First past post system took choice out of elections

BY WARREN DUTTON

IN THE 1964 HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY elections, I was a returning officer in the North Fly Electorate when the first-time ever voters were introduced to, and capably used, the optional preferential system of voting.

In 1968, I was elected as a member of the House of Assembly for North Fly, defeated in 1972 and re-elected in 1977 by the same voting system.

I will state categorically that the large majority of members elected to those three Houses of Assembly and the first National Parliament by that system of voting were, because of it, people who were elected, not to represent only their own clans, but to represent their whole electorates.

Most of them tried diligently to do so, and were by natural consequence nascent Papua New Guinean nationalists and responsible members, ministerial members, and then national ministers.

When the first past the post system of voting was introduced it inevitably took away from all voters the ability to exercise their judgement when choosing whom to vote for. 

Very few villagers can be fairly expected to give their vote, or their first preference, to anybody but to their own clansman.

Unfortunately, the corollary is that they will tend to vote for the biggest thief in their clan, in the vain hope that he will steal more from the government for them than he keeps for himself.

The events of the past ten years have clearly demonstrated this fact, and it is the ordinary people's belated recognition of it, that has caused the Police, the Defence Force, the unions and even the raskols, to say ‘enough is enough, a pox upon all politicians and their parasites, we will not support any of them’!

It is not the Westminster system that is PNG's problem.  It is the effective disenfranchisement of our voters by the introduction of the first past the post system.

Ironically the Australian Administration probably introduced the (optional) preferential system without too much thought, because that is what they were used to, and did so in the blind confidence that Papua New Guineans would quickly adapt to it, as they had to everything else new they were introduced to.

It was our elite, educated Papua New Guineans, and their elite, academic advisors, who also helped in the drafting of our overblown Constitution, who looked down on our bush villagers, and believed that they didn't have the intelligence to continue using the preferential system - which they had clearly mastered for the previous four elections - and so imposed on them something that they thought their bushy relatives could handle.

Oh, they of little faith in their own parents!