A series of eminent persons, including Sir John Kaputin, Peter Donigi. Alan Bird and Jamie Maxton-Graham, have spoken out this week to rubbish the government's model of development which favours foreign corporations over indigenous business and ensures the majority of people live in poverty.

The government's model is based on failed neo-liberal principles of unregulated foreign investment, exporting our mineral wealth, promoting corporations over people, and opening our land and borders to foreigners. This approach by the government is a far-cry from the principles of protecting our nationhood set out in the National Goals in our Constitution, which successive governments have chosen to ignore.

Former Finance minister, Sir John Kaputin, speaking in Kokopo, has said national interests have been abused through trade, migration and financial manipulations. He said this was due to a failure to follow the National Constitution to “protect our national interests”. 

“We are caught on a massive plantation, managed by our leaders for the interests of Australia and other foreign countries. Cheap labour, our natural resources and our land, are being exploited for the benefit of Australian, Chinese, Indian and other foreign interests. There is no doubt that they will exploit our oil and natural gas for their own industrial complexes and will suck up our national savings through their banks, insurance companies, shipping and airline corporations, as well as hotels and trading companies, and they will dump their rice, flour and other agricultural products in our markets.”

Sir John said in 2009 he was at a meeting of a business council in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where indigenous business people were calling for greater participation in their economy after 60 years of independence. “Is this what is in store for us?’’ Sir John said. “Are you prepared to wait for another 60 years before issues of inequality and lack of protection are addressed?"

A veteran of the legal fraternity and academic Mr Peter Donigi, has joined the criticism of the government's development model. Mr Donigi says PNG’s politicians are all driven by the fear that they must be on good terms with multi-national corporations so as to attract US dollar investments in the country. 


“Instead of determining independent paths for our growth – they are schooled, cajoled and manipulated in the art of keeping our people poor,” he said. The government's development plan "is aimed at keeping our people poor ...and by 2050 none will be any wiser as poverty will still be there. This is a plan that is conceived by people with no foresight, and schooled by the corporate interests in their universities with teachers who are schooled in the idea of keeping poor people poor and keeping rich people and corporate power at its highest peak.”

Mr Dongi says “we have had successive governments since independence that work not for our people but for foreign capital". Papua New Guinea, he says, must do away with "the Government of the foreign capital by the foreign capital and for the foreign capital. You might say that this is stupid"

Speaking in Port Moresby, at a seminar on the new foreign land-grab in PNG, MP Jamie Maxton-Graham, has spoken of the failure of unregulated capitalism to improve the lives of ordinary Papua New Guineans and the government's failure to protect our land from foreign corporations.

This theme was also taken up by prominent PNG businessman, Allan Bird, who says rather than giving costly tax breaks to foreign businesses there must be greater protection by government of locally owned businesses. Mr Bird has proposed all citizen businesses be given 20-year tax breaks, similar to those given to foreign mining companies.


“Why do we, citizens, have to pay 35 per cent company tax like the foreigners who, so often, are backed by their own governments to compete with us,’’ Mr Bird said. “We need what I call positive discrimination, and I think that’s what all [PNG business people] want.’’


Mr Bird has also proposed that all government contracts valued below K100 million should be reserved for citizens only.