Go North, young man

Australia’s job market still a little too slow for you?

There may be some good news, if that is so.

Senior officials  in Papua New Guinea estimate that their country will need 10,000 new workers in the near future.

That’s right.  Papua New Guinea.

Our northern neighbnur  is about to become a Pacific powerhouse.

A $US15 billion deal, that the country’s Prime Minister, Michael Somare, has just signed with the energy giant Exxon Mobil is expected to double, perhaps even quadruple this still young nation’s gross domestic product.

The project is expected to produce more than 6 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas from the PNG Highlands for export, mostly to Asia, each year.

This would  should transform  PNG from a least developed country to that of a middle income nation.

PNG officials, though, concede that they will need help to achieve that.

Old colonials, though, need not apply.  The officials sai they will be looking for people with the sensitivity and good sense to respect local cultures.

There are risks, of course.

The long closed Bougainville mine, once the biggest gold and copper mine in the world, still serves as a salutary lesson.

However PNG’s veteran’s Prime Minister, Michael Somare, is determined to ensure that his government will not ignore the wishes of local villagers, in the new project area now, as it did in Bougainville in the 1980s

That, ultimately, is what led to the trouble on Bougainville, back then.

Mr Somare knows the dangers, only too well.

“Our people can be excitable,” he once said.

The arrival of the new project could not have been better timed,  for PNG.

The giant Ok Tedi copper mine, in PNG’s Western Province, is approaching the later stages of its life.

One estimate says it might close as early as 2013.

Ok Tedi, of course, has been a mainstay of the PNG economy for many years not only by  providing valuable jobs to its 2,000 strong, mostly Melanesian, workforce, but also through the taxes it pays to the national government.

Taking one of those 10,000 jobs, or one of the business opportunities associated with Papua New Guinea’s new mineral boom, would, of course, be a radical step.

It would require careful thought.  Your correspondent, though, once spent two years  working in the PNG capital, Port Moresby and another 20 months, much later, training young workers in the Solomon Islands capital of Honiara.

Those were great times.