Policing Connect PNG out of contractors' goodwill

By Michael J. Passingan

The Member for Goroka has driven the new Connect PNG roads to Alotau and from Kerema to Lae. He saw two things. Communities along the corridors are seeing heavy daily traffic for the first time, and the roads are an obvious channel for contraband and illegal drugs. On 16 October he asked the Works Minister to write police stations or highway patrol posts into the road contracts, one between Alotau and Central Province and one between Morobe and Gulf.
The Works Minister, a former Police Minister, said the idea had been discussed in his previous portfolio. His answer is that contractors will pay for highway patrols out of their corporate social responsibility budgets. He has told his secretary to look at a component in contracts so that contractors' CSR includes building highway patrol posts, working with police. Contractors already use CSR money for roadside markets and schools along the corridors, he said.
This is the Government outsourcing a core function of the State to the goodwill line of a construction contract. Policing a national highway is not corporate social responsibility. It is a basic duty of government. A Works Minister who was recently Police Minister should know that better than anyone.
The model has obvious problems. Corporate social responsibility is discretionary and modest by design. It is negotiated contract by contract, so patrol posts will appear where a contractor is generous and nowhere else. And CSR is not free. Whatever contractors spend is priced into contracts the State pays for, on a programme that Peter O'Neill told the House later that day already carries more than K10 billion in outstanding commitments.
Who runs the posts once the contractor leaves? Buildings are the cheap part. Officers, vehicles, fuel, radios and housing are recurrent costs no contractor will carry. The Minister said only that it needs "a collaborative effort" with police. That is a description of the gap, not a plan to close it.
The question had been raised earlier in the same week. The Police Minister was asked to take note. He did not rise. The Government's answer to a policing question came from the Works Minister and was about contract clauses.
The Central Governor's grievance later that day showed where the gap lands. Her provincial government is building its own boom gates on the Hiritano Highway, she said, because the national Government did not fund security on the roads it built into her province. A province paying for checkpoints on a national highway is the Works Minister's model in practice: someone else pays.
The Goroka member's question was serious, asked by a member who had seen the risk himself. Roads open markets, and they also open routes for drugs, guns and stolen goods. A Government that spends billions connecting the country and leaves policing to contractors' charity has built the highway and forgotten the law.
The Government should tell Parliament which Connect PNG contracts contain a policing component, what it is worth and how many officers will staff the posts. Highway policing should be funded through the police budget, where Parliament can see and scrutinise it. Anything else is a road safety plan written on the back of a tender document