An economist says Papua New Guinea government allocations to the health and education sectors have reduced substantially over recent years.
The 2019 Budget, released this week, was bigger than last year, boosted in part by a lift in resource earnings.
But the expected deficit is also high at $US545 million dollars, or two percent of GDP.
The PNG Government like all governments paints a rosy picture of its spending on health and education but both these sectors have been suffering in recent years and PNG Economics principal Paul Flanagan told Don Wiseman there is no reprieve in this latest Budget.
Photo: RNZ Pacific/ Koroi Hawkins
Transcript
PAUL FLANAGAN: That's indeed the case. So at a time where PNG is suffering things that have attracted international community attention such as polio, increased malaria and TB rates, these things are drawing attention to problems in the health sector in PNG, but for all of the people in PNG, the difficulties in health are at a much more local, rural health centre level, where the number of staff is ageing and declining and their lack of basic medicine.
DON WISEMAN: Also relates to education doesn't. There's been this emphasis on trying to improve things or supposedly in terms of this fee free education, but we know that there are a lot of pressures, economic pressures within that sector and what has happened in this Budget is not going to make that any better is it?
PF: No. Essentially education got just the amount of the inflation rate, so there was no net increase that's required to pay the teachers the 3 percent agreement that was planned. And there is not enough funds there to increase the number of teachers that are actually required for the many, many tens of thousands of PNG students who are coming into schooling each year. Overall education has actually suffered some very big cuts since 2015 - cuts of about 30 percent after you allow for inflation. Even more than health which has been cut by 17 percent.
DW: How is the government explaining that away?
PF: Well in some ways quite badly. Like these things take some time to turn around. So you need to look beyond the annual Budget and you look to the Medium Term Development Plans, and the PNG Government brought one down in October, the Medium Term Development Plan from 2018 to 2022. After looking at the numbers the Post Courier even asked that the Planning Minister withdraw the plan because the numbers just didn't add up. There were figures in there that just made no sense. So this is the great concern that the language is good but as soon as you start looking at some of the numbers about how are they going to implement it, the numbers make no sense. The planning capability just doesn't seem to be there, so the prospects of turning the around can't be seen as being very good.
DW: There is going to be infrastructure spending. Much of that may well come from donor money which has suddenly become very available, from various sources. Is there any chance that some of this may go into health and education?
PF: I think the main emphasis there is on the transport sector, and also utilities such as the electrification and other areas. They are really significant gains for rural people but a lot of the actual funding you need - you can fund a big hospital which can take up a lot of money but it seems as if PNG's actual health requirements and education requirements are much more down at the grass roots level. So it's often difficult for the national government and even donors to get good activities operating down at that level.
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