The high moral price our regional neighbours are paying for Belt and Road

Papua New Guinea voted the same way in support of China last year. This year three of our regional neighbours joined in.

Now there can really be two reasons why China has been so successful in rounding up Christian democracies in the Pacific to support it on the international stage.

The first reason may well be that China has been far more effective than Australia, and New Zealand, and the United States and Japan, in lobbying countries that are essentially democratic, and belong to the Commonwealth of Nations, (and in the case of PNG and the Solomon Islands nations where the Queen is head of state).

If that is true then Foreign Minister Payne should be asking our diplomatic representatives in these countries just how much lobbying they undertook on what ought to be a no brainer when it comes to supporting freedom and opposing cruel oppression. Whatever they did, China clearly did much better.

And the same question needs to be put to Australia's representatives at the United Nations and its human rights entity.

But there is a second reason and it is one I find far more worrying.

Recently the PNG Foreign Minister, Soroi Eoe, met with the PRC foreign minister, Wang Yi, in China on his first overseas visit since he was appointed foreign minister in the Marape Government.

Apart from the usual pleasantries the focus of the meeting was a commitment by China to "strengthen strategic alignment and deepen the joint building of the Belt and Road initiative".

In his response to the comments by the PRC Foreign Minister said this:

PNG recognises that political stability is an important cornerstone of economic development and hopes to share governance experience with China and learn from China's development experience.

Governance experience?? Like crushing minorities, press freedom, and any form of dissent?

The question really is why would the Foreign Minister of a democratic country where dissent, press freedom and human rights are enshrined in the national constitution and upheld by democratic elections since 1975 talk about learning from China's "governance experience"?