ACTNOW's blog

Govt claims on reducing export logging don’t stack up

Updated 18 March 2022 with the details of four further new log export operations that started in December 2021

Government claims that it has stopped issuing new log export licences to foreign owned logging companies are not borne out by the evidence.

There are twenty new foreign-operated log export operations that have started up since 2020, according to the government’s own log export data.

Government Has Failed Over Cancellation of Illegal SABL Leases

Nine years after a Commission of Inquiry exposed the huge illegal SABL land grab, government efforts to cancel the leases have completely failed.

Last week Lands Minister, John Rosso, told Parliament that of seventy SABL leases recommended to be be cancelled only twenty have so far been rescinded. 

Just twenty leases cancelled over a nine year period is frankly pathetic.

How commercial banks have supported PNG’s destructive logging boom

Commercial banks operating in Papua New Guinea have given at least K300 million (AU$144 million) in available credit, since 2000, to the country’s five largest exporters of tropical logs, according to a new report, The Money Behind the Chainsaws, from Act Now! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre. 

Letting the Raven Fly: The failure to convict those charged with corruption offences.

Research into prosecutions for corruption in Papua New Guinea reveals that despite the enormous extent of the misappropriation of public funds only a tiny number of officials are ever charged and almost none end up being convicted or imprisoned.

This failure is likely one reason PNG shows no signs of overcoming its unenviable reputation as one of the most corrupt nations in the world and why allegations of corruption involving political leaders, the powerful and the wealthy remain rife.