In the nearly 34 years since Papua New Guinea attained its Independence, there has never been a State visit to Australia by a PNG Prime Minister. Now it seems, this April, Kevin Rudd is about to make good this deficiency. Michael Somare – nearing the end of a stellar political career and truly the father of his nation – will visit Canberra where he is expected to address the Federal Parliament.

This is the latest step in the growing closeness of the relationship between Australia and Papua New Guinea, a relationship blighted since Independence by benign – and sometimes deliberate – neglect on the part of Australia. Sure, we have always provided budget support funding and we have sent (not always the most culturally aligned) aid workers there, but we have not built a relationship worthy of the name at the political or civil level.

In March last year, in one of his early foreign policy initiatives as Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd paid the first state visit any Australian leader had made to PNG. At the time, Michael Somare said: “In the past few years things have not worked out as we’ve expected. The relationship was more or less deteriorated... There was no common understanding, mutual understanding ...”

And that statement said it all: it was as serious an indictment of the Howard Government’s attitude to Australia’s nearest neighbour as you would want to read.

And what was happening at the political level was reflected at the civil level. In 2006, PNG High Commissioner Charles Lepani told Hamish McDonald of the Sydney Morning Herald: “…the older generation of Australians with close contact has gone. A lot has depended on the very robust friendship that existed in Australia up to independence. There is nostalgia among the old hands but they can’t offer much today, they’re dying off. There needs to be more people interested… After all, the Australian taxpayer is paying for it.”

Today, of course, the PNG Association – in the face of considerable pushback and vitriol from some of its members - is moving to set the civil relationship to rights. In April it will ask its 1,600 members to vote for a constitutional change that will place furthering the relationship between Australia and PNG right at the top of its agenda. This change needs a 75 percent 'yes' vote to succeed. The vote will take place at about the same time Michael Somare pays his final formal visit to Australia as head of state. There is a wonderful symmetry about this.

If you support the strengthening of our relationship with PNG, and you’re not a member of the Association, join now, and make sure the organisation reorients itself to this new position. If the vote fails it is a dead set certainty the PNGAA will have failed. The only reasonable alternative in that case will be to form a new organisation that will undertake this necessary task. But it seems to me to be far easier to reform what already exists than to start anew.

You can join the PNGAA online for just $20 by visiting its website here.