IT is difficult not to agree with the criticisms made of the 30-member Commission of Inquiry into the Finance Department.
The Government has yet to respond to the sharpest of those critics, the leaders of Papua New Guinea’s trade union movement.
We’ve been asking Papua New Guineans for their reactions to the publication of the salaries and tax arrangements allegedly applicable to the members of the commission of inquiry.
The 14 people to whom we spoke ranged from senior overseas academics to unemployed squatter settlers and included leading public servants and executive officers of substantial private companies.
Not one of those people was prepared to regard the payments or the tax arrangements quoted as justified or defensible.
Indeed, the majority of those questioned were disgusted by the reported salaries; the squatter settlers found the figures incomprehensible.
The allegation that some of those 30 inquiry staff members were paid sums as high as K12, 000 per day tax free, stunned all 14 of the people to whom we spoke.
One of the academics responded with some cynicism by asking for the address of the inquiry’s employing body so that he could also, to quote him, “get my snout in the trough”.
The Trade Union Congress general secretary has said “these amounts and tax arrangements are mind-boggling and outrageous ... the fact that the payments are not taxed is even more alarming and incomprehensible”.
We wholeheartedly agree.
Further, it is ironical that such huge payments and unprecedented special tax arrangements should be made for the members of an inquiry tasked with investigating financial corruption in a premier department of the current Government.
As the TUC president Michael Malabag noted in a letter to Sir Michael Somare this week, the inquiry “places the Government and your leadership in the forefront of public scrutiny…”.
The president suggested that a new start should be made to the inquiry, with a new structure and membership and drawing upon a far wider cross-section of the community.
These revelations have a serious impact on ordinary citizens.
We wonder if those inflated payments and tax arrangements were ever pictured against a backdrop of the average wage of, say, a community school principal in a remote location, or a senior reporter in a PNG newsroom or a qualified senior nursing sister in one of our run-down hospitals – or the amount of money an unemployed citizen needs to keep starvation and disease at bay.
The salaries paid to these “servants” are simply to assuage their all-encompassing greed.
Do the recipients of these “salaries” – it is hard to see them as anything but handouts rather than sums actually earned – ever read the daily papers?
Do they not see for example, the appeals from hard-working citizens trying to put enough money together to send a dying child to Australia for a last-chance operation?
The K10 million spent by this inquiry would have bought two state of the art radiotherapy machines for Angau hospital in Lae, to alleviate the terrible pain of terminal cancer suffered by many of our people.
It could have been used to set up a number of basically equipped and staffed HIV/AIDS wards in some of our provincial hospitals or to purchase equipment capable of determining the anti-retroviral load in the blood of HIV and AIDS sufferers.
The Somare Government has again and again indicated its commitment to transparent administration and a public service staffed by people selected by merit.
Yet month after month we see power-plays in Government departments and a continuation of the political interference for which PNG governments are sadly famous.
What on earth is happening at National Planning and Monitoring, for example, and who is Mr Ten Percent?
Why is the Government challenging the PSC decision to reinstate Joseph Assaigo to his position as director-general of national security and what has happened to the allegations of his involvement in the notorious Moti Affair?
As long as our public service is torn apart by accusations and counter accusations, and peopled at huge expense by utterly unscrupulous personnel whose sole dedication is not to the people of this country, but to themselves, PNG will continue to stagger along a downhill path.