Strangling competition
THE Papua New Guinea public received a short sharp reminder yesterday of the long-standing inefficiency of government-owned utilities.
The government seems determined to hang on grimly to as many utilities and other service industries as possible.
We’re all too familiar with the debacle of the mobile telephone saga. Had Digicel not proven so outstandingly successful, we would have not heard a bleat from Telikom.
But as it turned out, Digicel’s innovative approach suddenly opened doors that had appeared to be permanently locked, bolted and barred.
Many of our people found that for the first time they could talk to distant relatives scattered throughout the nation.
And other families were at last able to afford to speak with relatives and friends overseas.
Telikom has for years pleaded a lack of funding as the main reason for its snail’s pace in reaching into the rural areas and connecting people throughout the nation.
Yet as soon as it became clear that Digicel was a real competitor for the insulated Telikom, it suddenly became all hands on deck.
Our people were inundated with offers, with discounts and with pleas directed at their assumed emotional links to an organisation whose performance had been a public insult for decades.
Telikom, we were told, is always there.
The competition between the two service providers became a high-cost advertising war and one fought bitterly.
Now Telikom has an evident advantage in the international calls sector, one created by the government.
The indisputable fact that the people of PNG are the ones paying for Telikom’s privileged position does not appear to trouble the government one whit.
Once again, the people of PNG are the significant losers and their reward will be the hollow consolation of “ownership” of a massive telecommunications organisation that will doubtless continue to charge high rates and give often intolerable levels of service.
Yesterday’s news related to another field and again reflected a puerile outburst of mud slinging between the hierarchies of two more of these government-owned or controlled utilities.
The same old excuses were trotted out and the same old exchanges of barely concealed insults were hurled from one utility to the other.
It seems that PNG Power and the Water Board have both missed the point over the ongoing saga of water and power supplies for Madang. The plain fact is that the people of Madang do not give a tinker’s curse who is to blame for the heightened events of the past fortnight.
All they want is what they were able to enjoy 25 years ago – uninterrupted power and water supplies. Who supplies the power and water is immaterial.
The “problems” allegedly generated by each of these lumbering utilities for the other is not the concern of the people of Madang.
A quietly plaintive letter also appeared in the letters column yesterday from a Madang resident.
Her suggestion was simple – open the power and water sector to international competition as in the mobile telephone arena.
The present administration loses no opportunity to claim its belief in competition but as the mobile phone saga clearly shows, that claim is hedged about with a multitude of qualifying clauses.
Yonki was supposed to end the power supply problems of the whole of the northern New Guinea mainland.
It has consistently failed to do so.
And as for water, many long-time Madang residents would cheerfully turn off the Water Board taps for good if they were allowed once again to rely exclusively on good old free rain water tanks.
As the letter writer noted, “we are not paying peanuts for our water and electricity supplies”.
Other quasi-government organisations fall into the same category of inefficient and expensive services.
Until Air Niugini was challenged by the overseas services of the fledgling Airlines of PNG, return fares between Port Moresby and Brisbane were outrageous.
Once competition got underway, those charges plunged to a fraction of their pre-competition levels. More people can afford to fly and it is no surprise that Air Niugini is about to invest in two new aircraft to meet demand.
Governments were created to govern and private industry to run businesses.
Our leaders need to be reminded of that fact.
 
Rich and poor share the harvest
ONE on each side of a vine-row, Stephen Melake and Jacob Mauruan set a cracking pace, snipping off bunches of tiny purple grapes, tossing them into plastic baskets, then jogging to the next plant. Behind them is a trail of full baskets.
It has been a hard morning already in the Fishtail vineyard, covering a hillside looking over a rugged valley in New Zealand’s South Island.
The autumn sun is still strong, and a stiff wind sends up clouds of dust from the vehicle tracks, whitening the crinkly hair of the two young Vanuatuans. But, after a quick lunch break, they are not letting up.
In just a few years, operations such as Fishtail have transformed this Central Otago area into one of the world’s biggest producers of pinot noir, along with Burgundy in France and Oregon in the US, adding a large volume of the fine red to New Zealand’s long-established output of white wines.
Previously, grazing land here was almost worthless. Then an introduced virus killed off the rabbits that were eating the slopes bare, farmers churned up the underlying schist with backhoes, and investors began paying NZ$30,000 a hectare for the cachet of setting up their own vineyard.
But there was a catch. The flow of seasonal workers from NZ and Australia who used to pick the grapes, the apples and pears, and the stone fruit of Central Otago tapered off as both economies neared full employment.
Backpackers with working holiday visas from Europe and elsewhere filled the gap but they tend to party hard and leave without warning mid-harvest.
Enter, workers from Pacific island nations under a seasonal labour scheme introduced by the NZ government.
After a short pilot scheme last year, about 5,000 mostly young workers from Western Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu – including Melake and Mauruan – have spent six months in New Zealand’s orchards and vineyards.
With encouragement from the World Bank, the Rudd government has been considering a similar scheme after it was rejected by the previous government although former foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer, recently admitted he supported it.
Last month, the Australian Workers Union, one of the federation-era institutions that had forced the deportation of the indentured Pacific Island workers known as “blackbirdiess” from Queensland’s canefields, dropped its opposition, too – as long as no Australian workers were displaced, and seasonal workers were paid full local rates.
The National Farmers Federation also came out fully in favour, in a report forecasting a shortfall of 22,000 unskilled workers in Australia’s A$7 billion-a-year horticultural industry as the drought ends.
It proposes a trial over the next harvest season, starting about October, putting 500 to 1,000 islanders in each of three locations such as Emerald in Queensland, Mildura and Swan Hill in Victoria, or Griffith or the Northern Rivers in New South Wales.
Ultimately it thinks up to 10,000 could come from countries in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, with the conditions set by the union.
“Farmers are desperate for workers,” the federation’s workplace relations manager, Denita Wawn, said. “We hear stories of A$100,000 to A$150,000 in lost production because it’s not picked, or not picked at the right time, and about labour turnover costs going up from A$10,000 a year to A$100,000.”
New Zealand’s experience should be encouraging to critics who on one side worry about workers jumping their visas or becoming socially disruptive, and on the other fear that employers and middlemen will exploit them.
Josaiah Iaken, 27, a father of three from the village of Tanyeba in Vanuatu’s volcanic island of Tanna, was among the 45 recruited from his country for the pilot scheme. He and 41 others have returned, along with 188 they helped choose.
Before he heads home later this month, Iaken will go up to Blenheim to meet a further 40 men from Tanna who will arrive to do winter pruning and backhoe work in the wine region of Marlborough.
“I’ll be showing them how to buy food and use electric stuff because some of them won’t know,” he said after attending Sunday prayers at the Presbyterian church in Cromwell. “It’s the first time they’ll be in a big country like this.”
Iaken believes he will have saved about NZ$5,000 when he leaves, after paying off the NZ$1,500 advance for his air fare and settling-in costs, and living a quiet life in farm-worker hostels.
He looks forward to coming for a further five years or so.
“I want to build a good house for my family and put in a solar panel so my kids can have lights to study,” he said. “After that, I want to start a small business, maybe buy a rental house in Port Vila.”
Next morning, Iaken and five other Tanna men are finishing the harvest at the Burn Cottage vineyard, where the manager, John Callaghan, is full of admiration for their spirit.
“They’ve found it very hard,” he said. “It’s relentless work and it gets very cold down here. I don’t know how many old football jumpers and fleeces I’ve handed over. Even tough Kiwis find it hard.”
The knowledge that good workers will get regular seven-month visas is a powerful incentive to knuckle down and avoid trouble.
Some problems have come from alcohol but few repeat the experiment.
“They all want to please, and see themselves as ambassadors of their country – to get a warning is pretty serious,” Basil Goodman, the managing director of Seasonal Solutions, the co-operative venture of Otago growers that handles recruitment, work allocation, payroll, tax, accident insurance, banking and accommodation, says.
“Out of the present 230, only one or two won’t be invited back.”
A large part of the pastoral care for the islanders comes from the “hostel mums” running the accommodation, who help with problems as diverse as forgotten PIN numbers, finding supplies of taro, and homesickness.
“At first, one or two were aghast at having ‘black men’ in their hostels,” Dr Manjula Luthria, the World Bank’s regional economist based in Sydney, says.
“By the time they left, the mums were crying and saying they were the best people they’d ever had.”
As well as injecting the workers’ cash savings and remittances into their villages, the scheme has created linkages that will help economic development back home.
A group of 32 workers from the village of Lolihor, on the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, raised more than NZ$10,000, from busking with ukulele, tea-chest bass and voices outside Cromwell’s bookshop and farmers’ market at weekends.
Rotary clubs and churches raised more funds for village improvements.
Locals for whom overseas meant Britain now plan visits to Vanuatu to see the homes of their guest workers.
Craig Howard, a manager at Seasonal Solutions, has been giving impromptu weekend training in computers and welding.
Dr Luthria wants to expand this, possibly through courses at the local polytechnic college in subjects such as business planning and tourism.
In New Zealand, it is no longer a pilot scheme, but a fixture. And now there is a new worry. NZ pays its pickers NZ$12.10 an hour, plus 8% holiday pay.
In Australia, seasonal workers get the minimum wage, about A$13 an hour, but piece rates can lift weekly earnings as high as A$1,000.
Although Australia, for political reasons, would be looking more to the north, to Melanesian countries and probably Timor Leste, New Zealanders worry that their pioneering work will end up benefiting their big neighbour.
“New Zealand is very conscious of the fact that wages here in Australia are higher and that, if this door opens up, there’ll be, as Ross Perot said, this great sucking sound,” Dr Luthria said. – Sydney Morning Herald-PNS
Editorial