POLITICAL PARTIES
By GORETHY KENNETH

Only nine political parties out of the 33 from 2016 have submitted their returns, and out of those, three have been knocked back.

And political party boss Dr Alphonse Gelu told Post-Courier yesterday that the office has not released funding to the political parties because they only have K500,000; they need K500,000 more to pay out all the parties.

Mr Gelu told Post-Courier yesterday that they receive K1.1 million every year and he is now under pressure to either pay smaller parties and bigger ones miss out because of the financial constraints or wait for the government to release the remaining funds so they pay out everybody.

“You see, we have 33 political parties from 2016 and with the submission of returns for 2016, only nine parties with members have submitted -People’s Democratic Movement, People’s National Congress, PNG Party, Melanesian Alliance, United Party, Pangu, PNG National Party, THE Party and Christian Democratic Party,” Mr Gelu said.

“Out of the nine, PNG Party, Melanesian Alliance and THE Party have been advised to redo their returns and resubmit.”

“The due date for the submission of the returns was on March 31st. Only a few political parties submitted their returns including the People’s National Congress, which submitted a detailed report. The Registrar is happy that the ruling party is showing leadership to the smaller parties by way of compliance. Funding to the parties will be made before polling for the 2017 election,” he said. Currently, a total of 19 political parties from the 44 are entitled to funding from the Registry. The distribution of funds is based on the number of seats a party has on the floor of parliament, in which K10, 000.00 is paid per seat.

The following are the names of political parties, the seats they have and the amount that would be allocated to each party;

  • People’s National Congress Party                                  51                               K510,000.00
  • National Alliance Party                                                   13                               K130,000.00
  • United Resource Party                        7                                K70,000.00
  • Triumph Heritage Empowerment Party      7                         K70,000.00
  • People’s Progress Party                             6                         K60,000.00
  • People’s Party                                            4                         K40,000.00
  • Papua & Niugini Union Party                      2                         K20,000.00
  • Papua New Guinea Party                           2                         K20,000.00
  • People’s Democratic Movement Party       2                         K20,000.00
  • United Party                                               1                         K10,000.00
  • Papua New Guinea National Party            1                         K10,000.00
  • Christian Democratic Party                        1                         K10,000.00
  • Melanesian Alliance Party                          1                        K10,000.00
  • Melanesian Liberal Party                            1                        K10,000.00
  • New Generation Party                                 1                       K10,000.00
  • Social Democratic Party                              1                       K10,000.00
  • Coalition for Reform Party                           1                       K10,000.00
  • People’s for Movement for Change Party    1                      K10,000.00
  • People’s United Assembly Party                  1                      K10,000.00

TOTAL ALLOCATION                                                          K1,040,000.00

“The government through its budgetary allocation provides K1.1 million annually to the Registry to pay the parties with MPs.

This is a mandatory allocation that the government makes. Unfortunately, in its allocation for 2017, the Registry was given only K500, 000.00 to pay the political parties,” he said.

“With the allocation of only K500, 000.00 to fund the political parties in 2017, the Registry has two options: To pay People’s National Congress Party the entire allocation of K500, 000.00 and the 18 other parties to wait until 2018 allocation or to pay the 18 smaller parties from the K500, 000.00 allocation and People’s National Congress Party to wait until 2018 allocation.”

“The Registry is put in an awkward position to make a decision whether to go for option 1 or option 2.

Funding more political parties is a better approach to funding only 1 party as part of promoting parties in the country. If the Registry was given the K1.1 million to fund parties and given its request for K500, 000.00 for its observation, that would be even better. However, this did not happen as evident in the attitude of the government of the day.”