Prime Minister
PRIME MINISTER MORRISON: Prime Minister, first of all can I congratulate you on becoming Prime Minister of our great and true friend Papua New Guinea. We have no truer friend than Papua New Guinea, a very true relationship and one that has been forged and developed and maintained through the best of times and in the most difficult of times. It is a great pleasure for me to formally welcome you here to Australia as a guest of Government. This is an honour we bestow on our great friends and partners around the world, and I’m very pleased that my first opportunity to do that has been not only with yourself but also with Papua New Guinea as our true friend.
I look forward to our discussions today. There are many areas where we are working together. I want to particularly welcome all of the Ministerial team that you’ve brought together at a very high level. It is a very senior delegation and we greatly appreciate the respect that has been shown in bringing such a significant team of Ministers here. But not only Ministers of your own government, but the Governors who sit behind you today. It is wonderful to have the Governors here, some whom I’ve met before – I have met Charlie [Benjamin] before up in Manus before, many times – and it's great to have that partnership forging between the provinces of Papua New Guinea and the states of Australia. And I know that the Finance Minister and the other Western Australians around the table are very excited about the fact that you will be all going to Western Australia later this evening, which I think will be a very important visit between Papua New Guinea provinces and the state of Western Australia.
But our objectives are very clear, and that is to ensure that our relationship continues to grow and build, that we enjoy the shared prosperity of our region and we encourage each other for the benefit of our citizens to continue to prosper, and for the health and wellbeing of our citizens. And we continue to forge the close people-to-people relationships we have between Australia and Papua New Guinea. We have engaged – particularly over the last 12 months – in a real step-up in our relationship with all of the Pacific nations, and there is no larger, stronger and more significant Pacific nation, of course, than Papua New Guinea. When I was in Papua New Guinea for the hosting of APEC, that was a significant milestone for Papua New Guinea and I think the world got to see what Papua New Guinea is capable of. And under your Prime Ministership I have no doubt they will see more of that and today we will have the opportunity to talk about how we can partner in PNG’s further development and prosperity in the future.
So I welcome you all, and on behalf of my Ministers and the delegation who are here today, and look forward to discussions in taking our partnership to a whole new level. Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER MARAPE: Thank you Prime Minister Morrison. Myself and my delegation here are extremely pleased and honoured to be received by yourself. Not only here in the Parliament House and the Cabinet Room, but also yesterday. When we arrived I placed on the record our greatest appreciation. We felt warmly welcome in a very cold winter here in Canberra.
[Laughter]
And so I think your warmness as a person-to-person adequately compensated for the coldness we felt as we arrived in Canberra.
Look, as you said, we echo your words. In our own foreign relations, although we have a foreign policy that goes like this. And since 1975 our founding fathers of our nation entrenched our foreign policy that still stands up to this point in time. We are friends to all, enemies to none, but a greater friend we believe is a friend we are sitting opposite right now and we deliberately chose to make our first visit to Australia – in my instance as the eighth Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea – and my colleagues who share the table with me in Cabinet, we felt that it was strategic and in the interest of our country. We share common borders, common history, common heritages and going forward, whether we like it or not, we are stuck in this part of the planet forever. And so we felt that as part of our Government’s contact with other governments in the region, our first contact must be with the Australian Government to ensure that we consolidate what we have and we improve on areas we need to improve going forward so that into the future as you can see Prime Minister yourself and myself arrived in politics in 2007/08 or thereabouts. But politics is a revolving process and our time will be up down the line, and your and my time will be… the younger generations will lead us. I think that personal rapport and person-to-person, leader-to-leader, government-to-government and people-to-people must go beyond the institutions of government. And I think what has transpired last night and into today is very warm and fruitful. We have issues to discuss on the table, but look, our discussions here should hopefully set the pace for our Ministers-to-Ministers, officials-to-officials to discuss as we come later on in the year. And so I did propose inside that we make this sort of an annual meeting with the leaders of our two countries. That should set the pace with our Minister-to-Minister as they change and ensure that we are all on the same page going forward.
But you know, many issues in PNG will affect and influence your life and your government in Australia and many issues in Australia will affect and influence life and government back in PNG. So we are always in the face of each other forever, as we have been in the past. And it is very important this rapport is at some years now, and I just thought we would accept the invitation when you placed your call in to me when I was elected into office as Prime Minister and for us to make the first visit. And so we kept ourselves on the same page as we will into the future.
It would be remiss of me not to appreciate every help since 1975, and even before 1975, the Australian Government and the Australian people have always made to Papua New Guinea. And after this point in time you still remain our number one supporter, whether directly in our budget support or indirectly. You still remain our number one government supporter, but also I think PNG has been one of the, if not Australia’s best place of investment. As I speak today, I am reminded that over $17 or so billion worth of investments Australian businesses have in PNG and more than 5,000 Australian companies operate in and out of Port Moresby, in and out of PNG. So PNG continues to be a great port of call for business investment as well as in a casual, social context, an individual context over a long period of time.
So it is very important that at a leader-to-leader level we set the basics, especially when Australia hears our assembly of new leaders that has come on board in PNG. You might be thinking what has happened up there, so we just thought we’d come and put our face to the name and tell you how we’re still human beings and we still have the same rapport and views on Australia. But there is room for improvement and we can work on to improve so that our relationship gets stronger and deeper and more meaningful. And in our view we want to be economically resilient and independent. Many of you said my leaders are sitting with me and those leaders that we left behind, they have the view that we can’t be a dependent, we can’t be spoon-fed from our partners in the region, our partners beyond our borders.
We need to be economically solid and strong, and a stronger, solid PNG needs a stronger, solid Pacific and stronger, solid region. And of course, Australia is safe and secure and we have been many times. Whether the World War II experience, in the Manus experience, until today we have always had our fair share of intervention and help across the Torres Strait just to ensure our friends in Australia are given a good night rest from as many intrusions as possible into Australia. So we will this year and we will always be there forever. But I think at this point in time, we just thought we would come and put a face to a name, and show to you what we are all about and as we go into the future, we can tidy our relationship and work on a better platform going forward.
So Prime Minister, I would at every chance say we have many, many MOUs and undertakings that we have asked for. We are proposing that as we come to the Minister meeting, maybe we can condense everything into one platform and we have one understanding between Australia and PNG and we work out way through based on a single platform, a single agreement and a single understanding.
But thank you very much for receiving us. We felt very warm, despite the coolness outside.
[Laughter]
We felt warm at the heart.
[END]