Dame Carol Kidu, standing up for the marginalised ... and women’s empowerment

Formerly a teacher, Australian- born Dame Carol Kidu is PNG’s Minister for Community Affairs and sole female Member of Parliament. She became a naturalised PNG citizen by her marriage to a Papua New Guinean, the late Sir Buri Kidu. She has been revered both at home and internationally for her work with the marginalised in PNG and her contribution to poverty alleviation. In 2005, she was made a Dame of the British Empire and in 2009 became a Knight of France’s ‘Légion d’honneur’. A Member of Parliament since 1997 and holding her Ministerial post since 2002, she has announced that she will step down in the 2012 elections.

Why is community development so important in PNG?

Having married into PNG society and lived in a village type of environment for 40 years, I know that strengthening the community is the basis of the future of PNG. Turning the whole social development approach around from a welfare mentality [Ed: PNG has no social security system] into a development model based on community empowerment is a long, slow process. We’re starting to implement a completely new policy framework, initiated in 2002, of an integrated community development policy. Because of our extreme diversity, we cannot have a one size-fits-all policy from the top when it comes to ground level policy development, so the policy is quite a flexible one that can be adapted to the differences in culture throughout the nation. The policy very strongly acknowledges that family and community are the basis of PNG society and will remain so for a long time. If we don’t strengthen the inherent resilience of our people, social breakdown will rapidly increase in urban areas. Over the past ten years, some areas of the country have remained as they have always been, whereas others have been impacted by undetakings such as the PNG Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project (see separate article in this report on PNG’s rich mineral resources).

What is the nature of the social stresses?

There’s a complex mix. There are all those that have lived throught the change from a subsistence to a cash economy. In urban communities, the mix of alcohol and marijuana causes social breakdown. There’s also an increase in gender-based violence. Some people think that this is something from the past. It’s not cultural but symptomatic of the stresses in society and changes in male/female relationships. Adjustments that have taken place  over thousands of years in some societies are happening for many people in PNG in just one lifetime. But when you consider what our society is going through and all the layers of value and belief systems, we’ve done quite well so far to adapt.

Many people all over PNG want to be involved in developing its potential

The country has tremendous potential. People have the resources but were never given the knowledge or skills to utilise them in new ways that fit into the global society. In my own community which is an urban indigenous community (Moresby South) poor people tend to sell their resources –land for example   to the wealthy Highlanders who have royalties from the sale of oil. We need to be honest in PNG – all of us – and that includes my colleagues. Traditionally, land wasn’t owned but was in the custodianship of the clan and women had rights. In the 1960s, when I went out with the elders in the gardens, when we were still gardening and doing the traditional things, the clan chief used to say, ”this is so and so’s mother’s place” naming the women not the men. In doing so, they clearly recognised that women were the users of the land. Men are conveniently ignoring these subtleties now. Traditionally, no woman would ever have been alienated by being in a position of having no land. I am worried about such feminisation of poverty and am angered when I see the acquisition of land by those who are able and those who argue that it’s the order of things that those who are aggressive prosper.

Is land also being sold off to non-PNG nationals?

Officially, customary land cannot be sold to a foreigner without the clan’s agreement – that’s the official law   but it is happening. People who call themselves principal land owners sell off without clan permission. There are a lot of such things happening that are difficult for a bureaucracy to manage.

In your opinion, could aid agencies improve their approach to community development in PNG?

For development agencies, getting involved in community development often means not working in parallel with government. Although government systems may be weak, I think the development partners’ job is to help strengthen government systems and always remember that things that grow organically from the ground, in terms of responses to social situations, will always be more sustainable than an imported model from another country. Too often, people come along with imported models that worked well elsewhere, but do not address what has been happening organically from the ground here. This may be okay if it’s a question of building a road or water system, but when it comes to community development, we have to break the tendency to have lots of nice warm, fuzzy projects and really make sure that sustainability and ownership are taken on board.

Have you made changes in your own ministry’s policies?

If you decentralise a function without a budget to go with it, there will be problems. Disability, women, children and youth are all in my portfolio and under a 1995 law became decentralised functions of government but there has not been any transfer of funds for this policy from the budget. This is an area I’ve been trying to work on before I finish my term in parliament. I want to tie down in law that the national government will put x much in to support policies from my department.

Do you hope to see more female members of parliament following the next election?

We are hoping to take a vote next week [last week of May 2011] in parliament on the Equality of Participation Bill which is pushing for 22 seats to be reserved for women in parliament. It’s a very unpopular bill. I don’t know if we’ll get the numbers on the floor. It’s been a long, long hard struggle. We obviously need more women members. I represent 0.9 per cent of the parliament and I’m a naturalised citizen. I’m not the only female Member of Parliament ever. Post- independence, there were four and one minister. This was followed by a period of ten years with no women representatives. When I first came to parliament in 1997, there were two women and from 2002 to 2007, just myself.

Debra Percival