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A tiny, cash-strapped agency funded by the firms it licenses can no longer keep up.
Capitalising on (in)security: Regulating Papua New Guinea’s security industry
Papua New Guinea’s licit private security industry is becoming markedly more capable and concentrated, yet without growing much larger. This report draws on a decade of company registration data (2015–2024) from the industry regulator, the Security Industries Authority (SIA), to quantify that change and examine its drivers.
The number of registered private security companies (PSCs) in PNG grew 37 per cent between 2015 and 2024, from 438 firms to 601. The licensed guard workforce, by contrast, grew only 10 per cent over the same decade — more slowly than the population. Its composition has also markedly changed: virtually all net growth in registrations occurred among Class A companies — those licensed to provide the full range of commercial security services including armed guards and cash-in-transit. The number of these companies has quadrupled since 2015, while unarmed commercial security has declined.
Changes in workforce levels across the sector are chiefly driven by its largest firms and their contract wins and losses. The six largest firms accounted for 32 per cent of total industry employment in 2024, up from 26 per cent in 2017. The three largest firms — G4S Secure, Black Swan, and Guard Dog Security — have, since 2017, run the only approved security guard training in PNG. They have huge structural advantages in the market. The SIA is severely constrained and relies on expertise from these three firms to set national standards. This is not evidence of regulatory capture. It is the predictable result of a funding model. A regulator with 14 staff, no appropriation from the national budget, and no revenue but licence fees has no means of writing or verifying a national standard except through the firms that already own the only approved training in the country. An independent appropriation is the remedy, and against current revenue of less than AU$760,000 a year, it would be an inexpensive one.
Papua New Guinea’s private security industry is impossible to miss. A short walk around Port Moresby or the regional centres of Lae, Mount Hagen, or Madang reveals a security-heavy urban landscape. Shops have barred windows. Heavy iron doors and gates secure entranceways. And everywhere, uniformed guards keep watch. Physical security is an unavoidable cost of doing business in Papua New Guinea (PNG). By some estimates, private security is the country’s third-largest employer.
Australia is deeply invested in PNG, its closest neighbour and single largest recipient of Australian aid. PNG received AU$637 million in official development assistance (ODA) in 2024–25, on top of AU$2.56 billion in non-ODA loans since 2019. Australia and PNG have an enduring bilateral security relationship, which was deepened by the Pukpuk Treaty, signed in October 2025 and in force since July 2026. Australia also invests heavily in PNG’s police, the Royal PNG Constabulary (RPNGC), providing advice, training, equipment, housing infrastructure, and opportunities in Australia for police officers via the PNG–Australia Policing Program. This investment in public policing capacity sits alongside a private security industry that is several times larger than the RPNGC yet remains far less regulated or documented.
Despite this international support, PNG is plagued by insecurity and fragility: causes and products of poor state infrastructure penetration and unequal economic development, among other persistent challenges. Outside the urban centres, swathes of PNG (which remain heavily populated) do not have basic physical infrastructure, such as roads suitable for freight, reliable energy, and telecoms connectivity. Many communities have extremely limited access to medical care, the justice system, and state policing. Traditional village structures and churches govern most facets of everyday life and play a pivotal role in maintaining law and order.
PNG is often described as “resource rich” and has focused its development on extractives: mining, logging, and fisheries. The rents derived from these tend to benefit individual communities but do not spill over into the rest of the economy. Unemployment is high, and the Asian Development Bank reported in 2012 that PNG had one of the highest rates of economic inequality in the Asia-Pacific. Violence, arising from the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the colonial state and the failure of post-independence institutions to resolve disputes, is now endemic. Tribal grievances, which travel with internal migrants, are politicised and can erupt into open conflict.
Beyond inter-tribal violence, most crime is economic, ranging from opportunistic looting, as in the Black Wednesday riots, to routine break-ins and armed holdups of businesses. It is also a key driver of demand for private security. A widely cited 2014 World Bank report found 67 per cent of PNG businesses saw crime as a major constraint on their operations, comparable to Venezuela (60 per cent), El Salvador (51 per cent), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (63 per cent). Most (84 per cent) paid for some form of security. Perpetrators are commonly young men, known locally as raskols, who are unemployed, undereducated, and disillusioned by the failed promises of capitalist integration, with few economic prospects. This demographic is also the main recruiting pool for police and the private security industry and, under the Pukpuk Treaty’s recruitment pathway, now the Australian Defence Force.
PNG is simultaneously one of the world’s most under-policed countries. Reliable quantitative data is scarce — including basic population and frontline police metrics — but estimates suggest the average police-to-population ratio by province, based on the latest official RPNGC reporting, is 1:3,741. This is 11 times lower than the UN’s 2006 median, and loosely analogous with Somalia’s 1:2,300 in 2012. In Hela and Milne Bay provinces, it is as low as 1:11,420 and 1:10,689 respectively. Globally, this is exceptionally low. The actual police-to-population ratio across PNG is very likely lower still. Data reported by the RPNGC is based on a conservative population estimate from 2021 and dated police force numbers.
This is the environment in which the private security industry has flourished. It combines home-grown companies with some large multinationals and is concentrated in urban centres — the focus of this analysis — and around resource extraction projects. It is less present in rural villages, where most Papua New Guineans still live. Companies predominantly provide physical security, including guards, a uniformed presence, access control, and asset monitoring, to protect business operations. PNG-registered companies are also legally required to support policing. The regulator attributes the industry’s growth to foreign investment in extractives, and to “the insufficient manpower in the law enforcement agencies to meets [sic] the basic security needs of the 7 million PNG citizens”.
The private security industry has the capacity to absorb vast numbers of working-age men (and, less often, women) from PNG’s potential workforce. This brings benefits: incomes where formal employment is scarce, and a modest share of extractives-sector revenue. But wages are low — the legal minimum is K5 an hour, and many guards earn less — and high unemployment keeps them down. For businesses, private security is an (often high) operating cost rather than a productive investment. A 2014 World Bank study found that 79 per cent of PNG businesses paid for security staff (around 9 per cent of their employees), and that for 30 per cent this cost more than 10 per cent of their annual budget. These rates were higher than in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Timor-Leste. Money spent on guards is money not spent on productive activity, business growth, or broader development. With the industry estimated at up to K1 billion in 2016, the investment capital lost to security costs nationwide is substantial.
PNG is one of two Pacific states with dedicated private security industry legislation. The Security (Protection) Industry Act 2004 established the Security Industries Authority (SIA), which licenses private security companies (PSCs), issues permits to private security officers (PSOs), and sets minimum training standards. This report uses PSC licences as a proxy for functioning companies, and PSO permits as a proxy for PSO employment. The SIA is governed by a council, chaired by the Police Commissioner, which may include representatives from the security, mining, and insurance industries, along with those from trade unions and the National Council of Churches. Neither mining nor trade unions are currently represented, and the security industry’s only representatives are two Australians who have both worked for the same large multinational firm.
The SIA categorises firms by size according to its fee schedule. Small firms employ between 6 and 50 guards, medium firms between 51 and 200, and large firms 201 or more. Its revenue, which is entirely drawn from the industry, is small. The SIA’s primary goal has therefore been to target unlicensed security operators to safeguard this revenue. In 2017 alone, lost revenue from the estimated total of unlicensed PSOs was at least K170,000. SIA officers have a structural incentive to expand the pool of registered companies, particularly in and around Port Moresby and Lae where staff are concentrated.
A significant portion of PNG’s private security industry likely operates without registration. In 2017, the SIA estimated 219 companies employing 7,649 guards were operating illicitly, against a registered sector of 482 companies employing 27,099 guards. Other estimates run higher: Pacific affairs scholar Sinclair Dinnen recorded one industry insider suggesting up to 80 per cent of the industry was unregulated. This estimate is widely reported but not further substantiated.
This analysis necessarily excludes the unregulated sector for want of data. Even so, the trends identified here remain useful to planners and those with an interest in PNG’s private security industry, and particularly its heavyweight firms. Two important caveats should be noted. First, registered but inactive companies cannot be distinguished from active ones in this dataset. This is unlikely to present a major distortion, given that thin margins and limited capital are reportedly significant constraints for many firms and limit the likely number of firms that register without operating. Second, this quantitative analysis does not draw on original fieldwork, only original analysis; its conclusions concern the composition of the licit industry specifically and are applicable in urban areas where firms are concentrated. Qualitative reporting on private security in villages and on extractive sites is outside the scope of this analysis and hence not discussed. This paper should not be read as a total account of security provision in PNG. With these caveats in mind, the trends examined below may serve as a framework against which future qualitative or quantitative research on PNG’s unregulated private security sector can be assessed. Other specific limitations are discussed where relevant in the following sections.
This paper extends and deepens existing quantitative work using a new dataset drawn from the SIA’s publicly accessible archives for 2015–24. It disaggregates companies and guards by licence class, firm size, and the revenue each segment generates for the regulator. The method is set out in full in the annex. Its findings show PNG’s licit private security industry is growing and stratifying. It is increasingly durable at the small end, consolidating at the top, and thinning out in between. Virtually all growth has been in top-level security capability, and this has occurred alongside increasing violence and insecurity described by election reporting. Stratification within the industry is structurally reinforced by a highly constrained regulator reliant on the industry’s largest firms.
PNG’s licit private security industry has expanded over the past decade, but unevenly, and not as the headline figures suggest. Company registrations rose 37 per cent; the guard workforce only 10 per cent. Each has a different driver. Guard numbers rise and fall mostly as the largest companies win and lose the sector’s biggest contracts. Registration growth, by contrast, has come almost entirely from small new entrants, which are increasingly renewing year-on-year. The result is an industry that is stratifying more than growing.
Changes in guard employment in PNG are driven by industry leaders, a pattern consistent with standard industrial concentration. Total PSO employment grew from 27,711 in 2015 to 30,611 in 2024, roughly 10 per cent (Figure 1), while PNG’s population grew by close to twice that. Per head, licensed private security provision has contracted. But if unregistered operators absorbed demand that the licensed industry did not, the decline may reflect changing registration rather than less security — a possibility this dataset cannot exclude. Growth was also episodic, with three inflection points: a net increase in PSOs of 2,813 in 2018, a decline of 1,899 in 2020, and a recovery of 1,893 in 2022 (Figure 1). Each was driven overwhelmingly by the largest firms (those employing more than 200 PSOs) and tied directly to major contracts.
The 2018 PSO surge is the clearest illustration of this dynamic. Lae-based firm Kuima Security Services registered 790 new PSOs that year, quintupling in size. Industry leader Guard Dog Security — operating under BBS Holdings — registered 474 new PSOs, while the large international firm Executive Security Solutions registered 300. In Port Moresby, Black Swan registered 211 additional PSOs. Together with Pomwan Paladin, which registered 527 new PSOs, these five firms accounted for 82 per cent of the industry-wide increase in PSO employment that year.
Government contracts drove these expansions. Security for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum was such a priority that the government passed special legislation granting the visiting Australian Defence Force, other foreign military forces, and PSCs extraordinary powers to search and use force against civilians throughout 2018. APEC security contracts went to large, highly capable firms such as Kuima and Black Swan.
Manus-registered Pomwan Paladin grew in 2018 after winning the Department of Home Affairs’ contract to secure the East Lorengau Refugee Transit Centre and other sites on Manus and in Port Moresby until 30 June 2019. It won the contract on its previous experience securing the Manus Regional Processing Centre, subcontracting for Australian prime contractor Wilson Security. The AU$423 million contract attracted considerable scrutiny in the Australian media and coincided with Wilson cutting 296 PSOs from its own security force as it divested from the most politically exposed parts of its work. It also demonstrates how Australian policy moves PNG’s private security market: a single Australian government contract restructured a PNG firm’s workforce in a single year.
The 2020 contraction in PSO employment follows the same pattern in reverse. Major providers G4S, Black Swan, Pomwan Paladin, and Paladin Security accounted for 1,467 (77 per cent) of that year’s layoffs. This coincided with a nationwide downturn in the non-extractives sector caused by Covid. The same year, the East Lorengau Refugee Transit Centre closed, and controversy over refugee processing security inflicted lasting reputational damage on both Paladin entities. Guard Dog Security was the notable exception: its diversified client base, including many well-resourced international organisations and businesses maintaining physical infrastructure, allowed it to absorb the economic shock more effectively than its competitors.
The 2022 recovery in PSO employment was more broadly distributed, in line with national trends. Guard Dog Security led, accounting for 45 per cent of the rebound. The rest reflected genuine industry-wide expansion, much of it among smaller firms in East Sepik, Eastern Highlands, Western, West New Britain, and Madang provinces. Median PSO numbers also reversed trend in every licence class — the only time this occurred in the study period — and can be linked to a simultaneous increase in company registrations. The data suggest more firms were able to expand their workforces in 2022, amid broad economic growth in PNG, than in any other year.
Company registrations show a different trend: growth driven by small companies entering, and increasingly staying in, the industry. The number of registered PSCs rose almost every year, from 438 in 2015 to 601 in 2024, a 37 per cent increase (Figure 2), though not uniformly. The sharpest single-year increase came in 2018, when registrations climbed 12 per cent, likely driven in large part by APEC security demand. The only contraction came in 2020, when registrations fell by five companies — a modest but symbolically significant dip that coincided with the Covid pandemic. That the industry shrank so little during one of the most disruptive global events in recent times speaks to how firmly private security has embedded itself in PNG’s economic fabric.
Perhaps most striking is where the growth in company numbers has been concentrated. Small firms — those employing between 6 and 50 PSOs — have dominated registrations every year since 2015 (Figure 3), and PSCs overall are getting smaller: the median number of PSOs per company fell from 15 in 2015 to 10 in 2024. In aggregate, the industry is increasingly composed of smaller operators.
The most significant industry shift since 2015 has been in durability. New firms are increasingly likely to renew their registration in the following year (Figure 4). The dataset does not record renewals, so they were identified by matching business names across consecutive years. This gives a conservative count that may understate the true number. On this measure, the share of companies renewing each year more than doubled, from 26 per cent in 2015 to 67 per cent in 2024. This broadly mirrors overall company registrations, excluding a dip between 2018 and 2019. That dip predates Covid and may instead reflect companies closing after APEC.
A logistic regression by firm size indicates that renewals are rising across all sizes; however, the evidence is not robust enough to show whether the trends differ by size (Figure 5). The renewal rate for small companies nearly tripled, from 20 per cent to 58 per cent in 2024, but they still renew at lower rates than medium or large companies. These figures are a conservative “floor”: name matching cannot capture companies that change their name, which may be more common among small firms.
Churn among the industry’s small operators has measurably decreased. Small operators are typically built on personal relationships and local networks rather than the range of services and broad client bases of major providers. They are reportedly often set up to meet a specific, local need, such as securing a particular business premises or event. This analysis shows that registered small operators are increasingly staying in business year after year, rather than closing once a contract ends or a need is met. They are becoming a mainstay of PNG’s private security industry and are far more durable than they were in 2015.
That durability, however, rarely translates into growth. About 10 per cent of companies changed size category, but many were simply oscillating around a cut-off (e.g., 52 PSOs one year, 49 the next). Genuine growth from small to large is exceptional. This limits the services small firms can offer (e.g., contracts requiring 50+ PSOs) and the degree of competition they pose to the handful of firms already leading the industry — a constraint reinforced by licence class.
Geography reinforces the pattern, with the industry concentrated in cities. Port Moresby and Lae account for roughly 55 per cent of registered PSCs and approximately 68 per cent of PSOs — shares that have remained broadly stable since 2015. This may reflect the pull of PNG’s two largest commercial centres, where international clients, regulators, and police are concentrated and the infrastructure larger operations need (vehicles, mechanics, energy) is most accessible. Major providers are far better placed to win international clients there than smaller firms relying on personal networks. This concentration is therefore self-reinforcing.
This two-tier structure is not unique to PNG. South Africa’s private security industry — Africa’s largest and one of the most studied — shows a strikingly similar pattern: a proliferating base of small firms surviving in local niches through personal and community networks, alongside large, often foreign-owned companies that dominate corporate and government contracts. The relationship between the two tiers is often adversarial. Large companies see small operators as undercutting them on price and eroding their client base, while small firms see major providers using political and regulatory influence to tilt the market. In South Africa, this stratification has become entrenched. PNG’s industry is smaller and its regulation less mature, but the same dynamic is recognisable, shaped by comparable conditions of declining state policing capacity, low human development, and high inequality.
Taken together, the employment and registration data describe an industry stratifying by scale. PSO employment rises and falls not with broad sector growth but with the fortunes of a handful of large companies and the contracts they win or lose each year. Registrations, meanwhile, show small firms dominating, multiplying, and increasingly putting down roots. These small operators are becoming a permanent, self-sustaining feature of PNG’s commercial security economy, yet they remain confined to its lowest tier, rarely growing into the higher ones. Where a small-firm majority survives indefinitely without contesting the large-firm minority, market power, once established, is unlikely to be challenged from below. Section 2 examines what keeps small firms confined.
PNG’s licit private security industry is concentrated and diverging by capability. Virtually all new companies, and some older ones, are choosing the highest-tier licence, while proprietary security holds steady and the middle tier hollows out. The shift may be marketing-driven, as companies promote technology and armed response to signal capability and seriousness to prospective clients. It may also reflect a business environment that is, or is perceived to be, increasingly unsafe.
Under the Security (Protection) Industry Act 2004, every PSC operating in PNG must hold a Class C, B, or A licence, each authorising a progressively broader range of services. Class C, the most restricted, is a proprietary licence: it allows a company to employ at least six guards exclusively to secure its own organisation, not to sell services to others. Class B permits holders to provide services to external clients for reward, including guard dogs, but not firearms or cash-in-transit services. Class A, the most comprehensive, authorises the full range of services to external clients, including armed escort and patrol, cash-in-transit, and advanced security systems. PSOs employed by Class A firms may legally carry and use firearms on duty, although not all Class A companies arm their guards.
Each firm must also pay a licence fee and an additional charge for each PSO employed. These fees are graduated for small (K1,100), medium (K2,750), and large (K5,500) firms. Class A fees are double the rate for Class B and C, so the median Class A company in 2024, with 20 PSOs, paid the SIA at least K2,640 — 66 times the daily minimum wage. That is a significant burden in an industry where margins are thin, competition is fierce, underpayment is rampant, and smaller operators routinely cut costs.
The licensing data show three clear trends. The first and most striking is the rise of Class A, the licence that permits armed and electronic security work: registrations have quadrupled since 2015. Over the same period, guards holding Class A permits rose from 15,329 to 21,975 (Figure 7), while the median Class A firm shrank from 50 guards to 20. This is not a sign of a weakening Class A sector; it reflects industry growth driven largely by small new entrants. Many are modest operations — a few guards and a vehicle — yet twice as many small firms now pay for a Class A licence, at double the cost of the alternatives. That cost is likely passed on to clients, which is telling in so competitive a market. But Class A is also the only licence that permits advanced security systems, so part of this shift may reflect the spread of alarms and electronic monitoring rather than firearms. The dataset cannot separate the two.
The second trend mirrors the first: Class B firms shrink in size and consolidate at the same rate as Class A grows. Class B remains the most common company licence, and despite a small increase in 2018–19, annual Class B registrations have remained close to static. That stability rests entirely on small companies: medium Class B firms fell from 24 in 2015 to 9 in 2024, and large Class B firms disappeared altogether in 2021 (Figure 6). Over the same period, renewals among the remaining firms rose from 17 per cent to 56 per cent, while Class B guard numbers almost halved, from 8,461 to 4,300. Class B is hollowing out: its firms are getting smaller, nearly all are now classed as small, and far fewer new companies are entering at this level. Its persistence as the most common licence reflects small-firm durability, not a licence that supports growth.
The final trend is Class C’s stability. Registrations have risen slightly across all Class C sizes (Figure 6), and PSO permits have grown at the same rate as the industry overall, 10 per cent since 2015 (Figure 7). Renewals have risen substantially among small and medium firms and held steady among the few large ones. Because these renewal counts are minimums, real turnover may be lower still. Year-on-year, largely the same firms employ the same number of PSOs for the same duties: proprietary guarding.
Put simply, growth has been concentrated in the industry’s highest-capability tier, proprietary guarding has barely changed, and the unarmed middle tier of commercial security has thinned.
Changes in size or licence class are uncommon and are probably undercounted by the matching method. The only consistent transition identified is from Class B to Class A: each year, 2–4 per cent of Class B companies upgrade on renewal. Because firms are most likely to rebrand when they move up to Class A, this should be read as a floor. Genuine changes in firm size are rarer still. There is no longer a visible path from small, unarmed firm to mid-sized commercial operator: firms stay in Class C, decline slowly in Class B, or step up to Class A. They start small and stay small, while employment growth remains concentrated among the industry leaders.
PNG’s private security industry is shifting towards small companies licensed to deliver the full range of security services, including armed services. The dataset cannot show how many deliver these services in practice, how well, or why firms choose this licence — whether in response to a worsening security environment, client expectations, insurance requirements, or simply as a signal of capability and seriousness. But it can be read alongside independent evidence of growing violence and insecurity over the same period to test whether the shift towards higher-capability licensing matches conditions on the ground.
Other sources bear on this question, but each has significant limitations. Crime statistics, whether from the RPNGC or data brokers, are too unreliable to serve as indicators; media reporting, in the absence of a quantitative study of how PNG’s media covers violence and insecurity, is useful only as context; and qualitative studies, while valuable in specific contexts, generally lack the temporal and geographic scope of election reporting.
Election reporting, by contrast, provides point-in-time assessments of violence and insecurity in the same locations at regular intervals. Observations are recorded under similar conditions and — in the case of Australian National University election reporting — often by the same observers. They can therefore be compared over time, providing a benchmark of violence and insecurity during polling. Given PNG’s many internal security challenges, this analysis assumes the benchmark reflects underlying violence and insecurity rather than one-off, politically motivated events.
These reports show that violence, firearms, and intimidation have become entrenched features before, during, and after elections. The ANU’s report on the 2022 National General Election found that polling was markedly more “controlled” than in previous elections, particularly in the Highlands. This control was exercised not by state institutions but by “candidates, their campaign managers and agents, supporters, strongmen, local leaders, private security, and warlords”. Gunfights between rival candidates, prosecuted by hired gunmen and armed supporters, broke out across the Highlands during polling. In Southern Highlands and Hela provinces, experienced observers logged the disembowelling of a man, gunfire at polling stations, bush knife fights, and armed seizures of ballot boxes as minor disturbances. In these regions, such events are now expected, and those present know conditions can deteriorate to violence of “extreme intensity”. Against this backdrop, the observation team noted a marked rise in civilian firearms.
“In 2022, civilians were observed to be armed with guns at polling stations in all regions except Southern (excluding NCD). Specifically, civilian guns were noted at 30% of polling stations in the Highlands, 17% of polling stations in Momase, 11% of polling stations in the NCD and 8% of polling stations in the New Guinea Islands. The increasing prevalence and visibility of guns gives genuine cause for concern.”
Observation data from the 2007, 2012, and 2017 elections show violence and firearms proliferation worsening steadily — a trend made more significant by the approaching 2027 elections. Some politicians have acknowledged their role in gun violence and its link to election wins, while others have called for greater scrutiny of politicians’ ties to the illicit firearms trade. Calling for consultations to address spiralling gun violence in the Highlands, Western Highlands Governor Wai Rapa said:
“I know we politicians too, we are owning firearms and even we buy firearms to use in elections. Everyone wants to be a leader. So because there’s so much threats, and you know, even the members of parliament, they feel their life is threatened too so they end up buying guns.”
Reporting outside election periods also points to worsening gun violence. In the Highlands, hiring gunmen to pursue private conflicts has become increasingly normal; those hired range from raskol gangs with simple weapons to individuals whose gunfighting reputations were honed in tribal warfare. The practice draws on long-standing Highland warrior traditions, but the spread of firearms marks a recent and deadlier departure. As the Highlander diaspora in Port Moresby and Lae has expanded, so have revenge attacks, the economic fallout of this violence, and media coverage of it. Violence once largely contained within provincial communities now regularly reaches the country’s commercial centres — where most private security firms operate.
These cities are more populous than ever. Their settlements — informal, often illegal residential areas — are swollen by economic migrants and by internal refugees fleeing tribal violence. Settlements sit at the intersection of insecurity, underdevelopment, and inequality. Media and elites portray them as a major source of urban crime, and therefore a driver of demand for private security. Yet settlers are also part of the security response: several firms, including industry leaders, advertise that their PSOs live in settlements, implying this gives them better awareness of criminal behaviour and security risks than their competitors. High unemployment among settlers also keeps labour costs low.
The licensing data and the election and settlement evidence point in the same direction: the commercial security sector is hardening as violence, firearms, and armed intimidation measurably increase during elections, and likely outside them too. The four-fold growth in Class A registrations has coincided with guns appearing at polling stations in most regions, gunmen being hired to settle disputes, and urban settlements being framed as both a source of insecurity and part of the response to it. Whatever the precise mix of client demand, marketing, and genuine risk driving this shift, the industry’s trajectory is unambiguous: more firms are licensed to arm their guards than at any point in the last decade. That trajectory has not been evenly shared. Growth and durability at the bottom of the market and expansion at the top have come at the cost of PNG’s unarmed commercial middle tier, which has been quietly disappearing since 2015.
Stratification in PNG’s private security industry complicates its regulation and may further entrench the largest firms. The SIA is responsible for licensing, training standards, and compliance oversight, yet has only a handful of staff and a small budget funded entirely by the industry it regulates. It therefore cannot set or verify a national training standard except through the three firms that own the country’s only approved training facilities — the same firms that compete for the contracts such a standard would govern. The constraint is structural, not deliberate, so the remedy must be structural too.
The SIA’s capacity is severely limited. The regulator operates from a “rundown former police building” with 14 staff including support personnel. Each region has a single inspector; in the National Capital District/Southern region, that one inspector was nominally responsible for 272 companies and nearly 15,000 PSOs in 2024. The SIA receives no government appropriation and relies entirely on licensing fees, which the dataset indicates totalled less than K2 million (<AU$760,000) in 2024. With these resources, effective national oversight is barely feasible.
Applying the SIA’s registration fee schedules to the dataset shows how narrow the regulator’s financial base is. Between 2015 and 2024, the SIA’s base revenue (excluding paid fines) grew 38 per cent, from K1.4 million to K1.9 million, closely tracking the number of registered companies and fluctuating with total PSO numbers. By firm size, small PSCs contribute more than either medium or large companies, and their share of revenue rose from 38 per cent in 2015 to 44 per cent in 2024 (Figure 8). The regulator thus draws its largest share of funding from the firms least able to meet a demanding standard, and all of its revenue comes from the firms it licenses. Its budget grows when registrations grow, giving it an institutional interest in enlarging the licensed pool rather than enforcing against it.
The six largest firms accounted for 32 per cent of industry employment in 2024 (Figure 9), up from 26 per cent in 2017. Over the same period, company registrations grew 20 per cent and PSO numbers 10 per cent. Lifting their share from a quarter to a third of an expanding workforce requires either outpacing the industry or absorbing competitors. Both are occurring. BBS Holdings (owner of Guard Dog Security) co-manages Hides Security Services on the PNG LNG project, extending its control over an even larger workforce. Because the data likely understate such arrangements, the largest firms’ share should be read as a minimum. Industry leaders are entrenching their position.
The SIA’s training requirements reinforce this position. The Security (Protection) Industry Act 2004 requires permit-holding PSOs to possess either a certificate from an approved training institution or a written reference confirming training. RPNGC and PNG Defence Force (PNGDF) veterans need not undergo security training, as military or police training is deemed comparable. For all others, only three companies (as of 2017) are approved to deliver security training: G4S Secure, Black Swan, and Guard Dog Security. They have also been the industry’s three largest employers every year since 2017, placing the sector’s most commercially significant credential under the exclusive control of its dominant firms. Other firms are not prevented from providing in-house training to their employees, and many do, but because these programs are not assessed against the Act’s standards, their certificates carry far less weight in the market. The gap matters most for risk-averse international and government clients, which may require approved training under contract or for insurance. That preference is not unreasonable: a six-guard firm would struggle to service a large contract. The difficulty is narrower: outside ex-RPNGC and PNGDF personnel, the credential that governs access to that market is owned by three firms competing for the same contracts, and no authority can verify it independently of them.
The three largest firms, which employed 22 per cent of PSOs in 2024, have built on their advantage. Guard Dog Security has invested heavily in its National Security Training College (NSTC), which has multiple campuses across PNG. The NSTC is the only provider of its kind in the country, and the company claims 1,500 trainees pass through annually. Black Swan models its training on Australia’s modular vocational framework, offering a Certificate II in Security and marketing other packages to external clients. These bespoke courses, which Guard Dog Security and G4S also offer but market less heavily, are pitched directly at international clients operating in PNG: Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), defensive driving, anti-carjacking, and self-defence. For other firms, accreditation remains effectively unattainable: new entrants cannot match the leaders’ investment, and each year of training widens the gap. A deteriorating security environment widens it further by raising demand for precisely what these firms sell. Yet the regulator relies on these same firms for technical advice when setting national standards. The problem is not the training itself, which is likely the best available in-country, but that the standards it answers to are shaped by those who sell it.
This quantitative analysis cannot determine whether the arrangement persists by design or by default. What is clear is that a regulator facing such extreme constraints depends on its largest incumbents for technical capacity, regardless of intent. The conditions for exclusionary outcomes are already in place, and the SIA has little capacity to counteract them. With 14 staff and no government funding, it cannot develop, assess, or verify a national training standard without the three firms that own the only approved training.
The ongoing review of SIA training policy illustrates the point. In June 2024, the SIA established the Security Training Advisory Committee (STAC), tasked with overseeing development of a national training syllabus. Training is a firm SIA priority, framed as the solution to overzealous PSOs and excessive force, which are often reported during settlement evictions (although the same criticisms are levelled at RPNGC officers). The STAC has three members drawn from the SIA council: a PNG judiciary representative and the council’s two industry representatives, both Australians with management experience in G4S Secure, one of the three approved providers. Input from the wider industry is confined to the subordinate Security Industry Skills Group (SISG), which identifies skills for the training package rather than shaping governance or standards. This is not necessarily regulatory capture; more likely, a constrained regulator is borrowing the only expertise available to it. The effect is the same either way. A demanding standard for firms licensed to arm their guards is warranted given PNG’s security environment. But the regulator cannot test whether it is the right standard or verify compliance independently of the firms that wrote it, and it has four inspectors to police some 600 companies. If the standard proves beyond the reach of most operators, the SIA will have no way of telling whether that reflects necessary rigour or incumbent design. Firms that cannot meet it may simply move into the unregulated market. Because these smaller firms provide the largest share of the SIA’s revenue, that could be fiscally disastrous.
The result is structural dependency. The SIA is funded entirely by the firms it licenses, and the largest share of that money comes from the smallest firms. The largest firms hold a growing share of employment and the SIA’s only source of technical training capacity. The remedy is not a lower standard but a funded regulator. A national budget appropriation, set against the K1.9 million the SIA now raises from the industry, would give PNG what it currently lacks: a regulator able to form its own view of the sector it licenses, and to write a standard that owes nothing to the firms it governs. Until then, the SIA will keep borrowing its technical judgement from the three companies with the largest commercial stake in the outcome, whatever anyone intends.
A decade of the regulator’s own records shows an industry that has changed shape more than it has grown. There are a third more companies than in 2015 and a tenth more guards, but the real shift is in what they are licensed to do. Firms permitted to arm their guards and run electronic systems have quadrupled, the unarmed middle has emptied, and the six largest companies now employ a third of the registered workforce.
This would matter less if the state could see it. The Security Industries Authority has 14 staff and a single inspector per region, and is funded entirely by the firms it licenses. It cannot write or verify a training standard except through the three companies that run the country’s only approved training — and that bid for the contracts such a standard would govern. None of this requires bad faith: a regulator funded this way arrives at the industry leaders’ answer because it has no other.
The SIA runs on less than AU$760,000 a year to oversee an industry several times the size of the police force. The remedy is unglamorous: an appropriation from the national budget, giving PNG a regulator able to form its own view. That is a decision for Port Moresby.
Canberra’s interest is narrower but real. Australian policy already moves this market: the Manus contracting arrangements reshaped one PNG firm’s workforce in a single year, and Australians hold the industry seats on both the SIA council and the committee now drafting PNG’s national training syllabus. Australia has become a participant in governing PNG’s private security industry without deciding to be one. It is also about to compete in the industry’s labour market: the recruitment pathway opened under the Pukpuk Treaty draws on the same young men the security industry absorbs, yet the two policies have not been considered together. Whether these overlaps warrant a more deliberate approach to the standards attached to Australian-funded contracts, or to the SIA’s capacity, remains an open question.
This project was carried out in four distinct phases:
All quantitative data used in this study was downloaded from the publicly accessible archive hosted on the SIA’s website. Datasets are listed annually and include all PSCs registered with the SIA that year. All datasets (except 2024, discussed separately) disaggregate data by province and region, with rows organised under the following headings: index number, company name, licence number, licence class, and number of PSO permits issued. Datasets from 2015 to 2019 also record compliance status; for these years, only companies listed as Compliant were included. Datasets for 2015 to 2023 are published in December and are explicitly authorised by Paul Kingston Isari, the SIA Registrar, as formal public advertisements.
The 2024 dataset is distinct, having been published online on 31 August 2024 as a print-out of the dataset rather than the usual formal public advertisement. It includes the additional headers “Registered Business Centre,” “Business Postal Address,” “Date of Expiry,” “Licence Holder,” and “Date of Issue.” This dataset may not include companies registered in 2024 on or after 1 September. The results in 2024 may therefore be undercounted compared to other years.
The following headings were used in this analysis:
The following information was obtained from the datasets and listed in newly created columns:
The following information was calculated and added to the dataset in new columns:
=LET(
val, 'Dataset'![Cell_A],
baseFee, IF(val<51, 1100, IF(val<=201, 2750, 5500)),
adjustedFee, IF('Dataset'![Cell_B] = A, baseFee*2, baseFee),
adjustedFee + val * 22
)
The following information was not used:
This analysis relies on two proxies: 1) the count of company licences issued by the SIA and recorded in the dataset as representative of the number of active registered companies, and 2) the count of PSO permits issued and recorded in the dataset for each company as representative of the number of PSOs employed by that company at that temporal interval (in this case, 1 year).
The first proxy incorporates companies which may have paid licensing fees but are dormant or non-operational within the total count of registered (assumedly operational) companies. The extent to which these companies may be present within the dataset is unknown and requires qualitative examination of a significant industry sample to estimate. No such work has been published. However, economic factors make a scenario where many firms are dormant unlikely. PNG’s private security industry is fiercely competitive. Wages are low, margins are thin, and the majority of operators are competing in the same size/class niche. If province information recorded at registration can be relied upon, a substantial number are also co-located in the same cities. In this context, the author assesses that the proportion of firms willing to pay the comparatively high costs of registration without conducting business is likely low. This proportion is very likely even lower for companies renewing their registrations. For this economic reason, the author assesses that the trends identified using the count of company licences issued by the SIA as a proxy for the number of active registered companies are still reliable indicators.
Equally, the second proxy may incorporate PSOs who are non-active in their roles within the count of permit-carrying (assumedly operational) PSOs. This is less likely than for the first proxy, again for economic reasons. PSOs are required to have salary and superannuation contributions paid by their employers. Permits are also specific to each PSO, meaning a company cannot purchase permits in bulk from the SIA and issue them to PSOs when they are hired. This is done to record information about training and work history, likely to aid in the SIA’s compliance-checking. Inactive PSOs are therefore an ongoing cost to companies. For this reason, and given the PNG context stated above, the author assesses that the trends identified using the count of PSO permits issued and recorded in the dataset for each company as representative of the number of PSOs employed by that company at that temporal interval are still reliable indicators.
The SIA provides clear and simple steps for de-registering a security company and revoking PSO permits on its website. The SIA also implores interested parties to ensure permit details are accurately recorded to avoid risking fines.
Recording errors were identified during initial data ingestion and structuring, during the EDA, and during compilation. Common errors identified were missing index numbers, mistyped or misprinted data (e.g., numeric columns containing letters), and province/region misspellings. These were manually corrected and verified whenever possible. Resolved errors in the original datasets numbered approximately 5–6 per annual dataset.
Licence numbers adhered to a common format, which in some cases was broken and likely indicative of a recording or printing error. Given their limited utility in this analysis and little prospect of manual verification, these were removed from the compiled dataset.
Possible spelling errors were identified in company names, including misspellings of city and province names and common terms associated with the private security industry. These were left unchanged in all instances, as such errors may be intentional branding choices by business owners; it would not be possible to verify intentionality versus recording, entry, or printing error for all possible misspellings. Possible business-name errors were identified in approximately 1 per cent of all rows. Where business names were unreadable, which predominantly affected the 2016 dataset owing to binder holes in the scanned paper records, “[ILLEGIBLE]” was added to the company name. This affected fewer than 10 rows and had a negligible impact on analyses.
Six of the 5,276 total rows were missing data on licence class or number of PSOs. These were removed from the compiled data; this likely had a negligible impact on analyses.
Summary information recorded in the 2015–2019 datasets giving registered-company and PSO-permit totals at the provincial, regional, and national levels was found to be erroneous on several occasions. Errors in summary information were generally associated with recording errors in the relevant section, and some summaries excluded entries without explanation, undercounting totals. Regional summaries may have been calculated from aggregated provincial summaries containing errors, with these errors observed to carry through, in some cases, to the national summary. For this reason, no summary data was used in this analysis; all calculations were made directly from the compiled dataset. This, alongside the aforementioned deletions of rows with missing critical data, explains the small discrepancy between totals given in the official summaries and those presented in this analysis. The disparity is not significant enough to cast doubt on the SIA’s data collection.
Company names were matched across two-year intervals as a proxy for companies choosing to renew their registration and therefore continuing their business operations. This proxy may include companies providing services for a single, recurring short-term contract (e.g., for an annual event). It will also exclude companies renewing their registration under a different business name (hereafter, ‘rebranding’), and cannot detect potential matches where a name has been erroneously entered. Despite these caveats, the trends identified by this matching process lend support to its utility as a quantitative method in this case.
Matches were identified by a script written by the author in Python, using the Pandas package, run in Visual Studio Code. Company names were trimmed of the strings “limited” and “Ltd,” all bracketed text (including “(PNG)” and “[ILLEGIBLE]”), and whitespace. This standardisation increased match fidelity without introducing false positives, as evidenced in manual testing. Year-list sets were then filtered by licence class, number of PSOs, or both, before being matched, with results printed to a table. The script identified total matches across both continuous and discontinuous selectors (e.g., a company moving from Small to Large, or Class B to Class A); however, filtered matches were included only if continuous (e.g., remaining Small and Class A across both years). A separate script identified these ‘missing’ discontinuous matches: companies whose names matched across both years but whose licence class or size changed.
The results demonstrate that, over a two-year period, companies changing licence class or size is highly unusual. A small but clear trend was visible in companies upgrading from Class B to Class A in a given year. The identification of this trend strengthens the case for this method’s use in detecting potential rebranding: rebranding-driven changes in licence class are assumed to affect transitions uniformly (A–B, A–C, B–A, B–C, C–A, and C–B are all treated as equally likely), and a company seeking to capitalise on a class change by rebranding would most plausibly do so when moving into the highest, most expensive tier, Class A. That a trend in B–A transitions is nonetheless evident is further evidence supporting the validity of this method and its results in this analysis.
False rebranding caused by data errors (e.g., misspellings) was likewise assumed to be equally likely to affect every recorded business name. Because large companies are comparatively few, their match percentages may be disproportionately affected by recording error; as industry leaders, these companies are also critical to the analysis. Special attention was therefore paid to manually verifying large-company business names, which was feasible given their comparative prominence in the sector and their advertising presence.
Name matching was carried out for nine distinct two-year intervals present in the compiled dataset: 2015–2016, 2016–2017, 2017–2018, 2018–2019, 2019–2020, 2020–2021, 2021–2022, 2022–2023, and 2023–2024. Further scope exists to analyse this dataset at other intervals (e.g., 3, 4, or 5 years), which could better articulate, and potentially forecast, company survivorship over different periods since 2015. Given the already broad suite of methods deployed in this analysis, however, temporal-interval analysis was deemed out of scope.
The results of this method should be considered indicative, providing a sound lowest-possible estimate of companies surviving each two-year interval. While scope plausibly exists for false negatives caused by company rebranding and data-recording error, extremely limited scope exists for false positives.
A small but real possibility exists that this method could record false positive results; for example, if a business closes and another, separate business takes on the previously registered name the following year. This may be more likely for generic business names, or where an existing name is sold or used under agreement. No examples of this were identified during the EDA, nor when reviewing previous work on PNG’s private security industry.
To test whether company registration-renewal rates changed over 2015–2024, and whether this trend differed by company size, renewal outcomes were modelled using logistic regression. For each year (2016–2024; 2015 was excluded, as no prior-year renewal base exists for it) and company-size category (Small, Medium, Large), the number of prior-year-registered companies eligible to renew and the number that renewed were treated as binomial counts:
renewals ~ Binomial(n, p),n = prior-year registrations
logit(p) = β0 + β1(year) + β2(size) + β3(year×size)
Small companies were specified as the reference category, such that coefficients for Medium and Large companies are expressed relative to Small companies. The year×size interaction term tests whether the temporal trend in renewal rates differs across company sizes.
Coefficients were estimated by maximum likelihood (iteratively reweighted least squares). Model fit was assessed via the ratio of the Pearson chi-squared statistic to residual degrees of freedom, with values substantially above 1 indicating overdispersion relative to the binomial variance assumption. The initial model returned a dispersion ratio of approximately 2.5. Inspection of residuals by year and company size traced this overdispersion to three large deviations: Small companies in 2017, and Small companies in 2020 and 2021 (with 2020–2021 renewal rates falling well below model predictions, possibly reflecting pandemic-related disruption that disproportionately affected small companies). Statistical significance of individual coefficients was assessed at α = 0.05.
Addendum: Logistic Regression Results
The following tables report the full output of the logistic regression model described in Section 7 of the Methodology annex (renewal rates by company size, 2016–2024). No correction for overdispersion or anomalous years has been applied; the model is reported as fitted.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Dependent variable | Minimum renewals; non-renewals |
| Observations (N) | 27 |
| Model family | Binomial GLM |
| Link function | Logit |
| Estimation method | IRLS (maximum likelihood) |
| Df (model) | 5 |
| Df (residuals) | 21 |
| Log-likelihood | −90.973 |
| Deviance | 52.521 |
| Pearson χ² | 52.7 |
| Dispersion ratio (Pearson χ² / df) | 2.501 |
| Iterations | 6 |
| Covariance type | Nonrobust |
| Term | Coef. | Std. Err. | z | P > |z| | 95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intercept | −1.5332 | 0.011 | −144.07 | < .001 | [−1.554, −1.512] |
| Company size: Large (ref. Small) | 1.6375 | 0.042 | 39.25 | < .001 | [1.556, 1.719] |
| Company size: Medium (ref. Small) | 0.6329 | 0.027 | 23.52 | < .001 | [0.580, 0.686] |
| Year (centred) | 0.1890 | 0.002 | 107.67 | < .001 | [0.186, 0.192] |
| Year × Large | −0.0263 | 0.008 | −3.35 | .001 | [−0.042, −0.011] |
| Year × Medium | 0.0305 | 0.005 | 6.31 | < .001 | [0.021, 0.040] |
Note. N = 27 aggregated observations (3 company-size categories × 9 years, 2016–2024), with 6 estimated parameters (intercept, two size effects, year, and two year×size interaction terms) leaving 21 residual degrees of freedom. Each size category’s estimated trend is therefore drawn from a single count per year, so any one atypical year (e.g., 2017 for small companies) carries disproportionate influence on that group’s slope. The model also shows meaningful overdispersion (dispersion ratio ≈ 2.5) that was not corrected for; since standard binomial errors assume no overdispersion, the reported standard errors likely understate the true uncertainty, and the nominal significance of the year×size interaction terms (Large: b = −0.026, p = .001; Medium: b = 0.031, p < .001) should be read with this in mind. These results should accordingly be treated as indicative of a pattern rather than a precisely estimated effect; a longer time series, and a model that formally accounts for the excess variance, would be needed to determine with confidence whether renewal trends genuinely differ by company size.
About the author
Bradley Dare
Bradley Dare is a former Australian Defence Force officer now working as an analyst within the Australian Government.
