Government proposes new national planning act

 By HENRY KARIO

THE Government is proposing a new planning act to enable equal service delivery inthe country.

This was revealed by the Department of National Planning and Monitoring at a Consultative Implementation and Monitoring Council (CIMC) Forum in Port Moresby yesterday.

According to National Planning and Monitoring Minister Charles Abel, the act would allow the Government to effectively implement its development policies as well as monitor them. To effectively carry that out, Abel said the Government needed to know the exact number of people in each council ward, LLG, district, province and region.

It would help the Government to know the exact number of people who received services and not base its service delivery on “estimated figures”.

Along with the proposed Planning Act, Abel said the Government had created a national service delivery framework in which service delivery points were planned. He said one of the things the Government wanted to capture in this strategy was to enable “uniformity in the number of people across all political units” so that equal funding was directed to equal population across each unit.

“At the moment, we have a disparity. We have got places like Anglimp-South Waghi with 190,000 people and places like Goilala with around 35,000 people and yet they are getting the same DSIP funding,” Abel told the forum.

“We are trying to create service delivery points starting from the village to the ward councils and up to the regional levels. All these political units should relatively be uniform; same in size and population and the burden that each carries should be the same.”

Abel said the Government would move boundaries of each political unit to a size so that all of them were equal because “these political units form the basis of our national service delivery framework”.

He said each ward would have “minimum services” including a community aid post, an elementary school and water supply at the main stations.

There would be bigger services like rural health centres, primary schools and high schools in the next bigger political units.

Secretary for National Planning and Monitoring Hakaua Harry said the proposed Planning Act would only legalise the implementation and monitoring of the Government’s development policies to enable effective service delivery at the ward level.