another view - what the national reported

A PANEL member at the PNG Update seminar in Sydney has dismissed the bleak picture of PNG painted by Prof Allan Patience. He told a World Vision questioner that Prof Patience’s suggestion in the SMH that “PNG was a vast administrative mess” and that the country needed “massive international intervention” was more rhetoric than substance. “I see some understandable impatience in the comments,” he said. Earlier the director of the Australian National University’s Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government Andrew MacIntyre said people in regional countries like Papua New Guinea were offended by comments that their country was a failing state. “It is a state that is here to stay,” he said. "Such negative comments by academic and other commentators were due to “a misreading of the scale of problems”. With increasing Australian intervention in the region, Mr MacIntyre said Australia needed to try and exercise “modesty” and “be really careful about not getting a rush of blood. Australia cannot solve the problems of Timor Leste than the United States can solve Iraq,” he said. "Surges in development assistance could be unhelpful. It is more important what Papua New Guinea itself needs to do. The fiscal discipline showed by the Somare Government itself represented “enormous progress”.