SIMON DAVIDSON
SONOMA - Papua New Guinea has a choice - to innovate and develop its massive natural resources to create more wealth or to forever be a rent collector.
Right now, we are a rent collector for our massive natural resources including the K65 billion PNG LNG project and the newest $US16 billion Papua LNG project.
The nation’s leaders have no intention of harnessing our resources to innovate and extract the wealth ourselves.
So decisions on our resources are dictated in the corporate boardrooms of off shore corporations, while we stand by idly watching the rapid plunder of our resources.
Our leaders have no vision of the nation’s economic future. There’s plenty of political grandstanding and rhetoric, including the much vaunted Vision 2050m but it is all simply noise.
These men are blinded by greed and self-aggrandisement; they fall easily for the corporate dollar and sell our wealth cheaply.
Natural resources are finite; their extraction has an expiry date. When our timber, gold, gas and other resources expire, we will be left with nothing.
We need to learn from our Asian neighbours like Malaysia, who became fed up with the rent collecting mentality and decided to take control and innovate.
They incorporated Petronas, the national petroleum exploration company, and mandated it to extract and undertake downstream processing of the nation’s resources in the energy sector, thus generating greater wealth for the nation.
Other resource rich nations have followed similar paths instead of depending on foreign corporations like Shell, Exxon Mobil or Total to extract their wealth.
The tiny mid-Pacific nation of Kiribati, with a population 110,000, has a sovereign wealth fund holding the equivalent of K2.5 billion. Timor L’este, with a population one million, has a fund worth K57 billion through its wise application of oil and gas revenues.
Through prudent and honest management of our natural resources, PNG could do likewise.
We should also be innovators. It is possible to innovate with a little spark of imagination. To allow foreign corporations to extract our resources for a pittance is both a form of neocolonialism and an insanity.
The interest of foreign corporations is to maximise benefits to their shareholders through the exploitation of other nation’s natural resources. If we don’t innovate, in the end we will become losers, become poorer and miss out on our golden opportunity to become self-sufficient.
What the leaders of this nation need to do in this era of unprecedented resource exploration is to dare to innovate.
We must not follow the path of least resistance and forever be rent collectors.
The choices our leaders make now will determine the future of our nation. Will we rise or will we fall?