The following rant assumes for a moment that this story has some basis in fact, which is a stretch for anything on Pprune.
It's a common story in PNG, although not often involving helicopters. I am familiar with at least three occasions in the last 20 yrs where outside individuals have been asked to "help" local people set up helicopter operations to compete with the established ones.
Naive PNG locals with landowner rights and un achievable expectations coupled with the frustration of feeling powerless to change things, imagine their ship has just come in when in cooperation with a perhaps well intended naive non PNG culturally unaware service provider, and "malleable" government signatories, "approval" is granted and money provided.
Apart from the particular Aust provider having an unenviable reputation for poor standards and little attention to legality, it is a nonsense to imagine that a "helicopter training school" has any chance of success in a place like Kikori. It's a bit like setting one up at an outstation in the NT. Why would you do that? Because someone is trading on uninformed expectations and royalties to promise the impossible. Someone is benefiting, but it will not be the landowners or the so called "students".
Of course the "school" is only a ploy anyway. Someone thinks by getting into Kikori this way, the oil and gas interests will give them work. If that happens, it will make the whole rort worthwhile for the provider, but I give it a one in a thousand chance of success. The oil and gas folks do have some standards and audits to support any decisions to grant work, even if it is sometimes just lip service.
I fear that it is yet another K6.5m down the tubes of what started as Aust taxpayers money in the form of AusAid. And the difference between the real cost of a Squirrel and the A$10m quoted? Ask yourself where all the funds come from that enable half the PNG legislature to own real estate in Australia and send all their kids to private schools down here. It is surely not from their salary, which also largely comes from AusAid.
If anyone can demonstrate, with substance, that the above is off target, please contribute. By substance I mean someone who knows the players, who knows the culture, and has dealt with the context personally over enough years to know what they are talking about. It would be a pleasant surprise to be wrong.