HERE IN THE Hervey Bay/Maryborough area of Queensland we’ve got a local daily newspaper, The Chronicle, which has been around since Adam was a lad.

About a year ago the editor retired and was replaced by a refugee from the south.

The paper immediately lurched dramatically to the right and now forsakes hard news and informed comment for sport, car crashes, drink drivers and council-baiting. I’ve persisted with it because it still carries a Phantom comic strip.

This is the heartland of Australian apathy and the last thing I would ever expect to see in it would be an article about PNG.

Today, in the jobs section, there was a full page spread on the LNG project. This looks promising I thought.

However, when I read further I discovered it was a thinly disguised advertisement for several international petroleum industry recruiting agencies that seem to have the game sewn up.

I imagine they paid for the same article to go into local papers all over the country.

The only encouraging thing is that most of them now seem to have offices in Port Moresby. I wonder if the same advertisement appeared there too.

The article starts off by saying: “Talking jobs and Papua New Guinea it really is a jungle out there. The tiny island nation to our north is one of the least explored countries in the world”.

Having hoofed it over a fair slab of the country I’d take issue with the description of PNG as “tiny”.

It goes on with the unexplored theme (read primitive): “In a country with very little infrastructure – 72% of the population lives rurally, with the nation on the whole one of the least explored on the planet – there is a massive amount of work to be completed before the project actually produces any LNG”.

The crux of the matter is summed up in the box alongside the article.  It begins by saying, “Interested in working in Papua New Guinea on the biggest project the country has ever seen?” and follows by listing the exclusive recruiting agencies.

To me those words are saying “there are going to be heaps of jobs paying big money come and join the feeding frenzy”.

The article mentions that the PNG government has a “national content plan” which will focus on “the development of the local workforce, expansion of supplier capability, and strategic community investment”.   I wonder if AusAID had a hand in penning that bit.

Underneath the article there is a large advertisement from Toyota in Brisbane for a “Toyota Retail Specialist in PNG”.

Suffice it to say I am currently unaware of any government programs madly training workers for the LNG project. I’m sure the prime minister said, “Bugger it, we’ll use Asians?”

Other than that, I’m puzzled. Why do you need an Australian to sell Landcruisers to Esso and Oil Search?

But that’s not my point. What I wanted to say was, watch out workers of PNG - it has begun.

Be quick and, if you’re lucky, you may be able to grab a shirt tail as it goes past.