BY WARREN DUTTON*

I AM DESPERATELY afraid that our Liquefied Natutral Gas Project could turn out to be the sickest joke that the world has as yet played on PNG.

We must turn the undoubted revenue that will flow from the LNG Project into real wealth that will genuinely benefit all our people and especially our rural majority.

We cannot delude ourselves that we have been able to do this with the excessive revenue that has already flowed into, and then out, of our country from Bougainville, Ok Tedi, Porgera, Lihir and Kutubu.

We have made mistakes over the past forty years, and inexplicably we have so far survived the consequences of those mistakes.  We must now learn from those mistakes.  We must create positive solutions.

I do not believe that we can hope to survive as a country if we repeat the same mistakes with the revenue we are earning from our mining and oil projects and with the more distant revenue to come from the LNG Project.

Our rural people have not needed to use their political power because, until now, they have been able to survive as subsistence farmers.  Any extra income they could earn from their cash crops was in fact a luxury, and they consumed it as a luxury.

Our rural people have, until now, actually in many ways enjoyed an easier life than their friends and relations who have migrated to our towns and cities, where, I am sure that many of you here would agree with me, they are effectively well on the way to becoming ‘wage slaves’.

Even before our LNG Project began to hasten this process of turning more and more of our people from independent self-reliant farmers into wage-earners, population growth, in particular, had commenced the process.

Using traditional farming methods our ancestors were not able to produce enough food to allow their populations to grow.  It was not until new and more productive farming methods were introduced that populations anywhere in PNG were able to begin to grow larger.

In the small area of the Western Province affected by the Ok Tedi Copper mine, the life expectancy of the people has risen from considerably less than 30 years to now over 50 years, and the population has in some places trebled.

I am sure that this experience has been repeated in the near vicinity of all of the large resource exploitation areas throughout the country.

When I first entered the House of Assembly 1968, I think that all of us believed that PNG needed a larger population so that it could develop into a strong independent nation. Forty years on, I believe that all thinking people now realise that our population has been growing far faster than we as a country have been able to cope with. 

We are falling further and further behind in the provision of the vital services and more importantly the rights that are essential for our citizens.  Especially for our remote rural villagers.

The most important right that we have taken away, I will even say that we have stolen, from the great majority of our people, and especially from our rural majority, is the right to be independent self-reliant men and women.

That is what our hunter/gatherers and our subsistence farmers were forty years ago – independent self reliant men and women.  There were not so many of them, but they were independent, and they were self reliant.

To a very great degree, they maintained that self reliance as they made the transition to cash crop farming. But the coming of the excessive wealth from our large mining and oil projects has stripped away that self reliance from the majority of our rural people.

This mining and oil wealth has indeed made many of their leaders richer than all their tribe. But their leaders, or rather their spokesmen or their commission agents, have not had the wisdom, nor the responsibility, nor the care for all of their people that traditional leaders or Big Men used to have.

PNG has lacked the experience and lacked  the wisdom to properly manage and to properly share the riches that have been produced by our copper and gold mines and our oil wells, and PNG and its rural people have suffered greatly because of this lack.

Traditional society was by definition, and by necessity, a sharing society.  So are all successful societies.  Over the past forty years PNG governments have forgotten, have unlearned, this.

Unless PNG and its various governments begin now to share the wealth that is every day being produced by our existing mines and oil wells, unless they begin to share it right down to the most remote of our rural villagers, it will be too late to start doing so when the LNG finally begins to start providing real revenue in 2016.

*Spotted on Keith Jackson's PNG Attitude blog