The argument that preferential voting delivers an absolute majority to the winning candidate applies more to a full preferential system than to an optional preferential one This is because a system that makes

marking o f preferences compulsory will almost always result in an absolute majority o f formal votes for one candidate, whereas an optional preferential system will usually have a high number of'exhausted' votes, resulting in the winning candidate often achieving less than an absolute majority (an 'exhausted' vote comprises a ballot where the preferences for an excluded candidate cannot be passed on to any continuing candidate, hence 'exhausting' before the full distribution o f preferences).

The re-introduction o f A V?

Pressure for electoral reform in PNG has tended to come from a small handful of senior politicians and political observers. In September 1989, Minister of State Ted Diro said that the government was “seriously considering” substantial electoral reforms including a “limited preferential voting system” {Post-Courier, 19 September 1989). Following the 1992 election, the option for a change to AV was again raised, this time by the Minister for Provincial Affairs and Village Development, John Nilkare, who told parliament that “we need to instate an optional preference system of voting so that the most popular candidate in the constituency can win ... not ‘because I have the biggest tribe and therefore, I win”’ {Hansard, 12 March 1993). It was not until 1993, however, that the first serious steps towards electoral reform in PNG were undertaken, when Manus Province returned to AV for their provincial government elections, becoming the first province in the country to do so. Premier Stephen Pokawin was a strong supporter of the new system, claiming that it would provide the “legitimacy of leadership” that was lacking under FPTP, as “many national and provincial leaders could not claim to represent their people when they were voted in by a few who had given them a simple majority” (‘Manus to use preferential voting for new assembly’, Post-Courier, 8 August

1993).

Manus’s AV elections were held in August 1993 and provided an ideal opportunity to see if a return to AV would be feasible, and whether it would result in candidates with more widespread support being elected. The results were encouraging for proponents of AV: of the 17 winning candidates, only one (Premier Pokawin) was able to win the seat on first preferences. Six others gained absolute majorities after the distribution of preferences. Importantly for those who claim that AV would deliver results similar to a straight plurality contest, in five electorates the winning candidate was not leading on first preferences. As the PNG Electoral Commission noted, under FPTP “those five people who enjoyed a greater mandate by the people would never have got in” (1995, 6). Professor Yaw Saffii of the University of Papua New Guinea, who observed the elections as a guest of the province, concluded that

in my view there is no question that the more elaborate and complicated mechanics o f the optional preferential system presented no noticeable difficulties for either the voters or the electoral officials. It is also clear that the new voting system allowed all winners, except the Premier who won by an absolute majority on the fust count, to improve ... on the level o f support they could claim to enjoy amongst their voters. In that sense, the cause for democracy and enhanced leadership has been served (PNG Electoral Commission 1995, 6).

While this experiment (brukim bus in the words of Premier Pokawin) with AV was clearly a success, it took place in conditions unlikely to be replicated across the rest of PNG. Manus is a small island province with relatively good communications, high rates of literacy, an effective bureaucracy, a small centralised population and a relatively high degree of social cohesion. Few if any of these factors are typical of the rest of the country, particularly the mainland areas.

Nonetheless, the success of the Manus experiment has encouraged more serious consideration of re-introducing AV at the national level. At the 21st Waigani Seminar held in Port Moresby in August 1995, Warren Dutton, then a political advisor to Prime Minister Julius Chan, returned to the electoral systems debate, claiming that the decision to change from AV to FPTP was “the root cause of PNG’s current political problems”. Citing the case of the Member for Sinasina-Yonggamugl, Ben Okoro, who won his seat at the 1992 election with less than 7 percent of the vote, Dutton argued that this meant that 93 percent of the electorate concerned was effectively disenfranchised:

This is the prime cause o f our political problems today. What w e’ve done is disenfranchised the people and they are rebelling ... Electoral statistics show that seven percent is the least number o f votes a candidate can win by. Most members o f parliament are elected with less than 50 percent and remarkably few are elected with more than 50 percent. Basically, our system o f representation is supposed to be based on representation o f all people, but in effect, in most electorates, a member is really representing only his own clan or an alliance o f clans. In such a situation, the member is likely to distribute his EDF in the area o f the 7 percent o f the voters who elected him. The 93 percent o f the people who did not vote for him know that the member can do very little for them in his term o f office. This is why politicians are held in such low esteem ( ‘Dutton: voting system cause o f difficulties’, Post-Courier, 31 August 1995).

In February 1995, the PNG Cabinet agreed that the 1997 election would be held under an optional preferential AV system, with preferences limited to three only (PNG Electoral Commission 1995, 1). The then Minister of State, Arnold Marsipal, announced the decision to Parliament on 16 March the same year. The proposals were initiated directly from the Prime Minister’s Office without recourse to the Electoral Commission, but significantly this time they had the support of the Electoral Commissioner, Reuben Kaiulo, who argued that the change to AV would encourage campaigning members to reach out beyond their own clan areas in search of wider support rather than concentrating all their campaigning within their tribal ‘home’ area. Kaiulo advised Cabinet that whereas FPTP was adopted for its simplicity,

at a time when the electorate was considered to be unable to deal with a complex voting system ... the electorate is now more experienced and those who take the trouble to vote will be capable o f using the preferential system if they so choose, providing that the system has been explained to the

voting public and the number o f preferences is kept down to a manageable limit o f three. Preferential voting will ensure that the final result is more representative o f the electorate’s wishes by taking into account the second and third preferences o f voters (PNG Electoral Commission

1996, 3).

This would have significant benefits, he said, for the smooth running of the electoral process, the level of electoral violence, and the quality of representation provided by elected MPs.26

In July 1996, Dutton claimed that almost three-quarters of the National Parliament supported electoral reform, and that a change to AV would be “the most crucial thing in improving government in Papua New Guinea”. Dutton made a number of additional claims for the beneficial impact of AV, arguing that it would improve the conduct of the count, particularly in areas of high contestation such as the highlands, because the elimination of low-placed candidates would also enable the ejection of those candidates’ scrutineers and hopeful supporters from the counting station and surrounds (thus easing the chaos of a counting station in which every candidate is entitled to have two scrutineers present) while progressively enhancing the legitimacy of the remaining candidates (who can be seen to have built on the vote base of the eliminated candidates) as results are sequentially announced. Furthermore, Dutton argued that the need under AV to cover the whole electorate and reach out to other clan groups to gain preferences will require the assistance of party organisations — and thus that AV would help to strengthen PNG’s weak party system.27

Even with this level of support, by late 1996 it was clear that the reforms had again failed to attract sufficient parliamentary support. Despite amending legislation having been drafted, Prime Minister Chan was unable to convince his backbench that a change of electoral system would not harm their own interests. The proposed reforms were killed off in party meetings without ever reaching a vote in parliament. As in previous years, the large number of MPs elected with minimal support levels who would have been adversely affected by any reforms combined to effectively end the reform proposal. The lack of party discipline in PNG means that substantive electoral reform has thus become almost impossible to achieve: those who have the most to lose are the very parliamentarians who are being asked to approve the reforms. The failure of this

2^ Interview, Reuben Kailulo, PNG Electoral Commissoner, 23 July 1996. 27 Interview, Warren Dutton, Prime Minister's Advisor, 23 July 1996.

concerted attempt at a return to AV means that such a reform must now be considered unlikely in PNG for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, pressure for change is likely to continue: a Commonwealth Observer Mission report on the 1997 elections recommended that “given the numbers of candidates contesting elections in Papua New Guinea, serious consideration should be given to alternative systems of voting” (Commonwealth Secretariat 1997, 7). The new Prime Minister, Bill Skate, is apparently also a supporter of a change to AV, so further attempts at electoral reform are not out of the question.28

Conclusion

To what extent the increasing fragmentation of electoral competition and rising levels of electoral violence in PNG since independence can be attributed to the influence of the electoral system is difficult to estimate with any confidence. Because the change of electoral system was coterminous with decolonisation and the departure of the Australian colonial administration, AV elections were clearly affected by different circumstances than those held under FPTP. For example, pre-independence elections were not themselves a direct route to government, which was still controlled by the Australian administration until 1973, and were thus not necessarily as fiercely contested as future elections. Similarly, the ‘guided’ nature of democracy in PNG in these early years, with the hand of the Australian administration often visible, probably moulded political competition into more moderate expressions than would otherwise have been the case, and the influence of the Australian administration in the management of the electoral process was also a significant factor.

Nonetheless, relevant areas of both PNG’s traditional society (such as the importance of clan affiliations for electoral support) and the modem apparatus of representative government (such as mass suffrage elections to an elected legislature) evidenced continuity as well as change over this period. The evidence from this chapter suggests that AV encouraged co-operative campaigning behaviour in many electoral contests in the pre-independence days. Under AV, candidates from smaller clans or those without a ‘block’ vote were able to campaign outside their home base area for other voters’ second preferences, in the full knowledge that first preferences would always go to the

‘local’ clan candidate. In areas where there was no clear majority candidate, accommodative campaigning practices were encouraged by the need to gamer second preferences which may be relatively small in number but could provide the necessary margin of victory. AV also enabled the votes of several aligned candidates to accumulate so that diverse but related electoral interests could be marshalled successfully without the vote being ‘split’ several ways.

Whether these accommodative effects would be replicated if PNG were to re-adopt an AV system must, however, remain speculative. PNG politics is much more competitive now than in the pre-independence days, and the stakes are much higher. What we can say with some confidence is that the PNG politicians quoted above clearly believe that the type of accommodative campaign strategies adopted by some candidates under AV are not rewarded under a FPTP system, where voters often feel bound to give their vote to their clan candidate. In addition, the tiny proportion of voters who actually elect their local member under FPTP in some seats appears to have undermined the representativeness of the legislature, and to have contributed to instances of electoral violence. It is also the case, however, that substantive electoral reform in PNG has become increasingly unlikely with the failure of the most recent reform attempts in 1997. These characteristic features of PNG elections are therefore likely to continue, and probably increase, in the foreseeable future.