Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the report of the Australian Parliamentary Delegation to Papua New Guinea from 4 to 10 December 2022, and I ask leave of the House to make a short statement in connection with the report.

Leave granted.

I would like to begin by acknowledging my colleagues who were part of this delegation to Papua New Guinea, some of whom are in the House at the moment. Firstly, the leader of our delegation was the President in the Senate, our dear friend and colleague the Hon. Sue Lines. I want to acknowledge the member for Macnamara, who joins us in the House today, who was present, along with Dr Scamps from Mackellar. We were also joined by those from the other place. In addition to the President, we had the Hon. Linda Reynolds and Senator Mehreen Faruqi, and we were ably accompanied by Mr Alan Raine, who was our delegation secretary. I thank them all for their good hearts and camaraderie over the time that we were in PNG.

Of course, PNG is not just our closest neighbour but a very dear, deep friend of Australia's, and these delegations are a very important part of building on those existing relationships and being able to add to the deep commitment that both Australia and Papua New Guinea have to ensuring a stable, secure and peaceful region.

During the delegation we were very well briefed and accompanied by the Australian High Commissioner in Port Moresby, His Excellency Jon Philp, and his staff, who assisted us tremendously throughout our visit. We greatly appreciated the effort made to accommodate both the needs of the delegation and the wishes of both nations in ensuring a very successful visit.

A very big shout-out to someone who's become a very dear friend, I suspect, for the member for Macnamara, me and everybody else on the delegation, the Hon. Sasindran Muthuvel, the Governor of West New Britain. One of the terrific things that we were able to do was go and visit West New Britain, and we were joined by the Hon. Freddie Reu Kumai, the member for Talasea Open, whose district we were visiting. We travelled with both gentlemen throughout West New Britain, and their hospitality and generosity were really astonishing. We thank them deeply for that.

Some of the matters that we were able to talk about in a very frank and robust way were issues around ending violence against women. We know this is a profoundly disturbing part of Papua New Guinean society—and Australian society. We were able to speak very frankly at round tables with the services that were providing terrific support and new programs for women and children who were experiencing family violence. The Australian delegation participated in that. We shared some of the tragic stories from our own communities and the efforts that we seek to make in Australia to end what is a national scourge in our communities.

I also especially appreciated the UNICEF visit and briefing that we had, looking at education in Papua New Guinea. We got to meet amazing Papua New Guinean women who were trained in my home town at the University of Newcastle and who are now masters graduates and are doing outstanding work in terms of leading great education programs in their home communities in Papua New Guinea. I want to give enormous thanks to the team at UNICEF there for improving educational outcomes and the socioeconomic outcomes for children in PNG more broadly. We were very keen to look at what could be done and what was happening to help improve retention and completion rates of the students there.

We also got to visit and see the new facilities at the University of Papua New Guinea, which were financed through an Australian government contribution to build some new infrastructure at the university. Of course, the University of Papua New Guinea has very deep ties with the Australian National University and has had for a long time. As a young anthropologist I was one of the beneficiaries of all of that training in Melanesia, which my teachers took me through. For a long time, the Australian National University has had a Pacific studies program, and, indeed, many of the gentleman who taught me as a young woman found their careers in Papua New Guinea. So there are some very deep ties to build on there.

I would also like to add that, for many of us, it was very moving to see the Bomana War Cemetery in PNG. It's a very meaningful place for many Australians and, indeed, for many Papua New Guineans. It has been beautifully cared for and restored, and I want to assure all those families that the Australian War Graves people, in partnership with Papua New Guinea, are doing us the most tremendous service by maintaining the dignity of those who are buried in that war cemetery.

Enormous thanks go to the people of Papua New Guinea for their warm hospitality. To their leadership: I really look forward, as I know the President and others on the delegation do, to working closely with our dear neighbours and working on some of those challenges about ensuring that more women are elected to places like this in PNG as well. I know that is a task that many women in PNG also wish for themselves.

I present this report on behalf of all the delegation, and I certainly look forward to Papua New Guinea being able to return here with a delegation to the Australian parliament. I know that members in this House from all benches will absolutely want to be part of deepening those ties and relationships. We all want to see a stable, secure and peaceful region in the Pacific. Thank you very much.