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For *electorates* there is little ambiguity - they are established by the EBC's report and maps as approved by parliament. This was reaffirmed by the courts already in the early 80s. Districts were until 1995 a separate matter, as Colin says. There is also the issue of the LLGs. These are established in 1995 in such a way that they can cross district boundaries, but not provincial boundaries. This is in a sense a continuation of the way local councils were organised into area authorities rather than districts, which is itself a continuation of a separation in the colonial period between districts as the unit of administration, the electorate as the unit of representation and the council as the unit of... well... the unit of 'political education', in the paternalist colonial perspective. It is fascinating how these structural choices have persisted. There is a kind of epic cycle of local government. The day seemed to have come in 1995, when LLGs are formalised, but that reform created, as many have pointed out, a 'fourth tier of government', the district. This eclipsed the the LLG, and with the advent of the SIP-centric political economy we've seeen over the last 10 years, this eclipse has become more profound. So in many places the LLG ends up being a kind of 'political pedagogy' again, with little actual power - despite the fact that LLGs have extensive powers (as Colin has written about). But like any good epic, there is a twist, so LLGs have a kind of revenge. They are somewhat easier to alter, and introduce yet another element of ambiguity in the political-administrative map, one which has now basically short-circuited the definition of districts. And that is what has happened: regardless of their origins, after 1995, and certainly after 2022, the EBC maps become absolutely essential. But they are simply ignored, the NSO continues to have their own map and that is a very important map since it has the population, as Bryant points out. Next week, I deal with some of these issues - there are relatively straightforward fixes for the immediate problem of eg. Mendi not having an electorate, but the lack of harmonization between maps is a deep problem. An important aspect of it is that the failure to harmonize the maps after 1995 shows the difficulty, maybe impossibility, of legislating extensive changes in administrative practice - adjusting the districts to match the electorates was perhaps idealistic. But the alternative, to adjust the electorates to map the districts, raises issues as it entails attending to administrative practicalities when redistricting.

I'm sure Colin's history is correct. My ADF mapper was trying to create Electorate maps from textual legal descriptions. But he called them 'Districts' so he was as confused as everyone else, including those who asked him to do the task.

With all due respect, I do not think that PNG had a single law defining the boundaries of districts and open electorates in 1980. That is because these were two different types of geographical entity before the new Organic Law on Provincial Governments and Local-Level Governments was passed in 1995. Before that, districts were administrative units through which public goods and services were delivered to their residents while open electorates were the entities through which voters were represented in the national parliament. This was part of the Australian colonial legacy. As in Australia, the Electoral Boundaries Commission was meant to make periodic adjustments to the boundaries of open electorates in order to ensure that each one contained a similar number of voters. There was no reason why different districts needed to have a similar number of residents, just as there is no reason why different local councils in Australia need to have a similar number of residents. From the point of view of public service delivery, what matters is the distance between the administrative headquarters and the places to which services need to be delivered. In PNG, all this changed with passage of the new Organic Law, and those changes occurred because MPs wanted to get more control over public service delivery in order to enhance their chances of being re-elected. So the old administrative districts were abolished. Since then, the adjustment of electoral boundaries, which are now also district boundaries, should have been based on the numbers obtained from the national census. But since there are no reliable numbers derived from a national census conducted since the year 2000, the production of new electorates (and districts) has been based on a sequence of political decisions to simply divide some existing electorates (and districts) in two, apparently without much consideration of the number of voters or residents that each one of them contains. This does not constitute an excuse for the boundaries to get muddled up, but it does serve to show that the new Organic Law created new opportunities for muddles to be made.

That's certainly an important dimension of the problem. The difficulty describing perimeters is one reason the maps are very important - they provide a 'ground truth' to the electorate and district definitions. It is important to note that the situation now is substantially worse than any ambiguity that might have existed with the 1977 maps. First, the new electorates do not have a perimeter defined in text, instead they are indicated in the EBC report as a collection of LLGs and wards. That's fundamentally ambiguous. The inconsistent maps are a major problem because the EBC maps is how you resolve ambiguities in the text. There is basically nowhere to run to here - the text can't clarify the maps, and the maps can't clarify the text. And that's before we consider that for most of the changes, there are no written indications of the changes at all.

A lot of constitution crisis in PNG due to electoral boundaries redistribution.

This problem has existed for at least 45 years. Around 1980 I met an Australian soldier who was working in the National Mapping Bureau. He was attempting to use the legislation (the law) that defined the Districts (and electorates) of PNG. He had found large numbers of what seemed to be typographical errors in the legislation, which was in many ways just long lists of of compass bearings and distances and latitudes and longitudes and the errors were in the numbers that comprise these, When he tried to plot polygons from these definitions of Districts and Electorates, he could not get the polygons to form closed geographical units. It seemed to me likely that all PNG elections since Independence had held in electorates that did not exist legally, but just where everybody, including the Electoral Boundary Commission, thought they were. How the electorates have been reviewed by the EBC and how the new electorates are defined legally remains a mystery.

There are a number of limitations to the above piece in what is not considered or examined. - There is an assumption that any decline in the number of PALM workers must mean all the decline is replaced by other workers. There is no consideration if productivity of the remaining workers has increased. Under the old PALM Scheme Deed if an employer brought out too many workers for the work available, most of the cost of the miscalculation would fall on the workers and their families, as workers might only get one or two days a week work and still have to pay all costs associated with accommodation and vehicle hire saving costs falling on the employer. In the new arrangements, where workers are required to have a minimum income, there is an incentive for employers to bring out less workers and ensure they have enough work to meet the minimum requirement, otherwise the costs will all on the employer. Testing the contribution of this change would require examining the change in income of workers in agriculture over time to see if worker productivity on the PALM Scheme has increased. - The piece, like official government statistics, ignores the presence of people who are working on visas without work rights in agriculture. Experience in the field points to many thousands of such people working in agriculture, but no government agency even attempts to estimate the actual size of this illegal workforce. As long as a farmer can count on not getting caught by Australian Border Force or the FWO, such a workforce is highly attractive. Such workers can be ruthlessly exploited, providing farms drawing on such a workforce with a highly competitive edge. We have experience of farms using a mix of people working legally and illegally at different rates of pay, so that the legal workforce provides cover against the people working illegally being detected. The increased requirements and oversight of the PALM Scheme makes employing people working in breach of their visas more attractive and may contribute to the substitution of PALM Scheme workers. - Being out on farms with WHMs finds that their productivity varies enormously, based on their previous experience working in agriculture. In horticulture, when piece rates applied with no minimum hourly rate, then WHMs were attractive as low rates for picking could be applied and the WHM would only get paid for what they picked. PALM Scheme workers, who have a background in agriculture, tended to be more significantly more productive than many WHMs. The change in the Horticulture Award requires the payment of a minimum hourly rate of pay. Thus, a WHM that picks two buckets of fruit in an eight hour shift now comes at a very high cost to the farmer who is complying with the law. If indeed PALM Scheme workers are being replaced solely by WHMs (the assumed hypothesis of the piece) then it raises questions of if farmers have become much better at being able to attract highly productive WHMs? How have they done that? The alternative is that farmers have become more willing to illegally exploit WHMs to make their employment work and count on the FWO not catching up with them. To explore fully what is going on here would require a comparison between the productivity of PALM Scheme workers and WHMs. Such a comparison will be difficult as any farmers that are illegally exploiting WHMs will not be honest about their criminal activity to allow for true comparison.

Dear Sir, I am an Afghan woman. I want to leave this country for the sake of my future and my children. Because the Taliban took away the right to education, work and full life from women and girls. I want to get a humanitarian scholarship and study visa. I don't know what to do. Can you do it? Please help and guide me. Thank you

Hi Natasha Do you still remember mama Helen from Madang? congradulations on your achievement. very good write ups and set up for the Pacfic seasonal work. please more information. you I have church youth Groups that are eager to work in Australia. For a youth group how do we help them. thankyou.

I am a student who was excepted to study in Okmin University in Indonesia. However I couldn't manage to process my passport ,because I only received the NID Card. And my birth certificate is said to be in Port Moresby While I'm in my home town (Vanimo). Could you please help me to send me my birth certificate to Vanimo immediately?

As a matter of fact, Paragraphs 11 and 12 are fully about decolonisation , and comprise the star argument of the article. From “stop creating… “ to “… must end”.

To be frank, I do not know! But it is a good question to ask the Ministry of Finance, to share with the public. Ex-PM Sovaleni sought NZ legal advice in 2023-24 because he was sued as Prime Minster and head of Cabinet (and I think as Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs) by the Secretary for Foreign Affairs (who is also the Secretary to the Privy Council). This is what happens when there is an overlap between the executive powers that His Majesty retained and those that devolved to the Prime Minister and Cabinet in the constitutional reforms of 2010, And when there is a dispute, one resorts to the Supreme Court for direction. So far the Supreme Court has declined to take sides and would prefer that the parties resolve their differences through dialogue. Dialogue is not happening! But Dialogue is the only way out! Malo.