Our government has received a lot assistance from China to build or upgrade public infrastructure in recent years.

This Chinese assistance is mainly in the form of loans of varying terms. As part of the deal, the Chinese have brought in their own machineries, tools, materials and manpower to do the work on the infrastructure projects. If you visit or pass through some of the infrastructure project sites across the country, you will see Chinese machineries, tools, materials and manpower being employed. On road projects, you will find Chinese operating dump trucks and other machineries and even physically working on drainages. These are work that Papua New Guineans used to perform in projects under different infrastructure or resource development project arrangements. In the early years of our nationhood we had a critical shortage of manpower to do just about all kinds of modern jobs including work on infrastructure projects. Our pioneer colonial mentors including foreign missionaries had to bring in the skilled manpower and also train our people. Our people were fast learners so they quickly learnt how to be cooks, carpenters, drivers and the like. The early roads, bridges, airstrips and jetties were built by the physical hands of our people using very basic tools like space, fork, crowbar, axe and saw and hammer that our foreign colonisers and missionaries introduced. Looking back at our modern history, we can read and hear great stories of our people in their multitudes building the roads by human hands, for example. Our people deployed their physical labour in these road projects under difficult conditions with little pay except for rations of salt, axe, rice, tobacco roll and canned food. We can look back and appreciate that the foundation of our modern country was laid by the physical labour of our people under the supervision of often hard colonial masters who stood by watching the work with their shot-gun and baton and colonial policemen. Some of the present road upgrades and rehabilitation, that Members of Parliament have boasted about in the media, are on those old roads built by the human labour of our people during the colonial times and neglected for decades since independence. We the post-independence generation owe it to our people of the colonial era who built our early foundational infrastructure with their bare hands basically for nothing compared to the millions of kina spent today on similar work in our 89 districts. In the years leading up to independence in 1975 and the years that followed, location of jobs was very active. Our initial graduates from colleges and universities were scooped up by the public service to localization positions held by Australians and other expatriates. It was by world standards, one of the most swift and easy locations processes compared to similar decolonization situations in other countries. Again, we ought to be thankful to our independence era leaders and our colonial mentors, the Australians for enabling a very smooth localization of jobs. My point is that we have a history of doing work on public infrastructure and other blue colour and white colour jobs as part of nation-building. Many of us are sons and daughters or grandchildren of those great Papua New Guineans who became pioneer labourers, truck drivers, nurses, medical orderlies, teachers and the like. We know what our parents and grandparents did to build our country. We hear great stories from them about their pioneering works to build the foundation infrastructure and deliver those early services in health, education, agriculture extension and the like. Their pioneering work should and must not be forgotten. It is part of our history that we must be proud of and it can inform our development endeavours at the present time and into the future. What our parents and grandparents did to pioneer the construction of roads, airstrips, jetties and other public infrastructure and provide public services shows our present-day people can do the same work. It informs us that our people had the ability and drive to build infrastructure on short notice with limited or no skills and training.In today’s development arrangements with our financiers such as the Chinese, we ought to factor in the reality that our people did and can do the work to build or upgrade public infrastructure like roads. We do not need an army of truck drivers, heavy equipment operators and the like to build roads from China from example. We do not need an army fishermen and office workers from the Philippines to work in the PNG-based fish canneries. Our people can do these jobs. What is needed from our government is a strong policy and legislation-driven will to secure and guarantee a lot of these jobs for our people and not to give in easily to the wishes of the foreign loan providers or multinational corporations. Our mandated leaders in Parliament and in the bureaucracy must have the strong will to vouch for Papua New Guinean employment and only allow for highly technical skilled jobs may not be filled by our people. We must have the national will to protect jobs for Papua New Guineans and retain the money on remunerations and spin-offs in the country.