Explanation welcome but late

THE explanation provided by the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Elias Wohengu, on the recently concluded and signed agreements between Papua New Guinea and the United States on is most welcome and not a little late.
The agreements on Defence Cooperation (DCA) and Counter-Illicit Transnational Maritime Activity Operations (Ship Rider) have created much comment, much of it ill-informed, fomenting suspicion, confusion and fear.
It is most instructive that when parties are engaged in bilateral negotiations or engaging negotiations of a commercial nature that thought be given beforehand as to how the public will receive and perceive the conclusion of such events.
Often public reaction can be the difference between concluding some of these negotiations successfully or not. And the agreements just concluded got through, as they say, by the skin of the teeth.
It is often the case, and we see it often from where we sit in the information gathering and distribution space, that public information is an afterthought.
Tilt the chair back. (Sigh) “Oh well, it is signed and sealed. Tell the public!”
So long as that kind of attitude persists, we will always have a confused public feeding itself half-baked stories and misinformation and perpetuating them via social media platforms.
That is why most departments and ministerial offices have a public relations or media and information position in the structure.
Government often accuse the news media of misinformation but it is often the case that the government’s own information system is clogged.
Through the Secretary’s precise and well enunciated brief we are now better informed but the event has come and gone and much has been said about the agreements.
We can see that negotiations towards the agreements began in 2016 and were carried out on a mixture of platforms including contact in-person, virtual, cellular and cloud based negotiations.
We can appreciate now that senior officials were engaged from the Office of the State Solicitor, PNG Customs, Department of Information and Communications Technology, Civil Aviation Safety Authority, National Airports Corporation, Defence Department, PNG Defence Force, Transport and Foreign Affairs Department.
The Commissioner of Police and the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary, the Public Prosecutor, PNG Ports and the Secretary of Justice and the Attorney General of Papua New Guinea were also kept informed.
We can better appreciate that traditional military allegiance is inadequate to cover current global, regional and national security environment.
DCAs will capture the dynamics of a robust and fast changing global security environment to facilitate cooperation in such fundamental areas as defence policy coordination, research, development, joint military exercises, education and trainings, arms procurement and facilitation of sophisticated military technology, and exchange of classified information on new and emerging security environment and platforms.
This is most welcome but it would have been much better appreciated had the critical facts been provided before the ink was dry on the agreements.
It would most certainly have allayed the “fears and anxiety that has been placarded in the social and mainstream media without facts and basis” as Secretary Wohengu rightly states.
Still, we appreciate the depth of background he has given on the subject.
We now ask if he could give us an equally detailed insight on the tussle for dominance of our region by China and the United States and what it might mean for our country.