Maru: Government failed to build robust economy in the past 50 years

Minister for International Trade and Investment, Richard Maru says the country's biggest problem in the last 50 years was not building a strong and robust economy like other countries.

He made this statement during the 8th Customs Business Consultative Forum in Lae this morning.

To address this, Maru told members of the Government Agencies and the private sector that government will create a more attractive business environment.

He said at the moment PNG is not an attractive place to do business compared to its competitors, but he appreciated the government agencies and private sector for hanging in there despite all the challenges that the country is facing.

"We have challenges including the highest unemployment, the highest law and order problems, serious foreign currency issues, national debt of over K60 billion, and depreciating Kina value, which have made it very difficult, especially for our private sector," Maru said.

He said despite the real issues the country is faced with, the exciting thing is, it is not all doom and gloom, because the country has seven new resource projects coming up, including Papua LNG, Pasca Gas, P’nyang Gas Project, Wafi-Golpu Mine, Freda Mine, Wildebeest, and Namabarope.

"To create the 1 million jobs as stipulated in our Medium-Term Development Plan 4, we must change our policies, we must downstream process all our resources, we must compete with the rest of the world to bring in foreign direct investments, and the best way to do it is to develop Special Economic Zones [SEZs]," Maru said.

Mr Maru added that PNGs over reliance on the mining and petroleum sector has been the biggest mistake since Independence.

"Our future will be downstream processing of all our logs and fisheries resources, manufacturing of all our raw materials in the country, and replacing imports like rice. This is the future.

"We now have the Paga Hill SEZ which has already been licensed, and we will have others licensed this year including the Sepik Plains SEZ, Madang Integrated SEZ, Finschhafen Integrated SEZ, Used Lead-Acid Battery recycling plant SEZ in Central Province, Sea Park SEZ, and the Central Province Industrial Park,” he added.

Minister Maru said the opportunities were extremely bright in the next few years but PNG should improve its ease of doing business and not continue to use old manual systems of facilitating trade processes.