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Sean Dorney

Sean Dorney is a Nonresident Fellow at the Lowy Institute. After reporting on the Pacific (with a particular focus on Papua New Guinea) for over four decades, Sean left the ABC in August 2014. During his time with the ABC he won a Walkley for his coverage of the Aitape tsunami and was both deported and awarded an MBE by the Papua New Guinean Government. He is the author of Papua New Guinea: People, politics, and history since 1975 and The Sandline Affair: Politics and mercenaries and the Bougainville crisis.

Articles by Sean Dorney (13)

  • Sean Dorney 19 Apr 2016 13:15

    PNG's PM, police and fraud squad star in stranger-than-fiction saga

    Papua New Guinea has an amazing tendency to tangle itself up in so many knots that it is often difficult to find any way to unravel the result. PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill (Photo: Getty Images) In what other country would you have the head of the police fraud squad ordering the arrest of the Attorney General, a Supreme Court Judge and the Prime Minister’s lawyer and then, surprised at his own suspension, winning a court order to have that suspension nullified? As reported by the ABC’s PNG C
  • Sean Dorney 8 Apr 2016 16:00

    Papua New Guinea: Every day a field day for lawyers

    The senior courts in Papua New Guinea have a rather impressive record of not doing the bidding of the government of the day. There was another example of this just a matter of days ago when three judges sitting as a Supreme Court bench dismissed all orders preventing anti-corruption officers from investigating whether the Prime Minister, Peter O'Neill, and the Finance Minister, James Marape, have a case over authorising allegedly fraudulent payments to a legal firm. Mr O'Neill's initial reactio
  • Sean Dorney 16 Sep 2015 12:00

    Could PNG teach Australia a thing or two about political stability?

    Australian officials used to fret about the so-called 'arc of instability' of Melanesian nations in our neighbourhood, with particular concern about regular votes of no confidence in our former colony, Papua New Guinea. But the sudden mid-term overthrow of Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his replacement by Malcolm Turnbull has people in PNG wondering which of the two countries now has the more settled political atmosphere. In fact, since 2002, while Australia has chopped and changed
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