Patch all leakages to create wealth

IT is now widely accepted and taken for granted that PNG is a resource rich country but remains poor in all facets from national wealth to bulk of the population living below poverty levels.
The current status quo of laws and economic structure and systems traps PNG to remain poor, no matter how hard the government tries to bail the economy out of poverty.
No one in position of responsibility is putting his or her foot down to identify all resource envelope for the country and categorising them into non-renewables and renewables, defining new terms of ownership thereof by policy and law.
There is no formulation of new polices and laws on cost sharing and benefit sharing with the developers/investors and that of with the landowners and the three tiers of government.
There needs to be a holistic change to rewrite sector laws governing resource ownership, exploitation, harvesting, and sharing of costs and benefits.
If the resource is a Mother Nature gift, why are landowners – as custodians – would be forced to borrow money to share costs of exploration and extraction to constitute its paid-up equity in the venture to a resource they already own.
That is insanity at its best. If fact, it is totally a wrong concept for the past 44 years.
The developers are simply guests here to take the risk to exploit a resource at the permission of the custodian to make a profit for its shareholders so let them take 100% commercial risks.
Let the State worry about all non-commercial risks to safeguard investments.
Let the final output be shared at 60:40 basis of the landowners and the State, without the landowners or the State forking out any money for exploration and development.
Additional measures include a compulsory production levy in a form of one-tonne free gold ingot to the State by every gold mine per year for five years, to be processed and stored as bullion in a local investment bank vaults to hedge the economy against any future financial pressures.
For the fisheries sector, tuna management requires clear laws on who owns the fishing grounds and the fish that swims inside the EEZ and those who pay K30,000 under vessels day scheme to scoop any value of fish themselves per day.
Is it the best formula or not? Why not let the fishing boats take full risk of fishing costs but issue conditional licence to land every catch to be shared 50:50 basis with the State.
As in the forest sector, the current formula is that timber harvesting rights in a licence area is given to the developer to log and export.
All the risks is passed on to the log. Here the developer takes off or deducts 70% value of the one cubic feet of log to cover costs of logging and export.
The 30% becomes benefits which the logger takes 20%, while 5% is taken up by national government, 2.5 % provincial government 2.5% landowners.
Is it a best and optimum benefit stream for logging?
All those needs to be exposed and patch all leakages to create real wealth.

Galaxy Spencer