Up Front

with the Editor

The pastime in Port Moresby these days, where I am writing this column, is a game called Guess the Constitution. It’s been going on for months, but it ends in May when the Constitutional Planning Com mittee finally tables its long-awaited, frequently-delayed final report.

It’ll be a bulky document and while I don’t claim to know its de tails, I confidently predict it will be controversial. Papua New Guinea’s draft constitution will establish some new and important principles not seen in any constitution anywhere.

You can also say it will be a “tough” constitution in the effect it will have on the present expatriate society here. The constitution mak ers have gone back to the grass roots for what Chief Minister Somare, who is chairman of the CPC, has described as a “home grown” product. He means to imply more than the obvious fact that it is being drawn up locally and not, say, in Canberra.

It is a constitution which repre sents local thinking and aspirations.

The motivation behind it is that PNG is for the New Guineans and has to be preserved for them. The thinking is that constitutions ordin arily don’t get changed much, so you need to write into them, now, the kind of safeguards that will be re quired 20 years from now.

I suspect the European or Chinese who has lived most or all his life here will find the citizenship pro visions unpalatable, and 1 say this even though I don’t know the de tails.

In the current Assembly meeting we have seen two bills introduced (on land and on coffee) in which the draughtsmen have had to define a “non-overseas person”, and these probably give us a clue to citizenship.

In the land bill a non-overseas person is defined as “a person at least three of whose grandparents were born in PNG and who is re cognised as being a member of a tribe, moiety, clan, subclan or other customary social or land-holding group indigenous to PNG”.

In the coffee bill, a “local person” is described as a person “three of whose grandparents were born in PNG and one or more of whose grandparents were born in the neigh bouring area”. The neighbouring area is defined as the British Solo mons, Irian Jaya and any other place specified by notice.

The citizenship provisions will, I believe, be among the controversial items in the final report, but they may not reach the House of Assembly in exactly the same form as recommended by the CPC. The report is being studied by cabinet, and the CPC could make compro mises at this stage, although there is a strong element on the commit tee which believes the report must go to the parliament untouched.

From what I understand, the con stitution is aimed at avoiding a multi-racial society, on the grounds that if you make it easy for ex patriates to become citizens you will confirm them as a privileged class of people who by their education and broader outside contacts can continue to dominate the business of the country. To avoid this the con stitution has to be tough on some people who would genuinely like to become citizens and who would be good citizens. Already in this current Assembly meeting we have seen introduction of a bill aimed at con fiscating expatriate-held land for the benefit of New Guineans who might be landless, and this is only one of a line of measures meant to safe guard the rights of citizens—that is, black citizens.

The theory behind the consti tution is good, and the constitution might work well in practice too.

Perhaps PNG really is creating a constitutional benchmark that will be used as a model for years to come.

But there is always the danger that by their nature some of the inno vations will be unsatisfactory—in which case it is good to hear, as I have, that PNG’s constitution is not being designed “for ever”. —Stuart Inder