PNG's only white woman MP finds key political role

Carol Kidu has won respect in a society where women are often treated as second-class citizens. Picture / Steven Nowakowski

A woman with bright, darting eyes, wearing a T-shirt bearing an anti-violence slogan, is walking briskly through a dusty settlement, or illegal shanty town, near Port Moresby.

Hordes of people are pouring out of the tacked-together houses, surging around the woman, who chats away to them in Tok Pisin.

Here, at Rabiatini, Carol Kidu, 58, is a popular figure. The MP for Moresby South is widely viewed as someone who cares about the "little people".

Kidu has brought some political visitors to the village to show the social conditions fuelling the country's HIV and Aids epidemic. She admits a little discomfort in bringing strangers as spectators, but she has a good reason.

"You can't understand HIV unless you understand the environment and the poverty," she says, in clipped, no-nonsense tones. It's not poverty in the sense of hunger, she adds, but lack of access to facilities: education, health care, job skills.

A total of 63 per cent of the known HIV cases in the capital are in her electorate.

Kidu, the Minister for Community Development, is a singular personality. Though many women have stood for Parliament since PNG gained independence in 1975, just five have been successful; Kidu is the only non-indigenous woman to enter the unstable, corrupt world of PNG politics.

Her practical nature and down-to-earth self-help policies have earned respect. A local diplomat says: "She is very blunt and not afraid to put people in their place." Kidu says that whatever people think of her, "I think most people recognise I'm honest".

She was born and raised in Brisbane and met her husband, the late chief justice Sir Buri Kidu, when he was a teenage student there.

"He was," she says, "a unique individual."

Aged 22, she accompanied him home to his village, Pari, where her father-in-law's home sat in a line of stilt houses along the high-tide line.

Then as now, rickety-looking but surprisingly solid walkways above the water link the homes of 3000 people.

Transition was tough: "I did a lot of crying from frustration. I'd say to my husband, 'I wish I'd never married you'. He always used to say, "You knew the arrangement, Carol. Never ask me to choose between you and my people'."

Kidu learned Tok Pisin and her husband's native language, Motu, which is related to Maori, and worked as a secondary school teacher.

In a 25-year marriage they had four children, with two others customarily adopted "and lots of others".

She embraced PNG and became a citizen long ago. "I don't deny my gumnuts," she says, "but I am not an Australian woman. I'm a Papua New Guinean woman. I feel very out of place [in Australia] after so long out of it."

Politically, her background continues to be "sometimes an advantage, sometimes a disadvantage. There are always those who use it against me. Things like, 'She's a white woman, she'll take all our money to Australia'.

"In another campaign, [someone] said 'She's a white woman, she's got a white heart, she hasn't got a black heart like us!' Just silly emotive stuff."

Kidu says before first standing for Parliament in 1997, three years after her husband's death, she had to carefully seek her clan's acceptance and endorsement, "because it would be pointless otherwise. And for a widow to stand in PNG society ... " The words trail off.

"When I was campaigning, there were some old men who were struggling with the cultural attitudes but they listened to me. I heard them saying, 'It's okay. We can vote for her. She's a white woman and she understands these things. But we're not going to vote for one of our women'.

"That shows that for PNG-born women, it's a very hard path. People try to justify voting for me by the fact that I'm outside their understanding."

In a culture where women are routinely treated as second-class citizens, her greatest frustration is "that sometimes I have to work through derivative power".

If encountering difficulties she suspects are related to gender, she co-opts a sympathetic male colleague to push things through.

"But that's the way it's got to be done ... It's not hard. I've been a part of this community for so long that I think I know how to play them at their own game."

But Kidu says next year's national elections will be her last, an announcement she is yet to make publicly.

"I want my life back. You know, I'm public property."

With an eye on succession, Kidu launched Women in National Government Strategies last month to generate financial and practical backing for women candidates.