both civil society players but also government players including the governor of the host province, Jiwaka, said basically our systems are pretty well stuffed. We're failing to deliver essential services, we're having too many tiers of government, our mechanisms seem to be undermining the capacity of those tiers of government to deliver, so we've actually got to come together to rationalise that and address those challenges.
