Is it "talking sense" to continue to allow foreign investment, which gives PNG a few toea and brings out of PNG a few kina for the investment? No one "foreign invests" unless they figure on making a lot of money. When foreign investors take the money they make and re-invest it in the country, that's one issue. But in PNG, most of the re-investment we have seen is window dressing - it's just done to hide the billions of kina through the years that have left PNG. This has been a major contribution to the decline of our kina.
Window dressing foreign re-investment includes the kind of giaman processing in which a tiny fraction of a PNG resource is processed onshore (like our tuna, or the RH plywood factory) while a huge amount of unprocessed raw material is exported behind the scenes where we never bother to look.
Window dressing foreign re-investment includes RH's establishment of stores which serve to bring back the kina they pay out in logging royalties so that it goes back into their own hands as naive Papua New Guineans buy products in those stores.
This kind of foreign investment is what dominates in PNG today.
This kind of foreign investment helps foreign development more than it helps PNG development.
I assume that since you support foreign investment, you see nothing wrong with all this?? |