Amend Act to ensure our land is protected

IT is perhaps for sure that land is a useful and valuable resource for any form of economic, social and biological life to evolve on.
Many people in mostly communal societies around the world value the land as a means of survival or a form of their life blood.
In PNG, over 80 per cent of the total landmass is customarily owned while the remaining balance is State owned.
The balance of State land has been extensively developed and used for various economic and social development purposes.
However, in the pretext of developing state land, a sizeable proportion of the country’s population has been disadvantaged inside the state land development mechanism.
In Port Moresby, which is the country’s capital, the rapid development expansion of state land has outstripped the means of economic and social life of thousands of city residents and even customary landowners in the city fringes.
Many more are still fighting for land titles so they can be brought into the government’s lands policy and act so that they can participate meaningfully in terms of triggering a high class economic and social status in the rapidly growing metropolitan society in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2012 – 2030 and the Vision 2050.
In light of the information asymmetry, some officers in City Hall and the Lands Department have benefitted from bribery, fraud and other similar corrupt and illegal practices at the disadvantage of genuine land title buyers, let alone the General Orders from the Department of Personal Management.
Therefore, I am of the view that some drastic measures needed to be taken to address the rot and downsides in the Land’s Act to instil efficiency.

Mike H