Overview on PNG’s election

Papua New Guinea’s 1.9 million eligible voters are half way through a three week polling exercise to choose the 109 members to sit in the PNG Parliament for the next five years.

Electing the members is a more accurate description than electing the Government because the way par liamentary democracy has evolved in PNG since inde pendence, it is not the people who elect the Government but the elected members who decide what the makeup of the government will be. PIM asked the ABC’s Port Moresby correspondent, Sean Domey, to write about how the election campaign has gone.

Mr Michael Somare was in his element. He loves campaigning much more so than administration. And as the time of polling drew near he was confident the signs were good.

After all, the day voting began June 13th was his Pangu Pati’s 20th birthday. Twenty years before to the day, on June 13, 1967, he and a handful of others formed the political party that was to cam paign for and win independ ence for Papua New Guinea.

The Somare charisma is legendary. The power of that charisma as a vote puller is one of the critical tests of this elec tion. Many of the other factors that contributed to his trium phant return to power in 1982 were nowhere near as compell ing this time round.

He has not had the same

team around him. Two of the principal architects of the successful “Pangu Knows the Way” campaign in ’B2, Barry Holloway and Tony Siaguru, left the fold, formed their own League for National Ad vancement and ran a slick “L.N.A. The Better Way” campaign. Holloway was one

of those Pangu founders from 1967 and his organisational abilities did much to establish Pangu in the Highlands.

Prime Minister Paias Wingti went into the elections confi dent that he had made the Highlands his.

When he broke with Somare and Pangu in 1985 and formed

his Peoples Democratic Move ment, Wingti took with him most of the Highlands Par liamentarians who had been elected on the Pangu ticket.

Eight months later Wingti’s PDM combined with the other five parties and independants to remove Somare in a vote of no-confidence.

Somare’s fall was his second in a vote of no-confidence Sir Julius Chan replaced him in a similar parliamentary coup in 1980.

Wingti has campaigned vigorously in the Highlands and has been counting strongly on his fork-bearded Highlands vis age peering out from the ballot paper to drag in a swag of Highlands votes.

In the first real test of the Highlander-as-Prime-Minister factor, Mr Wingti’s PDM candi date for the by-election in

Left to right: Julius Chan, Michael Somare and John Morris -Photo: John Carruthers.