Afterthoughts

with Percy Chatterton

in Port Moresby

One of Papua New Guinea’s most popular vogue words at present is ‘decentralisation’. Along with John (now Sir John) Guise I was one of the early advocates of decentralisation at a time when such ideas were regarded as highly heretical by the colonial establishment, and in 1969 I read a paper at the PNG University’s Waigani Seminar on the subject. It was called The Possible Role of Regional Assemblies in Papua New Guinea.

Of course we have always had decentralisation of a kind in PNG, that is, decentralisation of administration. Colonial Papua New Guinea was divided into four administrative ‘regions’, and each region into a number of‘districts’. The number of these districts rose from 15 in the immediate post-war years to the present tally of 19, some districts having been split into two. The demand for further sub-division is still being heard, sometimes

clamorously.

The four regions Papua, Highlands, New Guinea Mainland and New Guinea Islands had a kind of rationale. The districts might be described as kiap- sized bites, in other words, areas of a size which a kiap (district commissioner) could effectively administer.

The function of district administration, in theory at any rate, was the implementation of centrally enacted laws and regulations by means of an administrative hierarchy ranging from the prestigious district commissioner down to the humble patrol officer. These gentlemen were supposed to work by the book, but some of them showed considerable ingenuity in devising rules and even punishments which were not in the book but which they regarded as suitable for the local situation ‘ kiap law’ it was sometimes called. As the governed didn’t know what was or was not in the book, the kiaps generally got away with it.

But what Sir John and 1 were after in the late sixties was not decentralisation of administration, which we already had, but decentralisation of decision-making. My 1969 paper envisaged that the regional assemblies would be decision-making and law-making bodies. I adopted Guise’s suggestion that the units of decentralisation should be called ‘provinces’, and tentatively suggested that the number of these provinces should be somewhere between the four of the administrative regions and the (at that time) 18 of the administrative districts. In a PIM article in the same year I suggested a split up into seven or eight provinces. And five years later, in a submission to the Constitutional Planning Committee (CPC), I proposed five the four traditional regions, but with Bougainville as a separate province from the rest of the New Guinea Islands.

What finally came out of the CPC cooking pot was a proposal that the, by then, 19 districts should be re-named ‘provinces’, and that each should have its own provincial assembly. I have no doubt at all that this proposal accurately reflected the public sentiment of the time.

Now, in 1978, the formation of the 19 provincial governments is proceeding apace, and national government has got to learn to live with it. The Public Service has got to learn to live with it too, and that may be harder.

Whether it is really a good thing to have so many provinces is a matter of opinion. I think it isn’t. But for the moment it’s the ‘will of the people’, and we’re stuck with it. Somehow or other it must be made to work; its breakdown on any widespread scale could have serious consequences.

First, there seems to be a widespread lack of understanding of the fact that the power to make decisions is of little use without the expertise to implement them. Is there enough expertise available to be spread over 19 provinces? And will the experts

we have got go mad trying to serve two masters the provincial and national governments respectively? Yet a failure in implementation will generate a lot of discontent, some of which will rub off on the national government, which will be accused of having let the provinces down.

In the second place, with common roll provincial and national elections held separately, the chances of jealousy, tension and even confrontation developing between provincial and national legislatures and politicians are considerable. Already ill-feeling has surfaced between the interim (ad hoc) provincial assemblies and the national parliamentarians who represent those provinces.

These tensions may well increase when fully elected provincial governments replace the present ad hoc bodies.

Next, if so many provincial governments were necessary, one wonders whether it would not have been a good idea to structure them more simply. In 1964 the colonial power established the House of Assembly as an embryo national government, importing to it all the panoply and complexity of Westminster.

Now our national parliament has established provincial government on the pattern of the Australian state governments, with premiers, deputy premiers, speakers, deputy speakers, and all the other trimmings. Maybe this has given some of the participants delusions of grandeur; certainly it has led some of them to place a high monetary value on their services to their

province.

Anyway, six state premiers in Australia is one thing; 19 provincial premiers in PNG is another. It seems a pity that a more Melanesian pattern could not have been worked out.

I have on several occasions suggested that if and when provincial governments become well established and take over a substantial part of the legislative work load, a national legislature of the size of our present national parliament will become an unnecessary burden to the governmental structure. A smaller body might be more suitable, and would certainly be cheaper. Moreover, if the members of this body were chosen by the provincial assemblies instead of by direct election, the chances of friction between provincial and national governments would be lessened.

But it’s probably too late now for such a change. There are too many people around with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. So it looks like we are stuck with a very expensive system of government.

Perhaps the saddest part of the whole thing is that fewer and fewer people seem to be willing to do anything for nothing. At all levels people want to be paid for service to their community, their province or their country. They even want to be paid attendance money (far in excess of genuine out-of-pocket expenses) for turning up at meetings which their election to office places an obligation on them to attend anyway.

It wasn’t always so. In Sir Hubert Murray’s Papua we had a Village Council at Hanuabada. It was one of the many forward-looking experiments of that now much rubbished era.

The councillors were not remunerated for their services, nor were they paid for attending council meetings. They were quite happy with the opportunities the job gave them for improving the life of their community.

It’s all very different now. And in the long run it’s the wage earners and villagers who, through direct and indirect taxation, will foot the bill.