Comments

May the world understand the poorest countries that already suffer the impact of climate change, can not wait!

Vanuatu made the decision early on to let the "Private Sector" do the recruitment and for the "Employment Services Unit" under the Department of Labour to regulate by Licencing. This concious decision by Hon. Ham Lini was to keep "Politics" at arms length from who was being recruited. I think this has been the critical difference between Vanuatu and PNG and Solomon Islands. The other critical factor is the person of "Lionel Kaluat" who has stuck with the program from day 1. He works hard, provides good leadership and is a good public servant who is the single champion for labour mobility in Vanuatu. I have seen workers coming back with anywhere from 300,000 vatu to 1.5 million vatu in savings after 6 months. The median savings is 600,000 vatu. I have 225 people in Australia at the moment. 20 are female. Yesterday Lionel Kaluat handed out 28 licenses to recruit for Australia and 9 Licensed for NZ. We compete to find farms in Aus and NZ to place workers. We inmovate in Vanuatu to find the funds for birth certificates, passports, police clearances, medical checks, visa costs, airfares, establishment costs and the nomal screening, selection and training costs.

2017 begins as 2016 finished off - more great people checking out - maybe the state of the world broke their hearts!

A sad day indeed - he will be missed. Who else can make numbers jump off the screen and into your heart and brain like Hans?

This is an excellent article. I strongly support the concept of partnerships between commercial and NGO players to deliver win-win outcomes for both sides of the partnership. The Crawford Fund is actively exploring the scope for such partnerships with not for profit and commercial providers and contractors.

This is important work Robin and great that the Centre has embarked on this search for the facts on aid spending. The Policy Brief is an excellent summary.

A thoughtful and insightful article Emma which exposes how reckless and damaging the decisions on immigration and refugees, of successive governments involving both major parties, have been to our (Australia's) reputation, our own record on the rule of law and probity, and our relationships with our closest neighbour PNG. It is hard to overstate the long term consequences to the relationships and to the way in which we are seen now by the people of PNG. In the same process we have probably done untold damage to PNG's image thus potentially further damaging it economically. Thank you.

Thanks Garth - that's a classic victory of numbers over journalist. To be (very) picky, he was being a bit selective once he got onto politics and governance. My understanding (could be wrong; worth double checking) is that WB governance indicators haven't been improving over time in recent years (same true with democratisation). (As an aside, this brings a puzzle: if governance is so important, why are other things still getting better.) Still this is a minor comment. I liked the video, thanks for sharing.

Terrence, I think <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxxx03_JHlM" rel="nofollow">this short video</a> is one of his best.

Post Courier (PC) will have to apologize to PNG about this misleading and inaccurate article. When I saw the headline on 17 January, I didn't buy the paper. Because that's what PC wanted us to do - buy the paper for extra revenue. And I suspect, PC increased the number of prints for that day compared to other days. Interestingly, the topic of 'porn' sold big that day, and it would be interesting to know the total revenue generated that day. I also agree with Issac's comments above. The data rate is very expensive, data access via 2G/3G in the highlands and many parts of this country even in the capital city like Port Moresby is very slow and unreliable at times. This makes it very hard to watch videos or download images online. Now, I am curious to know if people who type the word 'porn' actually have the patience to wait to download or watch online. Also, I'd like to know if Google Trend actually could give us data on porn (videos/images) DOWNLOADS, WATCHED, etc. so we can work on some real facts and figures. Maybe, some people type the word 'porn' and seeing that the results are taking time to load, they turn off or quit and switch to social media or other searches. Well, all PC did was to sell big at the expense of our good country. We need an apology! Thanks Amanda. PC should also publish your well-researched article. Even though you are Australian, you are a true Papua New Guinean! Cheers Stanley

Thanks Stephen. Fair point; it will be hard to enable cheaper formal sector housing, particularly at levels affordable for the majority of the urban (or soon to be urban) population without major government focus, and support from partners. It will be interesting to see what the ongoing housing work (housing profile, followed by the preparation of a national housing policy) focuses on.

Thanks Martin for the comment. I agree rural development is important. But globally urbanisation has been one of the defining trends of modern times. More movement to towns and cities is likely inevitable, including in Solomon Islands. Solomon Islands may need to accept - and adequately prepare for - this ongoing tide.