Oct 18 Christopher Jay

FACED with drastic deterioration in law and order in Papua New Guinea, authorities there have sought Australian assistance in developing an integrated law-enforcement approach, to supersede piecemeal agency-by-agency activities.

A National Law and Justice Policy and Plan of Action, released in August 2000, focused on improving the formal and informal justice systems, and better co-ordination between police, department of justice and attorney-general.

This would include an integrated approach to Australian aid in law enforcement, supplementing direct agency-to-agency activities. To this end, the Australian aid agency AusAID will assemble a four- or five-person aid team, for a three-year assignment next year.

It will work with high-level Papua New Guineans on improving co-ordination, training, monitoring and collation of crime data. It will be called the Justice Advisory Group, or JAG for short.

AusAID is advertising for a private group to assemble a senior-level team with experience in legal and judicial services, restorative justice, performance monitoring and management and related law-enforcement areas. They will be interacting with top-level professionals in PNG.

Some experience in overseas justice work (in the Pacific for example) would be helpful. The tender, which could be in the vicinity of $5 million, is in this week's list of Hot Tenders from Melbourne tender notification and management specialist, Tendersearch.

The approach is in line with AusAID's highly successful general policy of assembling specialised expertise for various aid projects, and then providing ongoing management supervision and advice. This helps ensure funds are effectively applied to produce useful results, in contrast to just handing over large cash sums with no subsequent monitoring.

Typical of the law-enforcement problems to be addressed in Papua New Guinea is a two-year delay between arrests for a crime and finalisation of the matter. This creates a high proportion of remand, as distinct from convicted prisoners in jails.


Some $5 million has been pencilled in for JAG. Australia provides $25 million-30 million for law and order annually in PNG, part of total aid around $330 million a year.

stop wasting your money unless you are going to intervene directly.