Four young community advocates from Vanuatu have arrived in Papua New Guinea to learn more about the development issues facing the country and how they are being tackled.

They are being hosted by ACT NOW! who says the visit is aimed at raising regional awareness and building solidarity with other Melanesian countries. 

The visitors will see first hand how Papua New Guinea’s aspirations at Independence for a fair and equal society have not been realised as successive governments have ignored the development blueprint, based on PNG Ways, set out in the National Goals and have instead focused on supporting large-scale foreign owned resource exploitation.

The four young people will spend time in Moresby to see the enormous gulf between in lifestyles between a small wealthy elite and the those forced to live on the streets or in squalid and poorly serviced settlements.

They will also get a chance to experience life in rural PNG. Here they will see some of the local industries that people rely on at a community level but that sadly lack government support. They will also see the appalling state of health and education services outside of Port Moresby.

The group will also learn about PNG’s rich history and how the PNG of today is a very far cry from the Vision outlined for the country by the Constitutional Planning Committee (CPC) at Independence and enshrined in the National Goals in our Constitution.

The CPC warned that PNG should avoid “the present grossly unjust international economic system which allows wealthy corporations to exploit the people and resources of developing countries” and that instead a focus on “small-scale artisan, service and business activity, relying where possible on typically Papua New Guinean forms of economic activity” could provide everyone with “a decent standard of living, with no citizen living in luxury’"at the expense of ordinary people”.

The visitors will experience first hand how successive government have failed to heed the advice of the CPC and instead have fallen into the trap the Committee outlined where “far too many countries of the Third World are forced, by economic relationships with industrialised countries, to build their societies more in accordance with the interests of the industrialised countries than with their own national wishes”.  

The visit will also be an opportunity to learn more about the work of ACT NOW! and its campaign for a better model of development to guide PNG in the future. ACT NOW! promotes a development path that follows the advice of the CPC, is based on self-reliance, independence and integral human development and moves us away from the current situation “where foreign capital controls the destiny of our people” and a small greedy elite live in great comfort at the expense of the majority.