PNG’s democracy problem starts with its party law

As my father would tell me growing up – “Political parties in PNG are like empty bottles with different labels” – a reflection on the absence of doctrine or a foundational belief to guide their policies and direction. PNG is within a year of its next national elections and a reform to political parties now requires them to ensure 10% of their endorsed candidates are female (Opens in new window). But increasing quotas for representation without ensuring citizen participation in political parties is merely a change to the label. The bottles are still empty.

The design flaw in the conduct of political parties is found in its establishing legislation – the Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates (Opens in new window) (OLIPAC). The legal definition of a “member” for a political party is confined to party officials and parliamentary figures. The extension to ordinary citizens is limited to demonstrating financial contributions for the party to be registered.

The gravity of this omission becomes clear in comparative context. In democratic countries, including Australia and the United States, political parties aim to represent the view of most citizens. Who gets to represent a party as a candidate on the ballot paper is determined through convention and internal party rules – an internal selection process where the party members vote for that representative.

This concept is not foreign in PNG society – even smaller, traditional communities followed the consensus-based approach of “markim maus man” (selecting the spokesperson) to represent their views amongst other groups.

But the inverse happens in the formation of political parties in modern-day PNG. Local politics neither has the practice nor law to support citizen participation. A party can, in effect, be built around a single individual who decides to run for election and satisfies some very basic administrative requirements – identifying executive officers, lodging relevant documents, and articulating policies that broadly encourage national development. Every country will have the exception – the Pauline Hanson or Clive Palmer experience in Australia for instance. But in PNG the exception is the rule. The law also requires proof of 500 financial members on the electoral roll to qualify for registration, but further involvement or participation of those citizens vanishes from the legal framework the moment that threshold is met.

This is not merely a weak standard for establishing parties. It is this same design flaw that locks ordinary citizens out entirely: a law that does not require parties to be built on citizen membership gives those parties no obligation to acknowledge citizens at all.

The flow-on effects of this omission are profound. The political party becomes a vehicle for coalition formation on the floor of parliament (Opens in new window), not a conduit for the concerns of the people it claims to represent. The loyalty of intending candidates, and elected MPs, runs towards political peers instead of citizens. Citizens find it impossible to hold their elected leaders to account between elections. And parties that form government carry no policy foundation into office, leaving citizens with no coherent platform to measure them against – and no mechanism to hold them to it.

The fix starts with reimagining the role of a political party. Reform should convert that hollow threshold into genuine participation rights to vote for candidate selection, shape party platforms, and hold elected leaders to account between elections. A verifiable spread of membership base across multiple electorates should also be encouraged. That single addition would do two things at once: prevent parties from forming as vehicles for one candidate in one place, and create the structural incentive for parties to organise around shared policy rather than shared ethnic lines.

The nuances may be found in specific policies based on shared experience across the country. Last year I proposed a professional workforce association (Opens in new window) – that collective group of formal economy employees could form the membership base of a political party. Potential policy platforms could include pursuing collective tax reform to lessen the burden, or ensure through their elected representatives their tax contribution (as the PNG government’s largest revenue earner) is put to good use.

The beneficiaries of clearer policy platforms won’t only be domestic. PNG’s surge in diplomatic engagement in recent years carried an air of unpredictability, with foreign partners unsure of the policy priorities of incumbent governments. Even PNG’s Department of Foreign Affairs website (Opens in new window) concurs that domestic political parties “lack clear policy differences or bases in ideology”.

Policy-based parties would encourage predictability and better alignment of aid priorities and domestic needs. For Australia, PNG’s largest development partner, the stakes are direct, as millions of dollars put to PNG’s governance sector (Opens in new window) would achieve better outcomes if the system were designed to be accountable to citizens. There is no point in putting money into governance if the system itself is broken.

The conditions for a course-correction in PNG society are ideal. The parliament’s willingness to push the female candidate quota shows political reform is not off the table. The argument for going further and extending citizens’ membership rights sits within the electoral integrity agenda of the Marape government’s Reset@50 (Opens in new window) – a plan that calls for restoring integrity to the electoral process, of which citizen participation in political parties is the missing piece.

Citizens too have carried a renewed sense of vigour following last year’s 50th anniversary of PNG’s independence. This desire must come with a conviction to engage in the democratic process. What’s left is to start filling those bottles.