PETER O’NEILL’S FIRST BIG LIE TO THE PEOPLE OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA: AUGUST 2011
There we saw him in the newspapers last week, flying in style once again. It was Peter O’Neill, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, emerging in Beijing, China, from his luxury executive Falcon jet for the APEC meeting. If you’ll look close, you’ll see the corrupt Rimbink Pato waddling beside him.
There’s something wrong with this picture, and it starts with what kind of country we are. In terms of economic wealth per capita, Papua New Guinea ranks lows at 179 in the world (one giant reason why we don’t need more people in our country!). The GNP per capital averages a paltry USD $657 per person. In contrast, let’s look at Uruguay, a country that ranks 104 in per capita GNP, with an average $4,359. Yet, the President of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, ALWAYS does his foreign travel economy class on regularly scheduled COMMERCIAL flights out of Uruguay. Here’s the kind of plane President Mujica often flies on:
What’s the deal here? Why is Peter O’Neil traveling like a king when world leaders of much richer countries fly cheap and simple? Should we start calling Peter O’Neill “Your Majesty?”
Hopefully, none of you forgot the history of PNG’s government jet, this Falcon, that today is being used by the Prime Minister to fly here, there and everywhere. For those with hazy memories, here’s the story:
Emerging fresh from his constitutionally illegal victory of deposing Michael Somare as Prime Minister in 2011, Peter O’Neill began what has become an unending series of lies piled upon lies upon lies. His first week in office, one of Peter O’Neill’s first pledges to the nation was to sell the government’s executive Falcon jet.
At the time Peter O’Neill decried the waste to PNG of running this expensive executive jet with its own dedicated pilot on call and said he would sell it immediately to cut costs.
Ha, ha, ha. This is just like Manasupe Zurenuoc telling us that he’s demanding that departmental heads cut expenses. What a load of hot air! The fact is, the expensive Falcon jet was never sold. It was a stupid purchase in the first place and no one wanted to buy it at the price the PNG government tried to sell it for.
The bottom line is that Peter O’Neil lied. However, most people in PNG have bad memories and quickly forgot all about it. It wasn’t just O’Neill who turned out to be a Falcon hypocrite. When Michael Somare was jetting around PNG and the world in the Falcon jet, then-PNGTUC president Michael Malabag urged Prime Minister Somare to sell the K130 million executive Falcon jet to buy much-needed lifesaving equipment for PNG hospitals (http://pngexposed.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/sell-jet-to-buy-life-saving-equipment-for-hospitals-morauta/).
That was years ago. Today PNG’s hospital situation is far worse and in a critical condition itself. Michael Malabag is now Minister of Health in the O’Neill government and what does he say about the Falcon jet? Absolutely nothing, the bloody hypocrite!
The O’Neill government has more hypocrites than a street dog has louse!
With the Falcon lie, Peter O’Neill began his term as the King of Lies and taxpayers money is still being wasted. All for what? All for an exploding national debt!
Think about it. It’s your tax money and if the growing national debt causes skyrocketing interest rates or collapse of the kina, YOU will suffer just like the rest of us, because none of us said a thing about the extraordinary government waste that is going on right now, before our very eyes.
