Official stresses importance of reliable data

RELIABLE data on the country’s extractive industries is important both for public consumption and for policy development, an official says.
Executive director for PNG Chamber of Mines and Petroleum Dr Albert Mellam said during the PNG Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (PNG EITI) media workshop in Port Moresby last Friday that the reports formed public opinion and influenced policy development. The PNG EITI published six country reports from 2013 to 2018 focusing on payments made by the extractive companies to the Government, and the Government’s receipts of those payments.
The report for 2018 was released last week. “So fundamentally important in terms of influencing policy and policy development in Papua New Guinea is the availability of data,” he said.
“Reports like the EITI cover all the position in addition to the governance around the public section of the industry anchored on data.
“What is critical is the importance of reliable data.
“If we don’t have reliable data, then public policies are not aligned and we get all kinds of views about the contributions that the resource industry makes to PNG.
“It is absolutely fundamental that through the EITI process, we try to show that we improve in terms of our methodology around data collection and also what we extrapolate out of the data and therefore reported in the public domain is fundamentally important.”