Recent Notes 3: Bending the rules
02 August 2023
BENDING THE RULES BECOMES A NATIONAL SPORT
The PNG police commissioner says the Pandemic Act gives him power to intervene in a range of issues affecting the country - including the current fuel shortage – and, in Academia Nomad, Michael Kabuni writes that this is extending the commissioner’s power way too far.
He explains that the fuel shortage has been caused by the Central Bank’s rationing of foreign currency. As a result Puma Gas can’t get the funds it needs to buy the volume of fuel required for the PNG market. How can the police commissioner fix this problem using the Pandemic Act? It’s got nothing to do with Covid, he writes.
US MAKES DEFENCE A PREREQUISITE TO DEVELOPMENT
PNG prime minister Marape says he told US defence secretary Lloyd J Austin III at their meeting in late July that American business should take more interest in PNG and its potential to supply fresh foods to the world.
PNG Business News reports that Marape was particularly impressed by the US 3D’s approach of Diplomacy, Defence and Development and by the decision that USAID in Port Moresby begin reporting directly to Washington DC instead of through Manila, Philippines. “I urge the United States to adjust its lens so that it can truly understand the real needs of the region,” he said.
APEC’S FUTURE IS UNDER THREAT (AGAIN)
US President Joe Biden is expected to block Hong Kong chief executive, John Lee Ka-chiu, from November’s annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to be held in San Francisco.
Writing in China Daily, Regina Ip says if Lee is barred this “would be a deplorable betrayal of the original objective of APEC to promote greater economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region”. APEC was initiated in 1989 by then Australian prime minister Bob Hawke.
In November 2018, PNG hosted the APEC summit soon after it had become the first Pacific nation to sign up to China’s One Belt One Road trading infrastructure initiative. Since then China’s growing influence in the Pacific Islands has led the USA to intensify its own diplomatic and defence activities in the region.
“If the US continues to go down the primrose path of politicisation and protectionism in its policy on APEC," Ip writes scathingly, “it is not just Lee’s attendance that hangs in the balance. The future of APEC as a driving force for growth and cooperation hangs in the balance.”
Bent on survival of business? Rationalizing foreign currency transactions may have topped the list.
See: https://www.postcourier.com.pg/puma-no-further-supply-of-fuel/
Posted by: Lindsay F Bond | 20 February 2024 at 11:26 AM
Bending the Rules....
"More laws, less justice" - Marcus Tullius Cicero
"If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law" - Winston S Churchill
Posted by: Bernard Corden | 03 August 2023 at 07:43 AM