I am not and never have been a student of law but I deal in it daily.

Did Wartoto ever complete his maintenance work at Kerevat? Did he start it at all? If he did not, that is not good. Students of East New Britain will miss out on good dormitories and classrooms.

And there are other reasons he got that money from NPO. If it involves $30 million, that's a lot of money, people's money.

I don't want to indulge in long stories of rights and wrongs but a state minister is in kalabus now for this very issue.

So are you people telling us here that one is guilty but the other is not guilty for the same crime? Are we thinking right or "fucked up"?

For all the corruption fighters out there in PNG -
Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.

James 1:12
The English Standard Version

Another message from my lady friend in PNG Forestry.

Thank you for your fine remarks Kelvin.

Surely my outrage is quite impotent. But where I can wield it with a will, my quill will quiver in its target.

It may very well be that the systems need to be torn asunder to expose the corruption buried at its heart, e.g., do away with duplicated powers of provincial level government and reinstate local level government.

Ensure that legislators do legislating and administrators do administrating (which sounds simple enough.)

Take a serious stand on the accountability of government, particularly the NEC.

And etcetera, as better political minds than mine have commented.

We should be courageous enough to stand at the brink and look in to the deep.

And are we mature enough to ask the right questions, the hard questions of ourselves?

If we had leaders equal to the task...but rather we are eager to tear down carvings that apparently house evil spirits accused of being responsible for the corruption rife in government.

Otherwise, ditto my earlier jargon.

Kelvin, I am very pleased to hear that you are a corruption fighter. I was starting to wonder when you appeared to be supporting Wartoto.

For your information I have been fighting corruption where-ever I have been able to for a long time. I have been a great supporter of the NSW ICAC and have been pushing for an ICAC in PNG.

Yes, I did have some inside information on what happened in 2010 and I was able to help with the ABC Four Corners program on it during 2013.

The brave Mrs Ahai, the former Principal, who Wartoto had tried to intimidate, was able to testify on the Preying on Paradise TV program that the work had not been completed, while Wartoto just laughed it all off and said the work was completed.

Sam Koim knows all about it. He was also involved with the production of this program. Yet the courts procrastinate. Why?

My contacts, the former Keravat students, who have evidence, are too scared to speak out. A lot of people in PNG are scared to speak out, especially women, as they know of the violence that can erupt.

Now in my 70s I cannot attend the protest meetings but my husband and I did spend over an hour speaking with the local political party about what is needed in Australia at the moment and the problems of corruption in Australia.

This is something I encourage all PNGeans to do i.e. speak to your local member of parliament. Democracy is all about speaking out.

When I taught at Keravat in the 1970s I was very involved with the school debating group and had some wonderful debaters in the teams I mentored, people like Susuve Laumaea, who have spoken out for many years in PNG and are now entering retirement.

I'm very pleased to hear that you have joined the club, and are going to keep up the "good fight" for integrity and justice in PNG. PNG needs lots of people like you.

Mr Natata, you appear to be the voice of reason in defence of truth and justice, at least for the case of Eremas Wartoto.

However, I suspect that your supposedly virtuous comments and well intentioned rationale may have a less than valuable real influence on the social justice that this nation requires to rise up from the quagmire of corruption.

In order to move from a situation where the well-educated and crafty, well-connected and wealthy so called 'leaders of the nation' are able to manipulate the political and legal systems to their own benefit, it is perhaps time that we readjusted our social outlook.

The current basic systems of governance are very much against the average Papua New Guinean, let alone simple villagers of this impoverished resource rich island state.

For example, minimum wage was unchanged from around 1975 until recently despite the greatly flaunted economic gains made by the country. And yet on several occasions Parliament had deemed itself "justified" to raise their own salaries by almost 100%.

As another example of the current injustice (at least as I see it), the entire Police force of the nation was thrown into a nation-wide man-hunt for one particular man involved in a daring helicopter-roof-top robbery of a bank. The cost of this operation is unknown, whereas, to my memory, none of the stolen monies was ever recovered.

It is a bit too far fetched for me to belive that one man could organise and implement such an obviously costly robbery plan and make the money dissappear.

Meanwhile missing kidnapped female scientists in a small isolated part of the country have been allowed to lounge in captivity for the past few years while enduring goodness knows what kind of treatment from their captors.

And of course, the white collar criminals, which we waste our time arguing about, are still able to get away scott-free because of legal loop-holes, State and Court enforced silence and hypocritical reasoning from legal minds of dubious moral conviction.

Nay, when I say this situation is 'fucked-up' I am not at all being "unreasonably or obsessively anxious, suspicious, or mistrustful" (Oxford online definition of paranoid).

Neither am I getting carried away. Rather I am resigned to the understanding that we simply don't have the leaders with balls enough to stop all this shit from happening.

There are very few of us public servants who are trying to get our jobs done despite the massive quantities of manure and meagre quantities of money that we are given to work with by government.

I would be very much interested in hearing any practically actionable measures that we could take for systematically reviving the current 'fucked-up' systems in PNG.

As a supposedly Christian nation, if we continue to take calmly the corrupt actions of our leaders, I believe we are morally questionable. Does the good Book not instruct us to rage against what is wrong?

I believe that we are not outraged enough.

Here we go again Barbara. Why do you use generalisations and hearsay to prejudice a fair trial for this accused person?

I saw in a recent movie made on Jesus Christ the jeering Pharisees and the crowd chant, "If he is really the Messiah, the son of God, let his save himself" while others chanted, "Crucify him! Crucify him!", a verdict that was reached even before Pilate could render proper Roman Justice!

Truth and justice do not seem to have a place in your dictionary of social engineering (albeit I know you mean well).

That aside, what funds and from what account (ANZ or BSP) did the accused person use to buy which boat and how much money was involved and who was it paid to and on what date?

Ah, you see Barbara, even your many years of teaching these natives does not qualify you to lend yourself and your dignity to the slippery slide of hysteria that I was referring to.

Folks I believe you are all intelligent human beings. I don't condone anyone stealing. However, I think we are getting a bit paranoid and getting carried away. Logically:

1. At all times Mr Wartoto was not guilty of any offence. Until he was proven to be a criminal Australia was not wrong to grant him a visa.

2. The Allegations made are now before the courts. let the courts hear it without being assailed by such media hysteria and obscenities that goes directly to prejudice a fair trial for this accused man.

3 Too many times I have heard the likes of Sam Koim quick to blame Australia or Australians. Well Mr Koim must realize that he is a creature of the executive government of the day, feeding off the hand of the Prime Minister himself. He should do better to address the Executive Government of PNG on how to govern this country better than to go blaming another government for his own governments' failings. We cant keep going and blaming Australians for our own failings in such cases.

4. Mr Wartoto did take some money from PNG Government to start that Airline. It is easy. The Government should take the same value equity in Travel Air and call it even.

5. The government should also positively encourage national entrepreneurship by creating a seed capital fund and fund good men and women with good ideas. Mr Wartoto's idea is a brilliant one. He should not be penalized, but held accountable, because the executive government was complicit in this. He does not deserve pariah status for this one.

The issues are not quite right and wrong. However, we can choose what we deem as one or another, or look at other ways of doing things that may evoke the greater good and better than useless "justice"- meted out by the blind deaf and dumb.

Not all bells that toll, toll for us, and not all dogs that bark at Waigani, bark for us.

Sadly, on one PNG blog, all the "silly young ones" are busy praising Wartoto and saying he should be Prime Minister.
Give me strength!