Transcript
LAWRENCE STEPHENS: It was originally set here at 100 kina then it was raised to 1000 kina some years later, that involved a court decision which decided that was an unfair, unreasonable increase and things went on hold for awhile but without knowing the exact details of how it changed it did eventually settle at 1000. Now we hear the suggestion of 10,000 and if one goes back to look at what the judges said in the first case, it would have to be classed as an unreasonable way of keeping the poor out of politics, reserving political office for those who can find large amounts of money and that's been our concern. When people start talking about candidature for public service as something that has to be purchased by the candidate it makes public service sound as though it's more of a commercial transaction, more an opportunity for people to make money than to actually serve their people. In our view it's unreasonable to increase the fees so dramatically and it really is so unreasonable to expect individual candidates to pay such a hefty fee and it's like a throwback to a time before they reformed the British public service for example, when people had to actually buy their way into the public service and then naturally enough use that position to enrich themselves rather than provide efficient public service, those are the things that worry us.
DON WISEMAN: Do you think as a result of that, that it's undermining democracy?
LS: It could well be a way of undermining the principles of a democracy, the very principles that Papua New Guinea is based on are those of equality and that means equal rights for all citizens subject to some restrictions of course, age being one of them, right to be able to present themselves to represent their people in the national parliament and when you start imposing excessive obstacles in the way of the ordinary person you are damaging democracy.
DW: Well you say that Transparency is against it, what are you doing about it?
LS: Well all you can do is keep informing people, keep encouraging people to understand what being a public servant means, what being a politician means and what it doesn't mean and it's not as if a nurse has to pay for the right to provide medicine, it should be the other way around, we should be paying the nurse to provide medicine and similarly a person volunteering to join the police force should not have to pay a fee to be considered, we should be taking on the responsibility for vetting the applicants and so the same with the public service, being offered by a candidate for election, it's our responsibility as a nation to vet the candidates, not for the candidates to actually have to pay us to allow them to try to represent us.
DW: Yet the government says that the cost of running the elections has got prohibitively high and this was an attempt to recover at least some of that.
LS: We'd have to disagree with that too. To say that they're prohibitively high and therefore you have to impose a fee on the candidates to pay for the cost of the election is not very sensible. You could start by talking about the areas where you have not been collecting money correctly, where you have not been getting the tax money in, where you have not been checking on the exports and logs, but instead to turn around and start to impose a fee on the candidates, it just seems to be and feels totally wrong. One argument that is used in favour of it is the fact that over 4,000 candidates are likely to stand and this becomes an administrative issue but again the courts suggested that if you want to control that, if you feel there is a need to cut down on the number of the candidates be sure you have serious candidates, then perhaps you find other more reasonable ways of doing it. One being for example having the nomination papers signed by at least 100 qualified voters that would at least show that a person had support but to charge them a very unreasonable sum is not good and hopefully would be found to be unconstitutional.
