Provinces like Simbu began experiencing land pressures before independence. There were simply too many Simbus for the available land. The land that was available was jealously guarded by clans who had no desire to make it available for use by traditional enemies.

On the Gazelle Peninsula, the burgeoning Tolai people were under stress and running out of land too. In their case, the cause was over population exacerbated by the vast areas of traditional land which had been taken up for plantations, most notably by the Catholic Church.

The Australian administration’s response at the time was to resettle people in other districts (now provinces). To do this they bought surplus land in areas with low populations and set up resettlement schemes with plantations for products like oil palm and rubber. This is when the great highlands exodus began in earnest.

The drift to urban areas made many people landless when their former clan land was swallowed up to accommodate the needs of a growing town population. The biggest impact was in Port Moresby on the Motu and Koiari people, but by the 1990s immigrants to Mount Hagen and Lae had lost their land and had nowhere to go back to.

Resource development, especially mining, also made many people landless but the biggest impact by far has come from logging, particularly that carried out under Special Agricultural and Business Leases (SABLs).

In most cases, but especially with SABLs, the people losing their land receive little or no compensation. What they get is miserly and nowhere near enough for them to re-establish their lives elsewhere. In many cases there is no ‘elsewhere’ anyway. And too often, unscrupulous wantoks make off with most of the proceeds.

Migration had emerged as a problem before independence. People saw the commerce and the bright lights of the towns and wanted to be part of it. When their dreams were not realised they stayed on in settlements just hoping things would get better.

The urban areas didn’t get better, they got worse, but these people had children and those children had children and soon the link to the home villages and clans was broken permanently and they had nowhere to go. In their villages the land they might have inherited had gone to other people and they had been forgotten. As far as their home villages were concerned, they had ceased to exist.

If they weren’t there already, these deprived people - with no land, no prospects and no income - tended to drift to the fringes of the towns.

They still do, and in increasing numbers. On top of that they are reproducing at an alarming rate, very often outside marriage. Single women with dependent children are now a significant demographic in most towns. Increasingly, as traditional norms break down, it is the case in rural areas too.

The landless people of Papua New Guinea are a ticking time bomb.

Their options are severely limited. To get by, they often become involved in crime. Good people have become thieves simply to survive. And this is what they teach their children.

A few struggle above the pack, mostly by preying on their fellow citizens. They become big time criminals and join the elite as bona fide big men.

It is a strange irony that the poor steal from the poor; but it happens everywhere. The rich also steal from the poor in more sophisticated ways. Everyone steals from the poor.

The poor people steal, go hungry and resort to alcohol and drugs to dull their pain. The latter makes them even more prone to exploitation.

It is not a story unique to Papua New Guinea. It happens in most third world countries, especially Africa, and it happens in advanced western economies too.

The poor and landless are the people who will eventually rise up in revolution (if we take other revolutions as case studies, led by middle class dissidents).

They will reach a point where they have nothing to lose and, even if they fail, as is often the case, they will at least gain the satisfaction of destroying many of those people who have exploited them.

A sensible government would look after its poor and landless but where can you find a sensible government in these greedy times? The very term has become an oxymoron.

For Australia, which has its own problems of inequality, the time bomb is sitting on its doorstep, just 10 kilometres away at low tide. But for some reason the Australian government can’t see it.

Neither can the Papua New Guinean government, and it sitting right on top.

Why are governments so stupid? Why do they persist in allowing the development of the things that will eventually develop the potential to destroy them?