Event exposes defects in parlt

PNG’s members of parliament have developed the habit of bungling the conduct of their activities in Parliament and then promptly run to the Supreme Court to seek legal clarifications, even remedial measures, patrick kaiku writes

The events that transpired on the floor of Papua New Guinea’s Parliament on Friday, Nov 13, yet again exposed deep-seated defects in our politics.
These defects have little to do with the Constitution and the system of government.
The instability that was created in PNG’s Parliament is behavioural, not institutional.
Individual members of parliament (MPs), in calculating their prospects of holding on to power, stretched interpretations of the law, or twisted application of the law.
Every parliamentary drama that has emerged in the last decade or so seem to bring about a sense of déjà vu, raising questions about the Westminster system.
So what is the likely outcome of this latest episode?
The issues that emerged from the Nov 13 session were Constitutional in nature and the competent authority to interpret laws would be the Supreme Court.
PNG’s MPs have developed the habit of bungling the conduct of their activities in Parliament and then promptly run to the Supreme Court to seek legal clarifications, even remedial measures.
The Supreme Court seem to be finding itself doing the house-cleaning chore of Parliament.
This is a common trend.

If this continues, it would diminish the apolitical functions of our judiciary, as the Courts become entangled in resolving Parliament-related antics.
When MPs jostle for power, it is a sad indication of where PNG is with its use of westminster system.
The most convenient scapegoat in a Constitutional crisis had been the institutional design of the system of government.
A cornerstone feature of the westminster system of government was “parliamentary sovereignty”.
The parliamentary system and the doctrine of “parliamentary sovereignty” originated out of what was known as the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89, where sovereign power was removed from the monarch and bestowed upon parliament.
In the British tradition, parliament’s sovereignty was the outcome of hard-won victories.
The British were overly protective of their parliament’s sovereignty.
They know how it attained that independence and sovereignty in the first place.
We saw this in the rhetoric surrounding the Brexit vote of 2016, where UK voters voted to take back control of their parliament’s sovereign law-making powers from Brussels (European Union).
What does this tradition in the British system of parliamentary politics demonstrated?
The legislature was overprotective of its powers and would at all cost minimised the intrusions by the other arms of the government – the Executive and the Judiciary.
But as we in PNG know the chaos that happened on the floor of Parliament usually spilled over, the Supreme Court becomes unnecessarily embroiled in interpreting basically every letter of the law.
The Supreme Court is always expected to correct legislators’ incompetence in resolving Parliamentary intrigue.
One would think that law-makers would seek to minimise the role of the Courts in Parliament’s affairs.
This is not the case with PNG’s Parliamentary system.
How long would the Courts remain apolitical and independent given the barrage of cases relating to Parliamentary power plays?
If law-makers in PNG were not in the business of even understanding their roles as law-makers and worked within the rule of law in the conduct of their work, what were they doing for the best part of their time in Parliament?
It is not unusual we hear of MPs describing themselves as the “deliverers of goods and services” to their voters.
MPs in PNG were mistakenly of the opinion that their primary role included “delivering goods and services” to their voters.
This service delivery role substitute their primary roles of understanding how legislation works and how their profession is at the heart of socially engineering society, for better or worse.
It is no wonder, procedures such as the Standing Orders of Parliament, even laws that should be so explicit in the conduct of Parliament business were too bothersome to even understand.
We ended up with Parliament increasingly contracting out its powers of law-making to the Courts.
The watershed case, Re-Organic Law on Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates (2010) PGSC 3; SC1057 (7 July 2010) is an example.
Almost every aspect in the conduct of PNG’s Parliament seem to be written down in statute or in the Standing Orders.
There is this obsession with spelling out virtually everything that must be observed in Parliamentary proceedings.
Yet this written aspects of Parliamentary procedure does not even prevent the reckless debacles coming out of Parliament.
Jack Straw, a British statesman once observed that “the constitution of the United Kingdom exist in hearts and minds and habits as much as it does in law”.
If convention and practice are routinely part of the British experience with its parliamentary system, in PNG everything is written down.
But even where it is spelt out, PNG law-makers are not in the business of scrutinising and mastering it for purposes of regulating their conduct.
In conclusion, voters ought to understand the parliamentary system we inherited through our colonial connections to Great Britain.
Elections are not simply about voting people to Parliament to deliver goods and services.
Elected representatives are law-makers and law-making is a fulltime profession, where social engineering of society through laws is supposedly under their custodianship.
These representatives should know the law and rules of society better than the average Papua New Guinean.
As voters we are culpable in the instability that is instigated by our representatives.
Their failure to even understand how they conduct themselves in Parliament reflect badly on the voters who mandated them in the first place.

Patrick Kaiku teaches in the Political Science Department at the University of Papua New Guinea.