HUSAIT KANAKA BLO YU JIMMY?


by M.J. PASSINGAN

Jimmy (NPF Crook) Maladina issued a press statement this week assuring the nation that our Gas exports remain intact. Read Petroleum Minister Jimmy Maladina's assurance again, slowly. He does not say PNG loses nothing. He says he does not expect material impact on production or export volumes. Those are different claims, and the gap between them is where the money goes.

Volumes and revenue are not the same thing. A cargo redirected is still a cargo sold, but sold to a buyer who knows the seller has just been dropped by a customer for political reasons. That is not a strong bargaining position. The Minister's own statement puts the Taiwan trade at roughly K1.5 billion for six months. If that figure is immaterial, it is odd that he cited it.

Second, the seller is not the State. Taipei's CPC informed ExxonMobil, not Waigani. The contracts the Minister calls "fully intact" are commercial agreements between a joint venture and its buyers. The Government is assuring the nation about arrangements it does not control and cannot enforce.

Third, and this is the contradiction at the centre, the Minister says foreign policy and commercial relationships "should remain separate matters." Taiwan has just demonstrated that they are not. That is the entire content of the news. To respond by asserting the principle Taiwan has just disproved is not reassurance. It is a refusal to describe what happened.

Fourth, Taipei was explicit that the long-term contract holds for now, and that further steps depend on PNG's response. The Minister presents a conditional pause as a settled floor. Taiwan takes about a third of PNG's LNG exports, and LNG is roughly half of national export earnings. The exposure is not the spot cargoes. The exposure is the contract nobody has cancelled yet.

Finally, Taiwan's aid programmes agricultural missions, medical referrals, scholarships are under rolling review. Those reach people the LNG revenues never do. @followers

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