Tanya Zeriga Alone's comment starts from the premise that Australia is a Western nation and, by inference, PNG is not.

Australia is by no means a homogenous, mono-cultural country, with something like 25% of its citizens coming from a non-English speaking background.

In this respect it is similar to countries like the USA, Canada and New Zealand, together with much of South America, all of which were colonised in the last 400 years or so.

Quite what constitutes a Western country is, to my mind, not necessarily well understood.

I would say, as a starting point, that western countries tend to have shared some very important common experiences since around 1500 including the separation of Church and State, the rise of science, the impact of technology and, more latterly, a general (if not perfect) tolerance of religious, philosophical and ethnic diversity.

Importantly, the various "westernised" countries have been obliged to submerge a startlingly wide range of regional, ethnic and language differences within a broader national identity.

Of course, this was not a smooth or painless process and took a fair while to achieve in most cases. It usually required a series of very strong, often authoritarian central governments to achieve it, with the great and powerful slowly being required to relinquish much (but not all it seems) of their grip on power, privilege and wealth for the benefit of the citizenry as a whole.

Sadly, all this was not accomplished without bloodshed, which reached its crescendo in the first half of the 20th century with two almost unimaginably catastrophic industrial scale wars.

Also, separatist tendencies remain: just look at the Scottish Nationalists' current efforts to persuade their fellow Scots to abandon their 300 year old union with England.

PNG's situation, although admittedly an exaggerated version of what is found in parts of Europe or South America, is by no means unique.

Tanya, the task of nation building may be daunting but it is doable. What is required is the political foresight and will to do it.

So, when will PNG's equivalent to Mahatma Ghandi or Nelson Mandela or Abraham Lincoln or even (heaven forbid!) Mao Tse Tung arise to lead this process?

Depending upon who you talk to Australia has successfully embraced multiculturalism.

Apart from a few unfortunate incidents like the Cronulla riots it has enlivened and enriched our lives.

Other countries have done the same.

There is no reason why a country cannot function as a polyglot democracy with a thousand tribes.

Thanks for your comments Felix.

While I would be the last to suggest or imply that Australia's version of colonialism was a model of propriety and good governance, it was certainly hugely more benign than most.

Just one important example to consider is the way that the Australian administration strenuously resisted attempts to allow private interests to buy or deal in land.

This proved to be a very wise decision indeed and ensured that, upon independence, something in excess of 98% of all land in PNG remained firmly in the hands of its traditional owners.

There is a great danger that you and others will be seduced by the traditional left wing critiques of colonialism, which tend to proclaim that all ills that beset a former colony derive entirely and exclusively from the colonial experience.

This is just self serving nonsense, once a loud refrain from those models of freedom, justice and humanity, the USSR, Cuba and the Peoples Republic of China.

More commonly these days, it is the indigenous political and military elites who promote this idea, thus conveniently shifting the blame for their manifest failings onto others.

Oscar Wilde once said that the truth is seldom pure and never simple and that is the situation in this case.

I would agree with you that Australia is not blameless in relation to PNG. It left in precipitous haste mostly to avoid the embarrassment of being a residual colonial power in an anti-imperial age.

It set in place forms of governance and a related legal framework that made sense to it as an inheritor of the British legal tradition. Whether they made sense in a PNG context is rather less clear.

Worst of all, it did not create a large enough, well educated elite, sufficiently imbued with democratic ideals and aspirations, to establish and maintain a stable, honest government "of the people, for the people and by the people".

While Australia's failings must be acknowledged, nearly 40 years after independence it is becoming a bit of a stretch to say that the manifest corruption in the political process is the resolution of colonialism.

It is not: it is largely a function of the failure of PNG's own political class' collective inability to resist treating political office as being like winning Cross Lotto, whereby they and their wantoks are free to expropriate public wealth for their own private purposes.

This is the sad and depressing tale in most of post colonial Africa and many other parts of the world besides. Even in a "mature" democracy like Australia's we still have to be eternally vigilant to protect the integrity of our political process.

The onus now lies on you and others like you to take action to correct the situation. Australia cannot do this even if it had the will to do so, which it clearly doesn't.