What the country needs right now is political stability

Letters

DURING the recent Leadership Summit that was held at the Stanley Hotel in Port Moresby, the successful completion of roughly three-quarters of the Alotau Accord was said to have been underpinned by political stability.
Perhaps political stability is a necessary prerequisite for the complete and successful implementation of important government policies, plans and strategies which can spur wider social and economic developments and further avoids duplication of efforts and waste of scarce resources including time.
While most sectors of the country have benefitted from the successful implementation of the various goals enshrined in the Alotau Accord, some sectors, prominently the petroleum and energy and the telecommunication sectors have been dragged into the mud.
In the petroleum sector, a lot of issues are still in the tunnel for a vibrant and growing sector that has the potential to underpin the economic transition of PNG in the long term.
Landowner issues that were gauged through the Land Titles Commission (LTC) and then the Absolute Dispute Resolution (ADR) are still pending despite the funding of millions of Kina of public money and I don’t know what will happen again.
Distribution of projects under the Tax Credit Scheme concept have also been nationalised and as a result, new uneconomical roads and other infrastructures are being built while on the flip side, important infrastructure arteries that serve national interests, like the 120km Kutubu Access Road in the Southern Highlands remains a nightmare for the travelling public and the local economy.
The deplorable conditions of the Kutubu road is indeed due to heavy use by big trucks that are carrying logistics and procurements for the Kutubu, Agogo, Hedinia, Mananda and Moran oil and gas fields in the Southern Highlands which have been in operation since 1992.
I hope that Oil Search with its good management skills of the Oil Search Tax Credit Scheme will internalise the negative impacts like noise pollution and heavy use of the access road to reinforce a fair and legitimate investment climate in this resource rich area in the country. Furthermore, the fiscal terms have been altered in the 2017 Budget and this is against the spirit of investment in the petroleum sector as it defeats its attractiveness.
French’s Total SA has recently mentioned how it dislikes the alterations in the 2017 Budget saying it is also an alteration of the earlier fiscal terms available on the date of entry into PNG’s petroleum sector some years ago and that it might cause a bumsteer on business confidence in the future.
On the other hand, Telikom PNG and PNG Power which are State Owned Enterprises in the telecommunications and energy sector respectively have experienced twists and turns at the executive and industry levels despite being under a government that has enjoyed political stability.
In both PNG Power and Telikom PNG, workers and the unions have been taking industrial actions for quite a long time and this has affected management efforts and wasted a lot of resources thus rendering both companies in a slow business pace and poor service output.
This shows a picture that bureaucratic and industrial stabilities maybe or may not be in the confines of political stability and this probably could be solved through a better coordination between the National Executive Council, the unions and the organisation.
In other words, the government needs to create an environment where political stability will have positive synergies flowing down to the bureaucratic, management and consumer level in all sectors of the economy.
In all, I fervently hope that political stability will be embraced and enhanced by successive governments by aligning and integrating the spirit of political stability in all policies, plans and programmes as we move into the future.

Mike Haro, Via email