New Essay Competition on PNG's National Goals and Directive Principles

via Our Pacific Ways

What do Papua New Guinea’s National Goals and Directive Principles mean to you?

The five goals and directive principles are inscribed in the preamble of PNG’s Constitution. In 1974, a Constitutional Planning Committee travelled right throughout PNG in an unprecedented attempt to articulate the people’s hopes and needs for the new country.

They asked, ‘what kind of society do we want?’

These goals and directive principles are the result.

However,   37 years since Independence, the universal rights belonging to every Papua New Guinean man, woman and child expressed in the goals are yet to be realised.

As former Constitutional Planning Committee member John Momis said recently, PNG is at an important crossroads in its history [http://ourpacificways.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/john-momis-we-must-go-back-to-the-national-goals-and-directive-principles/]. While it has great opportunities, it also faces extremely grave challenges – customary land is being lost as commercial development increases in PNG, and this threatens our potential to secure the rights expressed in these goals.

So we are asking you to describe what these goals mean to you.

Are the five goals still relevant in PNG today?

And if they are, can they be resurrected and used as the basis for a new discussion about ‘which way for PNG’?

To watch short films featuring John Momis  discussing writing the Constitution, click here and here.

To watch a video about the National Goals and Directive Principles, click here.