 Hello and welcome to this Australia Papua New Guinea Network special event here at the Lowe Institute. My name is Jonathan Pryk, Director of the Pacific Islands Programme here at the Lowe Institute. We're coming to you today from Sydney, which is on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I'd like to begin by acknowledging and paying tribute to the traditional owners, their and their elders, past, present, and emerging. I'd also like to thank the sponsors of the OSP&G network project for their ongoing support, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and our event sponsors Bank South Pacific and Coca-Cola Amatul. We're pleased to be able to host this event today to talk about the biggest issue in the P&G-Australian relationship at the moment, the global pandemic of COVID-19. P&G has been particularly hard hit by this pandemic in recent weeks, an explosion of case numbers in the nation's capital has sent alarm bells ringing, but the true picture is a nationwide sustained stretch of community transmission that's in case numbers skyrocket. To discuss the latest on COVID-19 and P&G, I'm pleased to be joined by P&G's Health Minister, the Honourable Jelta Wong, MP. Minister Wong has been the member for Gazelle of East New Britain and P&G's Parliament since 2017 and was first appointed to the Health portfolio back in 2019. He regained the post late last year, quickly finding himself in the middle of the government's response to this pandemic. Jelta Wong, thank you for joining me. Thank you, gentlemen. Good to see you again. Great to see you too. Minister, we've only got you for a limited amount of time here, so let's jump straight into it. You were among the first group of people in P&G to receive the vaccination this week. How did it all go? And how are you feeling now? I'm feeling great. One of the reasons why we stood up to take the vaccine first is to show our people, especially our health workers, who had doubts that the vaccine was untrue. There's a series of issues around the vaccine, just to show them that we took it and we've come out of it normal and it's protecting us more than anything else. Well, that's great to hear, Minister. And I do want to come back to this point of misinformation because it does seem to be a critical one impediment for the rollout of the vaccine in the country. But before we get there, the news we see in Australia coming out of P&G is very concerning. As a close watcher and I hope a friend of Papua New Guinea, I've been watching with a mixture of anxiety and alarm. But what is the situation on the ground? How is the pandemic trending in Papua New Guinea? We are alarmed. We also work every day to mitigate to make sure that it doesn't go overboard. There's new facilities we're opening up to ensure that we cater for people within the city. Outside of the city, it's a different story. Most of our little towns and villages live a distance from each other. It's only the ones that are very close to communities where you can see the transmission move really quick. But in most of rural areas within our country, they live far apart and with some of our members going out there as well as our NDLH going out there and telling people that they can isolate within their houses. And because of the food intake of our local people and the nutritious greens that we have up here, it's sort of slowed down the pandemic outside of the city. And it's within the city that is our biggest worry, where there's close need of people and the population is very huge. And we don't have the hospital space to mitigate to look after the people that are coming in at this point in time. But we have already opened up the another, the Aquatic Center to cater for that. And then we've got another two post sites to open up within the next month or so that we make sure that we have space for our people. So Minister, would you say that in the urban areas in Papua New Guinea, and I know that we do see cases in almost every province in the country, would you say that it's a situation of crisis? In our urban centers, yes, because per capita, we lose people on, we lose people every day. And it, our people, sometimes they don't think that it's the COVID, it's COVID, but we have information that it's tied to COVID. And that's why we, in the urban areas, we try to, like for Easter, for example, we have put up isolation centers and within the hospital itself, it's full. And most of our health facilities, their staff are getting COVID now. So the two weeks of isolation for those staff is causing a huge problem for us is because we have to look for volunteer staff to man our hospitals while our front-liners are done. That's why the vaccine roll-up is very important. And, you know, it's a health system already dealing with so many other really significant health challenges that putting COVID on top of it all is just a real difficult situation for the health sector to be in. But I did want to come back to this question on data. You know, we regularly hear that the testing and data about the scale of the outbreak isn't showing the true picture. What do you think about the government's data? And why do you think it's so difficult to get the real picture of the COVID situation in PMG? Well, firstly, it's because we don't do enough testing. And that's our biggest problem. We don't do enough testing. And when COVID first hit the public beginning, I was health minister for two months or something. So I came into the health system, a 45-year-old, 50-year-old health system that has been struggling to capacity just to keep going. And the first thing I wanted to do was to make big changes within the New Age to stabilize the whole country. But we have already, the government before I had already created reform within the health space. And once we got through the nitty-gritty of what the PMG health system was like, through this government, I've been pushing for more funding to go into building the infrastructure. But halfway, not even halfway, I'm two into my tenure as the health minister, COVID-19 hit. From that day, we've been on the move in front of mitigated. And then we came into the end of last year where I was moved from the health ministry because we had low numbers and everything. And we became complacent. And people started to think that because we weren't getting COVID-19 in the public beginning, we were never going to get it. So they moved me to civil aviation. And then after the impasse, I would move back to health to take over this pandemic that has risen. The people didn't realize that it doesn't happen overnight. It takes a while for the virus to spread through the country. And through the Christmas break, through the Christmas break, when everyone was out celebrating and not thinking about COVID-19 because we had a whole year where we had numbers really down, they just relax and the numbers started going right through the country. So we have a lot of issues that we're still working on. And we're trying to make sure that we, with this next isolation program that we're having with the NCC, we slow down the movement of people so that the virus doesn't move into the provinces. That does all sound very challenging. And I don't envy you've been thrown into the deep end like you have been to manage this crisis. But on a more optimistic note, you have just had the vaccine, part of a batch of 8,000 rapidly dispersed from Australia. But the question is what comes next? What plans do you have for a national rollout? And what are going to be some of the barriers in making a larger scale vaccination program reality? Well, thank you to Australia that we got our first 8,000 vaccines and we're making sure that our front line is getting first. We also, on the COVAX list there to get more vaccines. We've never had in this country, we've never had an adult vaccine go up. We've always had the children's ones. And that has worked really well. It's going to be a real challenge for us to do this vaccination rollout. But we have a plan, NDOH as well as our logistics teams that come up with a plan that we could roll out as the vaccines come in. So we're trying to push into rural areas. And the biggest thing with the vaccination rollout will be education. Our people need to be educated enough to know that this vaccine will help them in the future. And with all the dooms they say is coming out and saying all these things, it just makes life a lot harder for, as a struggling country with a health system that's struggling, we're trying to explain to them and give them a very good vaccine to help them prolong their lives. So pumping in his way of living was never to go, you know how in Australia you can, if you feel that there's a vaccine there to stop you from getting the food. If people go there and you get the vaccine and then it stops you from getting the food. Our people are not like that. Our people, when they feel sick and they feel like they're about to die, they go to the hospital. And then they ask for these things. So we're trying to change their mindset by getting them to go early, get vaccinated and then live their lives. And of course one of the biggest challenges with this education campaign will be combating misinformation. We get a lot of misinformation here in Australia. We have a lot of anti-vaxxers here too. But it seems like in P&G it's at a whole other scale. This misinformation seems to be spreading across a lot of the middle class. And what do you think is driving this? Is it Facebook? Is it culture? And what's going to be the, how are you going to overcome this challenge? That's a great question. It comes out of Facebook and social media. Everybody becomes an expert. When Facebook hit Papua New Guinea everybody became an expert. Everybody had a PhD. We've been sitting under coconut tree that we get PhD. So Facebook has given a medium to people. Whether they work or not, whether they sit on the street, they can say something that other people will believe. There's always one person or two or three or four people that will believe what they say. And that is our biggest challenge. You know, when people tell us that Bill Gates is behind all this, how could we say Bill Gates is behind it? The machines that we're using to better the life of humans come from a person like that. His family is giving money to, to fundraising events. One of the biggest philanthropists in the world. And then some nutcase turns around and puts it on Facebook that he's the guy that started the Colbex thing. And then it just generates through Facebook. I think Facebook is, is our biggest conspiracy theorist platform. Before, you know, they go through the proper channels where they can, if they have a vaccine, like just for example, someone has a vaccine, someone has a type of vaccine or a type of medication that may help people and they've used it in the bush, bush time medicine. So we have protocols. We will bring it down to MDOH. It goes through the scientific system. It goes through WHO. They check it all out and then they send it back to you and say, yes, you can use that. But no, these people go straight to Facebook, use Facebook as their advertising point, which Facebook gives them the opportunity to do. And then they sell it on the streets. This is dangerous. And this is a type of things like we have a million more people in our country that just sit on Facebook because it's cheap. It's easy and they can get their opinion on that. That's all it is. So Minister, would you say Facebook has some responsibility here? Do we need to be co-opting them into helping with this misinformation, Buddhist campaign against misinformation? I think Facebook has a lot of influence here and they need to be held responsible for some of the information that they leak out. Most of it, if I take you through Facebook now, some of the stuff that is unbelievably not true and they still push it out and they're supposed to have a program where it stopped these type of things. Facebook for me is like I use it. I use it. I use it to connect with my family. And that's probably about it. And then probably in the health space is to use it to get information out for people to make sure that they get vaccinated or there's a drug here, a new drug for babies or something. That's what I use Facebook for. So in that sense, it's great. But when you put it to a person that has a lot of time on their hands and wants to sit there and just keep saying the same thing and just to get people to like, to have a like, you know that there's something wrong. And Facebook must take responsibility on this and stop it. Well, it sounds like we need to set up a meeting with the Sydney officers of Facebook pretty quickly. Another one of the big hurdles here for P&G will just be getting hold of a vaccine. I mean, Australians know this all too well. We're really struggling here to get our rollout moving because of just supply issues. Australia has chipped in with 8,000 doses of our own domestic stockpile to P&G, but that's clearly just the start. I mean, much more is absolutely needed. What kind of support are you looking to, are you receiving from partners like Australia and others? And what more support do you think is going to be needed? Well, firstly, I want to thank Australia for being the first to send the 8,000 vaccines here. You know, P&G in Australia, people in Australia have a misconception about P&G and Australia's relationship and it goes way back. It goes decades. And thanks to the founding father, the late Michael Thomas Tamara, there was a relationship that forged it. They became very good friends and neighbors. Even when you're the Prime Minister now, the Honourable Jeff Marrape and the Honourable Scott Marston, when they get together, there's a relationship there that you can't have with. You can see that it's only between them. We look forward to them helping us with the COVAX vaccine rollout. They've been instrumental. The Australian Foreign Minister, the Prime Minister, Australian Prime Minister, they've been very instrumental in pushing the European Union to allow us to get up the line in the COVAX line and also to get more vaccines for our country. We're also grateful to India, who are the producers of the AstraZeneca vaccine as well, who have given us 1,000 free vaccines. And that comes in the next couple of weeks. We've also got the Chinese government that have given 200,000 of their own vaccines for the citizens of their country to be vaccinated. So we're getting help from everywhere. And it's good help. Help that we like just the other day from New Caledonia. We got the tents that came in to set up a 500 person bed with ventilators and everything. So that eases the burden of the pain because when I took over the health, there are no plans for this. There are no plans to build these isolation centers or anything. Our plan was to build specialist hospitals so that it takes the burden off the provincial hospitals so that people with specialist problems can go to the specialist hospitals. And we were in the process of doing all this and COVID-19 just really blew us apart. And, you know, now that we've got a plan towards our future because we know that COVID is going to be in public health. We know that COVID is going to be in public in this life for a long time. And we believe that the vaccine will be the key to containing COVID-19 in our country. So just on China, Minister, you mentioned the 200,000 cinepharm vaccines that have been offered. What are the plans that are going to be needed to approve that vaccine for distribution in Papua New Guinea? None other than everything is above bureaucracy. We, certain countries, certain institutions have different ways of bringing and allowing medicine to be used in the world. So we, as you know, we are very highly involved with WHO and we follow their advice on how to get the best medicine for our people. So the WHO have come up with a solution that the medicine, the vaccine that China is giving is already with WHO. So the WHO have come up with a solution for the WHO to give us, to give a green light. But with us, we've asked for especially medicine used only for the Chinese citizens that are within Papua New Guinea so that this 200,000 can be brought in so that their citizens can be looked after because the government cannot provide for their citizens. We've also seen reports in the past week about alleged mismanagement of funds in the government's COVID response in 2020 prompting the Prime Minister to order an investigation into the catering contracts for one of the main Port Moresby isolation facilities. Our Prime Minister, Marapa, also noted yesterday that his government would use this crisis as an opportunity to strengthen the weaknesses in the country's health systems and how are you about these allegations, these specific allegations? And is misappropriation of funds a major issue in the PNG's health system? I think any, but I came from a private sector. So, you know, when you're coming from private sector, you go into the public arena, the public service arena. It's a totally different ballgame. I agree with the, there's a investigation, ongoing investigation with the catering contract. By right, the lady should not be involved with them, but we have to give the benefit of the doubt to the person and they will be thoroughly investigated. I can only comment when the investigation is finished. But one of the things that I find that it's very, very hard to do and to make changes to for the betterment of the health department is that the bureaucracy doesn't allow you to, when they see that, that you're trying to ensure that they, they get better things and build better infrastructure. The process is such a long process. It goes to one part of the department, to another part of the department and then insist that it goes to another, to another place. So what I try to do is, I try to tell the secretary, you know, you have to find ways to move things. Things cannot wait because I'm, I'm from the private sector and I don't like to sit idle. I want to move and move and move. And you know, every day I talk to donor partners from the private sector, and they have a lot of information and wealth of equipment that they want to bring to our country. But when they do bring it here, you can go to one place and sit there for three or four months and just waste my time as well as their time as why they donated this thing to my country. So I need to strengthen. That was what my plan was to strengthen the foundation of the NDOH, and I think it was eradicated from, from the department, but sometimes because the NDOH has every other group of institutes that come in between like, you know, the National Doctors Association who sometimes don't want me to get a secretary that's an administrator and I feel that for the health department to move forward, they need administration skills, skills that will manage people. They want a doctor there or they do all these things and then it becomes a real political game that we end up playing. Sounds very, very challenging minister and cutting red tape seems to be a challenge for every bureaucracy across the globe and especially seems in Papua New Guinea. Another challenge in the health system is just being revealed quite clearly in this crisis is just the number of health workers in Papua New Guinea and the average age of these health workers. You know, they are, a question I'm asking is are there enough new health workers coming into the PNG system? How can we improve the number of health workers coming in? So doctors, nurses andcillary support, you know, you name it, coming into the system. Coming into the system we have a lot of nurses not as many doctors as I would like but we don't have a workforce that is big enough for this country. That is the bottom line. We need to look outside and bring in expertise where they could help with the specialist hospitals and especially training for our nurses and some of our HGOs. Some of our nurses, don't get me wrong, some of our nurses are world class. You will get one nurse in a rural area that can do more things, that can do something that the doctor can do that if this happened in Australia she would be taken to court and these are the type of nurses that are built on experience and many years of doing things and that's why when you see most of our APOs they're looked after by nurses and the doctor does a patrol once or twice a week just to check on the nurses and make sure there's an emergency procedure that the doctor takes over and I give credit to the nurses some of the sort of nurses in the world through the experience and every province I think now has a nursing school so we're building capacity for nurses and my worry is the doctors we should be giving them a bit more training and more perks and privileges to stay within country and work here some of our doctors are now living across the world they have better working privileges and packages elsewhere than they do here in our country and the ones that stay behind it to make sure they make a difference I think we can all agree that the Herculean effort of the health workers in P&G is one of the main reasons that the COVID situation is being held at bay as best as it can be before we leave you Minister we do have a few questions from some of our audience the first is from Sarah Kuhman what can members of the public including companies expect to get access to vaccinations that's a good question we do have a rollout plan what we'll do is after our next meeting when we approve the vaccination plan we'll put it on our website we have a medium that we can to make sure everybody is ready through the companies getting vaccinations there's a bit of a policy layover that we're still trying to work out to ensure that everyone gets a fair share of the vaccine and it's at the right price the price that is affordable we have another question during the crisis the hospital has been closed how serious do you think this issue is and what are the plans to resolve it the general hospital is probably the largest outside of P&G and it caters to five different provinces in different hospitals within the vicinity of the provinces that come to Monhagen so that should take some of the burden but that won't be ready for another six to eight months to a year we are working with Treasury at the moment to ensure that we get some funding up to Monhagen General Hospital to replace some of the doctors that are down sick for the nurses that's the same thing that we have in most of our staff are down with COVID and we're just looking at volunteers and how to get them to start working within the system to keep the hospitals open thank you Minister and final question from the Australian newspaper here in Australia Ben asks how many people does P&G want to vaccinate is it everyone and if so by when if I had my way everyone would be vaccinated but we've given a choice to people the Democratic country the Prime Minister has given them a choice we should have enough vaccines in the country to ensure that everybody that wants to be vaccinated will be vaccinated and we should have within the next three or four months enough stuff to allow people who want to be vaccinated to be vaccinated and we can get it out to the provinces thank you Minister we could go on talking about these challenges all day we're taking you away from your time and addressing these challenges and helping to fix them but I do want to leave with you with saying you have my sincere and I think everyone at the institutes sincere and indeed in Australia sincere best wishes and best of luck to addressing the significant challenges you're dealing with with the COVID-19 crisis so thank you to Minister Wong for joining us today and remember that we published a daily news summary at our OSP&G network website to help you keep tabs on the latest from Papua New Guinea thank you Minister Wong thanks Jonathan and thank you for your support always next time when the borders open up I hope to see you over here again don't you worry mate I'll be on one of the first flights I can't wait to get back to your beautiful country no worries take care thank you Minister and thanks today to our event sponsors BSP and Coca-Cola Amateur for their ongoing support for the OSP&G network and to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for its ongoing financial support of this project we'll be back again soon with another OSP&G network event we look forward to seeing you again soon