Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

System reform to come from provinces not Moresby, says PNG’s Milne Bay Governor

Posted at 05:52 on 05 September, 2008 UTC

The Governor of Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea says moves to reform the provincial political system will come from provincial governments, not Port Moresby.

The national government has announced moves to reduce the legislative powers of provincial administrations, claiming they aren’t ensuring the proper delivery of basic services to rural people.

However Milne Bay Governor John Luke Crittin says the current system works in most provinces.

He says where the system doesn’t work is due to provinces being starved of resources by central government’s poor delivery system.

“Since the formation of the government last year, we’ve been pressurising the bottle neck at Waigani to be broken so that means the provinces get far more resources than they do at the moment. So this is what these ideas of reforming the provincial government came about. It’s a sort of self-defence of the entrenched bureaucracies in Port Moresby.”

John Luke Crittin says provincial government’s don’t particularly need legislative power, but must retain executive power.