by BRIAN GOMEZ
A grassroots exercise for betterment of society?

Papua New Guinea is presently going through a very important exercise in democracy. The spotlight is on political parties and more than 2,000 candidates who all want those 109 seats in Parliament.
Clearly the motivation for many is the pathway to new possibilities of power and wealth even though Parliament, as a seat of power, is meant to promote good governance and passage of fair and equitable laws that help provide for a better tomorrow.
Unfortunately for a whole variety of reasons, this has not been the fate of Papua New Guinea since independence in 1975.
There are many indicators of a performance that has not been very good, including high unemployment, a relatively tiny formal sector, relatively short life spans for most people, high infant mortality rates and falling per capita incomes.
On the positive side, one has to acknowledge there have been some good years but not enough of them as the nation is affected by several natural disasters and the human disaster represented by the Bougainville conflict.
The current outlook is arguably the most positive it has ever been. The last four years have been a period of steady growth but there is some uncertainty about its overall impact in some aspects.
One of the reasons for this is the poor state of national statistics.
As the lead article in the Australian National University’s latest Pacific Economic Bulletin notes: “But what is the population growth rate? The answer is no one really knows.”
According to Roderick Duncan, a lecturer at Australia’s Charles Sturt University, the World Bank puts PNG population growth at 2%, the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook has it at 3.1% while economists at Suva’s University of South Pacific place it at 2.5%.
In fact Health Minister Sir Peter Barter recently put the growth figure at a wildly unlikely 4.8% rate.
The PNG Yearbook, by the way, has the growth rate at 2.7%.
On the basis of the IMF figure, the economy has not been gaining in strength in the past four years. Per capita income on that measure only grew in 2005.
All that these figures are showing is that there is no room for complacency.
And yet, even the optimists among us would find it hard to imagine that the 109 members of the forthcoming 8th national Parliament are going to make a big difference.
There is no reason to believe that absenteeism will be any lower for parliamentary sitting; there will be many days when this august body will adjourn for a lack of a quorum and any likely coalition government will spend much of its time watching its back and trying to keep coalition partners happy.
Sure there will be many individuals with high morals and high ambitions in our unicameral chamber but as a body, self-interest will continue to be the order of the day. That is the sad reality.
Parliament will continue to have problems reducing the slush funds of MPs or in keeping down the perks of high political office even though they bear no resemblance to the daily lives of the mass of people within the public service or worse still, the majority of the populace in rural areas who make up the statistics for the nation’s woeful social indicators.
Thinking of all this makes me remember the admonition that former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew gave a business luncheon in Manila many years ago when he told them their country needed discipline more than democracy.
The audience was furious at this message. The truth of the statement continues to echo in the chambers of the Philippines Senate and Congress, where a variety of vested interests continue to ensure that the plight of the nation’s poor remains as bad as it ever was.
Some might argue it is worse than ever.
In PNG, this is the very reason why over the past three decades many government leaders and politicians have stressed the importance of agriculture, but have not backed up their words with action.
Even now the latest National Agricultural Development Plan, the first of its kind, has certainly not created any sense of public enthusiasm or anticipation.
There have been promises that plenty of funding will be available, but no real sense that some new directions or goals are being set.
How many sitting MPs out campaigning in their electorate today can argue in front of their constituents that their lives have improved considerably in the past five years?
And is it going to be that much different in 2012 when many of the 109 members of the next Parliament start their campaigning?
One good indicator of improvement by then would be whether the 25% or so of school age kids, who do not go to school today, will just be a grim statistic from the past.