Peter O'Neill is going through the same procedure with the LNG resource owners as he did with PNG's university students, and one is hard put not to be worried about what the outcome will be. He's starting out with the same old trick of being "too busy" to meet with the resource owners and actually telling the truth to them. Instead, he send the inexperienced and extremely unimpressive Nixon Duban to act on his behalf. We can't think of a more effective way to piss of the Huli resource owners of the LNG project.
We can predict right now that Peter O'Neill will never volunteer and will try to avoid answering all possible questions before they're asked. We wonder about what seems to be 2 different trust funds for the same purpose. We are confused what royalties are sitting in that trust account, and who is getting the mega-interest earned on all that money. We're wondering if the resource owners have ever actually received certified Central Bank of PNG statements to confirm beyond all doubt that the royalty money is sitting in the account as Peter O'Neill says it is.
We wonder why a new trust fund account was set up only in March to hold this money, and we wonder why Peter O'Neill curiously avoided answering Don Polye's question at the Parliamentary session just before the Vote of No Confidence as to why no LNG revenue is shown as income for either the 2015 or 2016 budget. These are elementary questions. The answers should have been offered to the newspapers a long time ago but of course they weren't. We have a government who loves keeping secrets, but as people become more educated, there is progressively less tolerance for secret keeping by the government. We all want answers.
Unfortunately for the Hela landowners, they're as unlikely to get straight answers as were the uni students unless they start raising a really big stink. They'll probably be forced to do this anyway because they'll probably never get any royalties unless they do.
Peter O'Neill worked in coordination with UPNG Albert Mellam to send police to campus to intimidate students and when the students weren't intimidated, someone in his government gave the order to start shooting the students. Does anyone doubt that all this might be in store for the Hela LNG resource owners?
Everything will only be okay if the resource owners accept what the university student activists did not, and agree that Peter ONeill knows best for us all, and will always be our leader. If the resource owners don't accept that and push the PM anyway, we could end up with a tragedy in our hands.
We wonder then if the Huli resource owners will back down and quit like the majority of university students have essentially done, or if they will take on the Prime Minister, Francis Ona style.
We wonder.
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