Eminent speaker series – breakfast with Dame Carol

In this compelling address to an influential audience, Dame Carol Kidu, former PNG cabinet minister and MP for Port Moresby, speaks of the pitfalls of unplanned development in urban areas in Papua New Guinea. The British Empire medallist called for Pacific-appropriate approaches that recognise the central place of kastom to Melanesians in urban planning.
 
Dame Carol described the dispossession of indigenous Papua New Guineans on customary land resulting from urbanisation and a combination of social and political factors in a breakfast roundtable meeting hosted by the Vanuatu-based Pacific Institute of Public Policy (PiPP).
 
In 2010 as PNG Minister for Community Development Dame Carol spearheaded PNGs first National Urbanisation Policy designed to recognise the rights of indigenous people living in informal settlements in her country. Despite massive unemployment and rapidly expanding squatter settlements around PNG no policy existed to accommodate the expansion, movement and cultural transition of its people.
 
Dame Carol appealed to the influential audience to consider the interface between kastom and modernity when she called for the creation of unified and peaceful urban environment models to address the increasing melting pot of cultures in urban areas in PNG and the Pacific region.
 
The Pacific Institute of Public Policy (PiPP) is the region’s leading independent policy think tank. PiPP’s Eminent Speaker Series is aimed at providing a regular forum for frank inclusive, non-partisan policy discussions. PiPP aims to assist opinion-formers and decision-makers by hosting events to promote relevant informed discussions to foster awareness of the changing geopolitical environment and the essential nation-building processes required to tackle the challenges of development in the Pacific Islands.