Stop wasting time going to court: PM

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PRIME Minister James Marape, pictured, says time has come for leaders like Patrick Pruaitch (Opposition leader) to admit that generational change has taken place and join hands to work together instead of wasting the country’s time by going to court.
He said this in response to the Opposition leader challenging his election as the eighth prime minister of PNG, questioning whether it was constitutional.
“Our country is going through a tough phase, including a tough 2019 fiscal year, and I do not know what the Opposition leader and his cohorts, including a few senior leaders of the former O’Neill-government, will achieve by going back to courts on my Parliamentary election as prime minister on May 30,” Marape said.
“Since assuming office, we have been looking retrospectively on how we have come as an economy and it does not look good when we are trying to fix our struggling economy that was caused by recklessness, laziness and lack of innovation by treasurers and PMs of recent past.”
Marape said Pruaitch, along with O’Neill, had run the economy as Treasurer and PM from 2007-11 and Pruaitch was again Treasurer from 2014 to 2017.
“The Treasurer and PM are key leaders responsible for our economy and as a former finance minister responsible for expenditures in the same period, I saw first-hand their lack of foresight and innovation in diversification of our economy. Their weak and lazy approach – just depending on commodity-price boom and when revenue drops, they run to quick and easy but expensive domestic debts – the reason why we are struggling today in our economy.”
The prime minister said when he talked about taking back PNG, he was also talking about taking it back from politicians who were lazy and weak to take the country to the next phase, from politicians who were susceptible to individual and corporate greed.
“We have failed our citizens in the last decade yet we hide our greed for power under the auspices of procedural compliance and good governance and we use institutions of states like courts to run personal agendas.”