PNG’s Diplomacy Is Stuck in Rhetoric—Mitna and Ako Explain Why

PNG’s diplomacy has too often been reduced to rhetoric. Successive leaders deliver striking foreign policy statements in Parliament or abroad, but the bureaucracy is left with nothing more than speeches. Without structures, strategies, or resources to sustain them, these statements evaporate. It is a cycle of rhetoric without results—and two authoritative voices, Philip Mitna and Lahui Ako, show us exactly why.

Dr. Philip Mitna, in his doctoral thesis Factors Influencing Papua New Guinea’s Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century, is blunt. PNG’s foreign policy, he argues, “remains weak and more personalised in individual political leaders”. For Mitna, the Department of Foreign Affairs has failed in its most basic task: to translate political declarations into sector-aligned documents such as white papers or national strategies. The system, he concludes, is institutionally incoherent.

The consequences are obvious. Foreign policy is reactive, episodic, and dictated by personalities rather than institutions. Prime ministers and foreign ministers set the tone with big statements, but without bureaucratic depth, these pronouncements fade. What passes for foreign policy is little more than a leader’s brand—policy as performance, not as a roadmap.

Ako, a career diplomat and commentator, reinforces this view from inside the system. As he observed in his book, for three decades, “respective foreign ministers have presented foreign policy statements to parliament as their signature intervention at the expense of another albeit formal foreign policy white paper which to this day is work in progress.” In other words, PNG’s diplomacy has relied on speeches in place of strategy. These statements, he warns, are ambiguous, shallow, and overwhelmingly shaped by the personalities of the politicians who deliver them.

The cover of Lahui Ako’s book Towards a PNG Foreign Policy White Paper captures the very challenge that, alongside Philip Mitna’s critique, inspired the creation of Divine Word University’s new postgraduate program in Foreign Policy Analysis.

 In his blog article, Ako sharpens the critique. He calls foreign policy a “game plan” that demands a whole-of-government approach—coordination, project management, and institutional commitment. Instead, PNG has clung to slogans like “Friends to all, enemies to none” or “Active and Selective Engagement” without ever producing the formal frameworks to back them up. Since independence, only one white paper has been written. Everything since has been politics without policy.

Here Mitna and Ako converge. Both show that PNG’s foreign policy is hollowed out by institutional weakness and over-personalisation. Mitna provides the structural analysis: weak institutions and an absence of coherent policy design. Ako provides the practitioner’s confirmation: diplomats working with ambiguous instructions, no resources, and no strategic framework. The diagnosis is clear—the system is broken.

Their differences, however, matter. Mitna looks at the theoretical and structural: why institutions failed to mature, and why the academic debate has lacked rigour. Ako zeroes in on lived experience: speeches without plans, slogans without budgets, and diplomats left to improvise in the dark. Combined, they give us the full picture of why PNG’s diplomacy is stuck.

The conclusion is unavoidable. PNG cannot continue to rely on rhetoric while neglecting strategy. A new foreign policy white paper is long overdue—not as another political slogan, but as a serious, resourced, whole-of-government framework. Without it, the country’s diplomacy will remain trapped in performance mode: leaders talking to the world while the bureaucracy has nothing to work with. That is the uncomfortable truth Mitna and Ako force us to confront.