Minister: Small ventures left out

SMALL businesses in Papua New Guinea have been left out and marginalised, Commerce, Trade and Industry Vice-Minister Ronney Knight says. 

He made this observation at a briefing with a group of more than 40 small-and-medium enterprise owners who left for Malaysia last Saturday. 

They left for a three-day SME show to be held Kuala Lumpur. 

These SME owners are engaged in real estate, car rentals, bakery, piggery, construction and building and tourism and hospitality.  

Knight said this trip should not be the last and it that was a privilege for them to go there and learn valuable business ideas that they could bring back to PNG to enhance their respective businesses. 

“This is not the last because we will push this further to make our businessmen and women to become the true job generators in PNG, which have been lacking for a long time.

“This is the right way to creating job opportunities and developing small business.

“By encouraging SMEs, it would create more jobs that would help reduce crime in our country. 

“It is much cheaper than to put billions of kina to our police force to solve our law and order problems.“Let us tell other countries that PNG is not the land of law and order problems,” he said. 

Commerce, Trade and Industry Minister Richard Marusaid “We have not created employment for our people and that is our root problem … about two million of our people are unemployed today,” he said.

“We want to build a new culture of people who want to do business and create job opportunities.”