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p. 17 · Read in the full issue
Members of yet another statutory body in Papua New Guinea have decided to visit South-East Asia but they are on the defensive already.
“We are not looking at the bright lights of the cities. It’s strictly a study tour, members of the West New Britain Area Authority said at the end of November.
The Port Moresby City Council has already weathered a public storm over a study tour that councillors made to the Philippines. And members of the Gulf Area Authority were still overseas in late November after surviving a public demonstration which forcibly tried to stop them boarding their aircraft.
Critics claim that the tours are a waste of public funds to provide thinly dis guised holidays.
The West New Britain Area Authority an elected group midway between the national parliament and local councils has voted itself K 36,000 for the tour. Its members will visit the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong and, possibly, Thailand.
They said half the money will come from government grants which are made without strings, and the remainder from the authority’s “own sources of revenue”.
“We won’t spend any time in Manila we go straight through and into the countryside to see rice, sugar, salt and fish production,” a spokesman for the authority said.