PNG Voices: Listening to Australia's Closest Neighbour: Papua New Guinean Perspectives on Australia and the World

In 2021, a broad coalition of researchers embarked on an unprecedented endeavour: to ask hundreds of ordinary Papua New Guineans about the strengths and challenges of Papua New Guinea (PNG), their dreams for PNG’s future, and how they see Australia’s relationship with PNG. PNG is Australia’s closest neighbour, and the single largest recipient of Australian development assistance. The two nations share a prehistory, and more recently, a colonial history. But despite this apparent closeness, few Australians today can say that they know how people in PNG feel about their own communities or about Australia, or about the impacts of Australian tax monies in PNG. The present study, PNG Voices, represents the first time, to our knowledge, that an Australian institution has sought the opinions of a wide swathe of PNG citizens about their realities and their perception of Australia. We asked 536 Papua New Guineans, originating in 21 of PNG’s 22 Provinces, to reflect on: the strengths and assets of their communities and of PNG as a whole; the challenges facing their communities and PNG as a whole; their dreams for their communities; Australia and Australians, and Australia’s relationship with PNG; the types of foreign investment in PNG by different actors. In sum, this has been the first major survey of Papua New Guinean attitudes toward PNG and Australia’s role in it. The key findings of PNG Voices do not always make for easy reading. Some readers may find points of dissonance between how some in PNG view Australia and how the Australia-PNG relationship is framed and understood by Australian policymakers. Let those points, along with the detail and subtleties of the responses as a whole, guide renewed reflection on Australia’s relationship with PNG and, perhaps, recalibration of Australian policies with our closest neighbour