Thanks to Zenitram Dee for bringing up Malaysian prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohammad.

His brilliant ideas included a religious surcharge on all businesses owned by people who did not belong to the state religion.

All businesses have to be substantially owned by ethnic Malaysian citizens. The percentage, I believe, has been recently reduced.

You can appreciate the enormous difference these two alone would make in PNG. Christianity could be made our official religion and receive this type of assistance.

There is absolutely no hope of it happening given our leaders weak record in failing to reserve businesses to PNG citizens.
Cottage industries are for us, such as shoe repairs etc.

Thanks Samuel.

I remember reading in the press about a trip to China before the general elections by Francis Awesa the then Minister for Works to initiate discussions on this loan. So I'm not sure that it took at "whistle blower" to make this known to the public.

There is some correlation between future mineral revenues and such key infrastructures. At the risk of being too simplistic, the basic premise is that we can't have a project if we don't have the infrastructure to support it. And no project means no future revenues. So it does make sense in my mind that the funding could be tied to such future revenue streams.

But I still would like to know a little bit more about the loan and its terms and conditions including the extent of the involvement of Chinese contractors (their version of Boomerang) and whether the fact that a great proportion of their loan money will return to China via these contractors had been considered in structuring the loan such that we are not penalised more than we should.

I think the proposed Chinese loan is required to urgently rescue some of our key economic infrastructure assets such as the Highlands Highway and not to cover the budget deficit as insinuated here.

Regardless of the pros and cons of a borrowing of such a magnitude, one thing is for sure: that our key economic infrastructure is in urgent need of repair.

So I have no particular qualms about looking for money (I don't care from where!) to get these fixed quickly.

I hate to imagine the "opportunity costs" of allowing this key economic infrastructure to collapse completely.

My feeling is that the Chinese loan would be secured against future revenues from the resource projects.

I can see the importance of the loan but its magnitude warrants careful consideration of all factors concerned before committing to it.

O’Neill must not rush this. Its full terms and conditions must be disclosed and debated properly before we accept the first yuan of this lending from Beijing.

I know the Chinese have a habit of being secretive but we owe it to ourselves to openly talk about it and understand its implications fully before committing ourselves to it.

Does this huge Chinese loan fit in with the method of indebtedness laid out below and will PNG be forever be in the hands of China?

Put Chinese names instead of American ones. With an enforced choice between America and China I would take America. Americans are not going to compete and take over the SME's the way that Chinese are and will. We would retain at least the lower levels of business.

This is an excerpt from "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins....

PREFACE

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.

They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources.

Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM.

I wrote that in 1982, as the beginning of a book with the working title, "Conscience of an Economic Hit Man".

The book was dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been my clients, whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits — Jaime Roldos, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire.

We EHMs failed to bring Roldos and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.

First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to MAIN and other U.S. companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster, and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects.

Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans (after they had paid MAIN and the other U.S. contractors, of course) so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.

My job...was to forecast the effects of investing billions of dollars in a country.

Specifically, I would produce studies that projected economic growth twenty to twenty-five years into the future and that evaluated the impacts of a variety of projects. For example, if a decision was made to lend a country $1 billion to persuade its leaders not to align with the Soviet Union, I would compare the benefits of investing that money in power plants with the benefits of investing in a new national railroad network or a telecommunications system.

Or I might be told that the country was being offered the opportunity to receive a modern electric utility system, and it would be up to me to demonstrate that such a system would result in sufficient economic growth to justify the loan.

The critical factor, in every case, was gross national product. The project that resulted in the highest average annual growth of GNP won. If only one project was under consideration, I would need to demonstrate that developing it would bring superior benefits to the GNP.

The unspoken aspect of every one of these projects was that they were intended to create large profits for the contractors, and to make a handful of wealthy and influential families in the receiving countries very happy, while assuring the long-term financial dependence and therefore the political loyalty of governments around the world.

The larger the loan, the better. The fact that the debt burden placed on a country would deprive its poorest citizens of health, education, and other social services for decades to come was not taken into consideration.

......the deceptive nature of GNP. For instance, the growth of GNP may result even when it profits only one person, such as an individual who owns a utility company, and even if the majority of the population is burdened with debt.

The rich get richer and the poor grow poorer. Yet, from a statistical standpoint, this is recorded as economic progress.

Like the humour towards the end.

I guess no MPs will turn up for such a short course because of their ego. As MPs they should know everything, that is the dominant perception in PNG.

Then again, with the new breed of MPs like the Governor for Oro Province and others, it might be possible.

The parliament or the government should conduct more monthly workshops and short courses about international politics, state of the national economy, decentralization, function of mainline government agencies and other issues for parliamentarians to build capacity.

It is a fact that not all the parliamentarians are university graduates, as such, through such workshops and short courses we can improve and increase their knowledge.

Thank you Samuel.

Peter O'Neil should come out and clearly tell Papua New Guineans the terms and conditions of the loan he would be drawing from China's Exim Bank.

I am just wondering if the issue should be debated in the Parliament before he attempts it? Can anyone anyone shed some light on this?

I totally agree with you, Samuel. That's nice and well constructed commentary. With you mate.