 My view is that I think a lot of us in this country take a very short-term view about corruption and we think that you can kind of just put together a group, run around and call it all in a period and then you've kind of won. I think with corruption it's really a war of attrition and simply because as far as I'm concerned we've been fighting corruption for 25 years and we haven't won it, we're nowhere near winning and it also seems to me that just before elections fighting corruption becomes a very major issue and all of a sudden it's fashionable to be fighting corruption now my personal view is that corruption only exists, corruption only does well when the environment permits it to do well and in PNG we have very weak systems we have very weak processes you couple that with no ethics and all those sorts of things and you've got a very healthy environment for corruption. I keep thinking back to what we do in agriculture because that's what I do for a living. In agriculture if you remove the weeds for instance you've got to go plant something useful in its place because if you don't the sunlight and the nutrients the sunlight that's coming from the sky and the nutrients that are in the soil are still going to allow for other plants to grow now if you don't have useful plants you remove the weeds you could end up with thorns if you just kind of leave it there and expect it to solve itself it won't corruption is the same you can go jail say 10,000 corrupt officials and everybody else by the end of this year or next year or whatever the jails will be full but I'm sure you'll find that there'll be another 10,000 move in to take their place and these ones that come in and to operate in this corrupt environment might be worse than the ones you just got rid of simply because the environment still exists you haven't really fixed anything it's just superficial it's window dressing in the last five years parliament approved something like almost 20 million quina per district for 89 districts the district support improvement program now some districts have made some progress but most of them have not now if you go back and try to work out what they spent the money on well most of them spent money on cars buying four-wheel drive vehicles they spent the money on you know well cars mostly and they spent money on maintaining this that or the other thing fixing a road to nowhere building a bridge in a place where instead of servicing 20,000 people well this bridge services 500 people you know things like that things that strategically don't make sense I've been fortunate enough to do some capacity work for Ozade through one of their programs here called EPSP and in one of the agencies because the issue came up in several other agencies I decided to do a survey just to find out okay in this particular agency which is one of the key government agencies how many of them are living in housing that they could sort of call their own not in settlements and you know temporary shelters around the city 56% of them and this is in one agency are living in slums essentially in coming to work for government the average salary annually is about maybe 23,000 Kena which is what $10,000 a year now these are people who are at the front line of doing work for the state now they're gonna send their kids to a good school right I mean I'm sure for most of them their primary concern is what's gonna happen to my kids okay in the school situation you've got at a minimum and these are stats I can easily back up 76 pupils to one teacher in Australia your ratio is more like 25 to one so you want to put your kids to private school well private school could cost you your entire for one child your entire annual salary if the kids get sick or if the spouse gets sick and they need to access the hospital the public hospital they got to wait in line for maybe six hours to get to see a doctor or see someone else who can help them so they decided to go to a private doctor the up market hospitals here in Mosby charge 250 Kena which is what about a hundred and say a hundred dollars hundred and ten dollars hundred fifty dollars for a consultation of ten minutes you know some of us are in the wrong business seriously right now it's costing a lot like I live in a single bedroom flat not in a flash part of town and I'm paying four and a half thousand Kena month for that that's more than twice the annual salary of the average public servant and I can't understand how they expect to live you go to the markets and because everything is so expensive the markets are also very expensive because those people living on the fringes of society they have to make a living as well we have a small cake and the leaders themselves and the people are fighting over this little cake the leaders who are the executive if you like in a boardroom situation they're the board the board ought to be interested in higher things than the rank and file but the board is not interested in higher things the board is interested in the same things that the rank and file is interested in it's a poverty mentality so those who ought not to have the poverty mentality actually have it just like those that do have it so everyone is fighting in the mud as it were with nobody on the hillside interested in hey guys there's milk and honey in the next valley maybe we ought to be interested in accessing the next valley instead of still fighting over this one you find it all over the place doesn't matter where it's in private sector it's in government I mean I suspect there's some collusion going on between those in the private sector as I said earlier these people aren't here because we're such a great country to do business in they're here because we're a country where you can get away with a lot