The parties, future leadership and the Local-level Governments

JOHN FOWKE

As at the last National Election in 2007 and as at present, only a year away from another crucial election, the status and composition and utility of PNG’s Local Level Government system - a hugely important factor within any intention or plan for decentralisation and improved rural services- is in question. And time is running out.

I have written already recommending that PNG’s national electorates choose representatives on the basis of an enforceable agreement that each elected MP will serve the interests of his people for and through the established local level government/s present in the electorate.Not as the supposed supporter of one or other of the parties, which in the PNG setting are largely meaningless except as sources of wealth and influence for the MPs and the senior party officials.

The parties will not welcome such a change, and will fight individuals who are successful in campaigning without help from a party, and fight the LLG-based representation concept itself wherever it is mooted and attempted. But the parties have had trial run lasting 35 years and it is long past time for change.

Regionally-driven representation in the central national assembly of a society within which ties to and membership of asples, hauslain and associated land-rights are absolutely basic to life itself is crucial to such representation’s successful function. This basic fact was ignored in the early rush for independence and for personal power. 

The class-based party-system copied from Westminster in the land of Misis Kwin has proved not only to be irrelevant in terms of connecting with broad society in PNG, but also very inefficient and resistant to being steered by the ordinary people. Parties as they exist in PNG are simply clubs for the politically-ambitious; window-curtains behind which scores of naughty boys play around at the ordinary citizen’s expense. There is no idealism or an ideology involved here.

Far better, I believe, to move to a system where the nation’s representatives report to their respective LLGs, not to party-bosses; representatives whose words are carried back to the villages by the Councillors; MPs who are given their direction in the democratic forum provided by the LLG, its wards and its hauslain gathering-places and markets.. Here a real, responsive democracy will arise from within what is increasingly a hegemonic government-by-privileged-minority. Such a change is achievable and is not in conflict with the provisions of the Constitution.

The Westminster system grew in Britain over several hundred years to address the wrongs, of both brutality and of slavery for the landless majority, in a land where only a few strong, privileged and corrupt families , the Barons, Lords and the Head Raskol, the King, owned the land and called all the shots. Late in the 19th. Century adult males in Britain got the vote, and not until 1927 were their women allowed this right. 

In PNG we had one of the most egalitarian societies in the world, where everyone shared in land and hunting and fishing rights and where there was no strongly-empowered aristocracy or land-owning minority to stand over the general populace. 

This is why the Westminster system has never been properly understood, why it was so easily hijacked for selfish reasons, and why a more appropriate basis for effective electoral representation must be found and established.

JOHN FOWKE is a former Patrol Officer and Kiap he first came to PNG in 1958 as a Cadet Patrol Officer.