In practice, the governor-general, chosen by free vote of sitting members of parliament, functions as a de facto non-executive president[citation needed].
In practice the courts have found great difficulty in applying traditional custom in a modern legal system and the development of the customary law according to indigenous Melanesian conceptions of justice and equity has been less thorough than may have been anticipated in 1975.
In practice the courts have found great difficulty in applying the vastly differing custom of the many traditional societies of the country in a modern legal system and the development of the customary law according to indigenous Melanesian conceptions of justice and equity has been less thorough than may have been anticipated in 1975; the Underlying Law Act does not yet appear to have had significant effect.
Victims of crime can choose to have their cases heard in the national courts but this means transporting all those involved to the nearest town.
Five types of officials can be appointed through the provincial governments, with senior officer requiring gazetting at the national level through the Village Courts and Land Mediation Secretariat.
In a remote environment with no police to back up and enforce his decision, the Committee Man needs considerable wisdom and diplomacy to make his verdict stick.
In 1979, four years after Independence, the then-Minister of Justice, Mrs Nahau Rooney, wrote a widely circulated letter critical of what she perceived as a lack of sensitivity by the then entirely expatriate-personnel Supreme Court to a "growing national consciousness": in particular Mrs Rooney was impatient with the purportedly excessively legalistic approach of the Bench to the indigenising of the laws of Papua New Guinea; she was also critical of a Supreme Court Justice's enjoining of a deportation order by the Executive.
The then-Chief Justice, Sir William Prentice, called a special sitting of the full bench to condemn the minister for what the court characterised as interference with judicial independence.
Three considerable ironies emerged in the long term from the Rooney Affair: (1) The vigorous criticism of the Bench by a member of the executive (or indeed the general public) would certainly not have occasioned so drastic response by the judiciary in other common law jurisdictions such as Canada and the USA which also have a constitutionally-guaranteed right of freedom of expression.
(2) Notwithstanding the immediate departure of the old guard of colonial-era expatriate justices and their replacement by national justices, the Supreme Court did not then undertake any radical new departures by way of indigenising Papua New Guinea jurisprudence and indeed has been notably cautious in undertaking judicial law reform by way of implementing social policy.
In 2006 the independence of the judiciary was briefly challenged when Sir Arnold Amet, the immediately retired Chief Justice of Papua New Guinea, who was in the process of inaugurating a post-judicial political career, launched a series of articles in the Malaysian-owned newspaper The National in which he politically challenged the deliberations of the court over which he had formerly presided with respect to a capital case which was then sub judice.