People told to study how SWF is used

THERE is a need for a strong political constituency that will hold the government accountable for its spending, thus leading to effective use of people’s money.
“If it cannot be guaranteed that PNG would have a better performance in the use of mineral resource revenues, then we need to look at other ways in managing the funds,” academic and author Prof Ron Duncan said yesterday.
The author of Spotlight with NRI publication, Duncan is an emeritus professor in the Crawford School at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia.
In releasing this month’s publication on “managing natural resource revenues in PNG”, Duncan said PNG should look to wealth fund models in other countries for guidance.
He was reacting to on-going discussions on the government’s proposed sovereign wealth fund (SWF).
“The critical issue is ensuring that those funds going to the government are well spent … and being well-spent means ensuring the replacement of those non-renewable asset minerals and petroleum with other capitals and that means infrastructure and what we call human capital such as education … so that while using up non-renewable resource, it needs to be replaced with other assets that will earn income well into the future,” Duncan said via tele-conference from Australia.
National Research Institute (NRI) director Dr Thomas Webster Webster told the conference that NRI’s main concern was governance.
“In our review, we established that some of the rules and guidelines were (sort of) changed to suit government’s interest and where the mechanisms were not working according to the government … so those rules and guidelines were sort of changed and somehow that resulted in some funds squandered and we did not capture the full benefits of those funds,” Webster said in his presentation at the recent SWF stakeholders’ workshop in Port Moresby.