Audio Excerpt – Justine McMahon:

“The landslide occurred at about 3am, in the morning, so everyone would have been asleep in their houses.

So my name is Justine McMahon. I live in the Highlands. I'm in Gorakhpur, in Eastern Highlands. I'm the country director of Care in PNG. I've been at Care close to eight years now, so yeah, a bit of a dinosaur.

Audio Excerpt – Newsreader:

“We're starting in Papua New Guinea, where more than 2000 people have been buried alive from a landslide which hit a remote village.”

Audio Excerpt – Justine McMahon:

“They would have had no warning. Ah, the noise that accompanies something like that is enormous. And it is absolutely terrifying for the survivors.”

Audio Excerpt – Newsreader:

“Many locals fear that they may not be able to find or retrieve the bodies of their loved ones and give them a proper burial.”

Audio Excerpt – Justine McMahon:

“It wasn't just dirt that came down. There were huge rocks and boulders that came down as well. Many of them, possibly, wouldn't have understood what was happening. They would have had very little time to react. It must have just been a horrendous situation.”

[Theme music starts]

ASHLYNNE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ashlynne McGee, This is 7am.

2000 people buried alive - it’s really hard to comprehend. And to see those videos days later of locals digging with their hands in the dirt, is a reminder of just how difficult it is to respond to this disaster in a country that’s just four kilometres from the top of Australia.

The PNG highlands were already a remote, inaccessible and dangerous part of the world and now, it’s even worse.

Today Care’s country director Justine McMahon, on why getting in there to help is so har. And journalist Jo Chandler, on what she fears may happen next.

It’s Wednesday, May 29.

[Theme music ends]

ASHLYNNE:

Jo, you’ve reported from Papua New Guinea so many times over the years. When you first heard about the landslide in PNG, what went through your mind?

JO:

I was thinking about the remoteness of this place and about, really, the lack of capacity within PNG to respond to an episode this extreme, this devastating. I mean, by all accounts, like lots of places in the Highlands, there's no functional roads here. The only way in and out of the afflicted area is by helicopter. There's obviously, you know, limited resources to be flying those in and out. And so I guess the first thing I was thinking about was just the utter devastation.

Your listeners may well have heard some of the reports from Justine McMahon and she’s the Care Australia country director.

Audio Excerpt – Justine McMahon:

“In Enga province, there's one main highway and it goes all the way from the coast in Lay right up through Enga, through the provincial capital and, in terms of the people, it's a rural community. And so, many of the people are subsistence farmers. Most of the houses would be built out of bush materials. So even a minor landslide, if there's such a thing, wouldn't withstand something like that, let alone a landslide at the scale that we've had.”

JO:

An event like this, if it not only blocks the road, it blocks the rivers. So you've got, you know, water being displaced, you've got crops being lost, you've lost whatever access, which was probably minimal to start with, to basic services like health. And people become utterly isolated. And just the fear in that community about why has this happened to us, it just doesn't bear thinking about.

ASHLYNNE:

So with this sense that the estimate was about 670 odd people missing, but now that number seems to have risen quite sharply. Why is it so hard to know just how many people are affected?

JO:

I think that a lot of the estimates at the moment, as I understand, are coming from, kind of, guesstimates about how many houses were in these locations and what would be the kind of average number of people that might be inside each one of those houses on any given night. Who knows? Because I understand there's been quite a lot of tribal fighting in this particular area, at least over the last year, maybe a bit longer. Some of it may go back to the last election, so some political rivalries from the 2022 election and, these highlands areas, particularly where they're close to a big mine and you have, really substantial disputes among landowners about who are the rightful beneficiaries of any royalties, payments that jobs that are coming out of these, tend to rile up some really quite fierce rivalries and fighting. And so, what that means is when this fighting breaks out, people run, they flee. Because their homes, their whole villages, get torched by these gangs. And so you end up with these massive populations of internally displaced people.

Audio Excerpt – Justine McMahon:

“I know that PNG gets a bad rap in the media. The Highlands, the people are overwhelmingly generous and kind. But, you know, there are times when conflict and violence can flare up really quickly, and you always have to be on your toes. The sad thing about this is invariably the people who suffer are the women and children, and the elderly.”

JO:

Often women and children, but often, you know, elderly people, you know, the men as well, will go and move into a household with some of their wantok's, they're part of their community. They could be very crowded or they might have fled the other way. So I do feel there's a lot of guessing here. Maybe the electoral role eventually might be a way to try and sort of pick your way through it, but even then, that doesn't account for people if they've been fleeing because of the violence.

ASHLYNNE:

I guess just listening to you say that, there's no good place for a landslide to happen, but this sounds like the worst possible place. It sounds catastrophic.

JO:

Yeah, I guess I should, what I should draw a picture of is the access to services and what will be playing out now. So in this particular area, as I understand it, there was one sort of functional Seventh Day Adventist church run hospital that's been operating on and off, depending on whether there's been fighting going, whether they've had power, electricity available. Then there's the Wabag General Hospital, which is in the provincial capital. It's like many hospitals, provincial hospitals in Papua New Guinea, really poorly staffed, really rundown. Its capacity to support this in this particular incident is going to be pretty poor.

One of the things that interested me from the outset on reporting on Papua New Guinea was that I've had a long interest in looking at, you know, human development indicators and development issues, health issues, maternal care. And I remember looking at some of the indicators around those basic things in relation to Papua New Guinea and being absolutely horrified at how bad a lot of these numbers were. And the Australian government, you know, I think Papua New Guinea has long been our major beneficiary of Australian aid, but I'm constantly surprised at how little interest and engagement there is in this country, which is our closest neighbour, our former colonial responsibility. And it is, it's beautiful. It's beguiling. It's one of the most fascinating places on the planet. And yet we don't engage in the best or the worst of it. And I'm just really curious about this blind spot we've got around this amazing neighbour.

ASHLYNNE:

After the break, Australia’s legacy in PNG and what we owe our closest neighbour.

[ADVERTISEMENT]

Audio Excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“Papua New Guinea is our nearest of neighbours and our closest of friends. We stand with each other in the good times and the bad. At this most tragic of times, I want the people of PNG to know Australia is there for them and always will be…”

ASHLYNNE:

Jo, we’ve been talking about Australia’s relationship with PNG over the years and so much of it seems to centre on our financial interests there. You know, the mines and energy projects Australian companies own or invest in.

JO:

We have some corporate interests involved in, you know, some of these big companies that are active. And when you went looking for information about Papua New Guinea, the only indices that you would generally find in the mainstream press were in the financial pages tracking the fortunes of mining companies, up and down and there was just so little reflection beyond those figures around well, what does that project actually mean on the ground, what's the social licence, what are the environmental and social implications of these projects? What are the guarantees that they're going to deliver to communities what they want? So, some of the first reporting I did was really to try and poke around some of those issues. And 15 years later, it's still a quest... There's still questions that remain completely open, really until the rise and rise of China's interest and the geopolitics began to bite in this part of the world. Still, most of the reporting you ever saw on Papua New Guinea was related to, you know, the commodities stocks and the stock market.

The story that comes up again and again when you go back to the Ok Tedi mine, the Bougainville mine, the PNG LNG development up in the highlands and the Porgera mine, is this cycle of expectation and positioning and this belief that these communities are going to be able to transition, that they're going to get the services they desperately need for health and education, they're going to get jobs, they're going to get roads. You have to understand that the PNG state is almost entirely absent from these communities. They're just not present. Your entire survival is largely going to be about you and your family and your wantok's and what you can do to safeguard what is yours, which is your land. And so when there's then a development of a resources extractive project that is going to impact on your land, there's that whole cycle of positioning to make sure that you get your share of it, and your community does. But the wash up is often that the jobs aren't there, the services aren't there. And you end up with this very damaged and disenfranchised, particularly young men but communities more broadly, that have been really devastated by, you know, a generation of expectation that's turned into nothing. And that's when you get these eruptions of tribal violence which don't fit the model of what occurred. You know, certainly tribal violence is part of Highlands culture and life but it's sort of corrupted and exaggerated by the overlay of modernity, expectation, money and mining and extraction and colonialism. You know, all of its come at them and it creates this stew that is just so potent in a context of such desperate need for basic services.

ASHLYNNE:

The Australian government is sending aid to Papua New Guinea, I wonder what your view is on this. When a disaster like this hits, what is our responsibility as a country?

JO:

I think one of the things that, as well as really getting in there with some long haul aid and understanding this is not going to be immediate, this is going to take years to recover for these communities, particularly if the landslide has blocked roads and rivers. We're talking about really long term displacement. But I think it has to be about more than emergency response. And it's about thinking about how to provide, you know, a functional hospital system that will not only respond to the needs of this community right now as they recover, but will also be fit for purpose going forward from here. There are a lot of reports of extreme rainfall events occurring within the Highlands in recent times. I've spoken to a couple of my contacts, one of whom, Professor Mike Burke, he's an agricultural specialist who's been reporting in and from Papua New Guinea for well over 40 years, and he was telling me that he's only recently come back from a trip to the Eastern Highlands, so the other end of the range, but he was completely shocked at the the rainfall events that he experienced when he was there and described them as being quite out of character to the sorts of events that historically have occurred in the Highlands. And obviously determining whether this event might be linked to rainfall which is outside the normal course of things, could it be attributable to climate heating and certainly, you know, there is plenty of evidence, anecdotal evidence, across Papua New Guinea of massive changes to rainfall patterns. But there's been so little work. So in terms of thinking of where do we go from here? I guess, how do we set up systems that are not just about the band aid at the end of the emergency, but anticipate what's coming and build resilience into that, into the, emergency response and into the medical and health systems for the long term.

ASHLYNNE:

Thank you so much for your time today Jo.

JO:

No problem, thanks very much to you.

Audio Excerpt – Ashlynne McGee:

“And hey, Justine, what do you wish people knew about what's going on there at the moment? People in Australia?”

Audio Excerpt – Justine McMahon:

“I think what we've seen from, you know, the news footage and other reports is that people are desperately trying to dig with their hands to recover their loved ones. And I think what would be good for people to know is the resilience and the determination of local people. Yeah. So... Sorry I get emotional about that. But that would be, yeah, that would be the main thing.”

Audio Excerpt – Ashlynne McGee:

“What about that in particular makes you feel sort of emotional?”

Audio Excerpt – Justine McMahon:

“I think because these are ordinary, ordinary people who don't have a lot. They're rural people. They may be described as simple, in terms of they don't have a lot of assets. They have a small… Yeah, they have, probably have no bank accounts, but they care very deeply about their community and about their villages. So that's the great strength of PNG.”

Audio Excerpt – Ashlynne McGee:

“Thank you very much for making time for us.”

Audio Excerpt – Justine McMahon:

“No worries, Ash. Thanks very much.”

[ADVERTISEMENT]

[Theme music starts]

ASHLYNNE:

Also in the news today…

The international president of Doctors Without Borders, Dr Christos Christou, has urged Australia’s government to take action, including sanctions, to force a ceasefire in Gaza.

Dr Christou was in Canberra addressing the National Press Club, when he said it was now the responsibility of governments like Australia’s to act, saying aid workers could only do so much, quote, “I think we still try to find the words, we cannot find them. We tried to collect the evidence. It is not for us any more.”

And,

The ABC has denied claims published by the NewsCorp Newspapers that there was an emergency board meeting held to discuss comments made by 7:30’s Chief Political Correspondent Laura Tingle.

Over the weekend, Tingle said at a ticketed Sydney Writers Festival event that quote, “we are a racist country, let’s face it”, and that Peter Dutton’s promise to reduce immigration risked reviving racial divisions in the community.

That's all from us at 7am today. We will see you again tomorrow.

[Theme music ends]