Connect with us
//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Asean

PNG’s new prime minister: Peter O’Neill

Author: Bill Standish, ANU The opposition’s nomination of Works Minister Peter O’Neill as Papua New Guinea’s new prime minister on 2 August came as a shock to many. There had been clues in some earlier press comments. Last year, O’Neill and the opposition agreed he would become the next prime minister if he crossed the floor before the mid-year challenge. He didn’t.  Although Deputy Prime Minister Sam Abal was acting prime minister during Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare’s continuing absence in Singapore following heart surgery in April, the opposition succeeded in declaring the prime ministership vacant without following constitutional procedures. The National Alliance led government’s collapse arose in three phases. First was Somare’s coalition’s gradual loss of public support over the last few years on the back of failing government services across most the country and allegations of corruption over the dispersal of development funds. Second was the increasing frustration among opposition members with Somare’s compliant speaker, Jeffrey Nape, who for five years refused to hear the opposition’s procedural points or allow votes of no confidence. Prolonged and unconstitutional adjournments of Parliament also meant that even government members could not monitor (and only rarely question) the ministers. And third was the pernicious rivalry within the coalition and the National Alliance Party itself. The Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on the political party ‘integrity law’, known as OLIPPAC, allowed MPs to not only to leave their parties but even to vote against their own party . In the current sitting, the Speaker accepted the opposition’s claim that the prime ministership was vacant. Refusing to hear the angry protests of key government ministers, the Speaker allowed a vote to fill the vacancy. Some 48 members of the coalition, including the majority of the National Alliance, crossed the floor, giving O’Neill a vote of 70 to 24. While the (former) government challenged the constitutionality of this ‘parliamentary coup’, on 5 August the National Court accepted the fait accompli , and implied the old government had also accepted it by voting in Parliament . Abal will challenge this ruling in the Supreme Court. The media had focused on the divisions triggered since Somare promoted Abal to Deputy Prime Minister in December 2010, replacing Don Polye, who held aspirations to succeed Somare. Although a respected and honest politician, Abal made fierce enemies. He sacked William Duma, whose management of licensing under the Petroleum portfolio and the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project had been under serious questioning. He also sacked the man now PM, Peter O’Neill, from the Treasury and Finance portfolios. Tensions grew among government ministers. Public attention was focused on the Polye–Abal feud within Somare’s party, and it became clear there would be some form of challenge to government. Under the Constitution, a vote of no confidence had to be initiated within days of parliament sitting on 2 August, but who would be the new PM? The issue came to a head at an Opposition meeting on 1 August, and it seemed that Polye had majority support among the alternate government camp for the top job. However, he reportedly baulked at the position — perhaps to avoid in-fighting with Abal, from his own province. O’Neill seized the moment, positioning himself for his formal nomination as Prime Minister. Polye is now his treasurer. Although Peter O’Neill has not escaped controversy, he has gained a reputation among Treasury officials as a highly competent and professional minister. As treasurer between June 2010 and June 2011 he arranged overdue pay rises for public servants, proclaiming there was no place for ‘commissions’ to release funds, arguing: ‘If we don’t say no to corruption the country will be destroyed’. O’Neill holds an honours degree in accountancy and worked for an Australian firm before making his fortune in real estate. Former PM Bill Skate made him head of Pacific Finance, which managed the state-owned enterprises: the Motor Vehicle Insurance Corporation, the PNG Banking Corporation and the National Provident Fund (NPF superannuation), all of which nearly collapsed a few years later. The Commission of Inquiry into the NPF failure reported that, in 2002, O’Neill had benefitted from suspect transactions, and should be investigated for perjury. He appeared at the Waigani Committal Court in 2005 charged with misappropriation. The case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Elected to Parliament for Ialibu in 2002, O’Neill was appointed Public Service Minister, but then became opposition leader in May 2004. From 2003 O’Neill proposed, to the dismay of many public administrators, that District Authorities be created, effectively giving MPs control over government activities in their electorates, including the public servants . O’Neill is also said to be preparing detailed policies for his People’s National Congress Party in 2012. As Prime Minister, O’Neill must manage major constitutional issues in the next 8 months, including setting the number of electorates for the 2012 House, creating two new provinces and confirming the existence of seats for provincial governors, and deciding whether to support provincial seats reserved for women candidates only. Peter O’Neill is a strong supporter of mining and the LNG project, but also shows clear signs of economic nationalism. While Treasurer, he argued that sovereign wealth funds to handle revenues from the LNG projects should be established overseas but controlled onshore. Since his election to Prime Minister, O’Neill has hit the right buttons. He stated that he will not tolerate ‘arrogance’ in government (a dig at PM Somare’s son Arthur?) and he will deal with the ‘massive corruption’ in PNG. O’Neill also wants to promote transparency in government. But his interim ministry comprises several key Somare ministers alongside the Somare government’s strongest critics. Many have asked how governance will change, implying — as was said when Morauta replaced then Prime Minister Skate in 1999 — that: ‘This will be a new game of cards, but with many of the same players’. Bill Standish is Visiting Fellow at the School of Culture, History and Languages in the College of Asia & the Pacific at The Australian National University. Sir Michael Somare and PNG politics When the Grand Chief is away: Papua New Guinea’s big-man politics Japan’s lame duck prime minister

Published

on

Author: Bill Standish, ANU

The opposition’s nomination of Works Minister Peter O’Neill as Papua New Guinea’s new prime minister on 2 August came as a shock to many.

There had been clues in some earlier press comments.Last year, O’Neill and the opposition agreed he would become the next prime minister if he crossed the floor before the mid-year challenge. He didn’t.  Although Deputy Prime Minister Sam Abal was acting prime minister during Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare’s continuing absence in Singapore following heart surgery in April, the opposition succeeded in declaring the prime ministership vacant without following constitutional procedures.

The National Alliance led government’s collapse arose in three phases. First was Somare’s coalition’s gradual loss of public support over the last few years on the back of failing government services across most the country and allegations of corruption over the dispersal of development funds. Second was the increasing frustration among opposition members with Somare’s compliant speaker, Jeffrey Nape, who for five years refused to hear the opposition’s procedural points or allow votes of no confidence. Prolonged and unconstitutional adjournments of Parliament also meant that even government members could not monitor (and only rarely question) the ministers. And third was the pernicious rivalry within the coalition and the National Alliance Party itself.

The Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on the political party ‘integrity law’, known as OLIPPAC, allowed MPs to not only to leave their parties but even to vote against their own party. In the current sitting, the Speaker accepted the opposition’s claim that the prime ministership was vacant. Refusing to hear the angry protests of key government ministers, the Speaker allowed a vote to fill the vacancy. Some 48 members of the coalition, including the majority of the National Alliance, crossed the floor, giving O’Neill a vote of 70 to 24. While the (former) government challenged the constitutionality of this ‘parliamentary coup’, on 5 August the National Court accepted the fait accompli, and implied the old government had also accepted it by voting in Parliament. Abal will challenge this ruling in the Supreme Court.

The media had focused on the divisions triggered since Somare promoted Abal to Deputy Prime Minister in December 2010, replacing Don Polye, who held aspirations to succeed Somare. Although a respected and honest politician, Abal made fierce enemies. He sacked William Duma, whose management of licensing under the Petroleum portfolio and the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project had been under serious questioning. He also sacked the man now PM, Peter O’Neill, from the Treasury and Finance portfolios.

Tensions grew among government ministers. Public attention was focused on the Polye–Abal feud within Somare’s party, and it became clear there would be some form of challenge to government. Under the Constitution, a vote of no confidence had to be initiated within days of parliament sitting on 2 August, but who would be the new PM? The issue came to a head at an Opposition meeting on 1 August, and it seemed that Polye had majority support among the alternate government camp for the top job. However, he reportedly baulked at the position — perhaps to avoid in-fighting with Abal, from his own province. O’Neill seized the moment, positioning himself for his formal nomination as Prime Minister. Polye is now his treasurer.

Although Peter O’Neill has not escaped controversy, he has gained a reputation among Treasury officials as a highly competent and professional minister. As treasurer between June 2010 and June 2011 he arranged overdue pay rises for public servants, proclaiming there was no place for ‘commissions’ to release funds, arguing: ‘If we don’t say no to corruption the country will be destroyed’.

O’Neill holds an honours degree in accountancy and worked for an Australian firm before making his fortune in real estate. Former PM Bill Skate made him head of Pacific Finance, which managed the state-owned enterprises: the Motor Vehicle Insurance Corporation, the PNG Banking Corporation and the National Provident Fund (NPF superannuation), all of which nearly collapsed a few years later. The Commission of Inquiry into the NPF failure reported that, in 2002, O’Neill had benefitted from suspect transactions, and should be investigated for perjury. He appeared at the Waigani Committal Court in 2005 charged with misappropriation. The case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Elected to Parliament for Ialibu in 2002, O’Neill was appointed Public Service Minister, but then became opposition leader in May 2004. From 2003 O’Neill proposed, to the dismay of many public administrators, that District Authorities be created, effectively giving MPs control over government activities in their electorates, including the public servants. O’Neill is also said to be preparing detailed policies for his People’s National Congress Party in 2012.

As Prime Minister, O’Neill must manage major constitutional issues in the next 8 months, including setting the number of electorates for the 2012 House, creating two new provinces and confirming the existence of seats for provincial governors, and deciding whether to support provincial seats reserved for women candidates only.

Peter O’Neill is a strong supporter of mining and the LNG project, but also shows clear signs of economic nationalism. While Treasurer, he argued that sovereign wealth funds to handle revenues from the LNG projects should be established overseas but controlled onshore. Since his election to Prime Minister, O’Neill has hit the right buttons. He stated that he will not tolerate ‘arrogance’ in government (a dig at PM Somare’s son Arthur?) and he will deal with the ‘massive corruption’ in PNG. O’Neill also wants to promote transparency in government. But his interim ministry comprises several key Somare ministers alongside the Somare government’s strongest critics. Many have asked how governance will change, implying — as was said when Morauta replaced then Prime Minister Skate in 1999 — that: ‘This will be a new game of cards, but with many of the same players’.

Bill Standish is Visiting Fellow at the School of Culture, History and Languages in the College of Asia & the Pacific at The Australian National University.

  1. Sir Michael Somare and PNG politics
  2. When the Grand Chief is away: Papua New Guinea’s big-man politics
  3. Japan’s lame duck prime minister

Go here to read the rest:
PNG’s new prime minister: Peter O’Neill

Asean

ASEAN weathering the COVID-19 typhoon

Published

on

Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc addresses a special video conference with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Hanoi 14 April, 2020 (Photo:Reuters/Manan Vatsyayana).

Author: Sandra Seno-Alday, Sydney University

The roughly 20 typhoons that hit Southeast Asia each year pale in comparison to the impact on the region of COVID-19 — a storm of a very different sort striking not just Southeast Asia but the world.

 

Just how badly is the COVID-19 typhoon thrashing the region? And what might the post-crisis recovery and reconstruction look like? To answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate the strengths and vulnerabilities of Southeast Asia’s pre-COVID-19 economic infrastructure.

Understanding the structure of the region’s economic house requires going back to 1967, when Southeast Asian countries decided to pledge friendship to one another under the ASEAN framework. While other integrated regions such as NAFTA and the European Union have aggressively broken down trade barriers and significantly boosted intra-regional trade, ASEAN regional economic integration has chugged along slower.

Southeast Asian countries have not viewed trade between each other as a top priority. The trade agreements in the region have been forged around suggestions for ASEAN countries to lower tariffs on intra-regional trade to within a certain range and across limited industries. This has lowered but not eliminated barriers to intra-regional trade. Consequently, a relatively significant share of Southeast Asian trade is with countries outside the region. This active extra-regional engagement has resulted in ASEAN countries’ successful integration into global value chain networks.

A historically outward-facing region, in 2010 around 75 per cent of Southeast Asian commodity imports and exports came from countries outside of ASEAN. This share of extra-regional trade nudged closer to 80 per cent in 2018. This indicates that ASEAN’s global value chain network embeddedness has deepened over time.

Around 40 per cent of ASEAN’s extra-regional trade is with the rest of Asia. From 2010 to 2018 Southeast Asian countries forged major trade relationships with four Asian countries: China, Japan, South Korea and India. Outside Asia, the United States is the region’s major trading partner. ASEAN’s trade focus on Asia’s largest markets is not surprising. Countries tend to establish trade relationships with large, geographically close, and culturally similar markets.

Fostering deep relationships with a few large markets, however, is a double-edged sword. While it has allowed ASEAN to benefit from integration in global value chains, it has also resulted in increased vulnerability to the shocks affecting its network connections.

ASEAN’s participation in global value chains has allowed it to transition from a net regional importer in 1990 to a net regional exporter in 2018. But the region’s deep embeddedness in a small and tightly-coupled network cluster of extra-regional global value chain partners has exposed it to disruption to any and all of its external partners. By contrast, ASEAN’s intra-regional trade network structure is much more loosely-coupled: a consequence of persistent intra-regional trade barriers and thus lower intra-regional trade intensity.

In the pre-COVID-19 period, ASEAN built for itself an economic house held up by just five extra-regional markets, while doing less to expand and diversify its intra-regional trade network. The data shows that ASEAN trade became increasingly concentrated in these few external markets between 2010 and 2018.

This dependence on a handful of markets does not bode well for risk and crisis management. All of the region’s major trading partners have been significantly affected by COVID-19 and this in turn is blowing the ASEAN economic house down.

What are the ways forward? The immediate task at hand is to get a better picture of the region’s position in global value chain networks and to get on top of managing its network risk exposure. Already there are red flags around the region’s food security arising from its position in food value chains. It is critical to look for ways to introduce flexibility into existing supply chains for greater agility in responding to crises.

It is also an opportune time for ASEAN to harness the technology transfer gains of global value chain participation and invest in innovation-driven diversification of products and markets. The region’s embeddedness in global value chain networks certainly places it in a strong position to readily access large export markets not just in Asia but also Europe and the Americas.

Over the longer term, ASEAN is faced with the question of whether it should seriously look…

Source link

Continue Reading

Markets

Tiger Trade Launches SGX Trading, Meeting Demand from Asian Investors

Access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX) adds to Tiger Brokers’ current menu of stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market (NASDAQ), the world’s two largest stock exchanges, as well as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX).

Published

on

SINGAPORE (ACN Newswire) – Tiger Trade, a one-stop mobile and online trading application by Tiger Brokers, has launched access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX).

(more…)
Continue Reading

Asean

Can Asia maintain growth with an ever ageing population ?

To boost productivity in the future, Asian governments will have to implement well-targeted structural reforms today.

Published

on

Asia has been the world champion of economic growth for decades, and this year will be no exception. According to the latest International Monetary Fund Regional Economic Outlook(REO), the Asia-Pacific region’s GDP is projected to increase by 5.5% in 2017 and 5.4% in 2018. (more…)

Continue Reading