Where are the benefits of foreign trips?

What have our very many large delegations abroad brought back to Papua New Guinea?
Plane loads of people have gone on junkets paid for by the tax payer or by borrowed money?
Literally tens of millions of Kina have been spent on these trips that could easily have been used on development needs around Papua New Guinea.
World developments, including conference agendas and outcomes, are at our fingertips in the internet age so the large delegations are quite unnecessary.
We refer to one particular area that has attracted big groups to attend – the climate change conferences in different parts of the world.
Big delegations have trooped off often to Conference of Parties (COP) gatherings in exotic locations around the world with nothing to show for the expense and the time away.
COP is the United Nations climate change conference and the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change.
No report has been produced and no policy outcomes have been achieved as a result of these conferences.
There is where there is no connection between developments around the world and local issues.
Innovative thinking can apply global solutions to local problems.
Combining PNG’s fuel shortage problems and climate change concerns, a positive policy outcome area would be a move towards electric vehicles, for instance.
Electric vehicles (EVs) are a cleaner alternative to gasoline- or diesel-powered cars and trucks—both in terms of harmful air pollution, and the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change.
Most cars and trucks use an internal combustion engine (ICE), powered by burning oil-based fuels.
When burned, those fuels create climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) and other pollutants.
In addition, PNG has a local problem with fuel supply.
For almost all of 2023 there had been sporadic supply problems as a result of foreign exchange shortages and the Bank of PNG’s refusal to extend Puma a large supply of foreign exchange to buy fuel.
A move towards electric vehicles can ease this burden somewhat and release available fuel for other purposes.
Electric vehicles, we learn, have neither engines nor tailpipes.
Instead, they have batteries that power electric motors.
It’s the same setup as a remote-controlled toy car with a great deal of hard engineering gone into making this work with a heavy, human-scaled vehicle that runs for hundreds of miles on a single charge.
Cars and trucks produce a great deal of pollution everywhere but in Papua New Guinea, it gets worse because there seem to be no limits on pollution in cars.
Smoky fumes, fuel and oil dumping, and other forms of pollution are everywhere to be seen.
And the problem will go into the long term.
People spend a lot of money on new ICE vehicles so these vehicles with their pollution are locked onto our roads and highways going well into the 1930s and 1940s.
However, if the Government were to introduce a policy to move towards electric vehicles it would attract a lot of support as a country which is actively making the hard decisions to implement climate change goals. Along with its large natural endowment of tropical hardwood forests, the country could really attract serious support.
The Government could begin by offering incentives to vehicle importing companies to start importing electric vehicles and offer incentives to citizens to invest in them.
Oil based vehicle owners could trade in their old vehicle for a brand new electric vehicle at subsidised rates for a start.
Buyers of EVs can claim tax credits if the government will offer it so that owners can buy dedicated EV chargers which are required by every owner.
If there are a good deal of electric vehicles on the road in PNG, would face no pressure if there was oil shortage.
This is just one example of taking a local issue that PNG seems incapable of managing out off and finding an external solution that in the final analysis works very well for the country.