Grade 10 exams are on

Grade 10 students throughout the country will sit for their national examinations beginning today, The National reports.
At the Gordon Secondary School in NCD, students were busy cleaning and tidying up the examination halls and getting the chairs and other exams logistics prepared for today. 

The exams will run for 10 days with students sitting for eight different papers, under the reformed outcome-based education curriculum, unlike the four core subjects in the past. – Nationalpic by AURI EVA

Businesswomen urged to support one another

WOMEN entrepreneurs in the country have been urged to support one another to achieve business targets and contribute to the country’s economy, The National reports.

The advice came yesterday from two prominent women – PNG Women in Business president Janet Sape and Women in Agriculture president Marie Linibi.

Both women were recently in Nagoya, Japan, for the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) women’s entrepreneurship summit hosted by the Japan and US governments as an opportunity for women to get together, network and share ideas.

Sape said the summit had brought many high profile women from around the world who were vice-ministers and other senior positions in their governments, vice-presidents, managing directors and many more. 

“This meet showed me that we, in PNG and the Pacific, have a long way to go before we can become like one of these women.

“And I saw that this is not a deterrent, but an encouragement for us to work hard to achieve this dream,” she said.

Linibi said they were  now encouraged to reach out to all the women in various sectors such as those in mining, informal markets, fisheries, agriculture, among others,  to all join and make this work.

Sape said New Zealand deputy secretary Amanda Ellis had pledged to assist PNG women overcome business hardships after she spoke on the subject at the summit.

Hospitals in crisis

Mt Hagen latest target of repeated attacks on staff

By JAMES APA GUMUNO

ANOTHER major hospital is in strife – this time it is Mt Hagen General Hospital in the Western Highlands which has turned away the sick and closed its outpatient wing yesterday following the attempted rape of a nurse at the weekend, The National reports.

Neighbouring Madang’s Modilon General Hospital is still embroiled in a dispute between management and staff over the appointment of hospital CEO Christine Gawi which is now before the court.

And, Port Moresby General Hospital has a morgue full of bodies which it could not empty because relatives were refusing to claim their loved ones while St John Ambulance and City Hall wanted payment up front for transportation of bodies and mass burial at the 9-Mile cemetery.

The latest incident in Mt Hagen comes days after the PNG Nurses Association elected its new national and branch executives who vowed to fight for better pay and working conditions.

The hospital’s CEO Dr James Kintwa said staff had closed the outpatient department in protest over an attack on the nurse.

Metropolitan commander Chief Insp John Kale said a complaint had been lodged and police were investigating.

According to hospital staff, a man broke into the nursing quarters at the hospital grounds and attempted to rape a nurse on Sunday night.

Kintwa added that this was not the first time this had happened.

He said, in the recent past, staff had been attacked on the hospital premises; some had their houses broken into and properties stolen and one person even discharged a firearm on hospital grounds.

Coupled with this, accident and emergency staff were constant targets of attacks and verbal abuses in the hospital or when they attended to emergencies and accidents in the city and province.

The frustrated hospital staff said they were not returning to work until better security measures were in place and their safety was guaranteed.

They demanded tighter security, better perimeter fencing of the hospital and residential areas and maintenance of their houses to be carried out by the provincial government and the Hagen rural and urban LLGs.

Kintwa said the staff and management planned to present their list of grievances to the provincial government and the two LLGs today.

Whether the outpatient department opens would depend on a “favourable” answer to their demands from the authorities by Friday.

He said they also wanted to know how far police had gone in their investigations into the discharged of a firearm on hospital grounds recently.

In the meantime, other units of the hospital, including inpatient and accident and emergency, were operating.

Although the outpatient section was closed, the sick were being advised to seek treatment at health centres or private clinics.

Kintwa sympathised with the hospital workers, adding that he could not force them to return to work.

However, he stressed that Mt Hagen General Hospital was a central Highlands medical facility which was already under-resourced and the current stalemate with staff was compounding an already fragile situation.

Neither the national nor provincial government officials were available for comments.

Yawari backs Agiru on LNG and stability

By ISAAC NICHOLAS

FORMER governor Hami Yawari is urging all Southern Highlands members of parliament to join his one-time bitter political rival Governor Anderson Agiru, The National reports.

“All Southern Highlands MPs joining Agiru and his United Resources Party are not making a mistake,” he said in a media conference in Port Moresby yesterday.

“We have to stabilise the government until the 2012 elections.

“As Southern Highlands leaders, we should be working together with Agiru to support Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare.

“Let Sir Michael complete his term and, if he wants to retire or continue in politics, that is up to him and the people of East Sepik,” Yawari said.

He said that Southern Highlands was home to the biggest LNG project and he did not want politics to destabilise the project that would give huge benefits to the landowners, province and country.

Yawari explained that he did not hold any grudge against Agiru who unseated him in 2007, saying that Agiru would stand for Hela provincial in 2012 while he would contest the Southern Highlands provincial seat.

He said he approved his own Conservative Party and Kagua-Erave MP James Lagea joining United Resources Party.

“We need to stabilise government and ensure the gas project gets off the ground to put PNG on the world map.”

Yawari made this statement when thanking the prime minister for appointing Komo-Margarima MP Francis Potape as minister assisting the prime minister on LNG and climate change matters.

He said some people with other motives had manipulated the National Gazette while the prime minister was in New York to create instability in government and the LNG project.

Meanwhile, Agiru said he was still a friend to Yawari as a Southern Highlander.

He said he was touched that a former rival had spoken highly of him and supported URP, the LNG project and the government’s tireless efforts for the benefit of the province and country.

Villagers stop work at scrapper station

By JEFFREY ELAPA

LANDOWNERS in Kikori, Gulf, have forced the contractor and French-owned company, Spiecapag Niugini Ltd, to stop construction work at the scrapper station at Omati, The National reports.

Spiecapag had been contracted by Esso Highlands Ltd to carry out work on the PNG LNG gas pipeline from Hides in the Southern Highlands to Portion 152 near Port Moresby through Kikori.

Early last week, landowners at Kaiam, also in Kikori, burnt several CCJV vehicles and machineries because they were frustrated that their landowner umbrella company, Greenfield Resources Investment Ltd, was not awarded any sub-contracts.

They also attributed their frustrations to the government’s delay in releasing the business development grants for landowners to start spin-off businesses.

Gulf provincial police commander Snr Insp Reuben Giusu yesterday confirmed the incident.

He said police had been informed and had dispatched a mobile unit from Kopi to the area.

However, they could do little because the villagers had only blocked construction work and had not done any damages to properties which were all on traditional land.

Reports said the contractor, Esso Highlands and the landowners would meet today to discuss the matter.

Landowners also warned that the blockage would continue if their demands were not met.

The villagers had also questioned the establishment of Kikori Energy Resources, allegedly set up by employees of Esso Highlands, and its interests in the project.

China's irresistible power-surge

By ROWAN CALLICK in today’s The Australian


AFTER countless "dragon rising" conferences and speeches, Australians have grown accustomed to China's emergence as an economic giant to rival the US.
But the past few weeks have seen something new: the most important shift so far in the 21st century. History in the making. China has made its move.
In August it leapfrogged Japan as the world's second biggest economy. And it has started to make that strength tell, beyond the worlds of factories, foreign exchange and trade, which it has already ruled for a decade.
During the past few years, Beijing has talked of projecting its soft power, its cultural influence. But that was either a feint or was destined to be a flop.
Instead, China is now exercising its influence in the world of hard power, where it makes other countries behave in the way it wants -- and this is especially apparent in the seas surrounding China's 14,500km coastline.
These are the waters through which more than half of Australia's traded goods have to sail. And Australia is the Western country most enmeshed economically and socially with China. There is thus no strategic issue of greater weight for Canberra.
In the past few days, the US House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly for legislation approving sanctions against China, which Americans criticise for subsidising its exports by keeping the value of its currency low by buying large amounts of foreign currency, chiefly US dollars.
Influential US economist Paul Krugman says these subsidised exports are hurting employment in the rest of the world. But not in Asia, where many of China's trading partners enjoy large surpluses in their China trade, thanks to the products they send for assembly there. Australia's dollar is riding high in part because of the strength of our trade with China.
The US is in no position to launch, let alone win, a trade war with China. US rhetoric about currency valuations instead underlines its economic impotence.
Two Chinese thrusts underline the country's role as a great power in Asia and, more significantly, its willingness to exercise its strength.
The first move: North Korea sank a South Korean corvette killing 46 sailors; the US and its Korean ally responded by planning a military exercise, involving the aircraft carrier George Washington, in the Yellow Sea between the Korean Peninsula and China.
China refrained from publicly rebuking Pyongyang and issued an emphatic warning to Washington and Seoul that this would be perceived as an attack on its sovereignty. The allies took a step back, and instead exercised off the Sea of Japan to the east of the peninsula.
The second move involved the ramming by a Chinese trawler of two Japanese gunboats in the oil and gas rich waters near Japan's Diaoyu islands, which are claimed by China. The Chinese skipper, Zhan Qixiong, was arrested.
China retaliated by banning exchanges with Japan, cancelling all cabinet-level contact with Japan, instructing travel agents to stop offering tours to Japan, and suspending negotiations to increase airline flights. "If Japan clings to its mistake, China will take further actions and the Japanese side shall bear all the consequences that arise," Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said in New York.
A week ago, Japan released the skipper unconditionally and China sent a plane to bring him back. The national CCTV news featured skipper Zhan's welcome with bouquets, hugs from his family, and massed media attention.
This wasn't the end of the affair. China went on to demand an apology and compensation from Tokyo. A foreign ministry statement said, after Zhan's safe return: "This was an action that gravely violated Chinese sovereignty and the human rights of a Chinese citizen."
China is steadily building a huge naval force, with a focus on modern, fast, quiet submarines, many berthed in underground pens at a base on Hainan Island south of Hong Kong, with direct access to the South China Sea.
The global financial crisis has triggered a shift in the balance of economic power. And while there is growing debate over how the West can and should respond to China's strength, there is agreement that the levers for all other forms of power are ultimately pulled by the economy.
A leading Australian expert on Asia, economist Peter Drysdale, stresses that "economic size matters to political heft" -- a fact that can be overlooked in the US, many of whose leading commentators on foreign affairs tend to leave economics outside their analyses.
Ross Garnaut said in a recent speech on China as a great power: "China will be the world's largest economy when its people on average are about one quarter as economically productive as the people of the US", because it has four times the population.
Many economists are tipping this to happen some time between 2020 and 2030. Garnaut says it is hard to imagine the Chinese remaining for long less than a quarter as productive as Americans. In the meantime, the US has been stressing to China's concerned neighbours that it is not about to pull out of Asia.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has backed the Southeast Asian nations' desire for territorial disputes in the South China Sea -- which is rich in oil and gas, as well as a key shipping channel -- to be resolved through ASEAN.
China's news agency Xinhua responded that "superpowers often adopt the strategy of divide and rule" via such solutions. Beijing prefers to negotiate with its smaller neighbours one by one.
Influential Chinese commentators have been promoting Australia as a sympathetic mediator. China Daily noted approvingly that then foreign minister Stephen Smith called for tensions in the sea to be resolved bilaterally.
The newspaper said the Gillard government was thus "seen as siding with China on the South China Sea issue, which the US has wanted to internationalise".
Shen Dingli, at Fudan University in Shanghai, wrote in a commentary for the Lowy Institute: "Like many powers before it, China's growing maritime interests overlap with those of others. By differing from America, which meddles directly, Canberra receives more respect in the region."
A fortnight ago, Australian frigate HMAS Warramunga participated in Chinese exercises in the Yellow Sea, from which the George Washington carrier was excluded.
The Chinese ambassador to Canberra, Zhang Junsai, told The Australian on the eve of his departure that Australia is emerging as an exemplar for China's fast-changing relations with the West and the Asia-Pacific region, "a testing ground in areas where we are playing an increasing role".
Recently, China has conducted extensive exercises in the South China Sea, where it has arrested hundreds of Vietnamese fishermen for fishing in disputed waters.
Indonesian analyst Dewi Fortuna Anwar says the "increasingly aggressive rhetoric from Beijing sends rather unwelcome news to the rest of the region".
Including to Singapore, where these issues are playing strongly. Ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh has written a new book, Asia Alone: The Dangerous Post-Crisis Divide from America.
Singaporean academic Evelyn Goh says the key question is "whether Asians are willing either to shift into a Chinese sphere of influence, or to facilitate a highly complex negotiated power sharing arrangement between the US, China, Japan and the region".
China is now the biggest economic partner of all its Asian neighbours. As Bill Clinton famously stressed: "It's the economy, stupid." And the US looks unlikely to regain economic dominance.
Japan's Economics Minister Banri Kaieda said shortly before the release of Zhan: "The Japanese economy's future performance seems to depend on whether the problem is solved quickly."
Japan's trade with China reached $156 billion in the first half of 2010, up an extraordinary 34.5 per cent from 2009. Thirty per cent of Japanese firms' manufacturing output is produced in China.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has warned that "we are now seeing the rise of a new great power. A growing China will pursue its interests globally: that is natural. [But] history is not overburdened with examples of how such transitions in geopolitical and geo-economic realities have been accommodated peacefully. We need a new way forward."
Andrew Davies, director of operations at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote of the Rudd government's 2009 defence white paper: "We come to the uncomfortable conclusion that our major ally and our major trading partner are, at some level, getting ready to fight one another."
Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, who drafted much of the Howard government's defence white paper of 2000, has stirred up a furious response to his new Quarterly Essay, Power Shift -- Australia's Future Between Washington and Beijing, because of his prescription that Australia should persuade the US to accommodate China's ambitions, and should convince China to join a "concert of nations", including India and Japan, to guide Asia's future.
The core of his essay lies in the less contestable analysis that China's economic surge will form the basis for a great rise in its strategic power. When China becomes the world's richest country, "that will make it too strong to live under American leadership in Asia".
China, White writes, is "already bigger, relative to the US, than the Soviet Union ever was during the Cold War", although one difference is that China has boomed because of its international economic enmeshment, becoming a champion of globalisation.
White says that "if China's power displaced America's primacy, we will have to start thinking about our place in the world all over again", even though "it is easy to hope that, like climate change, the issue will just go away".
He says Asia is "a maritime theatre". But the Western Pacific "is likely to become a kind of naval no-go zone in coming decades", paralleling the economic "balance of terror" between the US and China, with neither wishing to push the other too far.
American analyst Robert Kaplan says while the US and other nations consider the South China Sea an international waterway, China considers it a core interest.
He expresses concern about the US being distracted by Afghanistan and the Middle East as China builds an economic empire based on a far-flung trading network ultimately protected by its warships: "the British Empire refitted for a 21st-century era of globalisation".
White says: "If we plan to get rich on China's growth, we had better get used to the idea of it as a very powerful state."
It is also a more predictable state than most rising powers.
Despite its often opaque governance, it is no longer ruled by charismatic visionaries but by committee men who almost chronically covet consensus.
One of China's nationalist thinkers, Wang Xiaodong, says that while China's present leaders are essentially administrators, when today's students eventually succeed them, "China will globalise its national interests, and this will affect not just our close neighbours but the whole world. It must gain the capacity to protect those interests."
Paul Monk, co-founder of Austhink Consulting and former head of China analysis for the Defence Intelligence Organisation, in a recent speech cited Lee Kuan Yew's description of Deng's resurgent China:
"This is not just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of man."
Monk defines this in security terms: "The danger is less one of a large-scale military threat than of the gradual constriction of our freedom to operate in the manner to which Anglo-American naval primacy has long accustomed us."
He concludes: "The challenges we faced from Japan in the early 1940s and the Soviet Union during the Cold War were simple by comparison."

MCC out intimidating landowners again

Having threatened and intimidated their way out of one court action, Ramu mine owners MCC and Highlands Pacific, are following the same stratagy to try and get rid of a second court challenge, the Ramu Nickel Mine Watch website claims.

Construction of the Ramu mine's marine waste dumping system is currently on hold after MCC gave undertakings to the National court last week not to proceed with any coral blasting or pipeline work until an injunction application by local clans is heard on October 15.

But in the meantime MCC staff are out in the villages along the Rai Coast threatening and intimidating local people to sign 'Statements of Fact' (like the one illustrated below) stating they don't want to be part of the court action and know marine dumping (DSTP) is the 'safest way'.

MCC staff are particularly focusing their attention on Tugyag village which is the home of the court plaintiff Louis Medaing.

One technique being used by MCC to induce people to sign is to tell them that any relatives working with the company will be sacked if they don't cooperate.

Presumably it is the intention of MCC and Highlands Pacific to turn up at court on October 15 with as many of these signed statements as possible to try and undermine Louis Medaing in the eyes of the court and to intimidate him to withdraw his court case.

The first legal action collapsed when the original plaintiff's withdrew their case citing the conflict that it was causing in their communities and fears for their safety