Engage all stakeholders…
Engage all stakeholders in decisions that affect their future. Full stop.
I wrote about the seed of this opinion in Bringing out the best in people. Here is an excerpt from that publication about education in Papua and New Guinea in the 1960s: “It’s the education of the elite — we need to bring the cream to the top and prepare them to rule the nation”. She was teaching me … the Australian government’s education policy for the region. I was a girl from the poor inner suburbs of Melbourne. I didn’t like the sound of what I was hearing. “But what about those who don’t make the cut? What have we prepared them for?” It was a question without an answer …
It seemed to work fine for the first 2 or 3 years. But by the time the children had bordered away from home to attend classes in grades 3, 4 or 5, many parents and villagers expressed dissatisfaction with the return on their investment: they had bought the line that “we are taking your children to find the leaders — not just of your district but of the new nation”. Those chosen would be leaders of the Politik Pati (Political Party) — for ‘Pati/Party’ read ‘sing-sing’, the great nationwide sing-sing of all Papuan and New Guinean people groups. Why was their child — their investment — being discarded and sent home in disgrace?
Of course the Australian government did not have the intention to bring shame upon the children. They did not intend to disengage children from their village roots. They did not intend…..
I came home in the late 1960s determined to one day research what went wrong. My opinion has held — Australia did not engage all stakeholders in decisions they made in Canberra, decisions that affected the future of the emerging nation of Papua New Guinea. What I had observed even then was that many children became disengaged when they were spat out of the system. There were very strong communities and villages. But there were also emerging communities that simply could not understand what was happening. So much trust had been placed in the unknown but what they understood as a certainty was only a possibility. What happened to those children? Did they integrate back into village community? Did they drift away to peri-urban settlements to try to find a future from Westerners? After all, many were literate in English and English speakers had stripped their dignity — they owed them a future didn’t they?
So now I am researching what actually happened.
