Tag Archive for: Fiji

Reader response: Australia and Fiji – it’s complex and problematic

At the beginning of the year I predicted that developments in Fiji had the potential to outbid almost all else in terms of political significance in the region this year. So far, this doesn’t seem particularly wide of the mark. The rhetoric expressed recently by Victor Lal on this blog (see here and here) is powerful and compelling.

What’s missing from the analysis, however, is that Australia needs to factor in how its handling of Fiji might affect other relationships in the region. Australia can expect to exercise considerable influence within the Pacific Islands Forum from which Fiji remains excluded. The same doesn’t hold true for the Melanesian Spearhead Group: Fiji is the chair (until the middle of this year) but Australia isn’t a member.

The MSG is yet to make a consolidated response to Fiji’s apparently full-scale retreat from a return to constitutional democracy. It might be that such a response won’t be forthcoming, with the Melanesian leaders preferring to exercise influence using more subtle methods than exercised by others, such as the blunt words of the Prime Minister of Samoa.

What is undeniable is that the political profile and influence of the MSG has been, and continues to be, in the ascendancy. Australia’s overt support of Peter O’Neill as PM of Papua New Guinea might allow some indirect influence but, as Australia is all too aware, managing relationships with Melanesian states is a difficult task and each action and reaction needs to be carefully judged.

Tess Newton Cain is head of Devpacific and a research associate of the Development Policy Centre, ANU. 

New Zealand does some things better than Australia

Members of TG Rata 8 perform a Haka to welcome TG Rata 9 onto the RAMSI Compound.

This is part II of a series on Australia–New Zealand relations (part I here).

To stray into areas that are simultaneously sacred yet deeply unsafe, look at New Zealand’s strength in important areas such as rugby, race horses and the ability to make oceans of sauvignon blanc that millions of Australians guzzle as acidic nectar.

On race horses, Australia will never concede. On rugby, Oz has reached a state of resigned grace about being stomped by the All Blacks. On wine, the marvellous mixture from Marlborough—the top selling white in Oz—is driving Australian wine producers demented, moaning about the NZ blanc’s resemblance to cat’s pee, body odour and a noxious weed.

The whine about the wine prompts the thought that it’s good to see traditional standards of invective in trans-Tasman dialogue are being maintained. But let us turn from bruising topics like booze and ball games to the calmer, gentler realms of defence and diplomacy.

The previous column sketched some of the rules that influence the bilateral dance between Canberra and Wellington. This column seeks to subvert Oz traditions about kicking Kiwis by seeing what New Zealand can do in defence and diplomacy that Australia might find difficult, if not impossible. To focus the question that way is to come immediately to the South Pacific. Read more

Fiji: the perils of appeasement (part II)

Josaia V. Bainimarama, Prime Minister of the Republic of the Fiji Islands, addresses the general debate of the sixty-fourth session of the General Assembly.

I explained yesterday how the fear of driving Fiji into China’s arms has been wrongly used by what I call the ‘appeasement lobby’ as a reason to lessen the isolation of Fiji’s regime. It isn’t the only error they’ve made. They also fear that further isolation by Australia would destroy Fiji’s economy. Here they are on firmer ground. But the sad truth is that there’s little left to destroy. After six years of military rule Fiji’s GDP is lower in real terms than it was in 2006. All credit is due to the Minister for Finance: J.V. Bainimarama. In the same period, sugar production—on which at least 200,000 people depend for their livelihoods—has halved. Credit to the Minister for Sugar: J.V. Bainimarama. In the same period, wages have fallen, pensions have been slashed by up to 60%, and poverty now affects at least 40% of the population and possibly many more. The tax burden has been steadily shifted from the wealthy to the poor. The Minister responsible: J.V. Bainimarama.

It’s hard to see how Australia’s isolation could make this worse. In fact, most Fiji islanders would welcome the short term pain involved in removing Bainimarama if it meant a return to the rule of law and a return to growth. Read more

Fiji: the perils of appeasement

Australian policy on Fiji is shifting to appeasement in ways that will gladden the military regime and sadden Fijians. What might be called the Bainimarama appeasement lobby—broadly speaking a group of academics and journalists who have never lived under the Fiji dictatorship—make valid points about Australia’s interests but they are necessarily made from the viewpoint of a comfortable and calm Sydney, Melbourne, Honolulu or Auckland suburb without recourse to public opinion and conditions in Fiji.

Their position is well summed up by The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, in a recent column on the Australian Foreign Minister’s increasingly warm approach to the regime:

Carr was right on the substance and in the larger strategic picture. It would do the Fijian people no good at all to isolate Fiji, to send it into the arms of China, to destroy its economy, to further polarise and radicalise its society. The government there has done a lot of undemocratic things and these deserve to be criticised, but on the international scale of human rights abuses it is at the absolute gentlest end of the spectrum.

This is the view that rights and freedoms can be partially abused—that Bainimarama has done some bad things but these are at ‘absolutely the gentlest end of the spectrum’. He hasn’t killed many people. He has tortured only a few compared to other dictators. Further, the appeasers ask, what is the point of further dividing Fiji and driving it even closer to Beijing? Read more

Why Carr needs the velvet glove more than the iron fist

"More velvet, eh?"

On my flight home from Fiji recently, I was struck by the continuing negativism of the arguments regarding Australian relations with Fiji. Rowan Callick’s commentary in the Weekend Australian is another example of a tough line on Fiji without any positive proposals. The one element of novelty in Callick’s piece, however, is the suggestion that Carr’s ‘soft’ approach toward the Government of Commodore Voreqe (‘Frank’) Bainimarama is the reason why Fiji has slipped the leash and gone feral recently. But this belies the evidence of the past six years. When has the Bainimarama Government ever been on an Australian leash or even responded positively to pressure from Canberra?

Having viewed the changing events in Fiji fairly closely in a variety of roles over the past six years, I find it difficult to see how the tactics that have failed to have any influence on the course of Fiji’s return to democracy since the December 2006 military coup will work in the 18 months before Fiji is due to go to elections. And this view has been bolstered by a week in Suva talking with a range of people that included participants in the constitutional process, current and former members of Government and academics. More of the same intransigence simply will not to produce a different outcome.

The Bainimarama Government has neither deviated from the roadmap’s timing for the return to democracy that it announced in July 2009 and nor has it altered this timetable since Bob Carr became Foreign Minister. Still, it’s a welcome development that Carr apparently has accepted this—albeit at a fairly low level—but it’s far too late to have the sort of influence that was on offer at the beginning of 2008. Read more