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15 Bridges, 3 Ships, a Politician and Polisyndrome

Today is Tuesday the 20th of March 2012, the current parliament is meant to be having its final session for the year 2012! Now how is that for excitement?! Usually the routine is that if you had an exciting weekend then the week should be relatively mediocre, alas it seems that this won’t be the case for us here in this wonderfully exciting country of ours.

So the 411 for today is the Sydney Casino that helped reveal Mr Namah’s slight case of homophobia is 'dismissing' a number of employees (middle managers) because they ‘breached employment policies’ and revealed some highly sensitive client information. Yikes! You’ve got to kind of feel sorry for them as they probably didn’t realize the client they were revealing information about was a high ranking member of their neighboring country’s government. There is two questions that I know I’d like answered and they are 1) how much do our politicians get paid? Because if they get paid enough to comfortably gamble Aus. $800 000-then I’m running for elections come 2017. 2) Who leaked the story? Isn’t it strange that these allegations come out almost a year after the events transpired?

The official opening ceremony of the 15 bridges (how do you open a bridge?) in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville has had its limelight ‘stolen’ by the ill-thought-out plan to burn the MV Solomon Queen and MV Kopra 1 and 2. All of us empathize with the relatives of those who have lost loved ones aboard the MV Rabaul Queen, we demand that there be justice for those lost and their families! BUT to resort to that type of ‘hoodlumism’ when you don’t get what you demand when you demand - is very unbecoming. Who will take us seriously when the referendum period comes (2015 is only three years away) if we are behaving without rationale?

As promised last week a story on pukpuks, Papua New Guineans and Australians although not necessarily in that order. Have you ever heard of the ‘Crocodile Prize’? It’s an award that’s bestowed upon Papua New Guinean writers BY the Australian Government, as a way to encourage more writers and to promote cultural identity through this art. So now the Australian government has decided that it won’t be funding this ‘Crocodile Prize’ this year, fair enough-maybe it’s time we looked at other ways of sponsoring this. I am confident that publishing and printing houses out there in the big wide world, would love to publish and print ‘raw, exotic talent’ from raw exotic lands that are different from the usual materialistic garbage and fake spiritualism.

A last word for today’s episode is ‘Polisyndrome’! Learn it, memorize it but DO NOT live it. You see experience is something that is supposed to come with Age, Wisdom is supposed to come after Experience...Yet it appears we the people of Papua New Guinea have been retrogressing at an ever increasing pace for the last couple of decades-we WERE much wiser, despite our lack of experience and young age 37 years ago! Polisyndrome strikes again (politicians syndrome is a virus that can only be cured with a good dose of 'MORAL STANDARDS').