Posted Fri Jul 25, 2008 6:00pm AEST

A Papua New Guinea corruption watchdog has warned that civil discontent over alleged government corruption is growing.

The group say there could be a violent public backlash because of the ever increasing number of corrupt dealings in the Government.

Transparency International’s PNG boss Mike Manning says the breakdown of law and order is getting worse.

“We don’t have any answers immediately as to how we fix a single part of the breakdown of the system of law and order and the breakdown of the systems which would control corruption,” he said.

“But we do know that we’re reading about them day after day after day and that they’re getting worse.”

Transparency International PNG has also criticised government agencies like the Ombudsman Commission for not following through with investigations into leadership issues.

This is the original article which appeared in the business section of The National on 25 April 2008

I wrote a response to this report which appeared in The National on 5 May 2008

Greg Anderson, from the PNG Chamber of Mines and Petroleum, responded to my concerns with a letter that appeared in The National on 30 May 2008

A prominent Papua New Guinea lawyer, John Gawi, who is himself from the Sepik River has written a letter of response to the above letter by Greg Anderson. Mr Gawi demands that environmental plans for the Frieda River Mine must be put in place before the government and the developers rush into the production phase. Mr. Gawi’s letter could be found in The National of 27th June 2008. Concerns about this particular mine is continuing.

People in isolated locales in PNG need mines because mines provide necessary services and infrastructure development that the PNG Government is not able to provide. Thus geographic isolation and economic marginalism provide an attractive rationale for mines to be opened. It is a geographical fact that all the mining that has ever gone on in PNG takes place in very isolated environs in the country. However, in the same breath isolationism and marginalism have contributed towards isolating environmental issues from the extractive agenda of mining companies. The Fly River experience is more than a case in point. The government and company are interested mainly in the landowners around the mining area, but the majority of the people who shall bear the ultimate brunt of this mine are marginalised from the radar of environmental concerns.

The basis of Mr Anderson’s corrections rest on the view that the developers of the mine, Xstrata Frieda River Ltd, has resolved to not deposit tailings or waste rock in the Sepik River or any other rivers within the vicinity of the mine. If that is the resolution of the developing company, can we thus have a sound environmental plan laid out before us? Why are the government and the company silent over the environmental plans to do with this mine? Why are villages from Ambunti to Kopar not informed about these plans? Can the developer and the government sit down with the villagers of the Upper and Lower Sepik villages and discuss this very pressing issue? If there is a so-called “positive and proactive” approach to this particular mine, why leave environmental planning as an afterthought? It seems we are planning to talk about these only after problems have arisen.

Whilst I am fully cognisant of the legislative framework under which the environmental and social impact studies are commissioned in PNG, I am however convinced that it has not worked in all the places that we have had mines in the country. Our mechanisms for planning, evaluation and monitoring are extremely weak if not non-existent. Let us face the truth! The Environmental Planning Act is a convenient legal fiction that we invoke in order to convince ourselves that we possess an environmental conscience. Lessons from Bougainville, Strickland, Fly and Anga Banga rivers are too self-evident to rehearse them. There is no such thing as an “environmentally friendly mine”, such a thing exists only as an oxymoron. An oxymoron contains a contradiction of terms and, in this context, it must exist because there are people who make a living out of concealing contradictions with messages of “responsible approaches towards environmental management”.

The Sepik River is not another experimental site to test out the kinetics of sedimentation and mineralization. It is not a place where we can afford to repeat the failures we have encountered with mines elsewhere in the country. In fact, the language of wanting to avoid a repetition is ultimately an admission to the fact that all our mines thus far are ecological disasters. If all our mining and environmental efforts thus far narrate a common history of ecological failures, what is the guarantee that we cannot repeat these failures on this great river system?

The Sepik River is the spiritual abode of an ancient and youthful civilisation and the ecological home to a diversity of life forms. We need something more than telling us about the requirements of the Environmental Impact Assessment because the history of mining with its concomitant outcomes of ecological failures indicates that our requirements have not been satisfied. The Sepik River, its people and their culture cannot be given a third rate treatment in so far as matters of economic livelihood is concerned.

Whilst I am aware that anthropological studies on land ownership have been carried out in the mountain villages located adjacent to the proposed Frieda River Mine, no similar consideration or environmental sympathy has been committed to the people who inhabit the villages downstream. This is because the mining company has already delineated the land area with which it is primarily interested in and so it appears that those people who live downstream are not on its radar of immediate concerns. The lives of thousands of people on the Sepik River basin hang in the balance if this mine gets into operation in 4 years time. We need to know what are the government’s and the company’s plans for the impending environmental disaster that they will now introduce into the Sepik River?

This particular piece appears in the letters column of The National 01/07/08. At the same time another letter by S.K.Noku about the issue of the Frieda River Mine appears in The National of 01/07/08. The General Manager of Xstrata, the developer of the Frieda River Mine has just entered the public debate about the Frieda River Mine prospect. His recent letter indicates that the company is currently undertaking a diverse range of studies to help them establish whether a sustainable mine is feasible.