Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (PNG; , ; ; ), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an Oceanian country that occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia. Its capital, located along its southeastern coast, is Port Moresby. The western half of New Guinea forms the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua. At the national level, after being ruled by three external powers since 1884, Papua New Guinea established its sovereignty in 1975. This followed nearly 60
Provinces of Papua New Guinea the PNG national parliament. The 22 provincial members are chosen from single-member electorates. Each provincial member becomes governor of their province unless they take a ministerial position, in which case the governorship passes to an open member of the province. Immediately before independence on 16 September 1975, Papua New Guinea was divided into nineteen provinces and the National Capital District. These provinces corresponded to the "Districts" of the pre-Independence administration of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. It had been considered that an independent state with limited resources could ill afford the infrastructure of a two-level quasi-federal governmental structure.