Foreign Minister Julie Bishop made a speech on Monday to launch a new strategy to promote women's empowerment as a priority for Australia's foreign aid program.
"We have put an unrelenting focus on gender equality," Ms Bishop declared, and told the audience of her habit, when travelling overseas to represent Australia, of meeting with local women's groups to hear directly about the political, economic and social challenges they face. We certainly hope she is listening carefully, and taking particular note of the extreme violence many women must regularly confront in Papua New Guinea.
A report compiled by medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres and released this week tells of the harrowing cost of violence against women and their children in Australia's closest neighbour. Many of the almost 3000 women treated by MSF in the past two years had been attacked with sticks, knives or machetes, most often by their husband or partner. Children were also found to be regular targets of appalling sexual violence, with reports of babies molested and toddlers raped. While the report was sensibly cautious not to generalise the data collected from two clinics to the national experience across PNG, other recent surveys have warned about the intolerable rate of violence against women. 
As it happens, Ms Bishop is hosting her PNG counterpart in Canberra on Thursday for a regular ministerial meeting, and this offers the perfect opportunity for her to press what should indeed be an urgent concern about the treatment of women in the country. But Ms Bishop's words will ring regrettably hollow, given the government has hopelessly compromised Australia as a voice of conscience and reason on human rights by relying on PNG as the host of the Manus Island detention centre for asylum seekers.
PNG is the largest recipient of Australia's foreign aid, about $550 million this year. With PNG being a former colony, its government is understandably sensitive to the perception of interference by Australia in its internal affairs, and this prickliness about questions of sovereignty is often deployed in response to criticism. PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill has openly bragged that the Manus Island camp has allowed him to exercise greater control over where Australia's aid money is spent.
But it cannot be accepted that women are treated as a tradeable commodity in PNG, with a "bride price" paid in exchange for a woman to marry a man, a price that shackles her choices and can effectively trap her in an abusive relationship.
A political border cannot be a barrier to universal human rights, and there is simply no excuse to be found in culture, tradition or relative poverty that can justify the appalling treatment of women in PNG. That the policy of offshore detention has so diminished Australia's ability to pressure PNG to redress this situation is yet another reason for the Turnbull government to move urgently to close the camps on Manus Island and Nauru.
It must be acknowledged that PNG has made welcome efforts to recognise the long-standing problem of violence against women, finally adopting family protection laws in 2013 and setting up several safe houses for women to escape domestic violence. But policing of the law remains poor, and the safe houses are principally confined to the capital, Port Moresby, not the often isolated rural provinces.
Ms Bishop has presided over lamentable cuts to the foreign aid budget, but she argues "our neighbourhood [is] where we believe we can make the biggest difference, where we believe we have a responsibility". Proof of her words would be for Australia to make every effort to see women in PNG protected.