Economic growth not the solution to everything: Abel

By MATTHEW VARI

Sunday, April 5, 2015 (Sunday Chronicle, PNG)

MINISTER for National Planning and Monitoring Charles Abel has said that the preferred economic growth was vital to creating a better looked after population was not the way for the country to maintain a sustainable existence.

He said as a developing country, PNG has been getting lost in the subscription that economic growth not a solution to everything.

“In fact there are statistics coming out now through a conference by the INA (Institute of National Affairs) recently with ANU (Australian National University) also coming up presenting data that is showing a paradigm shift that is happening everywhere in the world, with statistics showing that GDP growth correlates to human happiness to a degree, after which it just flattens out,” Minister Abel said.

“Let us not subscript to this development ground pathway that says grow grow grow and forget about the consequence- tomorrow we wake up and the place is in a mess and we start to say why didn’t we keep some tree and some tuna and why did we let the population grow endlessly.”

“That is not being smart, it is tempting because you deal with issues like school fees and services everyday we are tempted to make short term solutions.”

He said that there has to be a balance of both that is going to take time ultimately getting to a stage where the population is stabilized, creating an economy based on strategic assets that is the basis for an export economy as well.

“A lot of developed countries sustain their lifestyles getting cheap resources from us- exploiting our weak systems, they exploit the fact that we are caught in a poverty cycle and utilize that to come and bargain with us and take our assets cheaply,” Abel explained.

“That is how they sustain themselves, that is how some of them are growing, surviving by extracting cheap resources from us and so you can see at the end of the day if we continue down this path we get to a point where a correction is going to happen.”

“That correction may already be happening, when you see these typhoons, hurricanes with strengths that have never been seen before.”

“You start to think that maybe something is happening, where human development needs to take a good look at itself.”