Australia must refocus and align their priorities to Papua New Guinea’s priorities, says Minister for International Trade and Investment, Hon. Richard Maru. He was referring to the Papua New Guinea- Australia Comprehensive Strategic and Economic Partnership, specifically the Pillar 3- Economic Partnership for Prosperity. Minister Maru said this in his meeting with the Australian Minister for International Development and the Pacific, Hon. Pat Conroy last week.
In the meeting, Minister Maru said that Papua New Guinea (PNG) was now focusing on growing its economy through the non-resource sectors and that was where Australia could step in and assist.
“Over the last 47 years, PNG has been over reliant on the resource sector and look at where that had left us- highest level of unemployment since independence, highest level of national debt and highest level of crime. It is serious policy flaw that this Government is determined to fix during our term; our focus is now on reducing crime and growing the economy,” said Minister Maru.
“We will focus on the agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and the services sector. We need to replace all imports like rice, dairy products, coffee, and all other products that we can produce ourselves. We need to downstream process all our raw materials and we need to build our manufacturing sector. We accept the fact that we have a lot of challenges like constant power blackouts and high cost of energy. These are areas that Australia can easily help us,” he said.
Minister Maru said that Australian investors could also assist PNG in the development of its Special Economic Zones.
“This (development of SEZs) is key to our plan to unlock the potential of our economy, so we want them (Australia) to support us in this area,” said Minister Maru.
“We also want Australia to support us develop new industries like cotton and feed. These are areas that Australia is very good at and has very mature industries and they can assist us. So, under this partnership (the Papua New Guinea- Australia Comprehensive Strategic and Economic Partnership), when Australia is looking at aid flows to PNG, they should focus on these sectors which will give us greatest impacts in terms of employment and wealth creation; they must not focus on the areas that they define but on our key focus areas that we define,” said Minister Maru.
Meanwhile, Minister Maru also advised Minister Conroy that he had approved for PNG National Trade Office to work with the Australian Government to engage an independent consultant to undertake a Feasibility Study into a possible Trade Agreement between PNG and Australia.
