Nobody in Port Moresby Is Off the Record

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

In October 2003, an American intelligence officer stationed in Canberra wrote a report on how the National Security Agency was helping Australia. Among the projects: NSA cryptomathematicians and engineers were assisting their Australian counterparts to break into the encrypted satellite network used by the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, the system carrying PNGDF traffic from small dishes in remote locations.

Twenty-two years later, in October 2025, Papua New Guinea signed a mutual defence treaty with the country that had been trying to read the PNGDF's mail. That sequence is the whole story in miniature. Papua New Guinea's political class talks about sovereignty as though it functions as a shield. It does not. Sovereignty is a legal status. It has never conferred technical protection, and in the Pacific it never has for PNG.

The record is long and it is documentary. In the 1980s, leaked papers exposed an Australian Defence Signals Directorate telephone-tapping operation codenamed Reprieve, run out of Australia's High Commission in Port Moresby and its posts in Jakarta and Bangkok. Prime Minister Michael Somare complained to his Australian counterpart Bob Hawke, and was assured no bugging was taking place.

The assurance did not settle the matter, because the collection did not stop. Documents from the Snowden archive, published in 2015, showed the Australian Signals Directorate working with New Zealand's GCSB to obtain comprehensive access to telecommunications networks across the South Pacific, harvesting communications from Papua New Guinea alongside Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tonga, Samoa and others. An NSA document from 2013 recorded that Australia carried sole reporting responsibility for multiple targets in the Pacific. Other material identified ASD collection equipment concealed inside the Australian High Commission in Waigani, Port Moresby.

When the Indonesian tapping revelations broke in November 2013, Prime Minister Peter O'Neill told Parliament that tapping phones without proper legal clearance was illegal, that he expected Australia to respect PNG's sovereignty and its laws, and that he had instructed Foreign Minister Rimbink Pato to summon the Australian High Commissioner for an explanation. Port Moresby went looking for Israeli counter-surveillance help. Canberra, then as now, declined to comment on specific disclosures.

What has changed since is not the intent but the infrastructure.
In July 2022, Telstra finalised its acquisition of Digicel Pacific with a USD 1.33 billion financing package from Export Finance Australia. Telstra's own contribution was USD 270 million in equity against a purchase price of USD 1.6 billion. The Australian state put up roughly eighty-three cents in every dollar. Digicel remains the dominant mobile network in Papua New Guinea, carrying the calls and messages of ministers, departmental heads, businesspeople and villagers alike.

Canberra presented this as investment in the Pacific family. The Lowy Institute read it differently, describing it as the clearest sign yet that competition with China was reshaping relations between the Australian government and Australian firms, the same logic that had earlier produced Australian financing for the undersea cable to PNG and Solomon Islands, built to keep Huawei out.

There is no public evidence that Australian agencies have access arrangements at Digicel PNG, and this article does not claim there are. The point is narrower and harder to argue with: the dominant carrier in PNG is owned through a transaction the Australian state funded for strategic reasons, in a country Australian intelligence has treated as a collection priority for forty years, now bound to Australia by an alliance treaty. Those facts sit together whether or not anyone connects them operationally.

For members with money offshore, the exposure sharpens considerably. Communications collection is one capability. Financial visibility is another, and it runs on entirely separate rails, financial intelligence units, anti-money-laundering reporting, mutual legal assistance, tax information exchange. What matters is that both sets of rails terminate in the same handful of jurisdictions. And there is PNG precedent for the money moving that way. In 2013, Sam Koim, then head of Task Force Sweep, estimated that around A$2 million of the Paraka payments had ended up in Australian bank accounts.

That figure came out of a PNG investigation, not an Australian one. But it establishes the route. Money parked in Australian banks, Australian property or Australian trusts is sitting inside a jurisdiction with sophisticated law-enforcement machinery, an intelligence service with a documented forty-year interest in PNG, and no obligation whatsoever to look the other way. Dual citizenship does not solve this. Distance does not solve this.

None of which means every member is being listened to. Nobody outside a very small number of buildings in Canberra knows what is collected on whom, or when. But capability is established, motive is easy to identify, Chinese engagement, resource negotiations, the reliability of a new ally, and opportunity has only grown.

Papua New Guinea's leaders have enriched themselves while hospitals run out of supplies and roads fall apart. They have done it inside an intelligence environment shaped, owned and financed in large part by a foreign government that has been reading the region's traffic since before independence was a decade old.

Whether Canberra ever acts on what it knows is a decision made in Canberra. That is the part sovereignty rhetoric cannot touch.

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