by BRIAN GOMEZ
Land of the unexpected indeed

There certainly is a buzz in the air these days.
Obviously there are things happening on many fronts and Port Moresby traffic has built up to levels not imaginable a few years ago.
Land of the unexpected indeed!
The traffic lights at the Waigani Road junction at Boroko Motors have been out for months and there is no sign when it will get fixed.
Does this mean nobody cares or is it just a sign of incompetence that everyone accepts as the norm?
The multi-billion kina gas pipeline to Australia has just been cancelled and, instead of being the disaster it would have been viewed as for most of the 10 years it has been pursued, many people are actually relieved.
For a long time there has been a view that gas sales to Australia would be the only way to develop massive reserves at Kutubu, Hides and elsewhere. A big market was needed to make such an expensive project viable.
For most of that period, it was not feasible to consider liquefied natural gas, or LNG, because the cost of piping it to a coastal location where liquefaction would take place, was just too expensive.
Now that world oil and gas prices have experienced a big increase, an LNG project makes a lot more economic sense.
But what has made it even more attractive is the likelihood that two world scale petrochemical plants to be built in Port Moresby would need a significant supply of gas both as their feedstock and as an energy source.
So putting through enough gas for a LNG plant makes a great deal of sense.
In announcing the cancellation of the project, Oil Search managing director Peter Botten made it very clear that piping gas to Australia was now a third best option because there would be better returns from production of petrochemicals as well as from LNG exports.
In either case, the gas could be sold to customers at world prices.
The spin offs would also be vastly different because a relatively small pool of workers could have ensured adequate gas supplies to Australia, where many industries would become even more competitive.
Each of the plants being planned in Port Moresby would need a thousand or more workers and the indirect employment that will be generated for service industries and others would be even more substantial.
So suddenly bad news has really become good news and Oil Search shares are gaining in strength, although some people are pondering the possibility that some energy giant may be eyeing it as a takeover target.
There has been a surfeit of good news in the past few months, particularly with the Government's handing out of around a billion kina for various infrastructure and rehabilitation projects.
As far as we can see, none of these appear to have taken off the ground as yet, though we would be happy to be proved wrong on this score.
Then again the Government had salted away K400 million from the 2005 budget, which I had argued in Bottom Line on Nov 24, 2005, was a questionable decision since there were so many ways this money could be better used for public benefit.
Even more money was set aside in the 2006 budget for the same purpose of funding the Government equity share of the pipeline, a project that now appears dead and buried.
The economic outlook did not appear as rosy in 2005 as it does at present because of the windfall revenues from record mineral commodity prices.
There is an element of luck in this because the drought in investment in the preceding decade has meant there has been little increase in mineral production in the meantime.
So the K400 million would have gone a real long way then. At this time, there is so much money in Treasury’s coffers, most of the beneficiaries will be unable to use it for some considerable time because of supply constraints on many fronts, particularly skilled labour.
But there is probably no use crying over spilt milk, as they say. It is somewhat better in this case since the money in the bank has probably been earning interest and could be put to good use sooner or later.
In another avenue though, it appears the clock may be turning back. Remember the K130 million or thereabouts that was awarded for road works in Port Moresby just before the 2002 national election.
I remember it well because Boroko Road, on which I travelled daily, was given space age treatment at the time. There is certainly vastly more traffic on that road today but I am still not sure if the road is really much better than what was there before.
This week the newspapers have reported a K36 million deal for a 1.8km section of Waigani Drive, a road in reasonably good shape, which is also about to get the space age treatment.
Motorists will be able to zoom down this highway from the university or wherever and then have to cope with traffic lights that may not work.
In the intervening years, virtually nothing has been done on other feeder roads in industrial areas in Gordon and elsewhere, where if the potholes were widened enough could be turned into mini-aquaculture projects!
And talking of budgets and Government spending, isn’t it incredible that even though every government since independence has talked about boosting agriculture, even now nothing is being done as the nation awaits another master plan.
Is it really that hard to even give away a variety of seeds and plants so that our long suffering subsistence farmers can at least improve the diversity of food available to them or obtain a little more cash by selling them in local marketplace?
Anyway, now that the country is heading towards a national election, all these are somewhat academic since it will be a new government that will hand down the 2008 budget in November this year.