PNG: The Rules of the Game (ATOM Study Guide)

How do you impose Western democracy on a land of 800 nations – and with no sense of being a single country? How do you get people who speak twelve per cent of the world's languages to speak with one voice about their own affairs? How do you convince the people of Papua New Guinea that Western democracy is such a great idea, anyway, when they have been practicing their own form of proto-democracy for thousands and thousands of years?

These are the key ideas that are explored in PNG: The Rules of the Game (Thom Cookes, 2007).

In the 2002 election, more than sixty people died. The 2007 election in July seemed set to be even more tumultuous than anything that had gone before.

The film focuses on three candidates at the 2007 election, but does so in the rich Papua New Guinean social, economic, cultural and historical contexts.

The three candidates are:

• Mal Kela Smith, the incumbent governor of Eastern Highlands Province, the hard-swearing former Vietnam helicopter pilot who has built an air freight empire stretching from the Pacific to the near Middle East and has become seriously rich – and deeply concerned about corruption;
• Julie Soso, one of the most powerful land-owning women in the region, who says the white men have failed to govern her country of 800 nations, and the black men have failed, too, so it's time for women to run PNG – women like her;
• Jon Yogiyo, the 'Coffee Candidate', the local coffee-growing magnate who wants to return to the days of the village Big Man, and run PNG as it was run before the coming of the Australian colonialists.

Behind this story is the Civics and Citizenship element of an experiment in democracy, where the notion of 'exporting' democracy is at the heart of current international conflict. It touches on the gorgeous ethnographic history of first contact, the Big Man system, and the culture of 'wontok', whereby every PNG politician owes absolute fealty to his language group.

The film shows that PNG is facing huge issues: like AIDS and wholesale destruction of the environment by multinational logging, mining and oil-drilling corporations.

Can the 2007 election help PNG face these issues?