'In the Long Run ...': Australian Colonial Labour Policy in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea

Abstract

The basic dilemma in Australian colonial labour policy in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea can best be stated as a question: How could the Administration create the workforce it needed and yet control it? At first the creation of an indigenous workforce was the primary object of labour policy. After 1945 the emphasis gradually shifted to one of control. Finally in the early 1960s as part of this effort to control the growing indigenous working class the Administration legislated a modern industrial relations system.

These developments are discussed chronologically with emphasis on the basic con tinuity of colonial policy. It is argued that this policy was not simply paternalistic, as various commentators have suggested, but that it aimed quite consciously to lay the foundations of capitalism in Melanesia. Labour policy had a particular role to play in this task in creating the workforce needed to fructify foreign capital and in con trolling it in the interests of that capital.