PM Marape: Investigations will continue into Ramu mine spillage

Prime Minister James Marape says investigations into Ramu Nickel Mine slurry spill at Basamuk Bay in Madang will continue.

PMJM being the abjudicator during heated debate on the issue of mine pollution of  Basamuk Bay in Madang today. Behind him is Leader of Government Business and Finschhafen MP Rainbo Paita.

He said this after lengthy and heated debate in Parliament today after a report on the August 24, 2019, incident was presented by Environment and Conservation and Climate Change Minister Geoffrey Kama.

“I note most Members of Parliament have a conversation to make in regards to this ministerial statement presented,” PM Marape said.

“As indicated by the minister, there’ll be further assessment and investigation.

“Every stakeholder, including the Governor for Madang (Peter Yama), has every right to have an interest in this matter.

“When matters relate to the security of our people, the interest of our people, and matters relating to the environment, it is just and responsible that we all have a concern.

“We note the concern that was raised by every Member of Parliament, especially the Governor for Madang and Member for Rai Coast (Peter Sapia) in the immediate precinct and affected areas.

“We are grateful for the comments by every leader this afternoon, in response to the statement minister has made.”

PM Marape said Northern Governor Gary Juffa had made a strong statement, as well as Kompiam-Ambum MP and former Environment and Conservation Minister, Sir John Pundari.

“Every other statement is also correct, finding the right balance,” he said.

“Our harvest of resources comes from the price on our environment.

“We’ve allowed those investors to come in, but the investors who come in must operate within responsibility and due care to our environment, to our country, and to our people.

“I think from the outset, without the specifics on the impact on the environment, the fact that there was a practical defect in the structure of the mine itself is an incident that warrants deeper study into what was taking place, in as far as the mine safety and operation is concerned.

“Cabinet did indicate this to the minister, and I note that minister’s statement embraces further investigation, further assessment.

“Let me assure people of Madang, people of Rai Coast, people of Usino-Bundi and people of this country, that this report and the investigation thus far is not conclusive and that is not the end of the story.

“The fact that there was a slip, which took place in the mine infrastructure, irrespective of the extent of the damage, warrants deeper scrutiny, deeper investigation, deeper assessment.”

PM Marape assured the people of Madang, Usino-Bundi, Rai Coast, as well as the country, that all stakeholders including Madang government, Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (CEPA), Mining Department and other Government agencies would look deeper into what had happened.

“I’m just falling short on telling the mine to cease until our next stop, but I will not be influenced by emotion to make this call,” he said.

“This report, which we’ve been waiting for, for some time, is the reference point and the starting point, which has now been elevated to a higher committee, led by Deputy Prime Minister.

“This must be a pointer to present operator of Ramu Nickel Mine, that a slip has taken place.

“We want to work with them to ascertain fully what has taken place, and for us to  go forward in ensuring that the mine is not only safe in as far as operation is concerned, but is also positive towards our economy and our country going forward.

“We want to ensure that going forward, this incident does not happen again.”

PM Marape: Government has right over Papua LNG Project agreement

Prime Minister  James Marape says the Government has every right to scrutinise the Papua LNG Agreement on behalf of the people.

He said this today during debate on 10 Papua LNG Project Amendment Bills, a requirement of the agreement, which were passed by Parliament.

The agreement was signed in April by the previous Peter O’Neill government.

Prime Minister James Marape (right) receiving K100 million dividend payment from Kumul Petroleum Holdings Ltd Chairman Andrew Baing (left) and Managing-Director Wapu Sonk last Thursday.

The 10 Bills are the:

• Income Tax (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019;
• Income tax, Dividend (WithHolding) Tax and Interest (Withholding) Tax Rates (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019;
• Stamp Duties (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019;
• Goods and Services Tax (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019;
• Excise Tariff (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019;
• Customs Tariff (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019;
• Resources Contract Fiscal Stabilisation (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019;
• Insurance (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019;
• Prices Regulation (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019; and
• Konebada Petroleum Park Authority (Papua LNG Project) (Amendment) Bill 2019.

Prime Minister Marape commended Petroleum Minister Kerenga Kua for a “momentous and massive occasion” for Parliament.

“He (Kua) came into this job with a lot of expectations,” he said.

“He was purposely placed in there to dissect exactly what was signed as Papua LNG, to ensure that the nation is given that comfort that we need, that what was signed is consistent with the overriding ambits of our National Constitution and all the other subsidiary laws that govern our country.

“Let me say that himself (Kua), and ourselves as Government, have every right on behalf of our citizens to put to scrutiny what was signed.

“Laws like this that are brought in for passage are not something that we must take lightly.

“As part of our Government plan, we embarked on an ambitious plan, to relook at whether there were some winners and lack of compliance to existing provisions of law that we can address.”

Prime Minister Marape said although this may have taken some time, “the industry need not be fearful”.

“Today is testament that any Government of the day can honor agreements, so long as those agreements are constructed in law, and working in consistency and in congruence to law.

“Minister Kua and his team were able to go through what was signed by the previous Government, and we also tried to push a little bit extra, in the context of what was signed.

“We’ve secured one of two additional gains from what was originally agreed upon.
“For instance, landowners from Gulf, provincial government and Government of our country can participate in the shipping business.

“We can look at a better definition of the pipeline…as well as define better what is ‘local content’.”

Prime Minister Marape said going forward, and learning from the past, no more concessions would be made in future projects.

“I place on record my desire, individually and as head of this Government, to quantify what is that 51 per cent in actual number terms, against what losses we are making in the concessions we are giving,” he said.

“(This is) so that future projects are built on solid data.

“We may never win on all fronts, but we must win in some areas.

“This afternoon’s passage of this bill is a signal of our commitment to honouring the gas agreement that the O’Neill-led Government signed earlier this year.

“To investors, we are giving you our commitment to allow this project to go ahead.”

PM Marape: PNG economy to grow to K200 billion by 2029

Prime Minister James Marape says the Papua New Guinea economy, now worth K80 billion,  will be worth K200 billion by 2029.
He said this yesterday at the ground-breaking ceremony for Steamships’ K250 million Harbourside South project in Downtown Port Moresby.

Prime Minister James Marape (third from left) officiating at the groundbreaking ceremony for Steamships'  K250 million Harbourside South project in Downtown Port Moresby yesterday. This is a massive project, to be completed by May 2022, which will transform the city. It will be a 21-storey mix-use development connecting the heart of the city to the harbour.It will introduce over 16,000 square-metres of car park space, over 800 sq. m of commercial, retail and leisure space, and 88 prime residential units in Port Moresby’s thriving Downtown.A key design feature is the airconditioned walkway over Stanley Esplanade that will connect Harbourside South to Harbourside East and Harbourside West.

Prime Minister Marape said the economy had grown substantially since 2010, with a lot more room for growth.
“Let me assure investors like Steamships, that your continued presence in our country will not be in vain,” he said.
“If one LNG project could have expotentially grown our economy from a K30 billion economy in 2009 to an K80 billion economy in 2019, we are now turning in the right direction.
“Our new leadership is in the business of mobilising resources, harnessing resources, mobilising partners who are in the business of growing our economy.
“We continue to escalate the positive trajectory of our economy.
“I give you my greatest assurance that our economy, by 2029, will go past K200 billion.
“This is a commitment I’m giving to the nation, and to participants in our economy.
“You ask me where it’s coming from: We are focused to deliver a minimum three more trains of LNG in the next 10 years.
“On the back of three trains of LNG, on the back of Wafi-Golpu, on the back of a possible relook at Porgera gold mine, and on the way of other projects, including our own Government’s signature special economic zones we will deliver right across our country for investors like Steamships.
“We are absolutely sure within the next 10 years, we will grow our economy from below K100 billion to an economy that will push past K200 billion within the next 10 years
Prime Minister Marape commended Steamships Managing-Director Michael Scantlebury and his team for their continued presence in the country.
“You (Steamships) have been here since 1908, if I am not wrong,” he said.
“Since 1908, many have come and gone, but Steamships maintains its presence in our country and not only a presence, but a robust, vibrant and active presence in our economy.
“For that, let me thank you, the Steamships Group of Companies, on behalf of the people of Papua New Guinea.”
Harbourside South is a massive project, to be completed by May 2022, which will transform the city.
It will be a 21-storey mix-use development connecting the heart of the city to the harbour.
It will introduce over 16,000 square-metres of car park space, over 800 sq. m of commercial, retail and leisure space, and 88 prime residential units in Port Moresby’s thriving Downtown.
A key design feature is the airconditioned walkway over Stanley Esplanade that will connect Harbourside South to Harbourside East and Harbourside West.

On East Texas stop, pilot tells of passion for helping people of Papua New Guinea

By Jimmy Daniell Isaac
 jisaac@news-journal.com

Oct 2, 2019

Before Samaritan Aviation brought its mission to Papua New Guinea, it took several days for thousands of residents to reach the island’s only hospital.

Mark Palm talks Wednesday, Oct 2, 2019, about how Samaritan Aviation's  float plan will be serving in the remote villages of Papua New Guinea. (Les Hassell/News-Journal Photo)

Tail section of Samaritan Aviation's float plane that will be serving people in the remote villages of Papua New Guinea.

Tail section of Samaritan Aviation's float plane that will be serving people in the remote villages of Papua New Guinea.

Over the past decade, the ministry has saved and impacted the lives of people who live along the 700-mile East Sepik River and have depended on canoeing or two riverside trails to get to critical medical services, according to Mark Palm, a pilot for Samaritan Aviation, which is based in Arizona.

Palm flew his transport plane into the East Texas Regional Airport on Wednesday.

He returned to the U.S. in June for a year in which he’s touring with his plane to raise funds for the charity and spreading the ministry’s message.

“There’s 8 million people over there, and they need help,” Palm said. “People need help. We all should be doing something to change our world where we’re at.”

He came to Gladewater for a public fundraising event Wednesday night at the home of Jeff Peterson, a businessman for Transworld Business Advisors of East Texas and a Samaritan Aviation board member.

“It’s amazing the need over there,” Peterson said, “and my favorite thing is how much the people of Papua New Guinea respect (Palm) and his team and what they do. They’re truly grateful.”

Palm’s mission began about 20 years ago when he said he felt called to put his skills to use saving lives.

 After raising money for 10 years to buy his first used float plane that he transformed into a flying ambulance, he transported it to Papua New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island with a land mass similar to California, he said.

An estimated 220,000 people live along the East Sepik River.

Along the river, there are few nurses and no doctors. Expectant mothers in labor have their babies in the bushes, and there is no hospital except on the coast.

Samaritan Aviation began as one man’s cause, but Palm is no longer the only pilot.

He also has a trauma nurse to answer the phone and make decisions on whether some calls are life-and-death issues that need an emergency response.

Midwives are available on many plane rides, as is anti-venom for snake bites.

This year alone, Samaritan Aviation has flown almost 70 missions to bring in vaccines and transport nurses to vaccinate children against polio in remote communities while also fighting malaria, tuberculosis and outbreaks of measles, whooping cough and polio, he said.

The organization also is working with the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The U.S. ambassador to Papua New Guinea visited the island earlier this year, and Palm took her out to the river to visit a particular community, he said.

While there, a crowd of people formed.

The first person brought from the crowd was a woman named Antonia, who was the first patient flown out by Samaritan Aviation 10 years ago. She was joined by her son, who was the baby saved through that flight, Palm said.

“And for the next 40 minutes, they just kept bringing out people from the community,” Palm remembered, “and ‘you remember this lady? You saved her twin babies.’ Then they bring a guy out who was a kid with cerebral malaria, then another kid comes out. It just went on and on.”

It was but one community served by Samaritan Aviation, which flies to 65 locations and impacts more than 120 community, he said.

“And so to have that impact over one community in that moment was so powerful for me because a lot of times you know you work hard at things, and we all are passionate about things, but when you see the result of your labor, for me it’s just a feeling of gratefulness that I have a chance to go be — we call it — the hands or feet of Jesus or to share God’s love in action to people who have no access if we’re not there and didn’t before we got there,” Palm said.

Peterson has served on the ministry’s board for about three years. The ministry was renting office space in a building Peterson owned, and as he got to know one of Samaritan Aviation’s “higher-ups in the organization,” he soon found himself becoming part of the work.

“I mean, this saves lives and changes lives,” Peterson said. “It’s awesome.”

Before Palm leaves East Texas, he is set to speak today to aviation students at LeTourneau University.

“We don’t charge for our flights, and so we’re 100% funded by donations,” he added. “Sixty percent comes from the USA, and then 40% comes from the Papua New Guinea government, so the great thing is that it’s a partnership. It’s not the USA doing everything over there. It’s us working together as partners and saving the lives of folks in these remote communities.”

US WWII bomber co-pilot to be buried at Arlington 76 years after PNG crash

Donn Young sits in a cockpit in this undated photo from World War II.
DONN ALEXANDER

By WYATT OLSON | STARS AND STRIPES
Published: October 7, 2019

A World War II aviator who in 1943 crashed into a Papua New Guinea mountain where his remains lay for a half-century will be buried with full military honors Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery.

Maj. Donn C. Young was co-piloting a crippled U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 bomber on Jan. 18, 1943, when it rammed into a mountainside during a thunderstorm. 

Young’s remains were recovered in 1998, but only recently did DNA testing positively confirm them as his.

His burial will include an Air Force flyover.

Young’s remains might have never been found if not for the efforts of Alfred Hagen, a 61-year-old construction business owner in Philadelphia.

Hagen’s great-uncle, Maj. Bill Benn, was the pilot that day on the ill-fated B-25, dubbed the Algernon IV. 

In the 1990s, Hagen set out to find the crash site, filming the excursions to make a documentary.

Hagen made his first trip to Papua New Guinea – a vast island just north of Australia – in 1995, the beginning of a series of expeditions.

Benn is credited with developing a technique called “skip bombing,” by which an aircraft released a bomb over water in a way that caused it to skip across the surface and hit the side of targeted ships.

“It was highly unusual to have two majors flying in the cockpit,” Hagen said of Benn and Young.

Benn was on the crest of being promoted to lieutenant colonel and taking command of the 43rd Bomb Group, Hagen said. 

Meanwhile, Young, the co-pilot, was a newly promoted major who would step into Benn’s position.

It is not entirely clear why the pair flew together that day, but their mission was to scout the north side of the Owen Stanley Mountain Range, whose jagged peaks jut out from tropical rain forest as high as 13,000 feet in some spots, Hagen said.

Army Air Corps aviator Donn Young poses with local men in this undated photo taken during World War II in Papua New Guinea, where he flew a B-25 bomber.
DONN ALEXANDER

The only Allied forces airfield on the island was in Port Moresby, south of the mountain range, while the battles against Japanese forces were taking place on the south side.

“So, if a plane got shot up and couldn’t get over the mountains then they were in trouble,” Hagen said.

The day of the crash, Benn, Young and the crew of five were scouting for clearings in the jungle that could be marked on charts so that pilots could more easily find a place to ditch badly damaged planes, Hagen said.

No one knows for certain the exact cause and circumstances of the plane crash that day.

“Maybe they got battle damage,” Hagen said. “They lost their left engine. There were violent thunderstorms that afternoon. The mountains were uncharted at that time, and they were trying to find a pass where they could sneak through.”

The plane never made it back to Port Moresby.

The crash site was discovered by a local man in 1956, and the following year a Royal Australian Air Force team hiked in, found the crash site and brought out human remains.

Those remains were subsequently interred in a mass grave in Kentucky, Hagen said.

By the time Hagen began his search in the 1990s, the exact location of his uncle’s crash site had been lost with time. He only knew that it was near Mount Strong.

Hagen made numerous trips to Papua New Guinea.

“While we were searching for his plane, we started finding other planes,” he said. “Each time I went back for four or five weeks, I’d find an airplane. I wouldn’t find what I was looking for, but I kept finding airplanes.”

He found eight World War II warplanes, which held the remains of 18 American and British airmen, he said.

After almost four years, he found his uncle’s crash site in 1998.

He found remains, and Donn Young’s dog tags, and brought them to the U.S. Embassy in Port Moresby.

Another two decades passed before the remains were positively identified as Young’s.

Donn Alexander, Young’s grandson, recalled being contacted by the Defense Department around 2005 saying that the remains from the B-25 crash were being examined. He submitted a sample.

“I didn’t hear anything for years,” he said.

Then, last year, he was notified that new advances in DNA technology had been used to retest the remains, and Donn Young had been positively identified.

Alexander said the news shocked him, but he was “very happy that there would be some closure on that.”

He expects about 20 family members will be at Tuesday’s funeral.

Hagen expressed awe at the scope of WWII, a cataclysm that delivered a scale of human suffering now almost “beyond your powers of comprehension.”

“When you find one man, however, the sacrifices of his generation are made quite clear in microcosm,” he said. “You find that a family was left behind with a lifetime of unanswered questions. There is a special pain when you don’t know or don’t understand the fate of a loved one. It was a pain that my own family knew all too well.”

He will attend Young’s funeral, he said, mindful of all who have borne such loss.

olson.wyatt@stripes.com
Twitter: @WyattWOlson

PM Marape: Agriculture can unlock wealth of PNG

Prime Minister James Marape has stressed the importance of agriculture to Papua New Guinea.

 He said this when addressing students, staff and the community at University of Technology in Lae last Thursday (Oct 3, 2019).

Please click below to watch video:

PM Marape on PNG becoming the "richest, black, Christian country"

Prime Minister James Marape explains to University of Technology students his vision of  PNG becoming the "richest black Christian country" on Thursday, Oct  3, 2019:

Please click video below to watch: