Brenda, a quick search of the internet finds a number of mentions of Raga Kopi of Kemabolo village, Rigo.

Raga indeed was a Kiap who was among the first group of six Papua New Guinea men to be appointed to the position of Assistant Patrol Officer in 1963.

He had numerous postings including the Sepik, Milne Bay and New Britain, where he obtained the position of Acting District Commisioner.

An article in the Post- Courier says he passed away on 22/12/1974 while on leave from Kokopo.

He had been hunting with friends and became separated from them. He was found close to his village.

Mentions of "Sowai Finds His Country" a series of six stories published by The Dept. of Information and Extension Services can be found on the internet.

I also saw mention of an audio collection in which Raga Kopi speaks about his life. The Australian National University may have a copy.

At the risk of boring some I suggest we have finally got down to the pith of the issue. It was and still is possible to run a country on a shoestring.

All you need is:
1. Honest, transparent and energetic national leadership and government,
2. Support for the government by the vast majority of the people, (usually only a given after the first is achieved),
3. Responsible and accountable public servants, (a given if 1. above exists)
4. Protection of National interests and from external threats, (axiomatically this depends on 1, 2, and 3)
5. Internal law and order ethically maintained (depends on 1., 2. and 3. above)

So the building blocks for a successful and inexpensive government system ultimately depends on the first issue being resolved in the affirmative. The rest will flow as a consequence.

In regards to PNG’s history, most PNG people didn’t have any involvement in choosing their government system. Prior to Independence, there was in essence a bureaucratic dictatorship (i.e. unelected), that could and was held accountable by the elected Australian politicians and to a lessor extant by PNG people. While we can argue about how much these political leaders knew about the people they governed, people like Minister Hasluck clearly took a detailed interest in the PNG people and obviously had their best interests at heart, albeit in a contemporary way. PNG didn’t have to pay for Minister Hasluck or his successors or his staff or any Australian public servants as these were paid by the Australian taxpayer. While there will always be the threat of corruption in any system of power, by in large, the Australian government has usually been able to sort this out with the system of checks and balances and the traditional separation of powers.

The corollary of this aspect is that many of the Australian politicians and their staff were often very much out of touch with what was actually happening at the PNG kunai roots level. Sometimes this wasn’t such a bad thing. The problem was that there was often a disconnection between the Australian government and their representatives in PNG from the Administrator down through the ranks.

After pacification and law enforcement was mostly effected by the late 1960’s, most PNG people could see the benefits of a peaceful life without fear of reprisal and ongoing warfare. True, the excitement of battle was usually unavailable however there was always sport, football and the annual shows to promote tribal unity and enthusiasm and feasts with ceremonial pig killing to help assuage blood lust to a minor degree.

With 4. above being looked after by the Australian government on behalf of the PNG people, that left 3. and 5. to deal with.

3. and 5. Were managed using a system of responsibility and accountability in government that had been developed and refined over hundreds of years of practice in both Britain and Australia. The necessary legislation required was either home grown or copied from Australian examples (e.g. The Queensland Criminal Code).

However, all the issues appear to ultimately stem from the first issue, (i.e. 1. above). Without that aspect being resolved, there is no ethical way forward. The only alternatives are either corrupt government and/or dictatorship.

So how did the so called founding fathers imagine the future PNG would be able to cope? Well that notion was clearly a synthesis of an out of touch political leadership in Australia and some opportunists in PNG. The PNG Constitution was supposed to be the panacea for good government. In the event, this had proven to be ineffective as a set of laws is only effective when it is fairly but impartially applied. When you have an elected but largely unaccountable government managing the nation’s laws, those laws quickly become subject to continually being undermined and therefore almost totally compromised.

That was the essence of why the Kiap system worked and with a few obvious exceptions, worked well. The system was fair but firm. Kiaps could be disciplined and /or dismissed and were moved around continually so that a natural power base or connection with an area did not ever develop.

Believe it or not, (and many don’t or won’t), at its height and together with a long list of dedicated, hardworking and loyal supporters responsible to many other departments, around 250 field officers managed 95% of 3 million people.

Independence was rushed - and thats the problem. If we are under Australian rule now and if our grand sons were allowed self rule, PNG would be all that different.

I see PNG caught like a fly in a spider web - but it will struggle free one day. PNG needs only good leaders to steer it to prosperity. We still have the rich resources God blessed us with. The onus is on the people to get good leaders into parliament come 2017

In a sense, the actual number of kiaps serving in TPNG circa 1970 is beside the point.

The truth was and remains that, any way you look at it, a country with a population of over 3.0 million in 1970 was being run on the proverbial shoe string.

This was possible mostly because of the ability of field staff of all Departments to, for example, maintain law and order using a relative handful of kiaps and police; deliver minimal but effective public health services via a "bare foot doctor" type system; improve agricultural production thanks to the efforts of a small and scattered group of didimen; run a school system where teachers often literally built the classrooms and create a rudimentary rural road system mostly by persuading the local people to build the roads by hand.

This created an entirely false impression in Canberra of what could be done with the available resources and so allowed the proponents of early independence to believe that the country was better prepared for this momentous change than it really was.

Of course, we now know that independence was a fait accompli from the moment the Whitlam government came to power.

At no time was reality ever likely to have been allowed to disturb the timetable for this event, which Gough Whitlam, to his dying day, sincerely believed was his greatest personal accomplishment.

40 years after the event it is only a tiny handful of grumpy old kiaps who are bothered by this, mostly because we don't like how the interests of the many have apparently been shamefully neglected by a ruling elite who, all too often, are either corrupt or incompetent or both.

The only certainty is that we cannot change the past or do much to influence the future, for that task has passed irrevocably to Papua New Guineans themselves.

My numbers in the table include the district commissioner down to the lowly cadet patrol officer (trainee patrol officer in the case of locals) and doesn't include any office staff, police supervisors, chief warders etc. I was a local government council advisor for a while and still executed executive powers. The council was an add-on to my normal duties. I reckon from DC to PO most had executive powers.

We were still very thin on the ground and most of our peers had a low opinion of headquarters (especially treasury) and a marked animosity to Canberra.

I can remember Joe Nombri at Kiunga erecting a large sign at the airport when a visiting group of Canberra 'swans' (aka swanning around on holiday) arrived for an hour or two to see what we were up to. The sign read 'Warning: Open Season on Swans'. No one reprimanded him and it went over the visitor's heads.

Phil, the list you’ve attached might be somewhat misleading to those who weren’t there at the time. While the numbers of field staff may well have been as portrayed your list, the actual field staff in executive positions was considerably less than 500.

I calculated that in the District I was first posted to, (Morobe), there were probably only two or three field staff at each location that had any actual executive powers. By executive powers I mean police and magisterial responsibility. Most clerical staff and trainees were support staff and had no executive powers as such. Those who were performing functions as Local Government Officers and advisers also were not supposed to use any executive powers. In addition, field officers stationed in towns and cities where there were magistrates and uniformed police officers mostly performed clerical duties unless they were on patrol.

Therefore I suggest that due to leave and training duties there were probably around a total of 250 Field Staff that were actually performing executive duties at the height of the most number of field staff on TPNG outstations. At that time probably about 95% of the 3 million PNG population lived in non- metropolitan (i.e. bush), locations. Those field officers in bush locations were loyally supported by the police detachments posted to each outstation and upon whose shoulders the responsibility of maintaining ‘Pax Australiana’ jointly fell.

Is it any wonder therefore that those Departmental people in Canberra and those briefing visiting politicians from down south literally had no idea how the District Administration actually worked in practice. It was totally incomprehensible to them given their incomplete and often inadequate understanding and death in cultural awareness. Given very few outsiders had any real concept of how the Territory was run, it should have been no surprise when there was an expectation that the whole system could simply just be handed over willy-nilly to local officers to operate.

On the other hand, local officers who were suddenly catapulted into senior positions were caught in a terrible dilemma. If they believed they were not ready they could not say so because that would have incurred the shame of being held up as wanting by those locals who sought political power for themselves. Many would also have had very little time or the necessary training to grasp how the system actually worked.

Lastly, there was the mystique and the basis upon how the field officers (Kiaps) actually held power. At the time, many locals thought it was simply enough to look the part (long socks that you could stick a pen down the top of), and occupy the house of the Namba Wan Kiap on the hill.

So was it any wonder the administration of PNG after Independence has virtually seen the total collapse of services in the rural areas together with a frustrated police force that reportedly often resorts to violence when they are required to maintain law and order without the actual means and the operating system to do so?