And jome kwame sundaram and anis chowdhury

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Opening Up to Our Pacific Neighbours

Keynote Presentation delivered at the 2014 Australian Association for Pacific Studies Conference, University of Sydney

What is striking about all this, from the perspective of 2014, is the assumption in Canberra that Australia would be making the key decisions about the future of the

1Christopher Waters ‘Against the Tide: Australian Government Attitudes to Decolonisation in the South Pacific, 1962–1972’, The Journal of Pacific History, 48:2, 2013: 194-208

Official Australia has mostly been attracted to the crisis way of looking at the Pacific. In 1993 the National Centre for Development Studies at the Australian National University produced an influential report called Pacific 2010: Challenging the Future. The report reflected government thinking about the Pacific at that time, and it was deeply pessimistic. It predicted a nightmare future for the people of the Pacific Islands unless their governments did what Australia was doing – reduced their public sectors, cut tariffs, encouraged private enterprise and allowed maximum freedom to foreign investors. If these measures were not adopted, the report warned, rapid population growth in the Pacific would mean falling living standards, decaying schools, urban squalor and unemployment.3 The New Zealand view tended to be different. Reviewing the Pacific 2010 report in 1995, Peter Pirie reached the opposite

2 Jack Corbett, ‘Between crisis and persistence: Interpreting democracy narratives in the Pacific Islands’, Political Science, vol. 65, no. 2, 2013: 198-215
3 R.V. Cole, Pacific 2010: Challenging the Future, National Centre for Development Studies, ANU, Canberra, 1993.

world” or out of it altogether‟. He thought „the possibilities are there and the present trends are positive‟.4

Taken as a whole, the Pacific Islands has experienced both crisis and advancement in the last twenty years, not only in the condition of its democracies, but more generally. There have political, economic and development crises at various times in Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Nauru; political crises in Fiji; ongoing under-performance of development in Papua New Guinea (PNG); and yet also a persistence of democratic forms of government everywhere outside Fiji, mostly accompanied by tolerable improvement in living standards. The nightmare scenario has not eventuated, but neither has its opposite. Instead, Pacific Island countries have muddled through to a variety of development outcomes, none outstanding but none catastrophic. PNG comes closest to fulfilling the predictions of Pacific 2010, with a population that has grown fast from 2.7 million at independence to an estimated 7.8 million last year. And the PNG government is the certainly the least effective of Pacific governments in delivering services. But mentioning PNG reminds us we that we should question the very idea of the Pacific Islands as a single region about which useful generalisations can be made. It goes without saying that life is very different for people in some parts of the Pacific than in others.

Marshall Islands, for example, held elections in 2011; Kiribati, Vanuatu, Palau and PNG in 2012; Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia in 2013. Solomon Islands, Tonga, Niue and Fiji are due to hold elections this year. Perhaps more importantly, constitutionalism has been maintained everywhere except Fiji. Words like „democracy‟ and „constitutionalism‟ may sound boringly familiar, not to say over-used. But the fact is that the lives Pacific people lead are intimately affected by them

„Democracy‟ defined more exactingly as a responsive system of government largely

Fiji‟s new constitution is imposed from above and designed to preserve the dominant

position of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces in the country‟s political affairs. The

Nevertheless, Bainimarama has stood down as military commander, he will stand for the elections as a civilian and the elections will go ahead later this year. Fiji will emerge not exactly as a democratic state, but as a more democratic one that it has been since 2006.

Pacific Development and Pacific Economic Growth
Twenty years after Pacific 2010, most of the Pacific is in better shape than the pessimists predicted it would be by now but in worse shape than the optimistic ones predicted. Even in PNG – the region‟s least effective state – economic growth, though not development (these are two different things), has surpassed expectations. Why, in the face of such doom-saying, have things turned out this way?

(ii) They placed excessive faith in good governance to produce economic growth. It may be a good thing but it is only weakly related to economic growth.

(iii) They could not foresee that trouble in the region – in the context of 9/11 and the Bali bombings - would boost development assistance and elicit a decade-long regional intervention in Solomon Islands.

rates in the region apart from the artificial case of Nauru, where „growth is driven by the expansion of the Australian Regional Processing Centre‟.6

Jome Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury, eds, Is Good Governance Good for Development? Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2012.

Authority in Jamaica, „our economy, our country, our people are searching for ways in which we may be able to improve our livelihood through better social and economic circumstances‟. In this pro-seabed mining spirit, Fiji has issued an International Seabed Minerals Management Decree aimed at regulating seabed mining, Cook Islands plans to open its seabed for tender this year, and Bluewater

8‘Mining headway’, Fiji Times Online, 21 Feb. 2013.

Fourth, let us consider the developments that boosted the flow of development assistance to the Pacific Islands in the last decade. Trouble in the Pacific generates aid to the Pacific, especially from Australia, which has a strategic interest is the security, stability and cohesion of its immediate neighbourhood. That neighbourhood in the Pacific consists of small, developing states – some so small as to be ongoing experiments in sovereignty – and the Australian strategic calculation since the 1970s has been that Australia should do all it can to enhance the development and economic growth of Pacific Island countries, and in this way ensure that they are politically stable and friendly. In this way, Australian development assistance has been a security instrument as well as a mechanism intended to improve development outcomes in a region that will always matter to Australia.

The decision by the Howard government to establish the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands was driven by the perception that 9/11 and the Bali bombings had changed the strategic outlook for Australia by rendering small, weak states potential security risks. Trouble in the Solomons, which took the form of the „tensions‟ that afflicted that country for more than five years, suddenly assumed a new, strategic significance that attracted the attention of the defence and national security communities in Canberra and Wellington. And when the Howard government sent Australian troops and police to Guadalcanal to lead the regional mission in 2003, it saw the intervention as part of a wider Pacific recommitment that would also boost aid spending elsewhere in the region, especially in PNG. The result was that Australia doubled its development assistance to the region in 2004-05 and increased its aid to PNG by a third, beginning a process that continued under the Rudd government elected in 2007. 12

Pacific has receded, so aid has receded, and the Abbott government is in a mood of retrenchment. The government has abolished AusAID as a separate agency, incorporating it into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and made large cuts to the aid budget, exempting only PNG and Nauru, the two Pacific countries with detention centres for refugees who attempted to get to Australia by boat. Aid cuts applied to all other Pacific countries and to Pacific regional programs.

As if to symbolise the shift of the Pacific towards Asia, China increased assistance to the Pacific just as Australia reduced its own. At the China-Pacific Island Countries Economic Development and Cooperation Forum in Guangzhou in 2013, attended by representatives from Micronesia, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Tonga, Niue and Fiji, China offered them a new soft loan facility of $US1 billion for use on roads, bridges, ports and other infrastructure, plus another $US1 billion on commercial terms.

Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF), funded in part by UAE and Kuwait, met for the first time in Fiji in 2013. Not every Pacific leader attended the Fiji meeting– Prime Minister Peter O‟Neill of PNG was not there – but it symbolised a new spirit of Pacific independence. The chief guest was Xanana Gusmao, Prime Minister of Timor-Leste, which donated $US250, 000 towards the costs of the new PIDF secretariat, to be based in Suva.

The Pacific plays more than ever before on a world stage. Not many people know, for example, that there are Papua New Guinean peacekeepers in Darfur and South Sudan, or that 600 Fijian peacekeepers are with the UN Disengagement Observer Force on the Golan Heights border between Israel and Syria, and that they have been partly equipped by Russia, or that more than 170 students from Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Vanuatu and Tuvalu have enrolled in medical training courses in Cuba since 2008.

regional country. Under a bilateral Regional Resettlement Arrangement, PNG agreed – for an initial period of 12 months – to accept such people for processing, and if they proved to be refugees, to resettle them. Peter O‟Neill wavered on this promise in 2014, suggesting that other Pacific countries should bear some of the burden of resettlement, but soon changed course and agreed that PNG would settle them all.14

living in mainland Australia. It is time we abandoned the mentality that lies behind barring Pacific Islanders from Australia.

What is needed is not only an expanded seasonal labour scheme, but, more importantly, a shift in our migration policy to establish Pacific access quotas permitting a certain number of Pacific Islanders – skilled or unskilled – to move to Australia. These quotas would not even have to be large in order to make a major difference to the prospects of the source countries.

16 ‘MSG Skills Movement Scheme Comes into Force’, PacNews, Port Vila, 5 Oct. 2012.