PNGBLOGS

by : Andrew Arthur Prime Minister James Marape had one of his worst performances in the last parliament session jumping from one place to the other over the Dominate Player Levy. One moment he pushed hard in NEC for the new tax on the advice of Ian Ling-Stuckey and Paul Flanagan and as is the case, he flips his decision when met with some resistance in Parliament. Everyone knows Marape has a real problem with being decisive- but his performance on the 2022 Budget has now left PNG with a k190 million hole by shelving the ‘Dominate Player Levy’ that his Treasury Ian Ling-Stuckey and highly paid failed Australian advisor Paul Flanagan had craftily written into the budget for additional taxes on banking and telecommunication. The budget preparation is a culmination of 12 months of planning and works for Politicians, Public Servants, and advisors that ended in a major failure and refusal by legislators in Parliament. An embarrassment to those who had worked hard to put together the 2022 Mon

by MITCH RENAGI Budget week should be a triumph for any self-respecting Treasurer - it should cap all his efforts over the past 12 months and lay out a rosy future for the next 12. Unfortunately for Ian Ling-Stuckey and his team of highly-paid foreign advisers, this Budget week has been a disaster, lurching from one crisis to another. His disastrous performance has shredded the Marape Government’s economic reputation. He and his advisers should resign, and failing that Marape should sack them. Ling-Stuckey’s failures are inexcusable. First, he missed the Budget sitting day by 24 hours.  Then when he did get around to delivering the Budget a day late, he did not table the all important Volume 1, Economic and Development Policies. In effect, the Budget has not been tabled. Neither Vol 1 nor his Budget speech have been posted on the Treasury web site as of Monday morning, so the public does not have access to the information that will guide people’s lives and the nation for the next 12 mo