Australia is paying ever more attention to its former possession, too, as are French energy company executives. 

International relations can seem ordered and manicured on the surface, but the reality is much more provisional and blurry.

In Papua New Guinea’s case, as in the days of old, much of the story seems to be playing out in bars and restaurants that attract as many fortune-hunters, do-gooders and assorted flotsam as ever.

McCrann’s — a place where the government secretary could most reliably be located “beautifully tight by four o’clock” and a sign warned patrons not to sleep on the billiard table with their spurs on — is long gone.

All we know is that it was somewhere “in town,” as the locals call the city’s original site around the fringes of Fairfax Harbour. Fairfax was the first name of the father of navigator John Moresby, who surveyed the area in 1871 and whose memory is also preserved in the name of a challenging 'premium' whiskey.

It’s overlooking the harbour, in the stylish Edge by the Sea restaurant, that I begin my tour of this central setting in the Pacific’s Great Game.

Nestled inside one of Moresby’s many gated communities, the Edge is separated by a channel of brackish water from the Royal Papua New Guinea Yacht Club, where I can see expats jogging around inside the fence.

A tasty modern Australian-style place, the Edge offers excellent coffee and even more exemplary people-watching. It’s a mostly expat scene, with just a few breakfasting members of the PNG elite — the occasional member of parliament, the head of the revenue service, one or two bankers.

Most people taking breakfast here are the worker bees in the new Great Game.

Most identifiable are the uniformed, barrel-chested Australian police officers gathered together in conversation.

Australia has been throwing money at their counterparts in the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary for decades, providing so much training that the force must constitute the best-instructed in the world. Well-equipped too: Canberra has financed everything from jet skis to a swimming pool.

Is all that time and money working? If it were a business, there’s an argument that this police-reform effort should have been closed years ago.

Port Moresby remains a city too dangerous for most to navigate on foot, which explains why the joggers are behind the Yacht Club fence.

Things became even worse in January when local police downed tools after a computer glitch cut their pay, precipitating a day-long riot in which at least twenty people died and businesses lost hundreds of millions in orgiastic looting.

But creating an effective Papua New Guinean force is not Australia’s sole objective here. The Australian police presence is as much about geopolitical shadowboxing and currying favour with elites to try to ensure that China doesn’t get too much of a foothold.

Every time a PNG government minister utters an oracular hint that Chinese policing support is being considered, Australia promises more kit and kaboodle. The Aussie cops are in no hurry to finish their coffees. Why would they be?

In more of a hurry should be the huddle of French-speaking men — Port Moresby’s expat scene is very male — asking the waiting staff to ferry them more espresso.

These will likely be men from the French energy company, Total, managing the Papua LNG project that is planned to extract and pipe gas from the riverine swamps of the Purari delta, a place that has attracted speculators ever since the days of the steamship.

Estimated to cost US$10 billion, it’s the second in a line of mega-projects touted to reap almost unimaginable fiscal windfalls when it comes on line. Or perhaps that should be if it comes on line. The project has been delayed many times; the final decision on whether it will go ahead is due next year.

While these projects are spruiked as game-changers by PNG leaders, they seldom deliver transformational benefits. As the World Bank commented in a no-nonsense review of its in-country programs over the past fifteen years, “Papua New Guinea has abundant natural resource wealth, but this wealth has not translated into welfare gains for most citizens… [T]hree-quarters of the population live in multidimensional poverty.”

Most of the people at the Edge are ostensibly engaged in trying to turn around that bleak statistic.

Gordon Peake is a writer based in Washington DC. He has written books on Timor-Leste and the would-be nation of Bougainville. He notes that last week PNG prime minister James Marape survived his fifth vote of no-confidence by 75 votes to 32 and remains in his job. You can read the full article here