DEMOCRACY IS WONDERFUL

By: Sig Nordal Very interesting posts have been made in this discussion group called the Sharp Talk. We are happy to read these discussions as it shows that the people of Papua New Guinea are conscious about what is going on in their society and also, discussion groups like these help to ensure that companies and governments are aware that they are being monitored. It is definitely needed to have more discussion groups like these in PNG and in all of our efforts in working in PNG have been to stress the importance of that point. All of of the 400 PNG members in our LinkedIn Group will know that this project that we are doing is absolutely not new. In fact, we constructed our first house in PNG in 2009, and we still have numerous houses at the harbor which are for the benefit of the government of PNG. Shortly after we did the housing contract with the government of PNG and imported houses to the country we did so in good faith. Nevertheless, the houses remain unpaid. This project that we are doing now was first started as a conventional housing project where people were to finance their own houses. It soon became clear that the high rental rates in PNG had "eaten away" people's savings and they were unable to come up with a down payment therefore, we designed a transaction whereby people can buy houses utilizing traditional mortgages and this allows the people to have no down payment. It is interesting to note that despite the fact that Amazon Realty Ltd. is a duly registered PNG company, with all records filed, and a company that possesses over 1500 subdivided lots should be attacked in this way. However, there is always another side to the coin and perhaps that is what this group wants us to do; we can bring all of our houses to PNG and sell them in the open market to the highest bidder but then way we would not be helping the working people, would we? There is one thing that we should all remember and that is that democracy allows us to voice our opinions about various matters but with democracy comes great responsibility. People must do their homework before they start accusing people and as all records and information about Amazon Realty are readily available perhaps the initiator of this discussion should have exercised the responsibility in checking if the statements made are actually true. To verify is necessary before statements are made. When a reference is made to articles in Post Courier one should read our comments about the horrific consequences of scams and how we have systematically tried to help Papua New Guineans avoid precisely that. The scams in PNG are far reaching, and we have pointed that out also, and those include misuse of natural resources, misuse of logging rights, housing scams, and most recently rental scams. Do you think it makes any sense that an apartment in PNG costs more to rent than an apartment in London or even Los Angeles? There are people that have opposed our program for obvious reasons as they benefit from the high rental situation. Again, I want to thank everyone in this group for their comments and I welcome them to contact us if they need any further clarification and we encourage you to continue to stay on guard towards the various misuse of PNG's resources, bribery, and other such issues all of which destroy the democracy. We look forward to hearing from you and please do not hesitate to contact us at mypnghouse@gmail.com.(We use gmail because it is an excellent platform to communicate with people as we work in a very open way as all of our clients know).