Life is full of glaring contrasts in PNG

Life can seem so very unjust. While some are rolling in money and good living, others are scraping to survive in the modern Papua New Guinea. In today’s (Thursday) Post-Courier, we have reports that portray glaringly different outlooks on life by our people. In one report, you have a cleaner battling to help her family keep going in urban life with her fortnightly wage of K60!

She is “fortunate’’ in that her husband is a gardener for a “big shot’’ and gets a bit more. But the cleaner is able to buy a bag of rice and little more with her entire fortnight wage. The pronouncement of new minimum wage rates that are supposedly being implemented already must seem a bitter topic for such people.

They can read the same edition of the Post-Courier and see some of the 1800 landowners of areas to be affected by the huge LNG project, climbing on planes to go home.Some have spent more than a month in Kokopo, living at government expense and were given K2000 each as a kind of a parting present.A tab of K12 million for the Kokopo BSA party has been mentioned. And this is just the tip of the LNG iceberg for the landowners.

Another report in this edition tells of the important meeting due to have been held yesterday for the National Tripartite Consultative Council to usher in the new minimum wage rates.While workers and employers are still trying to work out the wage implementation, government members of the meeting were nowhere to be seen at the venue.

They were, reportedly, lining up at banks to collect their spending money for a trip to an international meeting in Switzerland.It was the fourth time this council meeting had been deferred.No doubt the trip will be seen as “worthwhile’’ and reap fruits for Papua New Guinea but surely the NTCC meeting had priority in making the workers of PNG happier.

Surely the banking could have been done earlier . . . or during the meeting lunch break?It will seem to many grassroots workers that the economic scene is full of contradictions and contrasts. It helps if you are at the top of the tree and have a choice.

Source: Post Courier Editorial

*** I hate to say this but every time I log onto read the news, either the post courier or the national, it seems to me that the bad a so damaging news outweighs the good news. I don't deny what is really happening in PNG but I would want to read some interesting news among all the bad reports.

I wish that the reporters of various news outlets report more and better good news than the opposite. For the past three to five weeks, I can't stand reading more reports on riots, bribery, corruption, mismanagement, institutions running out of money, etc....

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@