The middle class in PNG seems to be preoccupied with a debate over whether the country should continue to look South to Australia and New Zealand for assistance or whether it is better to look North to China. 

But, prompted and encouraged by Australia, China and Prime Minister Somare, they are asking the wrong question and thus they continually miss the answer to the question they should be asking which is how can PNG lift itself above its current problems and find a better way forward?

The answer to that question is that PNG needs to look internally to its own Constitution and National Goals to find a better future rather than continually looking to foreign governments and multinational corporations.

It should not be disputed that Australia has a terrible record of assistance to PNG. The Australian government happily pours millions of dollars into the aid bucket every year safe in the knowledge that most of the money will be spent enriching Australian consultants and suppliers and happy to disregard the fact that the rest will just be diverted by corrupt politicians and public servants, while Australian companies gorge themselves on a massively imbalanced trade with their northern neighbour. PNG has and continues to suffer a massive leakage of its wealth into Australian coffers.

And yes, Australian and other Western mining companies have an appalling record in PNG for social and environmental abuses. As the Catholic Bishops have just pointed out, these comapnies have left most Papua New Guineans worse off than before, struggling with widespread corruption, poverty and violence.

But does this mean PNG should just turn its back on its old colonial mastas and welcome in the Chinese to replace them?

The Chinese government and its State owned corporationsins have for several years been spreading out across the globe in search of mineral resources, new markets and political allies. But the corruption, human rights abuses and environmental destruction that have followed in their wake to the farthest corners of the globe mirror the past abuses of white European colonialists.

The truth is that both China and Australia look on PNG with the same hungry eyes and care not for the future of its indigenous people.

If PNG it is to move forward along the path to a fair, just and balanced society, it must fundamentally change its current subservience to both countries and instead start to set the terms of the relationship with the outside world.

Papua New Guineas 'founding fathers' the bright young men and women who guided the work of the Constitutional Planning Committee foresaw very clearly what PNG would need to do to avoid the pitfalls of other nations trying to transition rapidly into the 21st Century and the perils of becoming the lapdog of foreign powers.

The Committee set out five very clear and simple National Goals that were intended to guide all persons, corporations, government departments and politicians, and enshrined these in the Constitution:

1. Integral human development
2. Equality and participation for all
3. Political and economic independence
4. Environmental protection and wise use of natural resources
5. Respect for Papua New Guinean ways

PNG is blessed with abundant natural resources. But that has been her curse over the past thirty years as Malaysian loggers and multinational mining and petroleum companies have intoxicated its leaders on promises to get rich quick while blatantly stealing resources from under the gaze of a bewildered people.

PNGs leaders would do well to stop listening to the self interested harping of people like Greg Anderson from the PNG Chamber of Mines and Madam Lu from the Chinese State owned Ramu nickel mine and move on from fuelling the debate over whether to allow Australia or China the lead in stealing the family silver and return instead to study the five national goals set out in the Constitution.

It is these five goals that offer the path to salvation through a modern economy, a fair and just society and a united country.

The people of PNG need to wake up to the fact that if they are to avoid the pitfalls of history they must take a new and unexplored path to freedom and prosperity but that the roadmap they must follow already lies within their own Constitution.