Australia needs to stop treating Papua New Guinea like an "unfortunate illegitimate child" that it's ashamed of and beef up genuine engagement with its closest neighbour.
That is the conclusion of a new Lowy Institute book called Embarrassed Colonialist, by Walkley Award winning former ABC Port Moresby correspondent Sean Dorney.
"While Papua New Guinea has its challenges it is not a hopeless case," Mr Dorney writes, pointing to its strong economic growth, a huge LNG project, resilient women, free media, boundless natural beauty and huge tourism potential.
"Australians need to move beyond this corrosive belief that no amount of Australian aid money will fix PNG's problems or that nothing good can come out of a deeper engagement with our former colony."
Mr Dorney laments that Australia's role in helping to give birth to an independent country is not part of the school curriculum in Australia.
"While there were some things from the colonial era that we should not celebrate, helping give birth to another nation should have been one of our proudest achievements," he said.
"Instead we seem to have become so embarrassed by our performance, so politically correct that we don't want to teach our children that we were colonialists ourselves once."
A lack of media coverage of PNG was also disappointing, he said, with only an ABC correspondent now based in Port Moresby.
PNG is Australia's largest aid recipient, receiving half a billion dollars a year.
"Throwing money at PNG is definitely not enough... we need to understand PNG," he said.
Mr Dorney called for a rethink of the aid relationship, saying there needed to be renewed focus on increasing capacity of PNG government officials rather than simply implanting Australian officials in the local bureaucracy.
Both countries needed to make it easier for people to obtain visitor and business visas, Mr Dorney said.
Despite being a former colony, Australia had no special migration scheme favouring PNG.
There were more Cook Islanders in Australia than Papua New Guineans despite the Cooks being a former colony of New Zealand and PNG being 430 times larger in population.
This was because NZ welcomed people from Pacific nations such as the Cook Islands, Samoa and Tonga, and then they came to Australia through the back door.
Papua New Guineans were also under-represented in Australia's seasonal-worker program which brought Pacific islanders to Australia to fill skills gaps in industries such as horticulture.
FACTS ABOUT AUSTRALIA AND PNG
* PNG celebrated its 40th anniversary of independence in 2015.
* More Australians died in PNG in WWII than anywhere else in the world.
* Australian MPs with PNG connections: Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had a penpal from PNG as a year-nine student and has family members who have spent time there. Labor's immigration spokesman Richard Marles went there on a school trip at age 16.
* PNG is a country of 1000 unique tribes and 800 languages.
* Australian investment in PNG comes in at $19 billion and two-way annual trade is $7 billion.
* An estimated 30,000 Australian visitors go to PNG a year and more than 5000 walk the Kokoda Track.
* At its closest point the northern-most Queensland island in the Torres Straits are four kilometres from the PNG coast.
