prosecutions by the Executive might,

felt some members, be used to protect summons-prone ministers from pro secution. However, when, during the debate on Chapter 8, an identical amendment was proposed to protect the Public Prosecutor from Executive interference, the opposition trumpet sounded an uncertain note and the amendment was defeated.

This anomaly, if nothing is done to correct it, could give rise to a situation in which a police prosecutor initiated a prosecution in a lower court and later, when the case went to a higher court, the Public Pro secutor could be ordered by the Executive not to proceed with it.

Moreover, the conditions under which the Executive could interfere are wide open, including not only national security but also “public welfare”. It would be easy for a touchy Executive to feel that the prosecution of one of its own mem bers would not be conducive to “public welfare”.

With only one chapter to go, time ran out.

On the afternoon of December 6 the House adjourned “to a date to be fixed” (expected to be in February) with Chapter 10 (Provincial Govern ment) still undebated. Ironically enough, this is the chapter which many Paguineans regard as the most important of the lot. For “provincial government” has become almost a cargo cult in many of our districts.

It is viewed as the panacea which will cure all our ills.

A few hours after the House rose, the Chief Minister spoke over national radio expressing his disap pointment and anger at what had happened. He blamed members of the House for their failure to attend properly to their parliamentary duties and their eagerness to get away as the sittings drew to their close. And reasonably so: division figures of 32-31 in a 100 member House on an important constitutional issue tell their own story.

Mr Somare went on to say that in spite of the setback, the Constitutional Bill would be brought down at the next meeting of the House, leaving the provisions for provincial govern ment to be added later. In the mean time, he said, he would press forward with the conversion of existing area authorities into provincial govern ments under interim legislation alreadv enacted to cope with the Boueainville situation.

While the House had been occupied during its two weeks of sittings mainly with constitutional matters, a quantity of routine parliamentary business had also been transacted: statements had been made and tabled, renorts had been presented, motions had been

carried or rejected, and new legisla tion had been enacted.

From this mass of business 1 choose two items which seem to me to be the most worthy of notice.

The first is a report tabled by the Standing Committee on Public Ac counts, which dots the “i”s and crosses the “t”s of an earlier Auditor- General’s report on ministerial spend ing. The new report says that pre scribed procedures for authorising expenditures have been widely ignored and that “the amount of improper expenditure appears to have been quite large”.

“Disregard for regulation and cor rect procedures which have been ex hibited by certain ministers has already seriously damaged public service morale and parliamentary prestige in the eyes of the public”, the report alleges.

Some of this disregard for rules and regulations has been attributed to the alleged inappropriateness of these Australian-made rules in the Papua New Guinea situation.

This is, of course, one of the stock excuses for law-breaking in present day Papua New Guinea. It is quite true that some of the laws and regulations now in force in Papua New Guinea are inappropriate. But surely the remedy for this is to amend or replace them so as to make them more appropriate, not to ignore or disobey them. That way chaos lies.

Which brings me to my second item. At long last the government has introduced a bill to set up a Law Reform Commission, charged with the mammoth task of reviewing all the present laws and recommending where and how they should be changed to make them “appropriate” to Papua New Guinea.

This is a step which everyone will welcome and, having regard to the present embryo state of the indigenous legal profession, it is probably wise to ensure that professional lawyers shall be the commission’s servants, not its masters.

But I must confess to feeling a faint tinge of apprehension when I read that one of the aims of the exercise is to ensure that “our legal system assists in achieving our national goals”. In many parts of the world today national goals are being pursued with a great deal of ruthlessness, and there are not wanting those in Papua New Guinea who openly advocate ruthlessness in the pursuit of national goals.

Perhaps I’m a bit old-fashioned, but I have always supposed that the proper function of a legal system was to secure justice for the people who live under it!