Jo Chandler and AAP
SYDNEY (Sydney Morning Herald / AAP /Pacific Media Watch): Papua New Guinea's government yesterday voted to defer mid-year national elections for six months.
In doing so, it has backflipped on pledges to proceed with the five-yearly poll, and defied expert opinion that condemned the unprecedented move as unconstitutional.
Deputy Prime Minister Belden Namah warned against foreign intervention as a result of the decision.
He said that whatever Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr had said about sanctions: ''I want to say, do not threaten the independent state of PNG.'' He was referring to Mr Carr's threatened sanctions against PNG last month if it delayed the poll.
It was a statement Senator Carr later repudiated, admitting "my choice of language was wrong".
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Peter O'Neill was reported to have assured Australia's visiting opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman, Julie Bishop, that the election would go ahead in June.
But yesterday his government voted 63 to 11 to defer the poll on the grounds that the electoral rolls and security arrangements, particularly in the volatile Highlands, were not ready. Parliament has instructed the electoral commissioner, Andrew Trawen, to ask the Governor-General, Sir Michael Ogio, to delay the election.
Legal advice
Trawen, who has insisted publicly that the Parliament could not legally push back the poll, was yesterday seeking legal advice.
Former attorney-general Sir Arnold Amet said the decision was illegal and would be challenged in court.
In April 2002, when the Morauta government tried to defer the election because the rolls were in poor shape, the courts ruled the move illegal, according to the Australian National University PNG specialist, Dr Bill Standish. He cautioned that there were always problems with the rolls, but the issues would not be resolved within six months, and tensions in the Highlands would only heighten if there was a delay.
The leader of the two-member opposition, Dame Carol Kidu - who indicated during debate yesterday that a two-month deferral may have been acceptable - condemned shifting the poll to December.
She said she was ''stunned and angry'' at events over the past week, reflecting the backlash of anger and dismay that the news provoked on social media.
''There is a limit to the tolerance of the people of PNG, and I think we are getting very close to that limit,'' she said. ''But how it will evolve is hard to predict.
''The whole country is being held to ransom by these decisions. The problem is with one particular region.''
Highlands instability
She was referring to instability in the Southern Highlands, home to the huge Exxon-led gas project.
The project has been the focus of escalating disruptions by local landowners, and last week the government ordered troops in to secure progress.
Protesting university students, who marched on the capital and boycotted classes over the controversial Judicial Conduct Act, were last night preparing to ramp up their campaign.
The head of PNG Transparency International, Lawrence Stephens, said the deferral was another example of a Parliament that had ''lost sight of the basic laws which guide the country''.
A political scientist, Henry Okole, senior fellow at the National Research Institute, said there were legitimate concerns about the state of readiness of the electoral roll.
But it did not appear that the constitution allowed for a deferral, ''putting us between a rock and a hard place'', he said. ''A lot of things done thus far impinge on the constitution.''
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
'NO DELAY' OVER PNG VOTE, SAYS O'NEILL ABC's PNG correspondent Liam Fox reports (April 10): Papua New Guinea's prime minister has assured thousands of angry protesters that the country's general election will not be deferred. Around 10,000 people, including students, union members and church members, gathered in a Port Moresby stadium on Tuesday to voice their anger at last week's vote by parliament to defer the elections by six months. They booed prime minister Peter O'Neill and his cabinet as they arrived to hear their grievances.
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