Before the Australian Government's Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme was even formally announced, it had attracted comments in Australia that ranged from carping to congratulatory.
The inclusion of Papua New Guinea, in particular, has drawn attention to questions of governance, education, health and other social indicators in that country.
For example, the latest report in the Centre for Independent Studies' Issues Analysis series, The Bipolar Pacific (No. 98, by Helen Hughes and Gaurav Sodhi), paints a particularly dismal picture, and concludes that 'guest worker schemes' — even those far more comprehensive than the Pilot Scheme currently envisages — 'would not help the employment problems' in PNG and the other countries included.
The scheme's focus has also been questioned by Opposition Leader Dr Brendan Nelson, who recently explained to Neil Mitchell on radio 3AW his concern about 'health checks, security checks, compliance — how do we make sure that they're going to go back?'.
The guest worker issue thus provides yet another demonstration of the way that Papua New Guinea, and more broadly the Pacific, intrudes into political discourse in this country.
Separating rhetoric from reality, however, we have little idea of the ways that ordinary people in Papua New Guinea live their lives. Our understanding is shaped by catchwords and phrases such as 'raskols', 'corruption', and 'arc of instability'. We ignore, if we ever learned it, the history we have shared with the people of Papua New Guinea; a history about which, conversely, many Papua New Guineans are profoundly familiar.
Many would also agree that the small numbers of people to be included in the pilot scheme will make only an insignificant difference to the problems of under- and unemployment with which they are faced. But they see the symbolism of being, or not being, included in schemes of this sort and they warmly applaud the Australian Government's proposal to rule them in.
Earlier this month I visited Port Moresby to attend the Waigani Seminar held at the University of Papua New Guinea. This year's seminar is the first since 1997, and its welcome return to the country's intellectual public life was widely applauded.
Its theme was 'Living History and Evolving Democracy' and, along with the two-day symposium that preceded it on books and writing, 'Book2Buk', it drew an impressive array of speakers. It received much attention in the Papua New Guinean media and attracted crowds of interested and enthusiastic