Mr. President,
allow me, on behalf of the Government and people of
Papua New Guinea, to offer our warmest
congratulations on your assumption of the presidency
of the General Assembly at its sixty-sixth session. We
pledge support for your statement highlighting the
success of global endeavours that are founded on the
principles of partnership, justice and responsibility. I
also thank your predecessor, Mr. Joseph Diess, for his
invaluable contributions to the United Nations, and I
wish him well.
I also wish to congratulate the Secretary-General,
His Excellency Mr. Ban Ki-moon, on his
reappointment for a second term, and to thank him for
attending our recent annual Pacific Islands Leaders
Meeting in Auckland, New Zealand. His attendance at
our regional meeting was the first by a United Nations
Secretary-General and is testament to the strengthening
ties between the United Nations and the Pacific region.
We particularly note his heartfelt comments when
describing his experiences on witnessing the adverse
effects of climate change on low-lying atolls in the
Republic of Kiribati and the various other development
challenges faced by many small island States in our
region.
Allow me, like other speakers, to take this
opportunity to welcome our newest member of the
United Nations family — the Republic of South Sudan.
Papua New Guinea continues to benefit from a
strong United Nations presence through its delivery of
various development programmes. Papua New Guinea
welcomed and formalized the “One United Nations
Initiative: delivering as one” concept in 2006. That has
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unified all the efforts of the various United Nations
agencies under one budgetary framework, monitoring
and evaluation process.
The concept will enable a more effective and
efficient way for the United Nations to deliver on its
mandate, particularly the new country programme for
Papua New Guinea, to be rolled out at the beginning of
January 2012. It will target the areas of governance,
social justice, health, education, gender, the
environment, climate change and disaster management.
That new country programme is part of our
overall efforts to achieve the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs). Since the inaugural MDG report was
published in 2004, Papua New Guinea has produced
two MDG progress reports. The first, in 2009, was a
summary report and the second, in 2010, a
comprehensive report. They showed that we have been
able to achieve some of the national MDG targets,
especially on poverty reduction and child mortality.
In terms of universal primary education, Papua
New Guinea is progressing well, with the enrolment of
children in grades one to six increasing significantly —
by 53 per cent. That is a marked improvement and will
increase the literacy rate in the long term. Our
Government recently announced a policy of free
education from the elementary level to year 10 and
subsidized education from grade 11 to university,
commencing 2012.
We are also revamping our national health system
to improve immunization programmes, to provide a
clean and safer water supply, to centralize the purchase
and supply of medical drugs, and to reduce maternal
and child mortality and the incidence of malaria,
HIV/AIDS and other communicable diseases. The
recent important summit on non-communicable
diseases, attended by our Minister for Health,
reiterated our equal responsibility for our own, our
families’ and our communities’ health and well-being.
Our Government remains committed to achieving
the MDGs, and we are now scaling up progress in all
relevant sectors. Our new Development Strategic Plan
2010-2030 and Medium Term Development Plan aim
to develop and foster key enabling environments,
which will raise Papua New Guinea to a middle-
income country and improve its Human Development
Index ranking.
We call on all our development partners to
complement our efforts to achieve the MDG targets in
line with our national development plans and policies. I
believe other developing countries will support our
call.
We are also investing heavily in the rehabilitation
of our major transport infrastructure, including roads,
airports and seaports. Aside from that, we are also
rolling out rural communication systems and rural
electrification. As we are all aware, improved
infrastructure will enable effective service delivery.
Women play critical roles in all facets of our
development. Our Government is conscious of the need
to have more women participate actively in the affairs
of state and in the economic life of our country. I am
pleased to report that we have recently passed the first
vote on a parliamentary bill that will provide for
22 seats reserved for women to contest in the coming
elections in 2012. That provision does not stop them
from contesting any of the existing seats.
We also appreciate the push by multilateral
partners like the Asian Development Bank and the
World Bank for gender equality. In the same breath,
however, we urge them to support our financial
institutions by specifically allocating funds without
risk to be lent to women entrepreneurs to develop
business opportunities.
We note the recently adopted San Francisco
Declaration by the countries member of the Asia-
Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) last week,
under the leadership of the United States of America.
That is a major step forward in supporting women in
business and is a powerful tool for women of the APEC
member countries. We will encourage our women in
Papua New Guinea to take advantage of the
opportunities created by that Declaration.
There remain many other global challenges that
continue to affect the development aspirations of many
of our countries. One is nuclear non-proliferation. The
Pacific remains a nuclear-weapons-free zone. We call
upon other Member States who are not yet signatories
to sign and ratify the Rarotonga Treaty.
The illegal use, abuse and the dangerous
proliferation of small arms and light weapons continue
to hamper the development aspirations of many
developing countries. We therefore call upon the
international community to deal seriously with
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outstanding issues such as the illegal supply of and
trade in small arms. Our Government will do all it can
to accelerate the implementation of the
recommendations in our own Gun Summit Report.
On transnational crime, Papua New Guinea
remains committed to working closely with other
Governments and relevant international law
enforcement agencies to curb drug trafficking, human
trafficking and money-laundering.
As one of the top five remaining rainforest
nations, we are committed to addressing the many
challenges of climate change, biodiversity and
sustainable development of our forests. We continue to
maintain dialogue with all stakeholders, being mindful
that issues confronting many nations on climate change
are very complex.
In the matter of United Nations reform, we
support and encourage the reform of the United
Nations, its agencies and its Secretariat, to make them
more responsive to and active in responding to global,
regional and national challenges. We reiterate our call
for an expansion of membership in the permanent and
non-permanent categories of the Security Council,
which must take into account the geopolitical realities
of today’s world.
In terms of our contribution to the maintenance of
international peace and security, I am pleased to
announce the deployment of our uniformed personnel
as military observers. That is history in the making for
our country, and we thank the United Nations for
giving us the opportunity for our security personnel to
participate in international peacekeeping duties.
On regional issues, tuna is an important source of
food and is, along with tourism, an economic resource
for the Pacific island States. Papua New Guinea and
countries that are parties to the Nauru Agreement are
determined to process tuna onshore to add value and
create employment for our people. We encourage
investors to invest in onshore activities.
At the Pacific regional level, we are conscious of
our obligation to conserve fisheries through sustainable
fishing. The parties to the Nauru Agreement have
introduced the Vessel Day Scheme to limit the total
catch for conservation purposes. In addition, Papua
New Guinea continues to make funds available to the
South Pacific community to tag tuna species so that we
are can quantify and assess the tuna stocks for the
future.
Over the past nine years, Papua New Guinea has
continued to experience unprecedented economic
growth levels of 6 to 8 per cent per annum. That has
been largely attributable to significant increases in
foreign investments in our mineral and hydrocarbon
sectors and to the high prices of our agricultural
commodities. Those economic growth levels have
positioned Papua New Guinea to become a significant
development partner within our region.
Papua New Guinea greatly values the objectives
and principles of the United Nations Charter. We
reaffirm our support for the maintenance of
international peace and security, the development of
friendly relations among nations and working together
towards the achievement of the aspirations of all of our
peoples.