Opposition urges Government to tell truth about country’s economy

 By MALUM NALU

AN urgent “fiscal crisis” meeting should be held immediately for all key Government agencies to revise the 2016 Budget and fiscal management debt management strategies, Opposition Leader and former Treasurer Don Polye says.

This is among seven measures the Opposition has suggested the Government and its agents need to do due to the country’s present economic climate.

“The Department of Treasury, Bank of PNG, Internal Revenue Commission, Customs, National Planning, and Finance should hold a fiscal crisis meeting immediately to revise the whole of 2016 Budget,” Polye told a media conference yesterday.

“It needs to be done immediately.

“It cannot be left to the last minute like what we saw happened last year.

“Supplementary budgets do not solve the problem if you put it to the last minute, and bring it together with a national budget.

“It should be done immediately to discuss the debt strategy,” he said.

“The current debt strategy that we run is irrelevant as debt in this country has blown to the roof.

“I believe it (debt) is not below K17 billion as said by Government, or K19 billion as said by the Bank of PNG.

“I think those two figures are misleading as I believe they have left out the K3 billion UBS loan, the debts that State-owned entities have taken because SOEs don’t get any debt unless they get guarantee from the Government.”

Polye had also called for the following:

• Independent Consumer and Competition Commission to immediately start a thorough survey to ascertain if people are benefitting from the trickling down of the global oil price decrease;
• ICCC to upgrade its programmes and introduce a new strategy to prescribe minimum standardised pricing for oil-related trade in PNG; 
• an urgent meeting to be held with the International Monetary Fund to urgently change the fiscal and debt policies of the government;
• Bank of PNG to give a more-realistic view of backlog of orders by the private sector;
• more debt control; and
• Prime Minister Peter O’Neill and his Cabinet to come out clearly on economic issues of the country without hiding facts.