If Australia had it still, do you think it might play any part with Australian politics if it had become a State?
Let's work with a 30 year rule. Australia has incredibly repressive information laws, and 30 years and no names might help. So lets speak of the development of the state of Papua New Guinea to 2013-31= 1982.
Not much room in there.
Assuming that Gorton† was laying the basis for territorial and eventual state entry.
1970: PNG 2,553,712, Australia 12M.
PNG would have to be admitted as a state, directly, or Australia would face significant opprobrium from the world community. Without disparaging Gorton's memory (and I have every right to, given that he's dead; a right I don't have in relation to the living) I am strongly assuming that the racist nature of Australians in this period, as opposed to later periods' different racist complexions, would result in preparation for admission as a territory, with a hand wave about certain developmental conditions needing to be met before entry as a state. This is assuming that the enabling referendum got up. Which it could as the dog-collar / citizenship referendum demonstrates, as does the general shift to the left in the period.
Assuming that a Labor government follows on, they are likely to try to use federal powers to change the situation in PNG, probably from an assimilationist stand point. The "multiculturalism" of the actual ALP government we saw in the historic early 1970s was shallow, tokenistic, and assimilationist—so for that matter has Australian multiculturalism been generally. While the relationship between Colonists and Indigenous people generally is fraught; at least Australia in the 1970s isn't in the "why not kill them all?" or "systematic rape / culture destruction" modes of governance. At least not in PNG. And Australia can't disarm PNG.
One advantage for PNG is that the ACTU and other peak union bodies might take unionising PNG workers more seriously if eventual incorporation as a state is on the table. I don't see this tendency as being changed by the change of government that will happen as the "unrestrained period of wages and prices growth" runs headlong into international recession.
Finally, government in the late 1970s is going to come under systematic attack by a burgeoning left movement in the cities of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. This is likely to include an anti-apartheid and anti-racist element in relation to PNG. This may result in a longer term exclusion of Torres Strait Islander indigenous identity, which could be overshadowed by PNG indigenous identities in politics.
Australia is viewed with disdain by many countries. The common comparison of Indonesia taking West Papua (and Timor Leste) and Australia taking PNG is made continuously. There is upset in many regions of PNG over mining exploration, though this is nascent.
By the early 1980s, PNG is still not admitted as a state, having failed to meet the "development" goals required, ie: the "white" hurdle as anti-apartheid activists in Australia call it. The Maoist factions in Australia have been busy sending activists North, and are getting a hearing.
I'm not willing to cross the watershed of 1982, if there's one place that Australia has gone backwards in politically since the 1970s, it is freedom of speech.
Finally, and most importantly, the impact of incorporation on the Australian Film Industry is a positive one, particularly as the South Australian film body sends producers to PNG, and as ABC's dual role as a coloniser and as a witness opens PNG up to the Metropolitan Australia's imagination.
Braver souls in freer nations may wish to explore more modern themes.
yours,
Sam R.
