Economics before politics– a colonial phantasy

Abstract

SummaryI shall now try to recapitulate the argument of the paper and to draw a conclusion from it.The early pages gave evidence that, although the Australian government during the 1960s took the initiative in setting up the constitutional framework for a democratic polity, on the whole they assigned primacy, especially in the second half of the period, to policies of economic development. Without entering into the merits or successes of those policies themselves, I attributed the basic order of priorities to a mixture of motives and assumptions.The first assumption was that Australia's colonial responsibility and her commitment to heavily subsidised economic development required restraints on political development, and hence the prolongation of colonial dependence. The conflict between this assumption and Australia's trusteeship obligations could be rationalised by the notion of cautious ‘preparation’ of the people for self‐determination, under Australian official guidance, and with the bait of continued Australian aid. This rationalisation seemed to be supported by a ‘vulgar’ Marxian belief in the primacy of economic activity and the secondary importance of political and other social functions. However, it was also hoped that economic change need have no awkward political repercussions. To sustain that hope, it was further assumed that while the colonial regime lasted, the government of Papua and New Guinea could be treated as essentially an administrative task, untrammelled by the claims of autonomous political ideologies and interests.If the policy makers for Papua and New Guinea held such a set of assumptions, consciously or otherwise, it would go far to explain some of the leading features of the country's governmental history in recent years: the strength of its economic planning machinery and the lack of sophistication in its administrative and political dealings; the relatively perfunctory efforts at political ‘preparation’; the attempts to keep local government and the public service ‘non‐political’ and to contain incipient politics in the House of Assembly; the paternalistic controls over members of formal government institutions; above all, the failure to maintain meaningful communication with the groups of people most profoundly affected by the incidence of economic development itself.For experience had falsified the basic assumptions of policy, so far as they accord a primary role to economics, relied on a comfortable continuance of the colonial relationship, and conceived government mainly in terms of administration. Politics the demand for the reconciliation of conflicting interests by autonomous negotiation—had erupted in local government, in the House of Assembly, in political associations, and in the villages. I t had erupted in spite of the assumptions of the regime—and also because of them, for the more rigidly such beliefs are practised, the more violent is the reaction likely to be.The conclusion, then, is that politics is independent of economics, and interdependent with it. In the government of Papua and New Guinea, as of any such country, political skills are as important as economic planning if economic growth is to be matched by political stability.