Devpolicy Blog

The dust may now have settled at Two-Mile Hill, but twelve hundred former residents of Port Moresby’s Rabiagini settlement remain homeless. They are the unfortunate victims of the latest of Papua New Guinea’s state-sponsored eviction campaigns. Forced to move into other crowded settlements scheduled for future demolition, they embody Port Moresby’s interlocking crises of housing insecurity, escalating violence and failing urban policy.

Palm oil is in around half the products on your supermarket shelf. It is also one of the world’s most socially contested industries. Coalitions of activists and consumers are mobilised around the view that palm oil is environmentally and socially damaging and should be limited, through boycotts or through policy. The environmental concerns are well-founded.

After midnight in Suva, a van parks near a settlement. The lights come on. A team steps out. People approach — some cautiously, some with urgency, some because a peer educator they trust has spent weeks building the relationship that makes this moment possible.

Papua New Guinea is home to an estimated one million persons with disabilities (PWDs): roughly 10-15% of the population. Over the past decade, PNG’s government has made significant policy commitments to support them, including the National Policy on Disability 2015-2025 and the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Despite these frameworks, most PWDs remain excluded from education, employment and community life.

In Dhaka’s Mirpur district, fifteen-year-old Rahim repairs mobile phones at a roadside stall, earning 200 taka (US$1.80) daily. Deaf since birth, he hasn’t been inside a classroom since age eight. When I ask his mother why he left school, she answers through a neighbour: “The teachers said they couldn’t help him.

This article draws on peer-reviewed research informed by analysis of Samoan media coverage. It reflects on Starlink’s entry into Samoa and what it reveals about public communication, policy and regulation during the entry of new technologies. Internet access varies across the Pacific Islands region. Data is more expensive in some countries than in others. Internet speeds differ between locations. Reliability of signal varies. Some communities remain without network coverage.

In July 2024, a group of students from the Australian National University attended an in-country field school in Papua New Guinea, funded by a New Colombo Plan Mobility grant. The field school focused on the political economy of service delivery and included meetings with stakeholders from the private, government and non-government sectors. We also met with students from the University of Papua New Guinea and Divine Word University.

The number of visitors to Papua New Guinea rebounded strongly in 2022 and 2023, largely driven by the reopening of international borders following COVID-19 travel restrictions. This recovery reflected pent-up travel demand, resumed airline operations and the gradual return of business and leisure travel. By 2023, total air arrivals had reached 70% of their 2019 pre-COVID level. However, in 2024, total air arrivals declined by approximately 11%, interrupting the recovery trend.

“Leaders” and “leadership” are a key focus of Australia’s engagement in the Pacific. Our regional diplomacy emphasises deepening engagement with Pacific leaders and leadership institutions, and our development program has a strong focus on supporting leadership as a key driver of change. In both diplomacy and development, the focus has often been on formal spaces.

The reforms to superannuation spearheaded by Sir Mekere Morauta in 2000 are regarded as among the most important in Papua New Guinea’s history. Certainly, those reforms succeeded in stabilising the sector and ending the mismanagement and scams that were a feature in the 1990s. But how have the superannuation funds performed since those reforms? That is a question that has received very little attention. In this article, we provide some initial analysis.