Up Front

with the Editor

Government schemes frequently enough fail to reach their target, but one that has exceeded its target to some embarrassment is the one calling for a reduction of expatriate staff in the Papua New Guinea public service.

A government plan announced in 1972, was for each department to cut employment of expatriates 15 per cent each year, and this has been done so successfully that the reduc tion rate has been running at about 30 per cent. Chief Minister Michael Somare now admits that they’ve over done it, and that staff has been lost they would have liked to retain. The cuts have especially affected PNG’s ability to carry out its social and economic programmes.

“We would rather employ people from overseas for as long as it is necessary, than have these pro grammes fail because of shortage of manpower,” said Mr Somare. He’s decided as a result that the arbitrary 15 per cent reduction will no longer be enforced.

He deserves applause for his public admission at a time of national fer vour when the country can’t be ex pected to go out of its way to offer concessions to expatriates. He got no thanks for it from the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Assembly, Mr Tei Abal, who said the decision to suspend the programme was neces sary but hardly commendable because the government should have made it earlier.

The PNG Public Service Asso ciation viewed the decision to suspend the target with alarm, agreeing that it was necessary to retain the skills of expatriates so long as the genuine drive for localisation was still assured.

But the most useful reaction in my view comes, surprisingly, from Suva, in an editorial in The Fiji Times, which comments that Mr Somare’s change in policy is both sympathetic and realistic, and it “has lessons for any country which is simultaneously trying to preserve the delicate balance between advancing its own citizens, and fulfilling its economic, social and educational aims”.

“Delicate balance” is the key phrase.

It was inevitable that many expatriates would leave PNG as independence approached, work re strictions were tightened and anti- European sentiment grew. And not only public servants. Between Sep tember 1972 and April 1974 a total of 12,000 expatriates left PNG per manently, among them public ser vants who didn’t leave as a result of the 15 per cent cut, but who were driven by the necessity of establish ing themselves somewhere else.

One of these 1 talked to in Sydney the other day. I’ve known him for more than 25 years, and he’s on his last leave before coming to Australia permanently. It was a “job-finding” leave. It’s a job he is looking for because he’s faced up to the fact that he is unlikely to find a career.

“It’s rather devastating that I’ve been out of this sort of society for a quarter of a century, and I’ve only just realised it as I look around Sydney and see everybody busy,” he said, gloomily. “Everybody has a job to do and they seem to know what they are doing, but there doesn’t seem to be any room for me.”

Yet Mr Somare, despite his sin cerity, can’t hold this man by saying that PNG would “rather employ people from overseas for as long as necessary” than have its pro grammes fail. People are not mere units of work who can be retained for as long as it suits the employer.

On the other hand, as the Public Service Association and Mr Somare himself stress, the drive towards localisation must not falter if it is to be achieved at all, and not drag on.

So l the problem comes back to this matter of keeping a delicate balance.

I wish both sides well, and not for the first time am I relieved that I have usurped the privilege of com menting on problems and not the responsibility of solving them.

Stuart Inder