PNGBLOGS

Development Policy Centre Papua New Guinea has no shortage of plans, visions, strategies and policy papers. Some are good, some are bad. All suffer from poor implementation. Despite the plans, and despite PNG’s mineral booms, the sad truth is that Papua New Guinean incomes, adjusted for inflation, have barely risen since independence. We are told that government’s new plan is going to change all that – incomes will increase by one third from K3430 this year to K4638 by 2015. (Actually, it’s not clear how much of the increase will be due to the implementation of the plan, and how much will be due to the LNG project, but that’s a question that could be asked at the 2011 budget lock-up on Tuesday 16 November.) The 2011-15 Medium Term Development Plan (MTDP) has not yet been released, but reports in the media give an indication of what it contains. The government will spend K36 billion over five years on a range of development initiatives that will help create 315,200 extra jobs and susta

Development Policy Centre Papua New Guinea has no shortage of plans, visions, strategies and policy papers. Some are good, some are bad. All suffer from poor implementation. Despite the plans, and despite PNG’s mineral booms, the sad truth is that Papua New Guinean incomes, adjusted for inflation, have barely risen since independence. We are told that government’s new plan is going to change all that – incomes will increase by one third from K3430 this year to K4638 by 2015. (Actually, it’s not clear how much of the increase will be due to the implementation of the plan, and how much will be due to the LNG project, but that’s a question that could be asked at the 2011 budget lock-up on Tuesday 16 November.) The 2011-15 Medium Term Development Plan (MTDP) has not yet been released, but reports in the media give an indication of what it contains. The government will spend K36 billion over five years on a range of development initiatives that will help create 315,200 extra jobs and sus

PACIFIC POLICY We are still in the era of Big Man politics in Melanesia, where people generally vote according to tribal, chiefly and personal loyalties, not because of any policy platforms linked to political parties. Roland Rich has summarised a core underlying issue: As in Africa, the elites leading the independence movements re-imagined their lands and islands in accordance with the maps drawn by their colonisers. The debate was not about the return to the pre-national existence of pre- colonialism, but rather the demand to take over the local institutions of colonial governance. The national revolution took place by way of this thought transfer. All at once, disparate peoples became ni-Vanuatu or Solomon Islanders or Papua New Guineans. The problem with this conceptual revolution is that it has been restricted to a small band of urban educated leaders. The majority of the people of these nations think of themselves primarily and perhaps at times exclusively in terms of their vil

PACIFIC POLICY We are still in the era of Big Man politics in Melanesia, where people generally vote according to tribal, chiefly and personal loyalties, not because of any policy platforms linked to political parties. Roland Rich has summarised a core underlying issue: As in Africa, the elites leading the independence movements re-imagined their lands and islands in accordance with the maps drawn by their colonisers. The debate was not about the return to the pre-national existence of pre- colonialism, but rather the demand to take over the local institutions of colonial governance. The national revolution took place by way of this thought transfer. All at once, disparate peoples became ni-Vanuatu or Solomon Islanders or Papua New Guineans. The problem with this conceptual revolution is that it has been restricted to a small band of urban educated leaders. The majority of the people of these nations think of themselves primarily and perhaps at times exclusively in terms of their

Ed Lasky Are Barack Obama's energy policies influenced by hedge fund billionaire and political patron George Soros? The administration is derailing oil and gas exploration and development here in America while taking steps to help foreign nations develop their own energy resources. The latest beneficiary of his efforts is the island nation of New Guinea. This effort by the administration is especially galling since the Interior Department has been blaming its delay in issuing drilling permits on lack of money and staff to process the permits. Why devote the department to helping another nation reap riches? To which one may also ask — why New Guinea? Perhaps the better question might be: Who benefits from President Obama's push to help Papua New Guinea become an energy power? That answer would be George Soros, sugar daddy of the Democratic Party and long an ardent and very generous supporter of Barack Obama's political campaigns. Soros stands to massively benefit if New Guin

Ed Lasky Are Barack Obama's energy policies influenced by hedge fund billionaire and political patron George Soros? The administration is derailing oil and gas exploration and development here in America while taking steps to help foreign nations develop their own energy resources. The latest beneficiary of his efforts is the island nation of New Guinea. This effort by the administration is especially galling since the Interior Department has been blaming its delay in issuing drilling permits on lack of money and staff to process the permits. Why devote the department to helping another nation reap riches? To which one may also ask — why New Guinea? Perhaps the better question might be: Who benefits from President Obama's push to help Papua New Guinea become an energy power? That answer would be George Soros, sugar daddy of the Democratic Party and long an ardent and very generous supporter of Barack Obama's political campaigns. Soros stands to massively benefit if New

John D. Conroy Towards the end of 2010, the PNG government approved a National Informal Economy Policy. The rationale for this policy was presented in a recent Pacific Economic Bulletin . It was adopted amid concern that the benefits of increasing economic activity in the resource-extraction sector — the ‘commanding heights’ of the PNG economy — will not flow efficiently or equitably to the grassroots population. A better functioning, informal economy is seen as necessary to increase the efficiency of linkages between mineral enclaves and the broader population. Among PNG’s neighbour states in Southeast Asia the informal economy is taken for granted. It is even regarded (rightly or wrongly) as an embarrassing indicator of backwardness, whose progressive elimination should be a policy objective. So it might seem odd that in PNG the ‘informal sector’ should now be subject to official encouragement. Monetised informal economic activity is thought to need facilitation and suppo