Corruption has played a big role in the nation’s health crisis but is not the whole story, said Prof. Stephen Howes, an economist at the Australian National University in Canberra who studies Papua New Guinea. The national government slashed its health budget 37 percent from 2014 to 2016 as commodity prices fell.
Conditions in Papua New Guinea have also been directly affected by the country’s changing relationship with Australia, its nearest neighbor and former colonizer. Like other international donors, Australia has shifted focus in recent years to infrastructure and capacity building rather than saving individual lives through direct services.
“That move out of service delivery was a mistake,” Professor Howes said.
Australia also owed Papua New Guinea a political debt after it agreed to process and resettle asylum seekers in detention camps on Manus Island, Professor Howes said, making Australian officials wary of criticizing the country over issues like corruption.
Though the Manus Island facility closed last year, there are hundreds of refugees still being held in Papua New Guinea. Australia also fears that pressuring Papua New Guinea too much could push it into the arms of China, which is courting Pacific nations.
“We are increasingly looking at P.N.G. through a strategic or in fact through a China lens, and that makes us reluctant to say anything that might annoy them,” Professor Howes said.
China and Australia have both invested millions in supporting the APEC meeting, which the Papua New Guinea public has come to view as a drain on government spending.
Charles Kerere, a parish priest in the Gulf Province village of Lese, said children in his community were dying from illnesses like diarrhea because the aid post had no medicines. He said he feared an outbreak of polio in the province, which recorded its first case in August.
“I’ve been to Port Moresby, I’ve seen lots of money has been pumped into the city,” Father Kerere said. “They are so concerned with trying to please the world leaders that Papua New Guinea is O.K. But under the carpet we have huge problems in our country, and people are suffering. They are crying for services, basic services.”
