All Essays

THE families of East New Britain and New Ireland are still burying their dead, and still searching for more.

As I write this, close to two dozen people are still missing after two boats capsized off the Duke of York Islands in a single week this July. A boat carrying nine people went down between Muliama and Anir Island. A boat from Bougainville's Nissan Island never reached Buka. How many more names does this country need before small craft safety is treated as the emergency it already is?

This is not new, and that is the most painful part. In early February 2012, the mv Rabaul Queen capsized off Finschhafen carrying roughly 500 people on a vessel rated for 310. More than 100 died in what remains Papua New Guinea's worst maritime disaster. A Commission of Inquiry made 34 recommendations. Fourteen years later, families are still waiting for justice, and we are still burying people for the same reasons: overloading, bad weather ignored, and nobody checking either.

This should make every one of us angry: the law to stop this already exists.

The Small Craft Act 2011 requires small craft that ferry passengers to be registered, and their operators licensed, through Provincial Small Craft Registration Boards working with the National Maritime Safety Authority. Fourteen of our fifteen maritime provinces have, on paper, set up these boards. East New Britain is one of them.

And still, the Duke of York tragedy happened in East New Britain's own waters. A registration book sitting in a provincial office does not save a single life. Without officers at the wharf or boat stop checking who is boarding, how much a boat is carrying, and whether the weather is fit to sail in, the law exists only on paper.

Then there is Madang, my own province. According to the Consultative Implementation and Monitoring Council, citing the National Maritime Safety Authority's own figures, it is the province with the highest rate of maritime accidents in the country. For more than fifteen years, we could not even bring ourselves to set up a board. It only launched in December 2025. Registration only began this March. By May, just 334 boats out of thousands had been registered. Fifteen years. That is not delay. That is negligence.

We license every car on our roads. A driver needs a licence. A vehicle needs registration, a roadworthy inspection, and compulsory third-party insurance through MVIL, so a grieving family is not left with nothing. Why does a banana boat carrying twenty passengers across open water face a lower bar than a 25-seater PMV bus?

I am asking, plainly: every operator who carries passengers for a fare must hold a real certificate of competency, not a nod from the wharf or boat stop. Every boat must be registered, numbered, and inspected every year for seaworthiness. Every boat must carry a life jacket for every passenger, and never more people or cargo than it is rated for, with real fines and real arrests for those who ignore it. And every one of them should be required to carry insurance for the passengers it takes to sea.

Other countries did not take fifteen years to act. After three boat disasters killed 31 people on the Philippines' Iloilo Strait, regulators did not wait years to respond — boats on that route were capped at 75 percent capacity, banned outside daylight hours and calm seas, and required to carry life jackets for every passenger before being allowed back on the water. Fiji requires every small craft skipper to hold a certificate of competency under its own Small Craft Code. None of this is radical. It is regulation PNG can have this year, not this decade.

We need water police on our common routes, checking loading and safety gear at the wharf or boat stop before a boat leaves, not after it has already gone down. Madang's registry is finally working with the Water Police on exactly this model. Every maritime province needs the same, properly resourced, now.

We should also ask why an open dinghy built for fishing is ever certified to carry thirty paying passengers across open sea, when purpose-built passenger craft exist. Other countries have already tightened the rules here. We should ask it before, not after, the next tragedy.

None of this brings back those still missing off New Ireland, or the more than one hundred we lost on the Rabaul Queen. But it can stop the next name being added to that list. I am asking our National Government, our provincial administrations, and NMSA, directly: do not wait another fifteen years. License the operator. Register the boat. Insure the passenger. Enforce it on the water, every day, on every route. Our people are dying while we deliberate. That has to be enough.