Three Weeks Is a Short Memory Justin

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

On 15 July, Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko announced the immediate closure of the Taipei Economic Office in Port Moresby. He did not present it as housekeeping. He called it a vital step toward deepening state-to-state trust and elevating relations with the People's Republic of China to unprecedented levels.

On 4 August, having watched Taiwan suspend roughly half a million tonnes of spot LNG purchases, the same Minister told this newspaper that Taiwan is welcome to keep doing business here, and that nothing stops Taiwanese firms operating as private entities.

Both statements cannot be describing the same policy. The first was a declaration of alignment. The second is a reassurance that alignment carries no cost. A government confident in July does not need to reassure in August.

Consider what the Minister now offers as evidence. He says PNG gave Taipei twelve months' notice and that he consulted Australia's foreign minister and other heads of mission. Taipei's account is that the closure was announced unilaterally. One of these accounts is wrong, and the Minister is the one who can settle it, by tabling the record of consultation. He has not.

He says Taiwan has not pulled out of its contract obligations, and that they are purchasing LNG as we speak. This is true of the twenty-year agreement and irrelevant to what happened. Taiwan did not breach the long-term contract. It withdrew the discretionary purchases sitting on top of it, and said plainly that whether it goes further depends on how Port Moresby responds. The Minister answers a charge nobody made.

Then the claim that should worry every reader: that the suspension is probably more detrimental to Taiwan than to PNG. The numbers say the reverse. PNG supplies around eight percent of Taiwan's LNG imports. Taiwan takes roughly a third of PNG's LNG exports, and LNG is close to half of this country's total export earnings. Taipei can replace us. We cannot replace Taipei at the same price without discounting. The Minister has inverted the asymmetry, and he has done it in public, on the record.

The offer to Taiwanese companies is the strangest part. A representative office exists precisely to facilitate private commerce, visas, trade introductions, dispute referrals, scholarships, the agricultural and medical programmes now under review in Taipei. The Minister has closed the door and is now pointing at the wall where it used to be.

None of this would matter if the Minister had a record of statements that hold up. He does not.

In 2018, as APEC Minister, he oversaw the purchase of forty Maseratis and told the country they would sell like hot cakes at no burden to the State. Three years later three had been sold, and the story of who paid moved from the private sector, to a deposit, to the taxpayer covering the full cost and the airfreight. The independent audit of APEC spending he promised Parliament has never been tabled.

In 2023 he called Papua New Guineans criticising his daughter's taxpayer-funded trip "primitive animals," stood aside, and was referred to the Ombudsman Commission.

In 2022 a magistrate threw out his defamation suit against a critic, finding the land-grabbing allegation was supported by evidence of a transfer from the National Capital District Commission to a company associated with his wife.

The pattern is not deceit in the criminal sense. It is a habit of asserting outcomes with total confidence and never returning when they fail. Parliament should ask for the consultation record, the audit, and a Treasury estimate of the revenue at risk. Assurance is not evidence. It never was.