Where is Mendi? How PNG’s electoral map broke: part 1

21 January 2025

Most people in Papua New Guinea know where Mendi is. The city, nested amongst the mountains of the Southern Highlands, has a permanent population of around 30,000 which ebbs and flows as people visit the regional centre to carry out business. It would be surprising if someone drew a map of the Highlands and forgot to include the Southern Highlands or its capital. Many people, particularly if they are interested in elections, or paid attention at geography classes, will answer that Mendi is situated in the electorate of Mendi-Munihu Open.  This is certainly what I would have answered.

Surprisingly, this answer is not correct. Mendi is not in the electorate of Mendi-Munihu. It used to be there, but not anymore. The town has not moved, but the boundaries of Mendi-Munihu have. This took place in 2022, when a new set of electorate maps were approved by Parliament. There is no shame in not knowing this, as the change to Mendi was not publicised. Indeed, the inhabitants of Mendi — who would go on to cast votes for Mendi-Munihu Open candidates in 2022, after the town had been removed from that electorate — might be even more surprised. So what is the real answer?

Figure 1: Imbonggu Open electorate Map

Mendi urban area indicated by red circle

Source: PNG Electoral Boundaries Commission

Figure 2: Mendi-Munihu electorate map

Mendi urban area indicated by red circle

Source: PNG Electoral Boundaries Commission

The answer to the question is unsettling: Mendi is not in any electorate. In Figures 1 and 2 we see the maps the electorates north and south of Mendi. To the south is Imbonggu (Figure 1). The red circle shows the Mendi urban area, outside of that electorate. To the north is Mendi-Munihu (Figure 2). The red circle again shows Mendi, outside the electorate. The maps differ in an important way. The Mendi-Munihu map has a southern border with “Mendi Central Open Electorate”, an electorate and district that does not exist yet, but is supposed to come into being in 2027. Imbonggu, on the other hand, has a northern border with Mendi-Munihu as it was before its redefinition.

These are not just any maps. These are the actual maps approved by the National Parliament when they accepted the recommendations of the Electoral Boundaries Commission (EBC) for creating new electorates in 2022. There is clearly a serious error here, a gap, and the entire town of Mendi, along with its environs, fell into it.

Mendi is not alone in finding itself in a gap in the new electoral map, and conversely, there are many more places which are currently assigned to more than one electorate. In two recent papers for the Department of Pacific Affairs In Brief series, Professor Nicole Haley and I outlined the basic problem, and the difference between PNG’s map of electorates and districts as they are established by law, and the map of these districts as they are organised in practice.

Papua New Guinea’s electorate map remained mostly unchanged between 1977 and 2022. In 2011, two new Provincial electorates were created for the new Jiwaka and Hela provinces, but the underlying Open electorates were not altered. Papua New Guinea’s constitution makes alterations to electorate boundaries very difficult, necessitating a report by the Electorate Boundaries Commission and approval by Parliament. This makes the electoral map resistant to political interference or gerrymandering, but it also makes it resistant to any change. Over a period of 45 years, serious issues of malapportionment accumulated, with the difference between the most and least populous electorates far outside the range prescribed by legislation. It was generally agreed that something had to be done about it.

In 2022, Papua New Guinea’s parliament approved the formation of 13 new electorates. Seven of these were implemented for the 2022 election and another six were approved for the 2027 election. These new electorates will not solve the issue of malapportionment. Indeed, some of the new electorates created are “born noncompliant”, with populations above or below the quota. The redistribution was also approved only a few months before the 2022 election, leaving little time to implement the changes. Nevertheless, the change to electoral boundaries was generally welcomed and seen as a step in the right direction.

It has, however, proven very challenging to find out what the redistricting really did to the electoral map. Unusually, the published report of the EBC did not include any maps or descriptions of boundary perimeters. Instead, the report defines the new electorates in terms of Local Level Governments and Wards. This is quite problematic, as LLGs boundaries are more vulnerable to political pressure, while Wards are points with no geographical extent. Drawing a map of an electorate using Wards would be like trying to draw a map of a country using only its cities.

This left researchers speculating on the proper placement of the new electorate boundaries. In most cases, the creation of the new electorates involved splitting existing electorates: the external boundary between the new electorates and others should not have been altered. Most people believed that the redrawing of the electoral map was limited to these changes. Nothing in the Electoral Boundaries Report would lead a reader to suspect otherwise.

At the end of 2024, we were able to track down the set of maps that were submitted to Parliament in the Parliamentary Library. As it turns out, the new electorate map includes far more changes than is commonly understood. Indeed, there were changes to a majority of electorates, with electorate boundaries altered in nearly every province. Only the changes within the electorates that were split were discussed in the EBC report or debated in Parliament.

In several of the changed areas, the new boundaries have plausible impacts on electoral politics, yet they were adopted without public discussion. Indeed, given the difficulty in accessing electorate maps it is quite likely that the majority of the alterations remain at present unknown to the populations affected. While the lack of transparency in this process is concerning, the full set of issues stemming from this new electoral map is in fact considerably more serious: the new map set is inconsistent and contains numerous drafting errors.

Part 2 of this blog series will detail issues associated with the new electoral map.

View the ANU Department of Pacific Affairs In Brief papers published by Nicole Haley and Thiago Cintra Oppermann on the problems arising from the 2022 electorate map, and the difference between PNG’s map of electorates and districts as they are established by law, and the map of these districts as they are organised in practice.

Author/s

Thiago Cintra Oppermann

Dr Thiago Cintra Oppermann is a research fellow at the Department of Pacific Affairs, Australian National University. He is an anthropologist working on the history and social organisation of Bougainville, and electoral politics in Papua New Guinea.

Comments

  1. 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.

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  2. 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.

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    • 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.

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    • 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.

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      • 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.

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