The underlying purpose of the East Sepik land legislation was to give effect to the National Goals of PNG’s Constitution as they relate to customary land in the province, in particular for development to take place primarily through the use of Papua New Guinean forms of organisation, and for traditional communities to remain as viable units of society. What prompted the laws was a new ‘reality’ — modern demands being put on people’s customary land^[36] — and the laws are an attempt to channel the response to that new reality. As observed by Nigel Oram, the aim of such laws is ‘to bring about a synthesis of the modern with the traditional systems’ and ‘attempt to close the gap between Western and indigenous systems, which are products of different cultural milieux’ (Oram 1979: 71).

Are the critics saying that these attempts by elected legislatures in PNG to adapt to new realities and further the National Goals are never valid? If so, then they invite the response which the pioneer Pacific anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski gave in 1930 to the dismissive views of the British authorities on African systems of land and property law. Weiner himself quotes Malinowski’s response:

The aim of the legislative recognition of custom, customary tenures and customary groups is to provide a legal process which maintains their basic character and dynamism, and enables them to adapt to new demands. ILGs in PNG are not meant to be the actual clans or other indigenous groups, but their legal representation.^[37] Weiner calls the results ‘legal transformations’ (ibid: 3), but then judges them according to their sameness. The important question is not ‘Are they the same?’, for they are not meant to be, but ‘How will they work?’ In other words, the attention should be on how to recognise custom, not on whether to recognise it. As the accounts of abuses by the leaders of ILGs show, this is a challenging task, but it should not be regarded as impossible.