A number of PNG political parties face de-registration

Transcript

The registrar of political parties in Papua New Guinea, Dr Alphonse Gelu, says a number of parties are facing de-registration.

He told Don Wiseman 35 of the 37 registered parties have failed to comply with the requirements of the Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates.

DR ALPHONSE GELU: The Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates is pretty clear.  Every year what we do is we look into the reports of all the political parties that are registered and if we see that there are certain areas that these parties have not complied with then what we do is that we put them on notice.  The notice is basically requiring the political parties to provide some kind of an explanation to the registry and it will be based on those explanations than we will either keep them to continue as political parties but if we don't think that the explanations do not meet up to the requirements that the registry is imposing, we will go ahead and de-register.

DON WISEMAN:  What have they done wrong?

AG:  The most important failure for most of these political parties is their failure to submit their annual financial return so what we are talking about here is the 2013 annual financial returns.  For most of the political parties, especially the bigger political parties such as the People's National Congress in which the Prime Minister Honourable Peter O'Neil is the leader of, they did submit their returns but the return came into the registry very late.  Basically what we are doing is to ask them and also to have a word with them to tell them that they should not do that again in the future returns that they will submit to the office.  There are some of the parties that since the 2012 election have not been active at all.  They haven't submitted their returns at all.  So those are the political parties that we are asking them to come and explain to us why they haven't submitted their returns but the Organic Law is very clear.  If you do not submit your returns for two consecutive years then we have not choice but to de-register the party.

DW:  How many parties then fall into that category and are they in the parliament at the moment?

AG:  No.  They're not in parliament but there is at least it's about 10 of them that are in the category that they have not been active since the 2012 election and this is something that has been happening in Papua New Guinea in previous elections where parties only rise up during the elections, after the elections then they die out.  This time we have an Organic Law that is in place that regulates the existence of the political parties so this time we do not allow them to go back to sleep and just come up again during another election.  This time we are saying, no you can't do that.  If you want to remain as a serious player in the politics of Papua New Guinea then you must remain active and you must comply with what the registry wants you to do."