Vale Ken Fairweather: one of the great characters of Papua New Guinea

We hit it off right from the start and have been friends ever since.

The Ken Fairweather I got to know was proud of his Australian heritage but even more proud of the record he gained over the years as an employer of hundreds of Papua New Guineans. He was a leader in road transportation, coffee processing and exporting, farming, and eventually politics.

After several unsuccessful tilts at politics in the Central Province he was elected MP for Sumkar in the Madang Province in 2007. He owned plantations on Karkar Island and managed to hold the seat for ten years until the 2017 national polls. He served as a Minister in the Somare and O'Neill Governments.

Ken was passionate about encouraging agriculture, which he saw as a real area of neglect during the colonial period, and about governments running businesses which could be far better run by the private sector.

He was especially proud of the work his businesses, under the Pagini Group structure, did during the construction phase of the Ok Tedi mine in the Fly River Province. He was working at the time of his passing on playing a similar role in the Wafi gold mine project in Morobe Province.

Over the years Ken dabbled in many industries with, as he put it in the book, "a mix of success and failure".

But he remained dedicated to the people of PNG to the end. He was a proud supporter of greater Australian investment in PNG and was really saddened at the difficulties of Papua New Guineans to get visas to travel to Australia. He wanted to see greater people-to-people engagement.

I will miss our texts, often many times daily, on sport, politics, world affairs and life in general, but it concerns me yet another Australian who was proudly contributing to PNG's development has left us. We need every friend we can get in our closest neighbour.

On Monday we lost one of our very best 'exports to PNG".

May he Rest in Peace.