By S. Gigi Aupong

Papua New Guinea is unashamedly dancing to the tune of multinational corporations. We are willing to break our own laws to make money for the rich. 

Sir Arnold Amet has a right to be angry at how colonizers tricked us in the past into giving up our resources for nothing. However, he fails to see that the same thing is still happening in PNG, this time through multinational corporations. 

PNG is waking up to the realization that our constitution is being broken every which way to suit the corporations greed. One of the most obvious is the Pacific Marine Industrial Zone (PMIZ) in Amet’s own province. Once it is up and running, the PMIZ project is supposed to be operating within a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). 

SEZs are established to create an environment where the investor will operate with minimal restrictions to its business activities. Essentially, it is supposed to provide an environment for the investor to make profits at the least cost. Already the Government of PNG promises investors a 10 year tax free holiday in this project. 

Minister for Commerce and Industry, Gabriel Kapris admitted in a recent PMIZ forum in Madang that there is no law in place to cater for an SEZ in PNG. 

The Government of PNG and the World Bank through its financial arm, International Finance Corporation (IFC), is currently in cohorts to legalize SEZ in the country. If we are to learn from other South East Asian Countries that have SEZs, we should expect the law at the very least to ensure that our labor, immigration, quarantine and occupational health and safety laws do not apply.

Papua New Guineans should then expect to provide cheap labor within these zones and with the failed promises of incentives already experienced by landowner companies. We shouldn’t expect to be equal participants to the benefits of extracting our natural resources.  

In effect, we are still plantation workers, now going to be sweatshop workers, working for the rich and giving away our resources for nothing, just as our grandparents did. As a nation, we may have gained sovereignty, but we have not escaped the clutches of greed that still needs PNG to act as a colony rather than an independent state. 

The five national goals and directive principles are fast becoming an ideal as we scramble to align our national interest and laws to suit the corporations. 

As an independent state we had a plan to pursue a path that was our own. That relied on our strength as a rural people, as a people that have customary control of their land. 

This was once a celebrated notion, with 97% of the land mass of the country, lying directly in the customary land owner’s care. As corporate greed takes over our ideals, the 97% is fast decreasing. Customary land ownership is now seen as an obstacle to progress.

When the obvious plan by the government and the World Bank to take control of customary land through land registration resulted in the death of student protestors, this didn’t stop the drive to take land from Papua New Guineans. Now instead of asking for consent, foreign companies or investors simply take, through the use of Special Agriculture Business Leases. 

As another amendment to the constitution, SABL is an investors dream in a resource rich country like PNG. Companies can now bypass forestry laws that ensure wide consultations with customary landowners to gain access to virgin forests. SABL grants easy access to hectares of land for commercial purposes. In itself, SABL has resulted in Papua New Guineans losing more than 2.5 million hectares of land in 6 months between 2010 and 2011. All this land has been taken by the government because corporations need our land to make money.

The government has thrown caution to the wind, choosing to ignore what the constitutional planning committee warned of the impact of large scale industries on our societies. 

While we are still trying to recover and deal with the impact of terrestrial mining activities, the PNG government approved the deep sea mining project, another project that has no law in place to regulate it.

The very act of approving this project has increased the stock value of the Canadian developer Nautilus; however, the people of PNG are still in the dark about the impact of this project.

While there is a huge effort by our government in ensuring that a Filipino company can diversify, a Canadian company makes profit and other foreign companies have easy access to raw materials, there is a marked lack of vision by our leaders for the people of PNG and ignorance for the country’s existing laws.