Residents on an Australian island next to PNG deal with a flood of unruly neighbours and immigration problems, writes Debra Jopson.

 

IT IS Faraway Land for most Australians, but a hefty new report from the Senate indicates that we should all pay more attention to that point in the far north where our soil comes closest to a neighbouring nation.

 

Saibai, a 20 kilometre by six kilometre blob of alluvial sediment so close to the Papua New Guinea mainland that village fires can be seen five kilometres away, is one of 17 Australian islands in the Torres Strait whose leaders have poured out their complaints to the Senate's foreign affairs, defence and trade references committee.

 

While written with Canberra restraint, the report, The Torres Strait: Bridge and Border is a tale of life at the edge in a border zone, where life can be hellish when the neighbours misbehave.

 

Local leaders have made claims of gun-running, drug smuggling and bands of PNG nationals striding down Australian streets with machetes and knives, while they helplessly await police based on another island to arrive by plane or boat.

 

As one resident told the Herald: "No one rings 000 up here. What is the point?"

 

But these are sporadic events. More pressingly, locals claim that their islands are being flooded daily with "medical refugees" from PNG and that while Australia gives millions in aid to Pacific islands to counter sea rise associated with climate change, not a cent has yet been offered for sea walls, which may be needed when king tides hit on January 20 and February 17.

 

The islanders get little recognition for being the "eyes and ears" of the nation on its northern border but carry the "silent burden" of visits from their neighbours, according to the Torres Strait Regional Authority.

 

This is the only local council area in the nation dealing with living on an international border, yet the locals who stop PNG boats from reaching mainland Australia are unpaid, or paid the equivalent of the dole for their work, the authority's chairman, Toshie Kris, says.

 

"The Torres Strait is doing this for the whole country for nothing," he says, yet it is seriously under-resourced.

The Torres Strait mayor, Fred Gela, tells of seeing 15 PNG nationals on the streets of Saibai brandishing machetes. Locals organised a police task force from across the border to come and arrest them at gunpoint, he says.

 

Mr Gela's Torres Strait Island Regional Council told the committee that it was concerned about gang rapes over the border and of a woman being abducted from the Torres Strait and kept prisoner in PNG. It told of smuggled sly grog and drugs and of boats and tools lost through theft.

 

"During the committee's visit to Saibai, local leaders gave similar accounts of drugs passing through the strait. They referred to incidents of vandalism and trade in illicit drugs, such as marijuana, and asked for the border to be treated as any other international border," says the report.

 

Police, immigration officials and customs all downplayed these complaints, possibly because the statistics are not startling.

 

Queensland government officials said the level of criminality in the region is relatively low and the cost of a police presence on every island would be too high.

 

But few witnesses who gave evidence to the committee - chaired by Liberals Helen Kroger and Russell Trood, with Labor's Mark Bishop as deputy - denied the locals' other chief gripe: that the PNG visitors are draining their resources as they clamour for health care.

 

These kin from the Third World drawn to the First World health services are displacing elderly residents in doctors' surgeries, occupying valuable hospital beds and using up scarce water supplies, local leaders told the committee.

 

On one day in March this year, 60 per cent of the patients in the Thursday Island hospital were PNG nationals, a proportion which was "not unusual," the Queensland Health representative, Bronwyn Nardi, told the foreign affairs, defence and trade references committee.

 

More than 99 per cent of the patients using Torres Strait specialist mobile units are from Papua New Guinea, her department said.

 

While the Queensland government exercises a humanitarian approach to PNG nationals who arrive at its doors sick, injured or in labour, Torres Strait locals fear that the visitors may bring HIV/AIDS, dengue fever, malaria and tuberculosis with them.

 

"We know that in Papua there is an extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis which is essentially a death sentence," Ms Nardi said.

 

For the moment, because of a cholera epidemic on Daru, a nearby PNG island, the flow of people across Australia's most porous border has been stopped.

 

But in normal times, there are 59,000 "people movements" between PNG and the Torres Strait annually. About half of them are our northern neighbours streaming into the outer islands without customs clearances, health checks or even passports. They can arrive without the usual checks because of a treaty which came into force in 1985, designed to ensure that the traditional ties between the inhabitants of the neighbouring nations continue.

It is a sensitive measure which many Torres Strait Islanders want to continue, but with better controls to ensure visitors qualify as traditional inhabitants, that they behave while visiting, do not overstay and do not restrain resources.

 

All the PNG visitors need to get to the islands is a dinghy.

 

Under the Torres Strait treaty, people from 13 villages on the Papua New Guinea south coast can visit the outer Australian islands without immigration checks to conduct traditional activities, which include gardening, hunting, fishing, ceremonies, barter and trade.

 

Visiting a medical clinic is not a traditional activity, but the South Fly district of Papua New Guinea's Western Province is so poor, so lacking in any health services, that it is not surprising that nearby Australia beckons.

This is "the most marginalised province in Papua New Guinea and basically in Port Moresby it is seen as rubbish country ... not considered to be terribly useful, productive, or important," an academic, David Lawrence, told the committee.

 

Daru, with its fluctuating population of about 13,000 people - higher than all the Australian islands of the Torres Strait - has just one hospital, he said. On this island, more than 30 people recently died of cholera and more than 800 others were infected, prompting Australia to close the border in October.

 

"We do not even know that there is actually one doctor for the whole of the Western Province," Lawrence said.

Australia has tried to assist with millions of dollars worth of aid. But the infrastructure it builds is often not maintained. The results of the federal government's efforts "can be seen rusting in the coastal villages along the PNG coastline," Graham Smith, once a project manager for an aid program there, told the committee. A Torres Shire councillor, Pedro Stephen, said lack of maintenance meant "you have a health centre out there and within 12 months the screen door cannot shut because it is frozen due to the salt content".

 

"Millions of dollars have been spent by the state to build all the health centres but there is no money to maintain those health centres," he said.

 

AusAID itself has noted that the Australian assistance could be done better, the Senate report said.

The Australian islands have been "inundated" by the residents of the 13 PNG villages covered by the treaty and another 16 that are not, many flocking to local health services, Toshie Kris says.

 

But "you cannot turn people away from your doorstep when someone turns up sick," he says.

 

Earlier this year, a strategy for tackling the effects of climate change, launched by the former responsible federal minister, Penny Wong, stipulating the amount of money needed for sewerage and water reticulation, housing and roads, is still unfunded, Mr Kris says.

 

He wants locals to be given properly paid police and border protection jobs, warning that if it were not for the islanders' good work, an immigration detention centre would be needed in far northern Queensland to deal with the PNG nationals who could use the Torres Strait as a "highway" to the mainland.

 

But geographically challenged officials make it tough for leaders like Mr Kris to get action.

 

"There have been cases where we talk to department people and until we produce a map, they don't know where we are ... People are making a decision on our region and they don't even know where we are."