Comments

Garth -- I decided to look at other components of the migration policy sub-index separately, in another post to come, but I did recently investigate your point above. According to the fine print, 'countries are more rewarded for accepting migrants from poor countries, rather than relatively rich countries'. That's from the 2015 assessment. Going back to 2013, the technical paper by David Roodman (to which there's a link in the post) says that gross immigrant inflows are 'weighted by poverty discount of sending countries, using multipliers ...Thus, immigration from Haiti is discounted less than that from Estonia'. It's not clear, even from the 2013 spreadsheet, how the multipliers actually work. And once you start weighting, things get tricky. For example, many small island states are upper middle-income, but surely we wouldn't want to weight migration from Estonia the same as migration from Tonga.

Thank you for this interesting post Anthony. I've also had the chance to undertake research on the Australian media's coverage of Papua New Guinea. In the research I was engaged in, with others, we focused on the broadcast media. We watched many hours and hours of TV news bulletins, listened to radio bulletins and included some online coverage too. We found that apart from the ABC's regular and balanced coverage, there is very little mention of PNG on Australian airwaves. A journal article on this research is available <a href="http://eprints.qut.edu.au/17566/" rel="nofollow">here</a>. Nonetheless, that research was on coverage in 2008. It would be quite interesting to study the Australian broadcast media coverage again, to see if anything has changed. Thanks again for the post, Amanda. 🙂

Thank you, Rod. It is an excellent question. Our discussion focused on aid in general. From my experience, Australian aid can inform the Brussels conference in two areas: type of aid being provided and alignment with Afghanistan priorities. In these areas, the Australian aid was relatively more efficient. Re Uruzgan the prospects are not very encouraging. A sharp decline in assistance in part undermined the transition in that province. If interested, <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Foreign_Affairs_Defence_and_Trade/Completed_inquiries/2010-13/afghanistan/report/index" rel="nofollow">here is the link</a> for the Senate inquiry on Australian overseas development program for Afghanistan. Some of the issues discussed are still relevant.

I think there might be an additional issue in the CDI methodology Robin that inflates Australia's development contribution via migration. It appears that several of the CDI components appear to treat all DAC recipient countries the same whether they are low income or upper middle income. For example with the Migration component, in Australia's case only one of the top ten sources of migrants and of foreign students is a low income country (Nepal), and many of the rest are upper middle income countries, yet it appears migrants and students from both these types of countries are given the same weighting. (https://www.border.gov.au/about/reports-publications/research-statistics/statistics/live-in-australia/migration-programme/trends-2013-14).

Thank you proff, I think all this risk PNG is taking is basically driven by one men's greed motivated by political agendas. It is apparent that most decisions made by our so-called leaders are derived from the notion self lust rather than the good of all, I hope the PM and all the MPs behind the wheels have a destination in mind for PNG.

What are some of the Solomon islands government regulations and policies that deals with the environmental problem caused by the Gold ridge mining?

One problem is also that voluntourism companies have close connections to review and advertising platforms which make it hard to find a good program <a href="http://www.responsible-volunteering.com/?p=394" rel="nofollow">based on reviews</a>. We have written a series with absolutely new findings and industry insights about this problem. You can follow us on our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/responsiblevolunteering" rel="nofollow">Facebook page</a> for more updates on voluntourism.

The TFF is a very good educational development policy instrument to achieve universal education plus other associated objectives in PNG. However, the many undesirable issues associated with TFF point out the need to strengthen the accountability aspect of it. And Provincial Education Board (PEB) is already a key partner in the system, so its isolation is a bad precedent. Interestingly the already ever-know-it-all politicians are dipping their finger of greed into this policy. For instance, now that the 2017 National Election in around the corner, few shortsighted and selfish politicians are already awarding the TFF infrastructural components to their cronies objectively to steal through kickbacks.. How sad to have legislators (Law Makers) who are at the same time criminals? This is wisdom in limbo.

John, Thanks, you raise some interesting points. The nature of ‘high value’ corruption in PNG would provide an interesting study.

Excellent article Anthony and great analysis. Reinforces how important it is for those of us who work and live there to be very careful with the narratives we engage in about PNG. It would be great to explore how the Australian (and other countries') media stories impact on cultural narratives for the people of PNG. Thank you.

Hi Rohan and Chris The MP funds is only a term used to refer to a number of funds given to the electorate in which the MP is the CEO/ chairman of these funds, eg DSIP. Out of the DSIP there is a certain % as discretionary fund for the MP to use not for personal gain but still for public good. However in practice the MP ended up deciding for all the funds; how, where, when & whom it should be used. That's why we can simply say "MP funds".

Thanks Tatia and Steve for this post. I think your subject line” the perils of quantifying corruption” would have more to offer than your pertaining post. Why am saying this? Most corruption through bribes and miss appropriation are done through legitimate process by people in legitimate positions, in a way legitimizing the corruption. It is not often done by people outside the system to get things done in their favor but those in the system themselves. So your post can extend to explore the challenges in quantifying this level of corruption would be a better analysis. As Mekere Mourata once said; corruption is systemic and systematic in PNG so we need to explore that. Another point relating to your Figure 1 bar graph, police has the worst case corruption, but in terms of value and wider impact to society (in the context of development) police corruption level would weigh less value and less serious impact to society. Whilst the less worst cases corruption; tendering boards and licensing authorities involves high value corruption cases (millions of kinas involves) and the impact is very serious and cause suffering to society. If you can analysis the value of corruption cases in each sector/level and the impact/suffering/damage it causes would be another step further to quantify corruption. However, the peril of working through to collect data and reach a better analysis of this discourse (corruption) is still higher. In PNG we need an analysis to quantify high levels of corruption with huge value and serious impact to society.