Govt urged to establish authority

The National National

A PAPUA New Guinea researcher has urged the Government to establish a customary land authority (CLA) to improve the administration of customary land in the country.
Logea Nao, a research fellow with the sustainable land development research programme at the Papua New Guinea National Research Institute, said this in a research paper released yesterday.
In the paper titled “The establishment of an entity to administer customary land in Papua New Guinea should be considered”, Nao highlighted a series of recommendations.
One of the recommendations was for a new entity (CLA) to be formed to be responsible for the administration of customary land.
“Its role will be to provide oversight and quality control as well as to manage policy issues relating to customary land at the national level,” Nao said.
“Several interventions could be made as either contributing to the setup of the new authority or complementing the same.”
Nao said some of these included the following:

  • RE-ORGANISING customary land divisions within the Department of Lands and Physical Planning (DLPP).
    This would see the two customary land divisions within DLPP that directly deal with the administration of customary land – incorporated land groups division and customary land leases division – be part of the new authority; and,
  • SETTING up the office of customary land development in transition to the establishment of the CLA.

The customary land development needs to have all the functions or branches and divisions similar to DLPP, including but not limited to surveying, valuation and physical planning.
Preparatory legal and policy work for DLPP’s customary land division to establish a new authority would require preparatory groundwork around the policy on customary land and related complementary policies.
Nao said clear policy directions on customary land issues would then inform drafting instructions for a new bill on CLA and also drafting instructions for amendments to existing principal legislations such as the Land Act of 1996 and consequential amendments to other land-related legislations.