BY JOHN FOWKE

John Fowke’s known lineage goes back to 17th Century India - "a touch of the tarbrush there," he says - thence to Ceylon, where an Irish ancestor, Ensign Grey, married a colonial Dutch girl around 1808. Great-granddad Fowke was a pioneer tea planter in the late 19th century. Present day Fowke continues the agricultural tradition.

The English used to call white colonial families like the Fowkes, 'Country bottled, old boy, country bottled!'   "Arseholes," says John, who never took to being patronised by anyone.

John knows rural development (and coffee in its pre-Starbucks’ state) like most people know their eye colour. He writes here from the PNG highlands, where he's having an extended stay, and provides something of real value: a solution - KJ

EVEN IF 2012’s Papua New Guinea general election sees a really dedicated reformist group lead this nation, a compromise will already have been made.

Fence-sitting parties will have been promised inducements to join in coalition, so forming a majority.

These inducements will have been shaped in a mould formed by tradition; a mould filled with the spurious metal of personal greed and opportunism.

It will be an alloy entirely lacking in idealism, or care for the future. It will be devoid, also, of that most essential ingredient, the principle of separation of powers.

Here … are opportunities for men who, though well-educated, possess little understanding of the outside world or care for principles of probity and transparency in public life.

Such men, once elected, adopt lordly guise, endowed with the means to dispense largesse, in this case in the name of ‘electoral development funds’.

Funds provided as of right with sketchy supporting budgets and plans. Funds dispensed without reference to relevant government managers and technocrats, who are completely sidelined in terms of task-related lines of control and technical expertise.

Hungry for personal wealth and the adulation of their own clansmen, a great number of today’s MPs are in the game entirely for themselves.

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As it stands today PNG is in a state of rolling social and civil crisis. The rule of law is almost entirely absent; there is no firm hand upon the steering wheel.

The arrival of projected vast returns from the newly-sanctioned gas resource projects can only increase pressure and disorder and discontent within this society. A society which already has great difficulty in managing and accounting for the rents it receives from already established extractive industries.

There is no evidence that the situation will be abated, let alone rectified, under the present leadership; and little reason to expect the current style and substance of administration to alter even when names change after the election to come.

How may PNG engender the emergence of a sympathetic, socially-conscious, “structured-to-fill-real-needs” political regime? How can it build a fairer and more open regime where the basic needs of society are met and the rule of law re-established?

Attempts to persuade politicians unilaterally to improve existing practice and systems in any dramatic way will meet resistance.

A revolution or a coup is unlikely in the near to mid-future, and in any case will only produce more of the same; more gravy for the already well-fed. Papua New Guineans from all walks of life ponder this question and shake their heads.

But there is a way. A way which is non-confrontational and entirely constitutional, and one which will need little if any rejigging of current legislation.

You can read John Fowke’s full article, ‘Power Returned to the People’ here.

Photo: John reunites with 80-year old comrade, Sinake ... "still full of life and ideas"