Transcript
KERENGA KUA: And if he doesn't then what he has effectively done is to give this category of people a preference of system that is not available in law to every person in the country irrespective of his race, colour, creed, or status or station in life and that has to be fundamentally wrong, fundamentally un-constitutional. In addition to that he has established what he calls a vetting committee inside the serious crimes directory here in Port Moresby so what he says is that the people in the category as mentioned, that is elected members of parliament plus senior department heads, cannot be put through the due process of the law unless an application is made by the ranking file policeman to this particular vetting committee and it is approved. Again why should these people be isolated from the rest? If there's going to be a vetting committee it's got to be done by reference to the category of crimes, not by category of person.
DON WISEMAN: Is this discrimination being applied across the board to all politicians or just members of the government?
KK: Across the board to all members of parliament and all departmental heads. In the Simbu province, the provincial police commander and a couple of his senior officers have been arrested and charged because they are accused of investigating another politician from that province without the consent and approval of the police commissioner and these two police officers have been arrested and charged for these and other offences and they are going through a very public criminal prosecution in the country at the moment.
DW: Another very well known example is what has happened to the members of the fraud squad.
KK: They have been dismantled for exercising their police functions. You see the police commissioner is given a lot of power to oversee the administration of the police force but in the ordinary course of police week, if there is some meritorious prima facie case that is already established and it's in progress the police commissioner should not be using his powers of oversight for administration of the police force to stop that, because that's happening and that latest development at the moment is this, for a long time the chief ombudsman commission has not been appointed by the Prime Minister Peter O'Neill, who is the chairman of the appointments' committee. It is now more than a year since the vacancy occurred, what is the reason? He can't say there is a shortage of qualified Papua New Guineans, so the obvious reason has to be to also dismantle that organisation from continuing its normal process of investigating leaders for misconduct in public office and he has got a lot of complaints against him in the office of the ombudsman commission and he has a conflict of interest. So instead of disqualifying himself as chairman of the chief ombudsman appointment committee he's sitting there effectively frustrating an appointment all the way up to now and it's been more than a year since the vacancy arose in one of the most respected and highest constitutional offices in this country, he suppressed the appointment of a new ombudsman commission and now I hear he's beginning to interfere with the process of the ombudsman commission, there's supposed to be two commissioners and a chief commissioner, there's no chief commissioner so the two commissioners there are not fully able to exercise their constitutional functions because they interfere from the outside.
DW: The position of police commissioner has been very politicised for a number of years now, hasn't it? So to overcome this the first thing is to depoliticise that, isn't it?
KK: The question is how? We can make any number of laws, but these people in the chair of the Prime Minster's office do not respect that process they are powerful enough to disrupt any system anywhere in the world.
DW: But couldn't the appointment of the police commissioner be taken away from something that the government has direct control over?
KK: The question is who do you ask to appoint because it's supposed to be done by the government. At the moment it's done by the governor general, the head of state, at the recommendation of the National Executive Council, the NEC, I can't think of any better place than to leave it there because that's the highest authority by the structures of the law. The only thing that we need to see improvement on for example, the ombudsman commission office, so that if somebody is mucking around with the appointment, or the performance of the duties and functions of the police commissioner, then the ombudsman commission picks up that point and makes it an issue of his conduct.
DW: Just on the wider question of this beneficial discrimination that goes to politicians, how can you stop it, how can you stop it right now?
KK: In a normal situation, there was a Supreme Court Judgement given by the Supreme Court in 2014, it was a reference for the court's advisory opinion about the scope of the police commissioner's power and in that judgement the Supreme Court said we can't help the fact that the police commissioner has very wide power. There's nothing we can do about that, however the only way that this method that is available is to refer to the ombudsman function for misconduct in public office, if ever he abuses the exercise of his power in office. Against the background that as I have said,the ombudsman commission has been compromised, so I can lodge my formal complaint, but whether it will see the light of day, I have grave reservations.
