Need for new Govt
By PETER SEA
Post Courier
THE need for The alternative government to take over is more pressing, more urgent now than it was two and a half years ago, according to the Opposition Leader Sir Mekere Morauta.
Papua New Guinea desperately needs an alternative to the Somare National Alliance Government. We need it now. We will need it in 2012, he said.
Sir Mekere was speaking at a New Generation Party fund raiser at the Golden Bowl Restaurant in Port Moresby on Friday night.
At the NGP 2007 convention, I described the then Somare Government as a government without direction, lurching from crisis to crisis, breaking laws, wasting public resources and controlled by clique of people whose interest was to use power to increase personal wealth, he said. He said then corruption was more widespread, more systemic and more systematic than ever; that corruption was firmly entrenched in the private sector as well as the public sector.
He claimed nothing had changed except the worsening of each and every one of these factors and total domination and concentration of decision-making by the clique, by the Kitchen Cabinet. He said new scandals have followed Motigate including:
n THE Taiwan cash for diplomacy saga;
n THE Singapore logging cash scam;
n REFERRAL of more Government MPs by the Ombudsman Commission;
n THE same MPs joining their boss in trying to use the courts to escape prosecution;
n THE Pacific Registry of Ships issue;
n K20 million for ICT policy advice;
n BILLIONS of kina stashed away in trust accounts with tens of millions not accounted for;
n LAVISH expenditure by IPBC all it would seem, at the discretion of its minister;
n K130 million on a Falcon jet that cannot land at most airports in the country;
n TV stations when provincial radio networks are collapsing; and
n HUNDREDS of millions of dollars of secret carbon trading deals that only the Grand Chef and a few Kitchen hands seem to know about.
The latest intrigue is the reported visit of the deposed fugitive Thai prime minister Mr Thaksin Shinawatra to Wewak. Did he come all the way from exile in Dubai to pay homage to the Sepik River God or to check out bemobile, LNG deals, timber deals, fish deals, construction deals, or other family businesses? he asked. What is wrong with Papua New Guineans that we put up with such naked abuse and theft?
Why are people not demanding action to stop the abuse and theft and to bring the culprits to justice?
Why is it only Mekere and Bart and a handful of others who go to bat over these issues?
How much longer will people put up with the miserable state of government services rundown schools, disillusioned teachers, clinics that are closed, those open with no equipment or drugs, roads with potholes the size of gorges, no clean water, no affordable housing, no jobs for our children leaving school, mothers dying in childbirth and outbreaks of cholera? Sir Mekere said the alternative would be a government with vision, an intelligent government, a hard-working government and an honest government.
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