CONFERENCE AN AVENUE TO TALK ABOUT ISSUES
Journalism student Esther Gahane
Public Service Minister Hon. Joe Sungi said, the focus of the one day Ministers & Governors conference was for all the department Heads, Governors and Ministers to get together to basically talk about the Reforms of public service matters on National level.
“The Prime minister and the Prime Minister’s department with my department had come up with this day so that we can all sit together and talk about matters that affect the service delivery of this country”.
He said, instead of us talking at the back and on the floor of parliament we must look for a way out that we can openly speak because there is no more body of leaders above us.
“This is the body of leaders that will make sure that Papua New Guinea progresses or Papua New Guinea doesn’t progress. So if you are thinking that there is someone else apart from you then you better start think again and say we are responsible for this country’ there is no one else above us and I think that’s the reason why we are here”. he added.
“Before we go into our first parliament session for this year, we must sort out the most important resource which is Human Resource, it’s not finance because we always worry about finance and forget about Human Resource”.
Hon. Joe Sungi described Human Resource as the nerve system of the body and finance as the blood in the body.
“We should now talk about public service because the human resource is the nerve system of any organization, when you cut the nerve system, the blood represents the financial resource.
Finance is like the blood system of an organization. When you cut down the nerve system the hand cannot communicate, because it doesn’t connect with the nervous system in the brain.” He said that we should now talking about Human Resource matters than giving too much attention on finance because it will be the human who will spend the money not the other way around. For too long this country has been always talking about finance and budget and we forget the most important resource which is human resource.
He also mentioned that if we have a good provincial administrator in the province, that provincial administrator will make sure that province performs.
When we start to appoint provincial administrators, we must know who we are appointing, we need persons with management and leadership experiences not your technical experience and that the reason we end up complaining about public services because it’s ourselves to be blamed as political leaders.
“I was once a Provincial administrator so it is important that we have the Provincial administrators here because they are the ones that will implement government decisions and policies down to the people.
This is the final forum that we should talk about how we can understand each other and assist each other. Public service is like your wife or husband, if our wife is well dressed and goes around it reflects the kind of husband she has and vice versa.
Our public service is the same, you can talk sweet and do all kind of things at the top but if the public service missionary is not functioning properly, you have a problem.
So I’m asking all of us the governors to look back and support the provincial administrators to sort out the human resource division in your respective provinces. Provincial administrators and department heads pay attention to your human resource divisions.
I am so thankful to the Prime Minister’s and my department for organizing this and most importantly support from our parliament committee Hon. Gary Juffa, Governor of Oro & Chairman of Public Sector Reforms and Service Delivery Committee. I request all of us as of today, if we can leave from this conference with a priority shift from finance to human resource.
The most important resource that any manager can manage is human resource and finance resource, if we can manage this too then the rest is okay.” Minister Sungi concluded.