The government is not ready to conduct the Local-Level Government (LLG) Elections says Member for Madang Open Bryan Kramer. Mr. Kramer stated in Parliament last week that the government is not ready to conduct the LLG Elections because there is no strategic report. “The global standard is that when a country conducts its elections, it complies a strategic election report or a strategic plan confirming how it intends to roll out the elections and that plan will provide strategic outcomes in how it intends to provide a free, fair and secure election. The plan will provide a clear program on how it will conduct the polling, how it will conduct the counting, and it will provide sub-plans on procurement plans on how it will procure election materials, ballot papers and ballot boxes. There should be a strategic plan on security on how it intends to address the risks of security in conducting its elections,” Mr. Kramer said. He stated that he believes that the PNG Electoral Commission does not have such a plan in place. “I can go online and find many countries that have a strategic plan and an operational plan where they demonstrate exactly how they will conduct the elections and provide a detailed budget which is in public domain. They will provide how they will conduct the elections, what they will spend on polling officials and what they will spend on logistics and others,” he said. Mr. Kramer asked if the responsible organization for conducting elections has done an assessment on security on where the risks are and identify where the polling locations and where there were previous elections with high risks and if they come up with what measure they are to take to mitigate those security risks. “We have no such plan and the last LLG Elections were less to the provinces and districts and Electoral commission was under funded and it was not supported adequately. The fund came at the 11th Hour; therefore, disrupting the ability to conduct proper planning towards the elections. So many of the service providers in the last elections and voting officials said that they never received any payment for the services they provided. These service providers and polling officials said they signed up, they conducted the elections, but they were never supported and there were no police present because there were not enough funds to pay police allowances,” he said. Mr. Kramer stated that the last elections were managed poorly and somehow got results of their own and left a lot of people unpaid. “So, my point is that we are not ready to conduct the LLG Elections on the scheduled date Thursday, 24 April 2025,” he added.