It’s health and education again

THE budget, to be handed down today, will obviously contain among its priorities health and education.
That has been the case for more budgets than we care to remember. They are the sectors where more aid monies have been going to over the past 30 years than in any other sector.
The results, as all Papua New Guineans know, are negligible and, by most observations, regressing.
There are many reasons for this state of affairs but among them are the personal priorities of PNG’s leaders, not as a collective government but as individuals.
Until they can actually refrain themselves from seeking medical treatment abroad, until they learn to risk death at the local clinic; until they consciously stop sending their children or kin abroad and seek a half-baked primary and secondary education onshore, there cannot be real change. Real change will only come when the leaders drive it with their personal interest foremost in mind.
Take the case of the builder who was asked by the frightened occupant of a high-rise building if the all-round glass windows would suffice to hold her naughty children.
“I like the excellent view and all that and I don’t like to criticise your workmanship. But they are very naughty sometimes, you know, in the way of children. They might run at the window or throw something at it and break the glass. I just want some assurance.”
She turned and gasped in horror as the huge man turned without a word and ran smack at the window at full trot and threw himself at it. There was a terrifying thud but the windows held.
“I think it will hold ma’am,” he told the shocked mother and walked out without another word.
And that is how it should be. Our leaders must be sufficiently confident of their handiwork in education and health that they are able to stake their own lives and those of their close relatives on them.
Instead, year after year, there is a long queue of political and bureaucratic leaders who mistrust the end result of their own laws, policies and programmes and send their children to schools in Australia or elsewhere and go for health treatment themselves in those far-off places.
We call for policies or laws to be introduced which specifically bar those who benefit from the public purse, in particular ministers of state, members of parliament, constitutional office holders and heads of departments and statutory institutions from sending their children for education abroad – particularly for basic primary and secondary education or from seeking medical treatment abroad for self and kin.
It is natural to want the best for your children but it will not do if one happens to wield the power to ensure every other child in the country can afford the same type of education or medical treatment and absconds that responsibility readily because his or her own needs can be satisfied elsewhere.
Every member of parliament or minister wields that power when he or she votes on the budget or is deliberating laws or executive policies pertaining to health and education.
Every departmental head and his or her senior managers wield that power when he or she implements the policies or programmes.
There is no greater incentive than personal interest. The opposite is, of course, that there can be no greater disincentive than when your personal interests can be readily secured elsewhere – such as abroad.
Australia and New Zealand, which have poured billions of kina for decades into health and education without any noticeable improvement, ought to have their own stringent guidelines in place to refuse entry by leaders’ children into their primary and secondary educational institutions. They ought to do the same for medical treatment even if they do so at the risk of inviting the scorn of humanitarian organisations.