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New Porgera Ltd (NPL) recently issued a statement “seeking to clarify certain matters relating to the reopening of the Porgera gold mine that have been the subject of considerable speculation and misinformation ... over the past week”. The NPL statement may be read as referring both to the Banks/Burton blog post and other social media posts. Under the 2023 Consent Compensation Agreements NPL is currently negotiating long term compensation agreements with the agents for tenement landowners. The NPL statement includes the comment that NPL “would like to see the benefits being distributed directly to the household level, and not through middlemen, to ensure that the benefits actually reach the people for whom they are intended.” Payment directly to tenement landowner households is long standng practice at Ok Tedi. NPL may move towards a community engagement structure similar to that of Ok Tedi with its Community Mine Continuation Agreement. The Ok Tedi mining company, owned by the state, actively manages this agreement. Payment of benefits directly to households was suggested as the better policy for the PNG LNG project. This was strongly opposed by the Australian based anthropological consultants. Perhaps because it simply bypassed the consultants somewhat mystical concept of customary land ownership. Vailala Post Courier (14 March 2024) https://www.postcourier.com.pg/porgera-restart-benefits-to-be-shared-fairly-transparently/

Thanks Australian Government for the great opportunity. When is this going to happen please?

Your wonderful story is really motivate me .It will give me courage and strength to overcome the challenges that I face during my study years.

Truly an inspirational piece Proud of you Mek.

Whilst there seems to be improvements on the CDF Legislation and Policy - Since 2000-2023, there is no formal reports from Constituency Offices based on their Annual Work Plans implementation and performance outputs. There is no indication of good governance principles at all in the absence of CDF Annual Implementation Reports for each Constituency. Constituents and Voters of some Constituency are not informed at all nor aware of the existence of the Constituency Development Plan for the 4-year period of a Parliament.

National government couldn't sustain the LLG SIP funds, and its PSIP funds after national revenue collapsed in 2015-6.

Thanks Theo. You're right. districts are not a tier of government, the three governments here are: national, provincial, and local level governments.

Thanks for the corrections

Correction made, 15 March 2024. This was an editor's error, not the author's. Thank you.

Why did the LLG now not receiving LLG SIP as used to be in the previous? LLG is a third tier of the national procurement which hails its laws.

What an informative and compelling piece by Andrew Anton Mako. If anyone needed further evidence that ‘technical capacity building’ is not the answer to Pacific Island development, this is it; as in all nations, power, conflict and leadership are the nexus and if donors want to have any influence in contributing to positive change, they seriously and intelligently need to engage with the realities that this author has so clearly outlined – and stop outsourcing this work to discredited ‘projectised’ modalities.

Congratulations Kerovin!