NO doubt we will soon hear from those who will accuse the Governor-General of interfering in matters that are not his concern.
But we believe the contrary.
Sir Paulias Matane has urged the Government to repeal the 2007 Casino Act because he knows perfectly well that it will create greater poverty and social chaos for our people.
Sir Paulias is not a figurehead and has never been one a person to beat about the bush.
He is a man of great experience, one who has observed the warp and woof of the fabric of Papua New Guinean society since his earliest days in education.
And the Governor-General has been an inveterate traveller, a man who has sampled a startling array of the world’s societies, their peoples and their customs.
Throughout a lifetime of hard work, he has never stopped broadening his experience and it would be a travesty if now, as he heads our nation, our leaders were to ignore that exposure.
Speaking last Saturday at the launching of the 40th anniversary of the United church in our country, the veteran Tolai leader said that poker machines and other forms of gambling had already wrought havoc in the lives of ordinary Papua New Guineans and pushed them over the poverty line.
Can we realistically deny that impact upon our people?
How many millions of kina are spent betting on horse races, poker machines and card games each year?
We are not for a moment saying that the average Papua New Guinean should have to live a life so constrained that relaxation and enjoyment can no longer be part of existence.
We sometimes think that we’ve forgotten how to laugh in PNG, and lost our equanimity, our simplicity, our easy view of life and our ability to mark both the high and low points that are the lot of everyone.
The gentle rhythm of our lives has been overcome by a different approach and it is one that we have yet to fully understand, even as we seek to emulate the patterns of foreign societies.
In the turmoil of our adopted Western ways, so much that was always our birth right has been junked, and so many false and destructive alternatives have been trumpeted as essential replacements.
Those, who see a glittering financial goal beckoning at the end of the casino road, have a cruel and selfish view of their own country and their fellow Papua New Guineans.
The establishment of casinos in this country is the last, the very last need of our people.
It seems that our once magnificent Parliament House blocks the view of those who inhabit its still elegant walls.
Can they not see the grinding poverty in our streets?
Are they immune to the sight of bun nating children dragging through the dust?
Do they ever bother to calculate how many children within their own electorate can actually go to school?
Go into any of the less salubrious clubs in the capital, and by clubs we mean drinking holes, and about the only facility you will find, apart from stinking urinals and filthy floors, will be a battered row of poker machines.
And propping them up will be the saddest array of our own people you are ever likely to see.
Day in and out they sit there, mute, waiting for their number to come up.
And of course it does – just often enough to keep them enslaved, a victim of the machines.
At home, there are the starving kids no longer able to go to school and the wife, who is both physically and mentally numbed by the hopelessness of her family’s situation.
What do those who support casinos imagine will happen to our society?
Please don’t feed the public that spurious nonsense about casinos only being for the wealthy and for visitors – if that were so, nobody would dream of venturing a toea to build these gaming palaces, for the returns would be miniscule.
No, the ultimate victims of the casino society will be our own people, and those who put forward this idea could not care less.
We fully support the Governor-General in his plea to repeal the infamous Casino Act.