Apec: Driven to distraction

There should be a global prize called the “What Were They Thinking?” award.

There should be a global prize called the “What Were They Thinking?” award. An award open to all the leaders of the lands across the planet. For many of the drivers (the leaders) of quite a good number of these lands are capable of making some, shall we say, “interesting” decisions, which so often create ripple effects across the country they lead, and into others.

The ripples are powered by a fuel called politics, which refines the decisions and choices and directions those leaders, and their assistants, choose to take.

They rule and run the place.

If they want to they can start a war. The people who pay the taxes and run the businesses (who effectively pay the wages of the rulers) don’t go out and start the wars, although they will inevitably suffer most if there is

one. They simply have to go along with what is being decreed at leadership levels.

Too many big guns of rulership are not in it for gaining a better landscape for their people, it’s more monetary gain for themselves. As we see pretty well every night on the news, this leads to people packing what little they have and crossing borders into another land which they hope can settle them.

In many cases they cannot, because there is only a certain amount of jobs, homes, food and whatever out there for their own occupants.

Having thousands more appearing on the doorstep every week isn’t something anyone can really prepare for. And it all comes down to the leadership of the lands where these people are effectively forced to get out of because inflation is rampant and there’s not enough food and fuel or wages to keep them going.

Go back 40 years and most of these places were running along okay . . . until some self-besotted lunatic often wearing a colourful military hat comes along and wants everything done “my way”.

It’s crazy and unpleasant in too many places out there but it just seems to be the terrible script these days.

A script agencies like the United Nations pretty much reads, shakes its head at, but allows to screen anyway.

Occasionally there is a slightly comical edge to the pursuit of the “What Were They Thinking?” award, where the leadership of a land does something so daft you can only shake your head, more in bewilderment and bemusement than anguish and concern.

So I nominate the government of Papua New Guinea as the latest contender for the award after its staging of the Apec summit there seven months ago.

A most important summit I’m sure, and for leaders it would have been a most invigorating get-together. Lots of fine food, some sight-seeing and a time to chat about whatever people at an Apec gathering chat about.

And of course they needed to be ferried about the place, so a fleet of cars needed to be organised.

Right then, what shall we line up in the parking spots? One would assume something reasonably spacious, comfortable, visually satisfying and not too harsh on the budget.

Okay, they decreed, let’s get 40 Maseratis.

Yep, 40 Maseratis.

Now, they are a fine automobile but the least expensive model goes for about $68,000, which means the purchase bill would have been about $2,720,000.

That sum could have sorted a few pressing issues within the community of the people who voted for the people who like Italian cars — given 39 per cent of the population live beneath the national poverty line.

Here’s the rub though . . . the Government believed they could flog the luxury cars off no worries after the summit.

So how many have they sold after seven months?

One.

There are still 39 left.

What were they thinking?