Let alone all the massive dramas with setting a team up there to make it competitive (IE lack of player attractiveness due to socioeconomic conditions, lack of economic ability to sustain a team [EG to cover the finances as we already know in the NRL ticket prices are average, at least to us, but you imagine that on a Papua New Guinea wage trying to get in, and if they don't charge those rates, how they cover their finances??]), to go from Sydney to Port Moresby, it will take you around about 6 hours, as you'd have to connect via Brisbane.
Who's going to fund these airfares? It's hardly like the Papua New Guinea economy has the sponsorship opportunities that say the New Zealand economy has. TV rights won't spike with it because advertisers won't see the PNG market as being that attractive to have their ads played in.
The furtherest they will ever get is the Queensland Cup, and I suspect any smart sports administrator involved with that competition will look for them to play as many games in Queensland as possible to overcome a lot of the flight issues.
The most recent 'large-scale' internationalised sporting operation in an Australian competition is the Singapore Slingers in the NBL. Singapore by comparison is an extremely rich and modern country (frankly, it's a beautiful place). Why didn't that work? I see far larger scale problems investing in a poor socioeconomic area where returns on investment (and ultimately thats the major thing) are going to be extremely low, and in fact represent a major net present value loss to a potential investor. Government's would be foolish to back it as government funding needs to be far better deployed into socioeconomic concerns in Papua New Guinea rather than outlaying for a rugby league team.
A much sounder strategy is to keep perservering with the Australian PM XIII matches in Port Moresby, and start to bring back the inter-Pacific-rim test matches. The problem extends beyond PNG but also is a problem for Samoa, Tonga and Fiji and neither New Zealand or Australia, or more pertently the lack of an independent international governing body, do enough to support growth opportunities there.
Given we can't even establish NRL board room support to get teams out of Sydney and into areas such as the Central Coast, Adelaide, Perth, another Queensland team and Wellington, the chances of going into a poor socioeconomic area are negligible.
