Wednesday (Jan 23^rd) a little board room in the Institute of National Affairs was humming …if you’d been listening from outside the room that is.

If you were inside, a part of the audience like me, you would’ve first seen the back of a lot of heads at first. Bald ones, frizzy ones, long haired ones and blonde ones too.

It wasn’t until the discussion got exciting that I realized there were some prominent faces to those heads! Peter Siperau (Deputy Auditor General – Provincial), Elizabeth Avaisa (CIMC), John Toguata (NACA), Loi Bakani and Dave Conn were present in the room.

So the not so exciting part was the stuff that we've been hearing for ages. You know; that PNG has poor social indicators despite the national average income being comfortably above the poverty line, Western Province despite being one of the highest revenue earners has one of the lowest social indicators, that we don't have enough qualified auditors in the country to be able to assist the Auditor General's office in auditing all the back dated stuff. Oh and the systems are being abused daily and some of the abuse is said to be a result of PNG culture. You know the usual negative stuff that has been going on for donkey's year and there hasn't been much of a genuine attempt to address all these issues at a national level.

Which brought on eye opening and brain activating discussion on what can be done to address these issues. "What we need is not necessarily a systems overhaul but a ‘people’ overhaul!" A sentiment that Mr Toguata felt strongly about and obviously alot of the audience agreed with him (I certainly did). A litany of the institutions in place to enforce accountability and why those institutions are not functioning, as they should followed.

There was one particular man (didn't get his name though) who broached the subject of the proposed ICAC by the government and discussion went into the pros and cons of setting one up or expanding and empowering the existing bodies.

At the end of it all - there definitely needs to be a major overhaul of people, systems and institutions and sounds like an ICAC is just the way to do it!

©Klaireh