China has long sought diplomatic relations with Tuvalu. Individual officials at various levels in Tuvalu have reported frequent offers of aid if their island state makes the break with Taiwan, and international media raised the potential of a switch after Tuvalu’s 2019 election.

Why might Tuvalu decide to switch to China? And does it matter?

Personal connections, leverage and ongoing aid projects all provide insight into the first question. In a political system without parties or clear pro- and anti-China factions, personal connections matter. Two members of Tuvalu’s parliament are elected from each of its eight islands to make up the country’s sixteen-member parliament, and the prime minister is then elected by MPs from among their number. Some parliamentarians are friendly towards China (and others supportive of Taiwan), and if a pro-China MP were to gain the prime ministership they would certainly have the influence to push for a switch. This alone may have prompted Paeniu’s warning that Tuvalu could switch relations after the upcoming election, but this has potentially been true after any of Tuvalu’s elections.

Leverage is also important. Taiwan is heavily aligned with the United States and Australia, and Washington has pushed Tuvalu to maintain relations with the government in Taipei. Ironically, Tuvalu’s acquiescence has put it at a disadvantage, for the United States tends to focus its attention and aid on Pacific nations that have relations with China.

Tuvalu has recent experience of how leverage can work. In 2021, when Tuvalu was in full Covid lockdown, the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, or CCECC, helped transport Tuvaluan ministers via Guangzhou to COP26 and other meetings. The result — a sudden renewal of aid promises by the United States — showed that China could not only provide substantial aid to Tuvalu itself but also prompt the United States to increase its assistance. The fact that Taiwan, with its close ties to the United States and Australia, could never enable such leverage was suggested just this week by Tuvalu’s finance minister, Seve Paeniu, who is guaranteed a seat in the new parliament.

How was CCECC able to transport Tuvaluan ministers out of Tuvalu during Covid? The tendering methods used by the Asian Development Bank, or ADB, and the World Bank to award development projects, especially cost-based tendering, often favour Chinese companies and contractors. Although Tuvalu is allied with Taiwan, CCECC workers and supervisors were stationed on some of Tuvalu’s outer islands until 2022 as part of a major ADB-funded project to improve harbours. CCECC’s state ownership demonstrated firsthand for Tuvalu what cooperating with China on aid or development might look like.

For companies like CCECC, there is literally no political or financial downside to lobbying on behalf of China. If Tuvalu switches, they win political capital in Beijing and contracts for work on the ground. While many Chinese company managers resist the embrace of China’s party-state because it’s a bad look or it’s simply not their main priority, CCECC is a pure state-owned enterprise, unfettered by complex ownership structures or the need to please foreign stock exchanges.

When the Solomon Islands government was considering its diplomatic switch in 2019, CCECC’s regional manager visited Honiara to lay out US$500 million worth of development assistance on offer if Solomons leaders showed the wisdom to change their allegiance.

If Tuvalu’s new parliament chooses Beijing over Taipei, CCECC’s fingerprints will undoubtedly be visible. Yet research also indicates that the decision to choose one or the other allegiance often comes down to highly local and pragmatic choices. Tuvalu’s original decision to go with Taiwan had nothing to do with democracy or freedom: at the time, Taiwan was still enduring the longest period of martial law the world has ever seen. Tuvalu chose Taiwan because it had a problem with illegal Taiwanese fishing vessels and reasoned it would have more leverage if it recognised the Republic of China.

The same logic of better futures — the prospect of future investment, aid and diplomatic attention — will doubtless be used by Tuvalu’s next leader, regardless of whether the choice is to stay or to go.

The second question — whether Tuvalu’s decision matters — produces a different answer depending on where you’re sitting. Along with Taiwan, Australia is the only country with a diplomatic mission in Funafuti, and our diplomats would clearly prefer the status quo to continue. The Solomon Islands’ switch — facilitated by a leader with a longstanding history of bad blood with Canberra — represents the extreme end of possible outcomes, but Australia can also do without clumsy attempts by Chinese diplomats to influence local media or provide inducements to politicians to keep Tuvalu in Beijing’s column. It could also do without any impact a switch might have on finalisation of the Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union.

In Beijing, another diplomatic switch so soon after Taiwan’s presidential elections would be welcomed, although you’d have to spare a thought for whomever they send to Funafuti. China’s Pacific diplomats look a harried bunch at the best of times; being under so much scrutiny in such a small town is not an enviable assignment. Taiwan’s new government, meanwhile, would find the question of why they continue to invest limited resources in a losing hand hard to avoid. For Tuvalu, the choice is theirs to make, and we should all respect their decision. •

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As surprising as the announcement might have seemed, a long history lay behind it. Until the first meeting of signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, in 1995, Canberra was largely seen as being on the same page as other Pacific nations (outwardly, at least) on climate change concerns. Then, at a tense South Pacific Forum meeting in 1997, prime minister John Howard refused to sign up to binding targets for emissions reductions. Other Pacific leaders eventually relented, agreeing instead that nations would “adopt different approaches” at the upcoming Kyoto talks.

Has prime minister Anthony Albanese finally repaired the “climate rift” with Australia’s Pacific neighbours? Although Tuvaluan critics of the Falepili Union treaty are rightly sceptical of Canberra’s commitment to climate justice, Mr Albanese was among the leaders who assented to the Forum Communiqué’s aspiration for what it labelled “a Just and Equitable Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific.” In doing so, they echoed the Port Vila Call for a Just Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific made by six Pacific countries, including Tuvalu, in March this year.

That call reflects an international effort to negotiate a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty inspired by the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Advocates argue that such a treaty — unlike the Paris climate agreement, which doesn’t explicitly name coal, oil and gas — would directly target their phasing out and outline a plan for a fair transition to clean energy.

If the phrase “a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific” rings a bell, you’re not mistaken — the phrase gestures to the campaign for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific that began in the mid 1970s. In 1985, with France continuing its nuclear weapons testing on Mururoa atoll and anxieties deepening about US military installations on Australian soil, those efforts culminated in the declaration of the South Pacific as a Nuclear Free Zone in the Treaty of Rarotonga. The French had bombed the Rainbow Warrior just a month earlier.

But the link between nuclear weapons and climate change goes well beyond inspiration. Historians have excavated how nuclear weapons testing shaped the US cold war–era science that shed light on the mechanisms of global warming. Likewise, the scientific debate over a nuclear winter helped to convey the possibility of widespread human-induced destruction on such a scale that even non-combatant nations would be affected. A nuclear war would have no winners.

Climate change was now seen as an issue the world’s governments should tackle multilaterally. As concerns about ozone depletion and acid rain had shown, the atmosphere respects no territorial borders.

This message was articulated clearly in the statement arising from June 1988’s Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security conference in Toronto. “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war,” agreed the largest such gathering of scientists and policymakers to date. Participants called for a global convention to coordinate scientific research and spell out concrete measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Nearly four decades later, security returned to centrestage in Chris Bowen’s annual parliamentary climate change statement last month. “The currently identified national security threats from climate change already present serious risks to Australia and the region, but they will become more severe and more frequent the further warming targets are exceeded,” the climate change and energy minister argued. “Climate change is an existential national security risk to our Pacific partners and presents unprecedented challenges for our region. It is likely to accentuate economic factors already fuelling political instability, including risks to water security across the globe.”

The implication of rising temperatures for the world’s coastal areas — home to half of humanity — was an early concern of scientists and policymakers responding to climate change. This vulnerability was especially clear in the Maldives, where storm surges in early 1987 had flooded the capital, Malé. After president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom raised the issue at that year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and then at the UN General Assembly, the Commonwealth Secretariat commenced its own study of the likely effects of climate change on its member nations, which in turn commissioned studies of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tonga.

With Malta prepared to raise climate change at the General Assembly in late 1988, the South Pacific Forum discussed the issue at its October meeting in Tonga. It joined other pressing concerns for the region, including fisheries exploitation, political upheaval and telecommunications. Subsequent gatherings of Pacific and other island nations in the Marshall Islands and the Maldives reiterated the existential threat that rising sea levels posed to their countries.

A 1989 booklet, A Climate of Crisis: Global Warming and the Island South Pacific, described the looming threat as a “climate bomb” that “threatens the physical and cultural survival of several Pacific societies. They are the innocent victims of the northern hemisphere’s 300-year orgy of fossil fuels.” Announcing Australian funding for a regional network of sea level monitoring stations in August 1989, prime minister Bob Hawke explained that it would help “ensure that we are well aware of what the region is in for.” Pacific concerns were reiterated at that October’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malaysia, where leaders responded to the Commonwealth Secretariat’s report with the Langkawi Declaration.

Australia’s own scientific research on climate change meant Canberra was well aware of its implications for the Pacific. Following Malta’s call for the “Conservation of Climate as part of the Common Heritage of Mankind” in October 1988, Australia’s representative at the UN General Assembly, Michael Costello, expressed Canberra’s concern about the “potential for climate change to cause serious economic and social disruption in countries of the South Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.”

The following year Tuvaluan prime minister Tomasi Puapua described to an Australian parliamentary committee the “possible impact of the greenhouse effect on his country,” which was “one of Tuvalu’s major security concerns.” Climate change represented a “potentially catastrophic” threat to the “very existence” of atoll states like Tuvalu, the committee reported. “In the worst scenario the entire populations of these small states may end up as environmental refugees, seeking resettlement in countries such as Australia.”

Canberra’s framing of Pacific island vulnerability as a security issue reflected almost a decade of assessing the prospects of newly independent and decolonising neighbours like Tuvalu. Nor had the Soviet Union’s recent efforts to extend its influence in the region gone unnoticed. “Environmental problems, if unchecked could threaten our security,” warned Australia’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans, pointing to the “devastating effect [of rising sea levels] on the small island countries of the South Pacific.”

Echoing concerns voiced in the United States and Britain, Evans anticipated hundreds of thousands of “environmental refugees” “who would look mainly to Australia for resettlement.” “In short,” he argued, “quite apart from the cost in human misery and dislocation to the island communities, which of course are ample reasons in themselves for our concern, it would jeopardise vital Australian national interests.”

Puapua’s successor as Tuvalu’s prime minister, Bikenibeu Paeniu, continued to assert the vulnerability of island nations on the world stage. In the wake of Cyclone Ofa and early meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he told the Second World Climate Conference in late 1990 that it would be “an injustice should we in Tuvalu and the island nations, be denied our right to live in our homeland.” He continued: “We contribute little or nothing to the problem and yet we will be the first to suffer. Our survival is at stake.”

Although the island nations were ultimately disappointed with the climate conference’s pared-back ministerial statement, they came away from Geneva having formally organised themselves as the Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS. With the legal support of the recently formed British group, the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development, the island nations understood that their interests might be better served collectively as a UN bloc in the upcoming negotiations of the UNFCCC.

Australian negotiators were quietly sceptical of the motives of larger developing nations, which they believed to be more interested in a renewal of the New International Economic Order. But they acknowledged the difficulties facing small island nations. After a meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee of the UNFCCC in late 1991, they reported to Canberra that AOSIS members were “genuinely worried about the adverse consequences for them.” As the small island states had stressed during the negotiations, “The very existence of low-coastal and small vulnerable island countries is placed at risk by the consequences of climate change.” Although AOSIS sought more ambitious provisions, the final text of the UNFCCC would go on to explicitly acknowledge their particular vulnerability to the “adverse effects of climate change.”

Australia was one of the first signatories to the UNFCCC at the Rio Earth Summit in mid 1992. The AOSIS nations followed soon after, including Nauru, Tuvalu and Kiribati, which were not yet UN members. Upon signing what they saw as a weak treaty without targets or timetables for emissions reductions, that trio joined with Fiji to expressly declare that were not renouncing their rights under international law concerning state responsibility for the adverse effects of climate change.

The Earth Summit offered Prime Minister Paeniu an opportunity to share Tuvalu’s position with a much broader audience. Thanks to the promotional efforts of Greenpeace, he addressed a full press conference on the implications of rising sea levels for his country. “There would be no land left for us,” he said. “There cannot be any other home for Tuvalu. Even if we were offered 10,000 acres in Australia, it won’t be the same Tuvalu.”

This was the scenario to which the leaders assembled at the recent Pacific Islands Forum returned. Having made a declaration on the preservation of their maritime zones in 2021, they now called for the preservation of their statehood and cultural heritage in the face of climate change–related sea level rise. Fearing the worst, Tuvalu had already set out to become the First Digital Nation — a project Funafuti hopes “will allow Tuvalu to retain its identity and continue to function as a state, even after its physical land is gone.”

Despite the existential threat that climate change poses, successive COPs have demonstrated the challenge of making manifest a planetary ethic for real global climate action. As in the late 1980s, however, asserting the security implications of climate change continues to allow for the alignment of territorial interests with atmospheric concerns that don’t recognise political borders.

Those territorial interests are really what’s at stake when government negotiators descend on cities like Paris and Dubai for what have become annual climate talks. For all the hot air those talks produce, there remains room for hope: regardless of territorial size or emissions, every party has a single vote on the future. •

The post Changing atmosphere appeared first on Inside Story.

Amid those anniversary moments, US president Joe Biden flew to Vietnam in September, the fifth sitting American president to visit since Bill Clinton re-established diplomatic ties in 2000 and “drew a line under a bloody and bitter past.”

In Hanoi, Biden and Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong “hailed a historic new phase of bilateral cooperation and friendship,” creating a strategic partnership that expressed US support for “a strong, independent, prosperous, and resilient Vietnam.”

With such flourishes, history delivers irony garnished with diplomatic pomp. Expect many shades of irony in April 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, when Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces. (Note the way the war is named: Australia joins America in calling it the Vietnam war; the Vietnamese call it the American war, the concluding phase of a thirty-year conflict.)

The shockwaves that ran through Asia after the second world war were driven by geopolitical fears that imagined nations as dominos toppling into communism. As France fled Indochina and Britain retreated from Southeast Asia, the United States stepped in to stabilise what it saw as a series of tottering states in Southeast Asia.

The proposition that the Vietnam war was “fought for, by, and through the Pacific” was the focus of a conference at Sydney’s Macquarie University that is now a book with nineteen chapters from different authors.

The editors of The Vietnam War in the Pacific World, Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall, describe a wide gap between US rhetoric and the military reality of the region. The US claimed it was acting to save the whole of Southeast Asia, they write, but “the documentary record suggests that Washington lacked a suitable appreciation of how the war in Vietnam was linked to the politics of the wider region.”

In a chapter on “the fantasy driving Australian involvement in the Vietnam war,” the historian Greg Lockhart, a veteran of the war, writes that the “red peril” rhetoric of the Menzies government “disguised its race-based sense of the threat from Asia.” By 1950, he writes, Australian policy had been shaped by an early British version of domino thinking and the “downward thrust of communist China,” a thrust that linked the perils of geography to the force of gravity.

Just before the defeat of French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, US president Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed the fear that drove US policy: “You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over fairly quickly.” The theory held that the Vietnam domino, with pushing by China, would topple the rest of Indochina. Burma and Malaya and Indonesia would follow. And then the threat would cascade towards Australia and New Zealand.

Lockhart scorches the way these fears led Australia to Vietnam:

Between 1945 and 1965, no major official Australian intelligence assessment found evidence to support the domino theory. Quite the reverse, those assessments concluded that communist China posed no threat to Australia. Shaped by the geographical illusion that “China,” or at least “Chinese” were “coming down” in a dagger-like thrust through the Malay Peninsula, the domino theory was the fearful side of the race fantasy, the nightmare that vanished once it had fulfilled its political function.

The US strategic ambition of containing communism in Asia “had been very largely achieved before the escalation of US forces in Vietnam in 1965,” Lockhart concludes, because Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia were already “anti-communist nation-states.”

The same quickly became true of Indonesia, where the military takeover in 1965 was a decisive shift towards the United States, destroying the largest communist party outside the Eastern bloc. Yet US president Lyndon Johnson used Indonesia to proclaim what American historian Mark Atwood Lawrence calls “the domino theory in reverse.” LBJ’s argument by 1967 was that the Vietnam war was necessary as a “shield” for a virtuous cycle of political and economic development across Southeast Asia.

Lawrence laments that few in Washington followed the logic that “Indonesia’s lurch to the right, far from justifying the war in Vietnam, made that campaign unnecessary by successfully resolving Washington’s major problem in the region.” He cites evidence to a Senate committee in 1966 by a legend of US diplomacy, George Kennan, that events in Indonesia made the risk of communism spreading through the region “considerably less.”

In 1967, the US Central Intelligence Agency appraised the geopolitical consequences of a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Lawrence says a thirty-three-page report “concluded that the US would suffer no permanent or devastating setbacks anywhere in the world, including even in the areas closest to the Indochinese states, as long as Washington made clear its determination to remain active internationally after a setback in Vietnam.” The study, as he observes, had no discernible impact on LBJ’s thinking. Instead, Washington stuck with its “iffy” and “problematic” assumptions about falling dominos and the interconnections among Southeast Asian societies.

For the new nation of Singapore, separated from Malaysia in 1965, the era offered the chance to build links with the United States and hedge against bilateral troubles with Malaysia and Indonesia. S.R. Joey Long writes that prime minister Lee Kuan Yew used Washington’s Vietnam focus to cultivate America for both weapons and investment: “The inflow of American military equipment and capital enhanced the Singaporean regime’s capacity to defend its interests against adversarial neighbours, further its development strategies, distribute rewards to supporters, neutralise or win over detractors, and consolidate its control of the city-state.” A later chapter quotes a CIA report in 1967 that 15 per cent of Singapore’s gross national product came from American procurements related to the war.

During his long leadership, Lee Kuan Yew always proclaimed the one remaining vestige of an argument for the US war — the “buying time” thesis, which claims that the US provided time for the rest of Southeast Asia to grow strong enough to resist domino wobbles.

Mattias Fibiger’s chapter on buying time calls the idea a “remarkably durable” effort to transmute US failure into triumph. What president Ronald Reagan later called a “noble cause” is elevated to a constructive breathing space. “America failed in Vietnam,” according to the Henry Kissinger line, “but it gave the other nations of Southeast Asia time to deal with their own insurrections.”

From 1965 to 1975, the region “became far more prosperous, more united and more secure,” Fibiger notes, and he finds “some truth to the claims that the Vietnam war strengthened Southeast Asia’s non-communist states, stimulated the region’s economic growth, and led to the creation of ASEAN — all of which left the region more stable and secure.”

The creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967 (with an original membership of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) is a milestone in the region’s idea of itself. ASEAN’s greatest achievement is to banish — or bury deeply — the danger of war between its members. This is region-building of the highest order. Earlier attempts at regional organisation had failed. Indeed, Fibiger notes, conflict seemed so endemic that a 1962 study was headlined, “Southeast Asia: The Balkans of the Orient?” ASEAN has helped lift the Balkan curse.

The founders of ASEAN certainly looked at Vietnam and knew what they didn’t want. While the war inspired “fear of American abandonment,” Fibiger thinks any relationship between the conflict and the strength of the region’s non-communist states is indirect. American military actions had little bearing on the ability of governments outside Indochina to command the loyalty of their populations.

Commerce, not conflict, became the region’s guiding star. In the quarter-century after 1965, the economies of East and Southeast Asia expanded more than twice as quickly as those in other regions. The eight “miracle” economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand — grew more prosperous and more equal, lifting huge numbers of people out of poverty.

Fibiger writes that the Vietnam war served as an engine of economic growth in Southeast Asia and fuelled exports to the US market. Growth legitimised rather than undermined authoritarian regimes in ASEAN, and deepened oligarchy. The war, he says, helped create strong states, regional prosperity, and ASEAN.

Beyond that summation, Fibiger attacks the buying time thesis as morally bankrupt because it is a metaphor of transaction, “implying that the Vietnam war’s salutary effects in Southeast Asia somehow cancel out its massive human and environmental cost in Indochina.”

America’s allies joined the war to serve alliance purposes with the United States. South Korea sent 320,000 troops to South Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, Australia 60,000, Thailand 40,000 and New Zealand 3800. The Philippines contribution was a total of 2000 medical and logistical personnel. Taiwan stationed an advisory group of around thirty officers at any one time in Saigon but sent no combat troops for fear of offending China.

For their part, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea fought “not for Saigon,” writes David L. Anderson, “but in keeping with their established practices of protecting their regional interests and constructing their national defence with allies.” By 1970, Australian opinion was divided over the war, Anderson notes, but the alliance with the United States still had popular support:

The war polarised the politics of the US, Australia and New Zealand. Antiwar sentiment in the three countries did not alone bring an end to their military engagement, but protest movements conditioned the political process to accept negotiation and withdrawal when government strategists decided national security no longer required the cost and sacrifice of the conflict.

In the years after the Vietnam war, Anderson says, the former junior partners maintained friendly relations with Washington even though the United States “was seen as a less reliable partner.” The new need was “greater self-reliance and independence from the US.”

Editors Cuddy and Logevall conclude that studying the regional dynamics of the Vietnam war is not purely of historical interest: “American foreign policy is turning its attention — even if haltingly and haphazardly — back to the Pacific… Understanding how the region reacted to the American war in Vietnam and how the war changed the region might help the United States and its Asia-Pacific partners navigate the currents of competition in the future.”

The Vietnam history offers cautions about the new competition between the United States and China. The United States again seeks regional allies and is gripped by vivid fears about the threat China poses to the system. The region again ponders the level of US commitment and its reliability.

The two giants compete to hold friends close and ensure no dominos fall to the other side.

Vietnam is a haunting demonstration that the Washington consensus can misread or even obscure Asian understandings and the complex politics of the region. Those truths from history matter again today. As America’s greatest strategic blunder of the twentieth century was in Asia, so in this century America’s greatest strategic challenge is in Asia. •

The Vietnam War in the Pacific World
Edited by Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall | University of North Carolina Press | US$29.95 | 382 pages

The post Domino days appeared first on Inside Story.

From the stand, Manasseh Sogavare, the Solomon Islands prime minister, looked on with relief and satisfaction. “Sports is the glue that holds the nation together,” he had told local reporters earlier. “It binds and unites us. It brings out the best of us, as individuals and collectively as a nation.” Regardless of “misinformation and shallow opinions” about the Pacific Games, “especially by a few foreign media,” Solomon Islands was united and proudly telling its games story to the world.

The games, which kicked off at that ceremony last Sunday night, have lifted the mood here after three years of turmoil and hardship. A dispute in November 2019 over Sogavare’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing led to ethnic-influenced rioting that trashed Honiara’s old Chinatown — the unrest ended, Sogavare’s government saved, by Australian troops and police flown in from Townsville. Then came Covid-19 and two years of isolation that shrank the economy by around 5 per cent.

Economic growth returned this year, but the mood was still gloomy. Along with the daily struggle for their livelihoods, people were mostly concerned about how their home provinces were doing, rather than the Solomons more widely, says veteran Honiara journalist Dorothy Wickham. “The only time you see Solomon Islanders proud of their own country is when there are things like this,” she says, referring to the games.

“I think that was one of the reasons the government wanted to go ahead,” Wickham adds. “They felt this country needed a unifying event. Even though it has come at a big cost, it was needed at this time. Especially after we’ve come through the ethnic crisis and people are fragmented.”

The cost of building facilities and hosting 5000 athletes is a big one for a country of 720,000 people with a per capita GDP of about A$3500, its deficit in trade and government spending covered largely by foreign aid and growing remittance flows from the 7000 seasonal workers now in Australia and New Zealand.

But the games have also became the focus of another competition that Solomon Islanders sum up in one word: geopolitics. China spent around A$120 million building playing courts, pools and the main stadium. While some feared that Honiara would be left with facilities unduly expensive to use and maintain, the stadium is far from grandiose — more like a typical Australian sporting club’s home ground than a grand final venue. New or improved halls of residence for visiting athletes are attached to seven colleges and schools around the city and will be a legacy for Solomon Islands students.

In the lead-up to the games, Chinese chargé d’affaires Ding Yonghua was dispatching influential Solomon Islanders off for tours of his country: all the provincial premiers for two weeks in October, a group of journalists for nine days in November. Two ambulances and four dental chairs arrived from a city in Guangzhou that has old trading links with the South Seas. In mid November, a squad of Chinese police installed metal detectors and video cameras at the games venues. Though only about fifteen-strong, their presence led to some overheated reports of Chinese police “patrolling” the city.

Big projects are being rolled out by Chinese contractors. One has just completed a new terminal and tarmac resurfacing at the airport in Munda, a tourism hub in the country’s west, which will enable direct Airbus flights from Brisbane. Huawei, the much-suspected Chinese telecommunications giant, will build 161 new mobile telephone towers funded by a A$96 million soft loan.

Not to be outdone, Australian high commissioner Rod Hilton has been in diplomatic overdrive, dispensing A$17 million in games assistance, including teams of sports medicine specialists. Together with Sogavare, he flew to Taro, the main town in the prime minister’s home province of Choiseul, to mark completion of the local airport’s hard surfacing and night-landing lights.

The Australian navy’s amphibious ship Choules arrived in early November to deliver two 4WD ambulances, vast numbers of uniforms and much other paraphernalia for the games, along with rolls of newsprint to keep Honiara’s two papers on the streets. A hundred Australian Federal Police officers flew in, on top of the fifty stationed in the Solomons since the 2019 troubles. New Zealand brought in two helicopters. The day the games opened, the US navy hospital ship Mercy arrived as part of the United States’ annual Pacific Partnership exercise, its great white bulk anchored off the city.

Australia won the VIP stakes at the opening ceremony, fielding governor-general David Hurley, who also used the opportunity to open new Australian aid projects. China came up only with Cai Dafeng, an architecture professor who is a vice-chairman of its National People’s Congress and leader of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, one of the eight tiny parties allowed in the NPC alongside the Chinese Communist Party. Despite the mission implied in his party’s name, Cai figures in the US sanctions list of officials alleged responsible for subverting Hong Kong’s limited democracy.

“The switch to China? I see some benefits in it,” Wickham says. “The best thing is the Americans have come back in, and the Australians are making more effort now. They are falling over themselves.”

Sogavare has played a hard game to fight back from his troubles of four years ago. Those troubles were driven by Daniel Suidani, then premier of Malaita, the country’s most populous island and historically the one that has sent out the most ambitious people to take advantage of the modern world.

Suidani, alone of the premiers, refused to back the switch to Beijing and cultivated continuing links to Taiwan. At one point he talked of a referendum about seceding. Sogavare’s supporters in the provincial government put up three motions of no-confidence to unseat him. The first failed. Street protests in the Malaita capital Auki prevented the second from getting to a vote. Early this year, though, the third was passed. Soon after, the central government used its supervisory powers to banish him from the provincial assembly, a move Suidani is still contesting in the courts.

While it lasted, Suidani’s defiance won support from anti-China hawks in Washington and Canberra. In a perhaps ill-judged move, the US government announced a US$25 million aid program for Malaita focused on sustainable village and forestry development. Honiara insisted such aid had to come through the central government, and when the US tried to send the funds via a civil contractor posing as a non-government organisation, the central government delayed work permits for its managers and experts.

Though some of those projects are visible in Malaita, Sogavare’s relationship with the Americans is still testy. A proposal from Washington in 2019 to resume sending Peace Corps volunteers, after a twenty-five-year absence, is still awaiting approval by Sogavare’s cabinet.

Although accusations of bribery have flown thick and fast around the votes of no-confidence that kept Sogavare in office and unseated Suidani — with sums of up to A$10,000 allegedly offered to MPs to switch sides — Ronnie Jethro Butala, the speaker of the Malaita assembly, says he saw no evidence of corruption. The explanation, he tells me, was simpler: Malaitans could see they were losing out.

“A lot of the Malaita public were getting tired of geopolitics,” he says. “No more funding was coming from the national government, and also the national government diverted all the projects from Malaita to other provinces. So it came to a stage where a lot of people said, ‘Okay, we are fed up of geopolitics, politics of different countries. We want the [provincial] government to go back to joining the [national] government so they look to ways to improve Malaita, especially with the roads and infrastructure.’”

As well as lacking development funding, Malaitans were being passed over for senior positions in the central government. Officials from the island used to be strongly represented among departmental secretaries, police commissioners and heads of authorities. Under Sogavare, preference has gone to officials from the Western and Choiseul provinces, the prime minister’s home ground. “A lot of experienced Malaitans now, most have found their way back to the village,” says Butala.

Still, Malaitans were used to being singled out and resented for their pushiness. “The black sheep within the flock,” he says. The idea of withdrawing from the Solomon Islands and going it alone isn’t dead. “My private view is that when you look at the resources in Malaita, [it] can become a very rich country if we have our independence,” he says. But a huge improvement in infrastructure would be needed first.

If the Pacific Games conclude successfully, Sogavare still faces the challenge of a severely stretched government budget and looming national elections, which have been postponed six months until next April. At sixty-eight, he is in his fourth period as prime minister and said to be anxious to finish his career with big achievements in infrastructure to bind the islands together.

The son of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Sogavare is admired for his discipline and focus. His main problem, says Wickham, is that his parliamentary supporters have little understanding of economics. “That’s his biggest downfall: he’s surrounded by politicians who just want to get rich out of the system.”

Like elections in surrounding Melanesian countries, next year’s vote  will be a contest of personalities and patronage networks. Formation of government will start only after results are declared in the country’s fifty electorates (fourteen of them in Malaita, where Suidani is forming a ticket) and MPs arrive in Honiara.

As for the geopolitics, voters will no doubt be swayed by the projects they see being built in their provinces and electorates. A good Chinese-built project would overcome the widespread antipathy this highly Christianised population feels towards China, says Wickham. “It’s like throwing a coconut into the sea — it will roll with the waves. That’s how we are reacting now.” •

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After the Marshall Islands entered into a compact of free association with Washington in 1986, its new parliament, the Nitijela, created a Nuclear Claims Tribunal to adjudicate claims for compensation for health and environmental legacies. Over the next twenty years Marshallese survivors and scientific experts provided the NCT with detailed information about the nuclear era and its impacts.

By the time the NCT began winding up in 2010, its judges had awarded a total of US$2.3 billion in compensation for property damage, loss of land use, personal injury, hardship and suffering, as well as for clean-up of contaminated lands. But the trust fund set up under the 1986 compact, with Washington’s one-off injection of US$150 million, fell well short of that figure. To this day, hundreds of millions of dollars of compensation remains unpaid.

That could have been the end of the story, but for a provision in the 1986 compact. The Marshall Islands government, says the compact, can seek further funding for nuclear legacies if it can demonstrate “changed circumstances.” Circumstances have changed, and that change came from an unexpected quarter: new archival material transferred from Washington to the Marshallese capital, Majuro, in the mid 1990s.

The cache of new material not only threw new light on the scope of the nuclear tests and their effects but also highlighted the importance of archival material for poorer countries seeking restitution for past injuries. In the Marshall Islands case, it came with an extra message: the need to preserve the archives assembled by the NCT over its two decades of operation, which were at risk of neglect and decay.

In December 1993, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, US energy secretary Hazel O’Leary announced the scheme that would help the Marshallese. Under the Clinton administration, O’Leary’s Openness Initiative aimed to increase transparency by opening up the United States’ cold war–era nuclear archives to scrutiny. Among the material to be made available would be many of the documents held by institutions involved in developing and testing nuclear weapons.

In March 1994, the Clinton administration created the Office of Human Radiation Experiments, or OHRE, to collate and release evidence of radiation research using human subjects during the second world war and the cold war. OHRE identified and catalogued documents drawn from 3.2 million cubic feet of archival records scattered across the United States. By the end of 1997, it had declassified more than ten million pages, including many records covering the Marshall Islands.

The US Department of Energy then released to the Marshall Islands government more than seventy boxes of newly declassified documents. They revealed that the spread of radioactive fallout from the 1954 Bravo test, as well as from other atmospheric tests that year, was much wider than previously acknowledged.

As one example, a US Atomic Energy Commission report from January 1955, “Radioactive Debris from Operation Castle, Islands of the Mid-Pacific,” listed two dozen islands and atolls in the Marshalls that received varying levels of fallout from all six of the 1954 hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.

The study shocked Marshallese leaders. For nearly forty years the US military had hidden documentary evidence showing fallout from the Bravo test series spreading across more than 11,000 square kilometres. Plumes of contamination had affected virtually every atoll in the island nation — not just the northern atolls close to the Bikini test site.

When I met then Marshallese president Dr Hilda Heine in Majuro in 2017, she told me these documents confirmed that eighteen other inhabited atolls or single islands had been contaminated by the tests. “The myth of only four ‘exposed’ atolls of Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utirik has shaped US nuclear policy on the Marshallese people since 1954,” she said, “which limited medical and scientific follow-up and compensation programs.”

It’s little surprise that the Openness Initiative was shuttered within a few years. In Restricted Data, his history of US nuclear secrecy, researcher Alex Wellerstein explains that Hazel O’Leary’s campaign for accountability and transparency was short-lived because openness “was increasingly seen as a political liability that had mollified few critics and drawn lots of attention to past misdeeds.”

As the shutters came down, documents about the testing program at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls began disappearing from the US Department of Energy website. In response, Wellerstein established a mirror site, the Marshall Islands Nuclear Document Database, preserving public access to more than 13,700 official documents that would otherwise be buried in the archives.

Prospects for further transparency are dire. When the US Public Interest Declassification Board examined the feasibility of declassifying more Marshall Islands records last year, it concluded that any reopening of nuclear-era archives would take up to six years, would cost between US$100 million and $200 million, and would need around a hundred staff “who are fully cleared at the Top Secret and Q levels” and “trained to identify and review technical nuclear weapons data.”

NCT staff recognised the importance of the survivor and expert testimony given to the tribunal’s hearings in the 1990s and early 2000s. These witness statements, recorded on audio and video cassettes, are vital evidence for any future litigation, especially with many of the witnesses ageing, ill or dying. Preserved, the recordings would also serve as an irreplaceable historical asset for future generations. But the Marshall Islands lacked the staff, finance and archival facilities to protect the fragile recordings. Who could assist?

Enter Trudy Huskamp Peterson, an archival luminary from the United States. Peterson spent twenty-four years with the US National Archives, including a period acting as the US Archivist. Since leaving government service, she has worked as an adviser and consultant for many developing countries, including archival training with Truth and Justice Commissions in South Africa and Honduras, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and worked with human rights groups preserving police archives in Guatemala.

Over many years, she has tackled the conundrum facing governments around the world: how do you protect information for reasons of privacy or national security while holding the security state to account?

“You do have the impulse from the security agencies that everything has got to be locked up forever,” she tells me, “but you also have the real impulse from the public to see what the government is doing in our name. Without public pressure, you do not get things declassified.”

The security agencies are generally over-cautious, says Peterson. “When we’ve opened things over their objections, the sky in general hasn’t fallen. Governments need to come to the realisation that these things can’t be closed forever. There has to be a time set in which you let the documentation go out. If it makes the security services look bad, so be it! But this is a terrible conundrum in most societies that have a modern security network.”

Recognising that the Marshall Islands lacked the resources to protect memory and history, Peterson seized the opportunity to work with staff in Majuro. “When I first got involved in the Marshall Islands,” she tells me, “we found a number of videos and many audio recordings of hearings of the tribunal. They were in terrible shape, as they’d been sitting in tropical heat for years.”

She says that preserving physical material is a real problem for poorer countries, but protecting electronic records also has its challenges. “It isn’t that the principles of creating archives change from paper to electronic, but the techniques do. All the technical equipment and skills that you have to have are different. Most countries like Palau or Kiribati can’t afford that. Internationally, we don’t have a good answer to that challenge.”

Throughout this period, NCT public advocate Bill Graham was a driving force in the effort to preserve the tribunal’s records. A former teacher and lawyer who arrived in the Marshall Islands as a Peace Corps volunteer, Graham retained an encyclopedic knowledge of the nuclear testing era, until his untimely death in March 2018.

Drawing on Peterson’s global network of archivists, Graham found support for the project halfway around the world, in the Catalan municipality of Girona in Spain. Peterson was friendly with Joan Boadas i Raset, who has served as the Girona Municipal Archivist since 1990 and is one of the world’s leading audiovisual preservation specialists.

Girona has a large museum of moving images and hosts an international conference most years to discuss the preservation of audiovisual heritage. As director of the city’s Centre for Image Research and Diffusion, Boadas had the technology that could assist the NCT. With some prodding from Trudy Peterson, he agreed to assist.

“I was sitting across the table from Joan at dinner one night,” she explains. “I said to him, ‘Let me tell you about this problem that I’ve got. Would you consider taking these materials in, cleaning them up, making a digital copy, then holding a copy and giving the originals back to the Marshall Islands?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I can do that’ and we shook hands across the table.”

The Marshall Islands government and the municipality of Girona signed an agreement in October 2012, agreeing to digitise and store irreplaceable NCT documents along with seventy-five videos and 428 cassette recordings. Bill Graham, travelling to a human rights conference in Geneva, took a suitcase filled with video and cassette tapes across the borders of the United States, Switzerland and Spain.

Staff at the Municipal Archive of Girona, known as AMGi, began work the following year to digitise the records — work donated by the city at no cost to the Marshall Islands government. At the time, the mayor of Girona was the Catalan politician Carles Puigdemont i Casamajó, a champion of self-determination and independence for the Catalan people. (Today, Puigdemont lives in exile, after Spain issued charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds against him and other independence activists who had overridden rulings by the Constitutional Court of Spain and organised a referendum on self-determination.)

For Joan Boadas, the role of the archivist is to recognise the power of memory: “Power for the benefit of administration and, therefore, institutions, businesses and people’s rights. Power to preserve memory. Power to avoid forgetting and, also, power itself because documents, archives, are an extraordinary tool for the future.” His centre returned the original documents along with hard drives of the digitised material to Majuro in early 2017.

Trudy Peterson then turned to another task: to find a third country that could safely store a copy of the Marshallese records in perpetuity.

“Most countries don’t want another institution holding important records,” she said. “But if you’re going to go underwater or the climate is so inhospitable, then getting a digital copy out is better than nothing. When we set out to find a safe haven for the Marshallese records, we probably could have found one in the United States. But that was the last place anyone would want those records to be stored, because they were the perpetrators of the nuclear testing.”

She turned to Switzerland, and obtained a grant from the Minister of Foreign Affairs to digitise key documents. Once again, she drew on her global network to find a Swiss non-government organisation to help NCT staff scan and save documentary records.

SwissPeace has a record of seeking safe havens for records, she says, whether the danger is from war, revolution, civil unrest or climate change. “That’s certainly the case for the Marshall Islands and probably for many other small island states in the Pacific and Caribbean,” says Peterson. “If you want to make a security copy to take outside the nation in danger, you have to make a copy first. But in general, in many cases, you don’t have a way of getting those records digitised in the first place.”

SwissPeace now administers a grant from the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs to preserve the records in perpetuity. “Working out this process with Swiss lawyers, for whom every comma and semi-colon has three meanings, was extraordinarily difficult,” Peterson laughs. “What can you see if you are a nuclear victim, or the victim’s lawyer, or a trustee? If you are an academic researcher, what can you access? If you’re a medical researcher, can you look at medical records but promise not to reveal people’s names? All of these kinds of questions had to be discussed laboriously between the two parties. We had to determine what would be restricted, and for how long, and who could have open access.”

In March 2016, the Marshall Islands Nitijela passed a resolution thanking the city and people of Girona, recognising “that the outstanding skills, talents and dedication involved in digitising and preserving the records of the Tribunal constitute a gift of inestimable value and serve to ensure that a major part of the documentation of the legacy and effects of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands will endure and not be lost or forgotten.”

Accepting an award for his archival work in 2022, Joan Boadas declared that “documents are the stuff of memory, even in this age of intangibility. One could even say that they are memory’s memory.”

He went on: “Are we to be in favour of amnesiac amnesties in the face of aggressive violations of human rights? Or should we go to the archives and the documents to find out what happened, who was responsible, who suffered the consequences and, from there, open up to reconciliation? If you like, it is as simple as this: documents allow forgiveness, but also prevent forgetting.” •

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Often acerbic and sometimes irascible in public, Hayden had a fine sense of humour, a passion for political intrigue and a liking for journalists. As Geoff Kitney noted in a tribute in the Australian Financial Review, he loved to hear and trade gossip, preferably salacious.

After a tour of the private quarters of Ferdinand and Imelda that day in 1986, Hayden emerged to present us newshounds with a global scoop. Imelda might have been famous for her vast wardrobe of shoes, but she also had another collecting passion. Her rooms, he gleefully reported, contained a formidable stash of pornographic cassette tapes.

Hayden is mostly remembered as the Labor leader whose keys to The Lodge were snatched by Bob Hawke; as the fleeting but steadying treasurer in the last inglorious days of the Whitlam government; and as a principal architect of Medicare and the landmark economic reforms of the 1980s. He should also be celebrated as one of Australia’s most determined and effective foreign ministers.

When he fell on his sword, enabling Hawke’s unstoppable ascendancy to the Labor leadership to go unchallenged on the cusp of the 1983 federal election, Hayden had already anointed Paul Keating as the next treasurer and instead took foreign affairs as his consolation prize.

In his five years in the job, he would lay the groundwork for a peace settlement in Cambodia, strengthen the campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime during Australia’s tenure on the UN Security Council and weather a period of bruising conflict with France over nuclear testing at Mururoa atoll, the Rainbow Warrior scandal and Paris’s intransigence on self-determination for its Polynesian subjects. He worked hard to build closer and deeper ties between Australia and its Asian and Pacific neighbours.

Hayden brought a stubborn determination and moral clarity to a job that saw him open talks over Cambodia with Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong in defiance of the United States, face down French bullying, and oversee a sensitive review of the ANZUS treaty. Through it all, he consistently spoke out in defence of what he saw to be Australia’s best interests.

In the same year as his visit to Manila, Hayden embarked on a grand tour of the nations of the South Pacific — if a two-week island-hopping expedition aboard an ageing Royal Australian Air Force Hawker Siddeley turboprop aircraft can be considered grand. At Funafuti, the tiny main island of Tuvalu, I vividly remember the plane almost getting bogged on the short grassy runway.

I missed another of the ports of call. The night before departure, a greatly amused Bill Hayden announced to his entourage over drinks, “We’re all off to Tonga tomorrow, but not Mr Baker, who has been declared persona non grata!” This is the first I knew of a ban imposed after I had detailed the extravagant lifestyle of the feudal court in Nuku‘alofa during an earlier visit to Tonga.

I rejoined the caravan in time for Western Samoa. On a free day, the travellers set off with togs and towels to a beautiful but treacherous beach on the north of the main island. To the consternation of his retinue, Hayden ignored the warnings, dived straight into the surf and swam far out to sea. Mercifully, Harold Holt’s fate was not replicated.

During the trip there was some engagement between the travelling journalists and the locals that went beyond the conventional scope of diplomatic intercourse. Hayden revelled in the gossip. At his first press conference at Old Parliament House after returning to Canberra he began by serenading one of the journalists with a variation on “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Hayden was also notorious for collecting outsized souvenirs on his global travels, many of them of dubious artistic merit. It was said that the garden of his Ipswich home was a Disneyland of kitsch, many of the pieces acquired on his travels around the world.

During a visit to Papua New Guinea Hayden alarmed his advisers by taking a particular shine to a large garamut, a slit drum fashioned from a tree trunk, that he spotted in the garden of the Mount Hagen hotel where his party was staying. Such was his enthusiasm that the hotel owner appeared to feel compelled to offer it as a gift to his distinguished guest.

The minders and the media — and perhaps the hotelier — concluded there was little risk of the gift being accepted given its great size and weight. Not so. By early the next morning it had been loaded aboard the VIP jet and found its way back to Ipswich via RAAF Amberley.

Throughout the tribulations and triumphs of his long political career, Hayden’s devotion to Dallas, his wife of sixty-two years, was a constant. In 1987 he was poised to travel to the frontline states of southern Africa at the height of the campaign against apartheid. It was a trip at the heart of Hayden’s determination to see an end to the racist regime in Pretoria — with the bonus of some exotic sightseeing and the chance to augment the Ipswich artefact collection. Days before departure, Dallas suffered a mental health episode and without hesitation Hayden cancelled the trip to stay with her while she recovered.

Among many fine tributes paid to Hayden in recent days was one by Laurie Oakes, former doyen of the Canberra press gallery. “They don’t come much better than Bill Hayden,” Oakes tweeted. “He would have made a great PM. Inheriting Bill’s policies and the people he’d put in key roles gave Hawke a head start. A politician in the finest Labor tradition. Humble, decent, clever, game as they come, Bill’s contribution was immense.”

Prime minister Anthony Albanese singled out Hayden’s achievements as foreign minister for particular praise: “Without Bill Hayden’s instinctive grasp of the relationship between facing our nation to the world and securing our prosperity for the future, the government in which he served might not have achieved the same degree of engagement in our region that still benefits Australia today.”

Had that vision been embraced and effectively driven by all of those who followed Hayden as foreign minister, Australia might not be struggling with some of the formidable challenges it now faces with its neighbours, not least in the South Pacific. •

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As we walked across the village’s central playing field after church, Wea described the scene there just over thirty-five years ago: seven French military helicopters, two dozen army trucks, and some 300 French special forces and police sharpshooters ready for action. In the bush near Gossanah, nineteen Kanaks were holding twenty-three French police hostage. They had raided the island’s gendarmerie, met more resistance than expected and killed four police before decamping to a remote cave with seized weapons and their hostages.

The raid was intended to be part of a territory-wide show of force by the Melanesians in support of independence for the country they called Kanaky. Seven months earlier, in September 1987, a narrow majority of white and other settlers had voted in a referendum to remain with France. The Kanaks had boycotted the poll in the belief that the result had been preset by officially encouraged immigration in previous decades. Kanaks had occupied traditional lands in the north of the main island, a settler ambush had killed ten Kanaks, and in January 1988, a sharpshooter had killed a Kanak would-be guerilla leader holed up in a seized farmhouse.

Despite the planning, the Ouvéa rebels found themselves acting alone in April–May 1988 — and a tough reaction to the kidnapping offered France’s ambitious conservative prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a chance to boost his prospects in the looming national presidential elections.

Just three days before Chirac faced off with Socialist incumbent François Mitterrand in the second round of the election, and after half-hearted negotiations for a peaceful surrender, Chirac ordered an all-out assault on the cave. Sixteen Kanaks were killed during the attack, two executed after their capture, and their leader was allowed to die of wounds without medical attention. Two soldiers died, and all the hostages were freed.

As it turned out, Mitterrand prevailed in the election. Chirac was replaced as PM by a Socialist, Michel Rocard, who brought the shocked Kanak leader, former Catholic priest Jean-Marie Tjibaou, and the loyalist leader, businessman Jacques Lafleur, to Matignon near Paris, locked them in, and presented a plan. Putting off a vote on independence for ten years, it pledged more training and involvement for Kanaks, and more investment in rural and island lands.

Tjibaou made a unilateral decision and signed the deal. Lafleur did too. They shook hands for a photo. And so the Matignon Accord was born. A decade later, in 1998, the Nouméa Accord postponed the independence decision for another fifteen to twenty years, when it would be put to three spaced-out referendums to make sure every voter made a considered choice.

Many Kanaks — among them Charles Wea’s uncle, a former protestant pastor named Djubelly Wea — had misgivings. A strong believer in independence, Djubelly had been among Gossanah villagers detained and roughed up by French troops looking for the cave. After the troops’ assault, he and twenty-eight others were jailed for several months in Paris without trial.

When Tjibaou came to Ouvéa on the first anniversary of the cave attack to speak at the burial site of the nineteen Kanaks, Djubelly stepped forward, shouted, “Long live Kanaky! Long live independence!” then pulled out a pistol and shot dead the former priest and his deputy, Yeiwéné Yeiwéné. A bodyguard then fatally shot their assailant too.

Walking through Gossanah, Wea and I came to a small, tiered garden with walls of coral rock that turned out to be Djubelly’s grave. Back in Nouméa, his victim, Tjibaou, is venerated as a kind of Gandhi or Mandela of the Pacific, and an Oceanic cultural centre designed by Renzo Piano is named after him. I asked Charles how his uncle’s reputation stands now.

His answer shocked me. “A lot of people think he was right,” the Kanak diplomat said. “They are saying: after more than thirty years of talk, where have we got?” Shocking it might have been, but his answer chimed with the sense that the politics of New Caledonia have come in a grand circle since 1987, with an increasing risk of an explosion like the Ouvéa cave drama.

When the time came for the series of three independence referendums promised in the Nouméa Accord, the French government was back in the hands of a conservative president, Emmanuel Macron. Like his predecessors, left and right, Macron was against giving the Kanaks any more voting weight than other French citizens, though the accord had “frozen” the electoral roll at 1998 to keep out later immigrants.

In the first referendum, in 2018, the vote for independence was 43 per cent. By the second, in 2020, it had grown to 47 per cent. The third vote was looming as a close-run thing at the end of 2021. Then, in September that year, Covid-19’s Delta variant swept through New Caledonia, quickly infecting over 13,000 of its 270,000 people. More than 280 of them died, about 60 per cent of them Kanaks.

With its communities having embarked on the customary year of mourning, the Kanak parties begged for the referendum to be postponed for a year. Quarantine restrictions limited movement, adding to the disadvantages faced by Kanak parties campaigning with village meetings while the urbanised loyalists could rely on the internet.

Macron, for his part, was facing his first re-election test in April 2022. His competition came from the further right, notably Marine Le Pen. He needed a boost for French national pride, especially after Scott Morrison delivered his humiliating submarine decision in September 2021.

When he and territories minister Sébastien Lecornu insisted the New Caledonia vote go ahead, the Kanak parties decided on a boycott. Participation fell from around 86 per cent in the earlier two independence votes to 43.9 per cent, with the non-voters concentrated in Kanak regions. Of those who voted, 96.5 per cent chose No and only 3.5 per cent Yes.

The result was immediately declared “null and void” by the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a forum of Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. The Pacific Islands Forum — a wider regional grouping that includes Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian states as well as Australia and New Zealand — was more diplomatic: the boycott needed to be considered in “the contextual consideration and analysis of the result.”

Unfazed, Macron declared that “France is more beautiful because New Caledonia decided to stay.” Local opponents of independence were also jubilant. “Tonight we are French and we will stay that way. It’s no longer negotiable,” said fervent loyalist Sonia Backès, president of the Southern Province region. To her, the Nouméa Accord was defunct, allowing the electoral rolls to be thrown open to more recent arrivals and special economic support for Kanak-dominated regions to be wound up.

Macron echoed these sentiments when he visited New Caledonia in July this year accompanied by a squadron of Rafale fighters and their air refuellers and transports designed to demonstrate France’s ability to swing military power into the Pacific. New Caledonia was French because it had chosen to be French in three referendums, he told a crowd of 10,000 tricolour-waving Europeans and Polynesians in Nouméa’s Place des Cocotiers.

Now the next stage of economic development could begin, he said, transforming locally mined nickel into a low-cost green-energy industry and expanding agriculture. The voice of France would resonate across the Indo-Pacific, boosted by a new military academy in the territory for the region’s armed forces. “If independence is to choose tomorrow to have a Chinese base, here, or be dependent on other fleets, good luck!” he declared.

On the political future, he invited loyalists and independence parties to a trilateral dialogue, mentioning more than once that the freeze on the electoral roll had always been “transitional” and had led to “exclusions and frustrations.” He had already inducted Backès into government as a junior minister, responsible for citizenship.

Macron then travelled on to Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, where he declared France was an “enhancer of sovereignty” for Pacific island nations, helping protect them against a “new imperialism.” The ironies were not lost on his audiences.

Kanak and loyalist parties were back in Paris for those talks last month, and will continue negotiating in Nouméa later this month. In Paris, Macron’s prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, now presiding over a minority government, put forward what was described, strangely, as a document martyr, a paper to be chewed over and torn apart before taking any final form.

On the critical question of electoral eligibility, the new external territories minister, Gérald Darmanin, revealed voters in territorial and regional elections would need to have been born in New Caledonia or resident for ten years. Whether or not the pro-independence alliance, FLNKS, agreed, the electoral roll would be “unfrozen” in this way before provincial elections due by May 2024.

Questions of self-determination, meanwhile, would be deferred for at least “two generations” from a new accord, Darmanin said — probably about sixty years. “There is no longer a sword of Damocles,” he added, although only the loyalists had felt thus threatened.

Aside from the backlash among Melanesian countries, Macron’s decision is seen as folly by some seasoned observers in New Caledonia, and appears likely to raise tensions and threaten unrest. Mathias Chauchat, a public law professor at the University of New Caledonia, says Macron is being likened to Bonaparte, who listened to no advice, even from his own ambassadors. “The French politicians are living in the past, in the 1960s,” he tells me. “I don’t understand it. It’s crazy. France is not a modern state like the other democracies.”

Others I spoke to wondered if the Kanak leadership would have the stomach to abandon their comfortable positions, as Macron is gambling they won’t. But being ousted after the electoral roll changes could harden their attitude. A return to violent protest was likely, and could happen without much warning. Chauchat shares those fears. “If you lose the majority, you have to go on the street, the terrain,” he says. “It would lead to unrest.”

I recount the remark Charles Wea had made at his uncle’s grave to Patrice Godin, a social anthropologist who has studied and lived among the Kanaks for decades. For Godin, Wea’s remark reinforces the risks of changing the electoral system to make any real decolonisation unimaginable for a long time.

“When political negotiations fail, it is not the most open and moderate leaders who prevail, but the most radical,” says Godin. “One wonders whether the French government is aware of this. I am currently sensing great concern among Kanak elected representatives and political decision-makers. If they fail to change the government’s policy, they know that their activists, their voters and the majority of the Kanak population will withdraw their support.”

These leaders are already facing a great deal of criticism, he adds. “If the government doesn’t listen to them, it will contribute to the rise of a new generation of Kanak politicians who will be less conciliatory than those they are discussing with today. This may take time, but it is inevitable. Kanak demands are too far advanced for the movement to die out.”

True, Godin says, the thirty-five years since the Matignon Accord have changed the Kanak people and their way of life, producing more graduates, managers and intellectuals. “But this evolution has in no way altered the Kanak desire for decolonisation. Quite the contrary, as shown by the results of the three referendum consultations on the way out of the Nouméa Accord. We might even say that this desire is more considered and it is a result of the changes that have taken place.”

The nationalist idea has matured to the point where the Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa and some other Kanak leaders are talking of “interdependence” with France following a transfer of sovereignty, an arrangement that recalls the pacts of free association the Cook Islands have with New Zealand or the Marianas with the United States.

While full independence was “false gold” for the Kanak parties, “it’s very difficult for them to ask for an associated state because they think France will lie to them,” Chauchat says. “There is no trust between the current French government and the Kanaks. If you want an agreement, you need trust first.”

Such an idea was proposed by Mitterrand’s high commissioner in Nouméa, Edgard Pisani, during the 1987–88 troubles, and would achieve decolonisation while maintaining French military bases. (The Kanak parties have no interest in building their own military.) But the option has since been studiously ignored by Paris, perhaps because it might win local support.

“There is no other solution, and definitely no solution in France,” says Chauchat, adding: “France never honours its words. It has always failed in its decolonisation processes… It will end in tragedy like everywhere.” The best option now for the Kanaks is to prevent the opening up of the electoral roll and keep the dream of independence alive, he says. “We have to wait.”

Macron still needs to persuade New Caledonia’s parties to agree to his new plan, and then his minority government must win a 60 per cent vote of approval from a joint sitting of the national assembly and senate to amend the French constitution, into which the Nouméa Accord is written. He is hoping his show of French force against China will win regional sympathy, which seems unlikely. The island states have no particular liking for China, but they will take its money and projects, and they will use its perceived threat to get more out of the other powers.

“If, as President Macron claims, France’s project is to contribute to the creation of an Indo-Pacific axis to stem Chinese expansion in the region, it will have to be admitted into the club of states of the region,” Godin says. “For the moment, this is proving difficult. The small island states see France as it is in the region, one of the last old-style colonial powers. All these countries are in favour of New Caledonian independence, and more or less openly support Kanak nationalist claims.”

France lacks the resources for a region-wide aid and development effort. And the United States and its allies need the support of the island states against Chinese coercion. “From this point of view, France is more of a pebble in their shoe than a reliable and legitimate ally,” says Godin. “By clinging to the last shreds of its colonial past, France is in fact a cumbersome ally.”

Still, Macron’s ambition, recalling Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, has its fans. Many Australians sympathise with Macron over the submarine affair and appreciate the way he called out Morrison as a liar. Richard Marles, the defence minister, is said to have struck a rapport with his French counterpart, Sébastien Lecornu, the same man who as territories minister helped push through the third referendum in New Caledonia. Marles is due in Nouméa in December for a gathering of Pacific defence ministers hosted by Lecornu.

Potentially complicating Australia’s approach was foreign minister Penny Wong’s appointment in March of Australia’s first ambassador for First Nations people, Justin Mohamed. The ambassador’s office, she said, “enables deep engagement with many of our closest partners including the Pacific family” and embeds Indigenous perspectives in Australian foreign policy.

Yet when she visited New Caledonia in April, Wong failed to acknowledge that the Kanaks — who were the first to settle its islands some 3000 years ago and now make up 42 per cent of the population (with Europeans accounting for 24 per cent, according to the most recent census, in 2019) — should be accorded a special right of decolonisation. “Institutional arrangements in New Caledonia are a matter for the people of New Caledonia and the French state,” was as far as she went, while repeatedly praising the French contribution to “security and prosperity in the Pacific.”

Of course, if Wong does want to raise the First Nations angle at some point — always difficult given Australia’s history — a No majority in our own referendum this month won’t help.

Meanwhile, though, pro-French loyalists are losing ground overall in the Pacific. In French Polynesia, the independence party led by veteran nuclear-testing opponent Oscar Temaru has won a majority in the assembly and now leads an autonomous government. In New Caledonia, a Kanak has just won a seat in the French senate for the first time after a vote-swapping deal with a dissident loyalist who beat Backès for the other seat. Every year recently, about 2000 white residents pack up and leave, gradually shifting the demographics, and métissage (intermarriage) between Kanaks and Polynesian migrants is on the rise.

Bonapartist or Gaullist, Macron is unheeding. His policies could well be driving New Caledonia back to the tense days of the 1980s, a condition of civil war. Younger Kanaks may see violence as a way of speeding up the French exodus. “Emmanuel Macron seems to be blinded by his ambitions for France and to understand nothing of what is happening today in New Caledonia and in the Pacific,” says Patrice Godin. “I still want to believe that it’s not too late to wake up.” •

The post France’s stubborn grip appeared first on Inside Story.

Kremer and I met the day after the announcement of the decision to close a daily newspaper published for more than fifty years. Staff were still coming to terms with the news, uncertain whether they would be paid their final wages and benefits.

It’s true that New Caledonia, a French Pacific dependency of 274,000 people, has a vibrant media landscape, with a range of weekly magazines, two TV stations and many commercial radio outlets. But the death of its sole daily newspaper comes at a crucial time, with supporters and opponents of independence debating future relations with France.

Founded in 1971, Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes soon saw off its only daily competitor, the venerable France Australe, which closed its doors after ninety years in 1979. To begin with, the new paper was a partisan broadsheet, promoting the interests of local business owners and campaigning against independence from France. It made little pretence of impartiality during the armed conflict that divided New Caledonia in the mid 1980s, denigrating indigenous Kanak and editorialising in favour of the anti-independence party, Rally for New Caledonia in the Republic.

The paper was bought in 1987 by Groupe Hersant Média, France’s largest media conglomerate at the time. A decade later, after the death of founder Robert Hersant, a financial crisis forced Hersant to sell off many media outlets, including Les Nouvelles, at fire-sale prices. In 2013, three local business figures formed the Melchior Group to take over the paper and affiliated businesses. Melchior’s majority owner was New Caledonian businessman Jacques Jeandot, with mining magnate Charles Montagnat and former supermarket owner Charles Lavoix sharing the remaining 41 per cent.

“Hersant sold the paper for global reasons related to its media group and the great difficulties it was facing in Europe,” explains Kremer. “That wasn’t the case in New Caledonia, where it was making a lot of money. At the time, Mr Jeandot had been considering setting up a newspaper in competition with Les Nouvelles, so he seized the opportunity by investing in the paper.” It was an investment driven by the heart, adds Kremer, who believes Jeandot never made much money from the paper.

The Melchior Group also owned printing presses, a range of giveaway magazines, Les Editions du Caillou publishing house and radio station NRJ-Nouvelle-Calédonie.

From the start, the new owners faced significant competition, including from French government–owned TV and radio stations. Many advertisers moved onto social media, and partisan media organisations received subsidies from the administrations in New Caledonia’s three provinces. A long delay in upgrading the Les Nouvelles website and investing in new technology contributed to a loss of readership.

The Covid-19 pandemic added to the financial pressures. Advertising slumped further and costs rose, prompting a hiring and investment freeze and an effort to reduce expenses by refusing to replace departing staff. Then in late 2022 the company decided to drop the paper’s print edition. It sold off its largest printing presses and went completely online at the end of December, placing a question mark over the future of other Melchior publications, like the weekly Le Gratuit, which used the daily’s print distribution network.

These dramatic changes reverberated across New Caledonia. The rural Northern Province and the outlying Loyalty Islands Province relied on the paper and smaller local media such as Caledonia TV, the monthly magazine Le Pays and occasional newssheets issued by the provincial governments. For Pierre-Chanel Tutugoro, mayor of the east coast town of Ponerihouen, one of Les Nouvelles’s strengths was its local inserts and regular reports from the provinces and rural towns. “For local mayors,” he says, “it was an important way to reach out to the community. Now that’s gone and it’s unfortunate.”

As has happened elsewhere, the rapid spread of smartphone technology has transformed New Caledonia’s media landscape, though unevenly. Nearly half the population can access the web through their mobile phones, but access to quality broadband — and even electricity — varies greatly between urban centres and isolated villages in the central mountain chain and the outer islands, where the population is majority Kanak.

Tutugoro, who is also secretary-general of the largest independence party, Union Calédonienne, believes the decision to halt the print edition undercut the economics of Les Nouvelles. “They went online, but that effectively meant they were giving it away,” he says. “Even in the deep valleys in the mountains near Hienghène or in Ponerihouen where people have 4G, you could get the news each day at 6am. People who had a subscription were sharing the online version on social media.”

The shift to digital-only was too little, too late. On the afternoon of 10 March, less than three months after the print edition closed, Melchior’s owners announced that the company would file for liquidation. Supporters of the group’s 120 employees rallied in front of the Les Nouvelles offices, but the court announced the liquidation of the company a week later.

“It’s a brutal procedure,” the paper’s executive director, Yves Delauw, told local media. “We have to do things very quickly, because we could not make this announcement several weeks in advance and continue working in this context. From the moment the court pronounces the liquidation, everything goes very quickly.”

The thirty-strong branch of the Société des Journalistes at Les Nouvelles deplored “the refusal of management to listen to the proposals and suggestions that we have made in recent years.” Management’s reluctance to take on new journalists and invest in new technology for the digital edition had led, staff believed, to a downward spiral.

While commercial considerations drove the decision, the complex politics of French colonialism was also a factor in the demise of Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes.

In the early years of publication, Les Nouvelles and the French government broadcaster RFO were the main sources of daily news for New Caledonians. Both were fiercely critical of the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, a coalition of pro-independence parties.

In 1985, faced with these dominant conservative voices, the independence movement sought support from trade unions in Australia, New Zealand and various Pacific island nations to establish a community station, Radio Djiido. Together with the short-lived magazine Bwenando, Djiido was the only outlet to provide alternative views during the violent clashes of the 1980s.

Decades later, Radio Djiido still operates on a shoestring, broadcasting news, talkback, feature interviews and music. Commercial radio stations and government broadcaster NC1ère, meanwhile, continue to air more conservative views. Coverage of competing perspectives has certainly improved in recent years, but most media outlets still editorialise against the FLNKS and oppose ending French colonial rule.

“Even though Les Nouvelles was controlled by Mr Jeandot, Mr Lavoix and Mr Montagnat — all businessmen who might be described as loyalists to the French Republic — we remained a neutral newspaper,” says Thierry Kremer. The paper’s openness was its “added value,” he goes on, “but it created problems, in that you need to be aligned to a political group or party in order to receive major subsidies.”

Independence activists don’t agree with that assessment of the paper’s strengths. While journalists like Yann Mainguet sought to maintain comprehensive coverage of statements from FLNKS leaders, many activists scoff at the notion that Les Nouvelles was an impartial voice. They haven’t forgotten the appointment of Fabrice Rouard, a former spin doctor at Noumea Town Hall, a bastion of the loyalist parties, as editor-in-chief in December 2013. Rouard notoriously told staff that the flag of Kanaky, the symbol of the independence movement and the Kanak people, should not appear in photos on the front page of the paper.

“Fundamentally, this country lacks balanced media,” says long-time independence leader Roch Wamytan. “In terms of the written press, it’s completely unbalanced. When you look at Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, you can’t say that it supported us!” In radio, by contrast, he sees more open debate. “We have a radio station that supports independence, and the other parties have stations like RRB. But for newspapers and magazines, there’s no such balance. There are monthly or quarterly newsletters, but the independence movement has never been able to find the finance to create a daily here.”

In his role as president of the Congress, New Caledonia’s legislature, Wamytan quickly issued a statement of concern about the decision to close Les Nouvelles altogether. French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc was more measured: “This emblematic daily newspaper has provided information to the population of New Caledonia for more than half a century. Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes benefited from various assistance to the press, particularly during the Covid pandemic, which, alas, was not enough to maintain activity.”

For staff members like Thierry Kremer, these sentiments provide little comfort. “We didn’t receive any support from the Southern Province, the Northern Province or the Government of New Caledonia, even when we were in some difficulty,” he says. “It is my personal opinion that, for them, it’s not a bad thing that we’ve closed. There are now people speaking out to help us as employees, but they weren’t there when we were in trouble.”

The paper’s journalists express anger or disdain at the muted response of New Caledonia’s political elite. As the Société des Journalistes noted in its formal statement, “The loss of the only daily press title in the country, with an indifferent response from politicians and institutions, is a disaster for democracy, in particular in view of the electoral deadlines awaiting New Caledonians.”

Les Nouvelles’s demise comes at a time when New Caledonians need accurate information more than ever. After three referendums on self-determination between 2018 and 2021, political leaders are now debating whether to replace the 1998 Noumea Accord, an agreement that has governed politics, society and the economy for the past twenty-five years. Time is short to strike a deal before the next provincial and congressional elections, scheduled for May 2024.

Three separate delegations travelled to Paris in mid April for bilateral discussions with French prime minister Élisabeth Borne and interior and overseas minister Gérald Darmanin. Despite the positive dialogue, fundamental differences remain over the way forward.

Embedded in the French constitution, the Noumea Accord can only be changed by a three-fifths majority in a joint meeting of the French National Assembly and the Senate — a level of support that seems unlikely at the moment. President Emmanuel Macron lost his majority in the National Assembly in France’s June 2022 legislative elections. His recent decision to force through changes to pensions and the retirement age has crippled his standing in public opinion polls and eroded his political capital.

The French government has nevertheless proposed a short timetable to agree on a new political statute that would keep New Caledonia within the French Republic. After last month’s talks, the overseas minister will visit Noumea in late May, with Macron following — possibly in July — in the hope of finalising an agreement by September. For the French government, this would open the way for reform of the French constitution in early 2024.

The independence movement, rejecting this timetable, has so far refused to engage in trilateral negotiations with the French state and loyalist anti-independence parties. Union Calédonienne’s Pierre-Chanel Tutugoro says the FLNKS wants Paris to agree to a new treaty and a clear timetable for a transition to an independent and sovereign state.

“Our proposed treaty highlights issues related to interdependence with the French state, during a period of transition after independence,” he said. “This will ensure there is no rupture with France. We’re following in the footsteps set by our forebears, seeking independence with full sovereignty, but with ongoing, albeit different, ties with France.”

Within this complex debate, Tutugoro says the closure of the daily newspaper makes it difficult to share accurate information across the community. “If we do nothing,” he says, “we leave our community at the mercy of social media, where many people get their news. But on social media, there’s not much filtering of ‘fake news’ or political posturing or outright lying — so it’s irresponsible to rely on it.”

Not surprisingly, Thierry Kremer agrees. “I hope that, for New Caledonia’s sake, a daily paper can be revived,” he says. “But would such a paper be as neutral as we were? The problem is that there will soon be provincial elections, which will be very important. I don’t understand why the French government didn’t step in, given the political context and the need to maintain neutral, accurate information in the territory.”

What’s next? The Les Nouvelles website and photo archive are a historical resource that must be preserved, but they are also a valuable asset as the liquidators seek to pay off staff, shareholders and creditors. (Disclosure: as a long-time subscriber to the newspaper I am technically a creditor, though I’m not holding my breath awaiting a small refund for the balance of my annual subscription.)

Les Nouvelles is gone, but in an increasingly polarised political context, new media may yet emerge. Local conservative politicians and business figures are discussing new projects, with conservative magazines like Actu.nc and Demain en Nouvelle-Calédonie looking at the economics of daily publishing.

Last year, businessman and former right-wing politician Didier Leroux made a significant investment in the radio station Océane FM, as the basis of a new TV station. The new channel, dubbed NC9, would likely receive significant financial subsidies from New Caledonia’s Southern Province under its president Sonia Backès, leader of the loyalist bloc in New Caledonia’s Congress.

Backès also serves as citizenship minister in the French government in Paris. With the audiovisual sector under the control of the French state rather than the government of New Caledonia, approval for editorial outlets opposed to independence will likely receive a sympathetic hearing. Commerce and politics are transforming the media landscape. •

The post Death of a newspaper appeared first on Inside Story.

That the two officials — diplomat Nick Warner and former army officer Paul Symon — had gone on to head the Australian Secret Intelligence Service was a twist Sogavare must have noticed. Warner and Symon might have had close knowledge of the Solomons, and of Sogavare himself, but their ASIS links were also a reminder that Canberra could act behind the scenes if it wanted.

Which is what it did. Australian intelligence leaked the text of the Solomons–China security pact to Sogavare’s most feared domestic rival, Daniel Suidani, premier of the populous island of Malaita. Suidani, who had fallen out with Sogavare when the latter switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing in 2019, had continued to deal with Taipei and talked of possible secession.

Jawboning by Scott Morrison and Joe Biden’s administration had persuaded Sogavare to disavow any intent to allow Chinese military bases. Yet he went ahead and signed the security pact anyway.

In response to the leak, Sogavare’s critics in the national parliament moved a vote of no-confidence. It failed amid allegations that Chinese interests had bribed MPs to support the prime minister. Mobs opposed to the deal looted and burned large parts of Honiara, including its thriving Chinatown. Australia and New Zealand sent in police and soldiers. Australia and China then competed to supply weapons and vehicles to the Royal Solomon Islands Police. (The country of 700,000 has no military.)

Meanwhile, an attempt by Beijing to broaden its foothold turned into a debacle. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi stormed a Pacific Islands Forum session in Fiji offering a broad security pact with the ten island states that recognise Beijing. He was rebuffed for trying to pre-empt the extensive consultation that such regional initiatives require.

The crisis was over. But strategic rivalry simmers. Last year, thirty-three Solomons police officers went to China for extended training. Just before Anthony Albanese visited Port Moresby in January to cajole PNG’s James Marape into a bilateral security treaty and announce expanded seasonal worker places, Beijing gave the PNG defence force a new hospital. The United States might have reopened its embassy in Honiara, but when Sogavare hosts the South Pacific Games in a new Chinese-built stadium this November, a VIP from Beijing will no doubt be guest of honour.

In Australia, meanwhile, the perceived Chinese threat in the Pacific has created a school of academic and think-tank study. As Michael Wesley observes in the superb first chapter of his new history of RAMSI, Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, Australia’s worries tap into an old seam. Denial of the Pacific to anti-Western interests is “arguably the foundational imperative of Australian international policy,” Wesley argues. Hence the “disproportional reactions” when Pacific states court deals with potentially hostile interests, which have included the Soviet Union, Gaddafi’s Libya and Chavez’s Venezuela.

At such moments, Canberra is wont to call on its imperial friends, the British and now the Americans, to do the heavy lifting in defence and aid. “Australia’s engagement with the Pacific is a story of passion outstripping actions, of ambitions outstripping abilities,” Wesley writes. “It is a record of long stretches of lassitude and inattention punctuated by intense periods of concern and engagement.”

If pieces like David Kilcullen’s essay in the latest edition of Australian Foreign Affairs can get a run then we are in one of those intense periods. Stepping outside his usual field of counterinsurgency, Kilcullen makes much of China’s vaunted but largely untested claims to have “carrier-busting” steerable ballistic missiles, and conjures up a Chinese thrust down through the Pacific like that of Japan in 1942, using island missile bases to cut us off from America.

Why it would want to do this is unfathomable. Unlike Japan at that time, China has all the petroleum and strategic minerals it wants from willing sellers like Australia. Its military focus is on securing the South China Sea for its ballistic missile submarine force and keeping up pressure on Taiwan. Forces projected into the South Pacific would be sitting ducks. But, says Kilcullen, don’t look at intent, look at capabilities. By this measure, I’d add, India is also a threat.

Rory Medcalf, who heads the spook school known as the National Security College at the Australian National University, accepts China’s “neo-colonial ambitions” in the Pacific as a given, but is more nuanced. A Chinese military base would be a direct threat, he says. “But even absent that scenario, the prospect of a Pacific island government turning to the guns and truncheons of a one-party nationalist megastate to supress domestic dissent is confronting.”

Again unconsciously tapping into the buck-passing tradition traced by Wesley, he sees Australia acting as a “guide and an informal coordinator” for powers in Europe, North America and Asia “poised to help the Pacific cope with China’s disruptive power.” But he also has to acknowledge that the “Indo-Pacific” perspective of which he has been a leading proponent can be seen by Pacific islanders as diluting their regional identity and demanding they take America’s side against China.

On that score, there have been no takers. As Wesley remarked at the launch of his book, the attitude of Pacific governments to Chinese aid and investment is “bring it on.” The region has never had so much aid from, and access to, Australia and other US-aligned powers.

Peter Connolly, a recently retired Australian army colonel who recently finished an ANU doctorate on China in Melanesia, shows in his Australian Foreign Affairs essay, “Grand Strategy,” just how flexible, resourced and patient China’s approach to the region is becoming. The last few years have seen a leap in the quality of its diplomats posted to Melanesian capitals: two senior colonels of the People’s Liberation Army intelligence branch became defence attachés in Port Moresby and Suva in 2020; elsewhere, in countries without militaries, senior police officers are posted as liaison officers.

Senior colonel Zhang Xiaojiang found the PNG defence force less open to cultivation, so he has concentrated on the under-resourced Royal PNG Constabulary, upgrading its CCTV surveillance in Port Moresby, funding a new medical clinic and sending in riot-control equipment ahead of last year’s elections. “By sensing gaps and enquiring about needs he gradually discovered ways to develop appreciation for the PRC” — the People’s Republic of China — “and appeared to learn from PNG’s traditional partners in the process,” Connolly writes.

Police forces across Melanesia certainly have plenty of resource gaps. By focusing on a Chinese military threat that seems quite improbable, our security watchdogs are barking up the wrong tree, ignoring the real security issues facing Pacific islanders, particularly in Melanesia.

Only in Fiji do the police have anything like the numbers widely seen as appropriate to population: some 3000 officers for 900,000 people. And it was there, during Frank Bainimarama’s recently ended prime ministership, that the police became an instrument of political repression without much Chinese assistance.

Solomon Islands has 1150 police for its 736,000 population, and PNG only 7300 (including reserves) for a population generally put somewhere around ten million. The PNG force has hardly grown since independence in 1975, while the population has trebled.

Few citizens rely on the PNG police for help. If they do, they must pay, ostensibly for fuel and other call-out expenses but also with an element of straight-out bribery. The police can be brutal, corrupt and under-trained. Often, they act as guns for hire used by loggers and other commercial interests to repress local communities. It’s for these reasons that citizens report crime and conflict to traditional elders, pastors in their church or neighbourhood committees in urban settlements.

A recent study for the PNG-Australia Policing Partnership, a forum for the police leadership in both countries, urged a doubling of PNG police numbers, an annual budget lift of around $51 million and a one-off injection of $1.6 billion to provide the resources the force needs to do its job.

Sinclair Dinnen, a long-term ANU-based scholar of the region’s crime and security, doubts this is the answer. “The police have to be better looked after,” he tells me after his recent field trip to PNG. “But in some ways there’s an argument for having a small, well looked after, professional force who have enough fuel and access to transport, who are skilled up in investigations and doing the policing kind of thing.”

At grassroots level, Dinnen sees another tier of security modelled on the “community auxiliary police” New Zealand has been funding in Bougainville since the end of the civil war there two decades ago. The island has only three police stations, often unmanned. The auxiliary police, drawn from communities, are often better educated than the regular police; in consultation with local chiefs, they deal with less serious crimes.

In some parts of PNG, Dinnen concedes, restoring law and order requires more than this hybrid model. He points to regions like Hela and Enga, where winners and losers emerge from large-scale resource projects and rivals fight it out with military-grade firearms. “You get what are low levels of insurgency, in fact,” he says. “And no police force should be expected to deal with that.”

Wesley’s book shows us that RAMSI strayed into this field of community policing for a while. After the initial success in restoring peace, “a cultural divide between modes of policing, which came to be seen as ‘Western’ versus ‘Pacific’ ways, began to open up,” he writes. Australian and New Zealand officers were seen as enforcement-oriented and aloof. Police from the Pacific islands invested time and effort in building links to local communities, taking care to respect cultural and religious values and acknowledge traditional leadership structures.

The islands police “understood the importance of sharing food, attending church, and working with traditional kastom processes to help resolve disputes,” writes Wesley. With police likely to be underfunded once RAMSI packed up, it was a good model. But for reasons Wesley doesn’t explain the pilot scheme’s funding ended after five years; presumably the scheme was beyond Canberra’s comprehension.

Wesley, who was deputy director of the Office of National Assessments at the time, sees an unusual confluence in the circumstances that gave birth to RAMSI. The Solomons government was on its knees and bankrupt; John Howard was flush with his accidental success in East Timor; and, with the disaster of Iraq still to become apparent, it was the high-water mark of muscular Western nation-rebuilding intervention.

It is hard now to think of any government that would allow large numbers of foreign police and finance officials — with legal immunity, investigative and arrest powers, and tax-free status — to handle a country’s security.

For all the diplomatic nuances used to gain regional cover for Australia’s intervention and the initial restoration of civil order, though, RAMSI gradually ran out of steam as local politicos reasserted their role as distributors of state resources. Within five years of RAMSI’s departure, Australia was again sending in riot police and soldiers to quell unrest and providing more lethal firearms to local police.

Now, Canberra’s focus is elsewhere, as it orders longer-range anti-ship and land-attack missiles to fend off the perceived threat of an attack by China. The Australian Federal Police has set up a new Pacific branch directed at border security and drug smuggling — our problems — rather than nurturing models of policing that suit Pacific communities. Dinnen, for one, suggests Canberra needs to cool it. “Sogavare is not going to be there forever, and in Honiara and PNG below the elite level there’s a lot of anti-Chinese racism that breaks out in urban areas.”

In her essay in the latest Australian Foreign Affairs, Solomons journalist Dorothy Wickham cites community-level fears of where the Chinese embrace might take the government. But she also points out that islanders’ everyday contact is less with Australians than with Chinese people: “Australians are here as aid workers, diplomats and police, but they are not mixing with local people.” With thousands of young islanders getting involved with the Pacific labour schemes in Australia and New Zealand, a new familiarity and affection is possible — as long as abuses are seen to be punished.

As for geopolitical rivalries, “the Solomon Islands government should try to get what it can from foreign powers,” Wickham writes. “But we need to choose those things with long-term benefits in mind. We should be careful what we wish for.” •

Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands
By Michael Wesley | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 310 pages

Girt by China: Power Play in the Pacific
Australian Foreign Affairs | Issue 17, February 2023 | $24.99 | 128 pages

The post Ambiguous embrace appeared first on Inside Story.

At their annual summit in July, island leaders appointed an independent five-member expert scientific panel to probe the project’s safety. Forum secretary-general Henry Puna, concerned about harm to the fishing industry in Japan and the wider Pacific region, has reinforced regional concern that the scientific data doesn’t justify the plan.

“Experts have advised a deferment to the impending discharge into the Pacific Ocean by Japan is necessary,” Puna said last month. “Based on that advice, our members encourage consideration for options other than discharge, while the independent panel of experts continue to further assess the safety of the discharge in light of the current data gaps.”

In a confidential report to the Pacific Islands Forum, the expert panel outlined detailed concerns about the project, arguing that any decision to proceed should be postponed. Even though Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority has given the go-ahead for construction, a growing number of scientists are warning about the long-term implications of dumping more than a million tonnes of water containing radioactive isotopes into the Pacific.

The waste problem goes back to March 2011, when three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were flooded after an offshore earthquake. A fourteen-metre tsunami hit the coast, causing massive damage to the reactors’ power supply and cooling systems. The partial meltdown of the reactor cores caused extensive damage as fuel rod assemblies burned through steel containment vessels and into the concrete base of the reactor buildings.

For more than a decade, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, has been using water to cool the excess heat still emanating from the melted fuel rods. The highly contaminated cooling water is then stored in more than a thousand tanks at the site. With more than a hundred tonnes of water collected every day, storage space is running out.

Japan proposes to dump this wastewater into the Pacific Ocean after passing it through an Advanced Liquid Processing System designed to remove most radioactive materials.

The cost of decommissioning the stricken Fukushima reactors has put TEPCO — and Japanese taxpayers — under massive pressure. Since 2011, more than ¥12 trillion (A$120 billion) has been spent on cleaning up the plant, decontaminating the site and compensating people affected by the accident. This accounts for half of the amount budgeted for work that must continue for many decades.

The Japanese government has already provided ¥10.2 trillion in no-interest loans to TEPCO. Last month Japan’s Board of Audit revealed that repayment of these loans will be delayed, highlighting TEPCO’s ongoing financial crisis.

Many analysts are concerned TEPCO is looking at ocean waste dumping as the cheapest option to resolve storage costs for the vast amounts of water contaminated with tritium and other radionuclides. As Benshuo Yang and Haojun Xu from the Ocean University of China report, alternatives include underground burial, controlled vapour release, and injection into the geosphere. Japan, they add, “has chosen the most cost-efficient, but most harmful one.”

Work on the ocean dumping plan is rushing ahead, ignoring international concern. In August, TEPCO began building the infrastructure needed to release the treated radioactive water into the sea, including a kilometre-long undersea tunnel and a complex of pipes to transfer the treated water from storage tanks.

Because Japan is a major donor to Pacific Island nations, some island governments are wary of directly condemning the plan. But anti-nuclear sentiment is strong in a region that still suffers from the radioactive legacies of fifty years of cold war–era nuclear testing, and many remember previous Japanese pledges to consult about plans to dump nuclear waste.

The expert panel was appointed to help bolster the islands’ dealings with Japan. Its five members have extensive expertise in the marine environment, nuclear radiation, reactor engineering and oceanography: Ken Buesseler works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Antony Hooker is director of the Centre for Radiation Research, Education and Innovation at the University of Adelaide, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress is with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey, Robert Richmond is director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, or IEER.

TEPCO’s radiological impact assessment, released in November 2021, sidestepped many of the initial concerns raised by critics of the project. Throughout 2022, the expert panel held meetings with TEPCO and Japanese officials, receiving some data on the type of radionuclides held in storage by the company. The International Atomic Energy Agency has also contributed to the debate, with director-general Rafael Grossi visiting the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in May 2022 and briefing a Forum meeting in July.

For panel member Arjun Makhijani, a former nuclear engineer and IEER expert on nuclear safety, the lack of significant data is a crucial problem.

“From a scientific point of view, we as an expert panel felt there was really insufficient information to plan this huge operation,” he tells me. “We perceived early on that because most of the storage tanks had not been sampled, most of the radionuclides are not being sampled, and so there just wasn’t enough information to proceed.”

As time went on, says Dr Makhijani, the panel’s worries about the Japanese plans became stronger. “Do they know what they are doing? Do they have enough information? Have they done the measurements properly? Do they know if the capacity of the filtration system will be enough for the volume of liquids, so the concentration of radionuclides would be low enough? How long will it take if they have to repeatedly filter the liquids? There weren’t any clear answers to these questions.”

As they met with TEPCO and Japanese authorities, the expert panel began to raise a series of concerns: the failure to accurately sample different isotopes in the storage tanks, the level of radioactive contamination in sludge at the bottom of the tanks, and the models used to determine how elements like tritium will disperse and dilute in the vast Pacific Ocean.

For Dr Makhijani, the Japanese authorities have not provided enough information to ascertain what range and amounts of radionuclides will be found in each tank. Only nine of sixty-four radionuclides have been included in the data shared with the Forum.

“The vast majority of radionuclides are not being measured, according to the Japanese authorities themselves,” Dr Makhijani says. “In summary, most of the tanks have never been sampled. The sampling they do is non-representative of the water in the tanks and when they were stored. Are the measurements of what’s in the tanks accurate? The answer to this is no.”

The bulk of the radioactivity measured in the wastewater is from two isotopes: tritium and carbon-14. But current data also show a complex mix of other highly radioactive isotopes, including strontium-90, caesium-134, caesium-137, cobalt-60 and even tellurium-127, a fission product with a short half-life of nine hours that shouldn’t be present after years of storage.

The expert panel has noted that some tanks low in tritium are high in strontium-90, and vice versa, concluding that “the assumption that concentrations of the other radionuclides are constant is not correct and a full assessment of all radioisotopes is needed to evaluate the true risk factors.”

Also of concern is the fact that particles in the water may settle to the bottom of the storage tanks over time, creating contaminated sludge. Japanese authorities have confirmed that tanks filled with cooling water in the years immediately after the 2011 accident contain contaminated sediment of this kind.

“The sludges were not sampled then and have not been sampled since that time,” says Dr Makhijani. “How much of these sludges will be stirred up and complicate the filtration system as you pump out the water from the tanks? This issue has not been addressed.”

TEPCO plans to filter out most isotopes but dump vast amounts of tritium into the Pacific, relying on rapid dispersion and dilution. But many scientists are critical of the model used to measure the dilution of tritium in seawater, which is based on models using international standards for how much naturally occurring tritium can be safely ingested in drinking water. Environmental critics of the dumping plan are concerned tritium and other radioactive isotopes will accumulate in ocean sediments, fish and other marine biota.

According to Dr Makhijani, the expert panel was concerned that the proposed drinking water standard for tritium does not apply to ocean ecosystems. “The discharged concentration of tritium will be thousands of times the background level you find naturally or through historical nuclear testing,” he explains, “and then you’re going to discharge it for many decades.”

He believes a full modelling of the impact would include “an ecosystem assessment, both for sediments and for vegetal and animal biota that travel,” which hasn’t been done. “In TEPCO’s environmental impact assessment, they didn’t take account of any bioaccumulation of tritium, which does occur in all organisms. The question of bioconcentration in an ocean environment was totally ignored in the statement.”

In its report to Forum member governments in August, the expert panel concluded that Japan’s assessments of ecological effects and bioconcentration are seriously deficient and don’t provide a sound basis for estimating impact. Writing in the Japan Times, the five scientists noted:

The release of contaminated material from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant would take at least forty years, and decades longer if you include the anticipated accumulation of new water during the process. This would impact not only the interests and reputation of the Japanese fishing community, among others, but also the people and countries of the entire Pacific region. This needs to be considered as a transboundary and transgenerational issue.

Insufficient information is available to assess how environmental and human health would be affected, they argued, and issuing a permit at this time would be premature at best: “Having studied the scientific and ecological aspects of the matter, we have concluded that the decision to release the contaminated water should be indefinitely postponed and other options for the tank water revisited until we have more complete data to evaluate the economic, environmental and human health costs of ocean release.”

The potential for long-term damage to the ocean environment is echoed by expert panel member Robert Richmond from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

“This is truly a trans-boundary issue,” he says. “Fish don’t respect political lines, and neither do radionuclides or pollutants in the ocean. I really commend the members of the Pacific Islands Forum for recognising this is an issue they need additional information on.”

Soon after the 2011 Fukushima accident, scientists confirmed that Pacific bluefin tuna can transport radionuclides across the northern Pacific Ocean. A 2012 study from Stanford University reported tuna with traces of Fukushima-related contamination had been found on the shores of the United States.

“Pacific bluefin tuna can rapidly transport radionuclides from a point source in Japan to distant ecoregions and demonstrate the importance of migratory animals as transport vectors of radionuclides,” the study reported. “Other large, highly migratory marine animals make extensive use of waters around Japan, and these animals may also be transport vectors of Fukushima-derived radionuclides to distant regions of the North and South Pacific Oceans.”

Will perceptions of radioactive hazards from Japan’s ocean dumping damage the global market for tuna? Many island nations derive vital revenue from the deepwater fishing nations that pay to operate in Pacific Island exclusive economic zones, or EEZs.

Regional organisations have also sought to process and market tuna from the Pacific as another key source of revenue. For nearly a decade, island states have supported Pacifical, a brand that promotes sustainable distribution and marketing of skipjack and yellowfin tuna caught in their EEZs.

Speaking after her recent appointment as executive director of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, Rhea Moss-Christian highlighted the potential damage of Japan’s decades-long project: “This is a massive release and a big, big potential disaster if it’s not handled properly.”

Moss-Christian is the first Pacific woman to head the commission, which manages the largest tuna fishery in the world, representing nearly 60 per cent of global production.

“I wish that the Japanese government would take some more time before its release,” she told journalists at December’s commission meeting. “There are a number of outstanding questions that have yet to be fully answered. They have focused a lot on one particular radionuclide, and not very much on others that are also present in the wastewater.”

Moss-Christian is a citizen of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, an island nation living with the consequences of radioactive fallout from sixty-seven US atmospheric nuclear tests on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. A former chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission, she is deeply aware of this radioactive legacy. Her nation struggles to control radionuclides leaching into the marine environment from the Runit Dome, a nuclear waste site on Enewetak Atoll created by the United States in the 1970s.

“We have a lot of experience in the Marshall Islands with lingering radioactive waste,” Moss-Christian said. “We don’t want to find ourselves in another situation, not just in the Marshall Islands, but in general in the region, where we agree to something without knowing what could potentially happen in the future. What are the contingency plans? What are the compensation mechanisms?”

At a time of growing US–China tension, the Japanese government is seeking to boost its role in the islands region. Tokyo is building closer ties with Australia and the United States through increased military operations and joint investments in the islands. In November, for example, Tokyo and Washington agreed to contribute US$100 million to support Australian underwriting of Telstra’s purchase of Digicel, blocking Chinese investment in the Pacific’s key mobile phone network.

Even as the Japanese government seeks to win hearts and minds in the region, community anger about the nuclear threat is growing. Church and civil society groups, including the Pacific Conference of Churches, Pacific Islands Association of Non-Governmental Organisations and Pacific Network on Globalisation, have criticised the proposed wastewater dumping plan.

When Japanese foreign minister Yoshimasa Hayashi visited Fiji last May, these community groups argued the proposed ocean dumping breached international agreements like the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution. A joint civil society statement concluded, “We believe there is no scenario in which discharging nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is justified for the health, wellbeing, and future safety of Pacific peoples and the environment.”

As Japan forges ahead with its plan and Australia works towards acquiring nuclear submarines under the AUKUS agreement, the gulf is growing between the two countries’ geopolitical agenda and the growing antinuclear sentiment across the Blue Pacific. •

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For most of the time I was working on the book, Wong and I — and most other observers — expected her to become foreign minister after the May 2019 election, which all the polls and most pundits were tipping Labor to win. She had been preparing for the job not only for the three-plus years she had held the shadow portfolio, but also during her previous term as shadow trade minister. She had always made clear that she didn’t seek to be prime minister; foreign minister was the job she wanted and the height of her ambition.

The plan was for Indonesia to be her first post-election stop-off as minister, followed by a made-for-media return to the city of her birth, Kota Kinabalu, in Malaysian Borneo. As a powerful illustration of her story and connections and an affirmation of Australia’s place in Asia, it was a public relations coup out of reach of any previous Australian foreign minister.

But then came the election defeat, and Wong had another three years to prepare. The pandemic set in, Donald Trump lost the American presidency and Xi Jinping’s grip tightened in Beijing. Among Australia’s Pacific neighbours, Chinese influence became even more apparent.

On 2 August this year Wong, now foreign minister, gave an unpublished address to staff at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Acknowledging that the department had lost influence under the previous government, she declared that Australia needed DFAT to be “more central and more persuasive” in an increasingly uncertain world. To do that, she said, required “frank advice, good decisions, courageous effort, focused advocacy, and me to do my job.”

She appealed to staff to “be ambitious for Australia,” to work with her to bring foreign affairs “back to the centre of the Australian government… We need to be creative; we need to be bold… to advance Australia’s interests and values.”

It was one of a series of speeches reflecting the new minister’s vision of what she had described in opposition as a “transformational” foreign policy. Australia can’t afford to be caught passively in the slipstream of the contest between the big powers, she argued, picking up a phrase used by foreign policy analyst Allan Gyngell. Rather, it is in the “influence game” and must use all available tools of statehood to negotiate the most uncertain time in recent history.

This means DFAT staff must lift their ambitions and the quality of their advice. “I think that starts with clarity of purpose,” she told them. “What is our purpose? To explain Australia to the world and the world to Australia. To clearly articulate our place in the world — as it is, as it should be — and deliver plans to bridge that gap… We’re not here to occupy the space. We’re not here to admire the complexity of problems we face. We’re not here to mollify. We are here to advocate.”

An urgent need to visit the Pacific and a succession of other overseas trips had stopped Wong from speaking to DFAT staff sooner. Her immediate focus had been the Solomon Islands government’s decision to sign a security pact with China — a development she described during the election campaign as “the worst Australian policy failure since the second world war.”

As it turned out, her first trip as minister was to the North Pacific rather than Indonesia. The day after she was sworn in, Wong and prime minister Anthony Albanese were in Tokyo for the Quad leaders’ summit. Then, over the subsequent ninety-nine days, she made four trips to Pacific nations (to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, New Zealand and the Solomons, and July’s Pacific Islands Forum summit in Fiji) and three to Southeast Asia (to Vietnam and Malaysia, Singapore and, twice, Indonesia).

In speeches during those visits she signalled her ambition to change how Australia is seen in the world — and her view that this is the starting point for an ambitious foreign policy agenda in which Australians will become “more than just supporting players in a grand drama of global geopolitics.”

At the Pacific Islands Forum, she avoided telling island nations what to do, instead suggesting they act regionally, as a “family,” to decide matters for themselves. The speech appeared designed to encourage a kind of peer pressure, elevating the sometimes shaky forum (from which Kiribati had just withdrawn) as a venue where the concerns of Pacific Island nations could be brought to bear externally, on larger powers, and internally on the China-friendly Solomons prime minister Manasseh Sogavare and others.

Without explicitly mentioning China, Wong said that Australia was “a partner that won’t come with strings attached, nor impose unsustainable financial burdens. We are a partner that won’t erode Pacific priorities or institutions.” She acknowledged that Australia had “neglected its responsibility” on climate change, “disrespecting Pacific nations in their struggle to adapt to what is an existential threat.” That would change, she promised, with the creation of an Australia-Pacific Climate Infrastructure Partnership to support projects in Pacific countries and Timor-Leste. She also won the leaders’ support for a joint pitch to co-host the UN’s COP29 climate summit in 2024.

This is what Wong calls “listen first” diplomacy: meeting people where they are rather than where you want them to be. It is far from easy.

A blow-up with Sogavare came when he announced he would delay the Solomons’ 2023 election because the country didn’t have the funds to run the poll in the same year as it hosts the Pacific Games. Wong’s offer of Australia’s help to pay for the election wasn’t novel — similar assistance has been given before — but its timing while the relevant bill was before the Solomons parliament provoked a furious reaction. Wong was attempting to “directly interfere into our domestic affairs,” Sogavare thundered, though he went on to accept the funding and delay the election regardless.

The federal opposition portrayed the incident as a blunder on Wong’s part. But others in the foreign policy community point out that she rarely speaks without calculation and may well have wanted Solomon Islanders to know that Sogavare’s excuse for the delay had been removed.

More broadly, Wong wants to engage with other small and middle powers in the region to define and articulate a common interest in building a “peaceful, prosperous region in which sovereignty is respected.” She hopes this will ultimately help shape how the superpowers behave.

In dealing with the countries of Southeast Asia, Wong has emphasised the centrality of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — the body that Kevin Rudd has described as the “swing state” in the battle for regional dominance between China and the United States. As Wong said last November, “the countries of Southeast Asia have made clear they don’t want to choose between the great powers — but want to exercise their own agency in how the region is being reshaped.”

As Allan Gyngell wrote in his 2017 book Fear of Abandonment, Australian foreign policy has always assumed dependence on a great power — first Britain and then the United States. The fear in Gyngell’s title has never been more keenly felt than now. Australia watched as the United States under Barack Obama promised to “pivot” to Asia but then failed to deliver. It tried to decipher the chaos of the Trump administration, which seemed to be abandoning America’s global mission to defend an international order on which the security of middle powers like Australia depends.

These shifts underlined Gyngell’s view about the dangers of being caught in the great powers’ slipstreams. Australia’s historical preference for hunkering down in the company of allies no longer serves the times, he argues. Gyngell is one of the foreign policy analysts Wong most admires.

Has Australia in any sense punched above its weight in foreign policy over the decades? The answer would certainly have been “yes” in the 1970s and 80s, when prime minister Malcolm Fraser played a role in creating a post-apartheid future for South Africa by using the Commonwealth as a venue for the defence of human rights. Fraser’s government also brought a practical end to the White Australia policy, changing the face of the nation with migrants from Southeast Asia.

“Yes,” as well, under the succeeding Labor government of Bob Hawke, when the man generally regarded as Australia’s most successful foreign minister, Gareth Evans, increased Australia’s engagement with Asia and articulated the concept of Australia as a middle power. His achievements included initiating a UN peace plan for Cambodia and helping establish both the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum.

But most observers would have answered “no” in recent years, as Australia became a laggard in climate policy and lost credibility in its natural sphere of influence, the Pacific. For island governments, rising sea levels are an existential issue.

Coming into this mix, Penny Wong is an extraordinary package. She is a self-conscious intellectual and policy wonk. As well as foreign minister she is the leader of the government in the Senate, and is generally regarded as the intellectual leader of Labor’s left, which is also Anthony Albanese’s faction. She is one of the prime minister’s closest allies and friends.

As she told Singapore’s International Institute for Strategic Studies in one of her first speeches after the election, she is far from the first Australian foreign minister to recognise the importance of relationships with Southeast Asia. “But I am the first to make these statements as an Australian foreign minister who is from Southeast Asia.”

Wong’s history binds together central themes in Australia’s development. On both sides of her family she is the product of British colonialism and its impact on the region. On her mother’s side, she is as deeply rooted in Australia as is possible for someone not of Aboriginal ancestry. Her great-great-great-grandparents migrated from Britain to what became the colony of South Australia in 1836, refugees from the exigencies of the industrial revolution. On her father’s side, she is the descendant of Cantonese Chinese recruited to labour on the vast tobacco and timber plantations and in the tin mines by the British North Borneo Company.

Wong’s most powerful understanding of her Chinese ancestry comes from the experiences of her Hakka grandmother, Lai Fung Shim, who singlehandedly ensured the survival of the family line during the brutal Japanese wartime occupation of Borneo in the early 1940s. Francis Yit Shing Wong, Penny Wong’s father, was Lai Fung Shim’s oldest child.

Francis Wong was a beneficiary of the postwar Colombo Plan, which sponsored academically able Asians to study in Australia. His decision to enrol in architecture at the University of Adelaide meant that — as Wong put it in a speech in Kuala Lumpur in late June — “a charming young Malaysian man could meet a bold young Australian woman.”

With the White Australia policy still in force, the newly married couple couldn’t stay in Australia. They settled in Francis’s hometown of Kota Kinabalu, where Penny Wong was born in 1968. North Borneo had been a British protectorate when Francis left for South Australia; by the time he returned it was part of the new nation of Malaysia.

After the marriage broke down, Wong’s mother took her and her brother back to Adelaide. They were the only Asian faces in their suburban primary school. The racism Wong suffered, and the strength she developed in surviving it, became a defining feature of her personality.

Only when prime minister Paul Keating declared in 1992 that the fall of Singapore was as important to the Australian story as Gallipoli, and the war casualties in Malaysia and Borneo as important as those in Europe, did Wong conclude that Australia was her home. When her plane touched down in Adelaide after a visit to her father that year, she thought to herself, “This is my country now. This is my place.”

It is this sense of the nation that Wong describes as central to an effective foreign policy. The time has come to stop championing the Anglosphere, she has said: “Foreign policy starts with who we are.” Australia, she told the Pacific Islands Forum, is a country with 270 ancestries, including the world’s oldest continuous culture. “This gives us the capacity to reach into every corner of the world and say, ‘we share common ground.’”

Wong has urged the leaders of Pacific Island nations and the countries of ASEAN to join Australia in attempting to shape a “settling point” between the United States, Australia’s most important ally, and China, its biggest trading partner. She has also referred approvingly to Kevin Rudd’s view that Australia and the countries of the region should seek “managed strategic competition” between China and the United States “within a set of minimum guardrails to reduce the risk of escalation, crisis, conflict and war.”

Wong has talked of moving Australia beyond reliance on the United States to a more activist role: unapologetic and robust in defending core democratic values, retaining the centrality of the alliance but seeking cooperation with China where possible. More than this, and although it is not explicitly stated, Wong clearly hopes to provide the United States with ideas about how to engage with the countries of the region without playing into Chinese narratives about arrogant, interfering white colonialists.

In Kuala Lumpur, she described ASEAN as “holding the centre of the Indo-Pacific.” Its strength, she said, “lies in its ability to speak for the region and to balance regional powers. All countries that seek to work with the region have a responsibility to engage constructively and respectfully with it.”

Wong first articulated the “settling point” concept during a speech to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta in September 2019, when she was still in opposition. US leadership would be most effective, she said, “when it is conceived in terms of leading a community of nations, with all that entails.” Beijing, too, should recognise that “most of us in the region are not comfortable with an authoritarian China becoming the predominant power.”

With Donald Trump still in the White House, she went on: “It’s fair to say that many countries in the region are unclear about what precisely it is that the United States is seeking to achieve… Absent that clarity, China will assume the worst… Great powers will do what great powers do to assert their interests. But the rest of us are not without our own agency.”

A “settling point” would mean the United States embracing a multipolar future for the region “with countries like Indonesia, India and Japan playing increasingly important leadership roles… Defining a realistic settling point will also help the United States recognise and accept that decisions relating to China will vary depending on the issues and interests at stake.” It would also remind Beijing that “when we make decisions that defend or assert our national interests in ways that may not reflect China’s views it is not due to a cold war mentality.” People who value the United States’ leadership, she said, “want the US to retain it by lifting its game, not spoiling China’s.”

She has repeated those ideas in several speeches, though since taking government the language has been more subtle. “Settling point” is still mentioned, but the emphasis has shifted to “strategic equilibrium.”

Another strand of Wong’s thinking, not yet fully articulated, is a promise to put the history of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at the centre of foreign policy. She has appointed a First Nations ambassador within her department, and when she was accompanied to the UN General Assembly in September by senator Pat Dodson, who hosted a roundtable on First Nations foreign policy involving Canada, New Zealand and other countries with Indigenous populations.

Wong has also indicated that Australia will be following a more active investment policy in Southeast Asia — with more detail clearly to come. This move recognises that China’s pitch for influence is overwhelmingly economic rather than military or cultural, and any response needs to be in kind.

China will continue to be a key challenge. Wong neither endorsed nor criticised US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, but she labelled China’s response as excessive and called for “restraint and de-escalation.” She described a new UN report on China’s detention of the Uighurs as “harrowing reading” and acknowledged it had found allegations of torture to be credible; but she also said that Australia’s response would be decided in consultation with other countries. Unlike the previous government, she is not putting Australia on the front line of conflict with China, but nor is she taking a backward step on key values.

Equally significant is what she doesn’t do, and doesn’t say. In the days after those comments, every serious current affairs program in Australia sought her out for an interview. That she declined them all might have created a background level of frustration, but it enabled her to duck the inevitable question about Taiwan. Would Australia, push comes to shove, join the United States in a military conflict with China?

The former government’s defence minister, opposition leader Peter Dutton, said last November that it was “inconceivable” Australia would not join in. But Wong has been keen to dial down the rhetorical heat. “More strategy, less politics” is her strategy. “Talk less, do more.”

With the Pacific dominating her first weeks in power, it was June before Wong made that long-planned return to Kota Kinabalu. The visit came complete with the perfect photo opportunity: the minister and her Chinese Malaysian half-siblings eating fish ball juk and noodles in the cafe she loved as a child. The message was explicit: this was her story, but it was also contemporary Australia’s.

Given that opinion polls suggest the Albanese government has increased its popularity since its election win, Wong is likely to have at least two three-year terms to enact and develop her foreign policy approach.

Will it work? Perhaps, in these bellicose times, it is optimistic to suppose that middle powers can have the agency Wong seeks. One strand in Australian foreign policy commentary doubts that the United States is really committed to the region — and believes Washington might well conclude its essential interests are not at stake there. Having accepted the Asia-Pacific would become a sphere of Chinese influence, it would then depart, leaving a friendless Australia carrying the can for the United States’ China containment policies.

In a recent Quarterly Essay Hugh White suggested the battle is already effectively over and China has won. Australia should tell the United States to surrender Taiwan to Beijing and then begin to talk to China about its role in the new hegemony.

On the other hand, foreign policy scholars and politicians agree that Australia does have influence in Washington. As the head of the US Studies Centre at Sydney University, Michael Green, put it in a response to White, “the strategic community on Asia policy in DC is pretty small and also very impressionable. If there are good ideas from trusted partners like Australia, they go right to the top.”

The good idea, from Wong and the thinkers she respects, is to listen first, shun binary thinking, and accept a multipolar region in a rules-based world. All this, and attempt to maintain mutual respect.

If Wong is successful in shifting the dial, Australia will once again have punched above its weight, claiming agency in the region, allied to but not necessarily always following the United States. It will have helped shape the behaviour of regional forums and the superpowers, and perhaps even contributed to avoiding war. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Making up for lost time appeared first on Inside Story.

France’s high commissioner to New Caledonia, Patrice Faure, announced last month that the vote would proceed as scheduled on 12 December, despite pleas from Kanak customary and political leaders for a delay until after next year’s French elections. “New Caledonians who wish to go to the polls on 12 December will be able to do so in peace and calm,” said Faure. At town halls and polling booths, they will be able to choose between Yes for independence or No to remain within the French Republic.

Despite this, the independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, and other independence forces have chosen not to participate in this weekend’s referendum. FLNKS spokesperson Daniel Goa has called on all Yes voters to stay at home on Sunday, and “to stay away from the polling booths to avoid any confrontation with people turning out to vote.” The non-participation of many Kanak and other supporters of independence “will obviously result in an overwhelming victory for the No,” says Goa, “in a proportion that will totally discredit the popular consultation.”

The vote is the third in a series under the Noumea Accord, a 1998 agreement between the French government and supporters and opponents of independence. After more than twenty years’ transition involving the devolution of powers from Paris to New Caledonia, the referendums ask, “Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?”

In the first referendum, in November 2018, the Yes campaign won 43 per cent support; in the second, in October 2020, this rose to 46.6 per cent. The FLNKS was hoping for majority support in the third and final vote in late 2022, but France’s rush to hold the vote this week led to their change of policy.

“This referendum is the culmination of the Noumea Accord, the culmination of a decolonisation process,” says Victor Tutugoro, president of Union Progressiste Mélanésienne, or UPM, one of four FLNKS parties. “The FLNKS, as a representative of the indigenous people, the colonised people, has said that the referendum should be delayed and we will not turn out to vote on 12 December. Despite this, the French state has gone ahead to organise the poll without the first people, the colonised people. So who will turn out to vote? People who have never been colonised?”

In a rare sign of unanimity, all pro-independence forces — political parties, trade unions and customary leaders — have formed a joint committee to back the call for non-participation. With the likely absence of tens of thousands of independence voters, Kanak and non-Kanak, the poll has little credibility. It does nothing to resolve the current political impasse that divides supporters and opponents of independence. There’s trouble ahead and the French government is responsible.

Opponents of independence have forged Les Voix du Non — the Voices of No — an alliance of political parties who want to maintain New Caledonia within the French Republic.

“We’re seeking to mobilise people who have voted No in the past, to ensure that they will turn out on the twelfth,” spokesperson Christopher Gygès tells me. The pandemic means “it’s very hard to estimate the likely turnout, even with opinion polling about voting intentions. But we’re getting a feeling about attitudes on the ground, because we’re out and about, talking to people.”

“Our objective — a very ambitious objective — is to maintain the same No vote that we obtained in 2020,” says Thierry Santa, leader of the anti-independence party Rassemblement-Les Républicains. A key member of Les Voix du Non, he served as president of New Caledonia between 2019 and February this year, and remains a member of New Caledonia’s multi-party government under his successor, President Louis Mapou. “But one problem is that some of our supporters, especially those who live deep in the valleys, in the tribes, are unlikely to turn out because of the call from the independence movement. In a small village, they may face some pressure and so they won’t go and vote.”

Complacency also exists among pro-French voters, he adds: “We have tried to maintain our mobilisation, despite the non-participation of independence parties, which means some people think ‘we’ve won, so there’s no need to go and vote!’ At the same time, there is the health crisis which continues to worry sections of the population. So we’ve really been trying to reach out to those people, telling them that they have to get out and vote.”

Like other anti-independence leaders, Santa welcomes greater autonomy from Paris while wanting to retain French sovereignty. “I think that we already have a very great autonomy, and that an ongoing decolonisation process can extend that autonomy within the French Republic, without completely cutting ties with France. This is the basis for the discussion that we will inevitably have, to forge a consensus between us, to recognise the recognition of identity that is at the heart of the independence struggle, even while recognising the diversity of ethnic communities that make up the New Caledonian kaleidoscope.”

The large Wallisian and Futunan community in New Caledonia has historically backed the conservative anti-independence parties, but a new generation of Polynesian voters are more open to engagement with the independence movement. The Eveil Océanien (Pacific Awakening) party, led by Milakulo Tukumuli, has said “No, not now” to independence. But Tukumuli has told members and supporters they can freely decide whether to participate in Sunday’s vote or stay at home. Many people in this islander community, hit hard by a recent wave of Covid-19, have other priorities.

The rush to hold the referendum is polarising the nation. Last April, key independence parties called for the third poll, but wanted it held in late 2022, after the French national elections. The decision on the earlier date of 12 December 2021 was taken by the French government following discussions at a roundtable in Paris last June.

At the time, leaders of the largest pro-independence parties expressed concern at what they described as a “unilateral” decision about the date rather than a consensus of delegates at the roundtable. France’s overseas minister, Sébastien Lecornu, agreed that this was a decision from Paris: “I would like to point out that this date is not the subject of a consensus… It’s an initiative that we are taking within the strict framework of the powers of the French state.”

In the lead-up to the first two votes in 2018 and 2020, former French prime minister Edouard Philippe invested extensive time and effort to forge a consensus over the date, registration of voters and other contested issues. But the French government under his successor Jean Castex has been distracted by wider concerns.

For months, and especially since the latest surge of Covid-19, Kanak customary leaders and independence politicians have called for a delay in the poll until 2022. But the young and ambitious overseas minister has forged ahead, despite warnings and cautions from across the spectrum. The final confirmation of the December date came not from the prime minister but in an offhand statement by high commissioner Faure. “We are shocked that it was the high commissioner who made this announcement, rather than the overseas minister or the prime minister,” UPM’s Victor Tutugoro told me, “because the issue of New Caledonia is their responsibility.”

Many French and New Caledonian commentators have highlighted the ambitions of the thirty-six-year-old Lecornu, who is a fervent supporter of Macron’s LREM party. One Kanak leader told me the minister is “young, ambitious and arrogant — a bad combination in a politician.”

Rassemblement’s Thierry Santa, a pro-French loyalist, is more diplomatic, but notes, “To be honest with you, Minister Lecornu has his own way of working, that involves breaking many of the traditional codes of practice. This has allowed things to move on a bit faster than usual, but it’s also shaken things up and caused some tension. His way of working today is criticised more and more. I agree that there are issues about his level of experience and the need for respect.” Things have moved faster, he adds, “but it’s a problem if this throws up roadblocks… His way of working is now less and less accepted and has created reactions that have stopped things moving forward.”

The rush to the referendum and Lecornu’s “crash through or crash” style has provoked a flood of condemnation from diplomats, academics, Pacific island leaders and other people with a deep knowledge of the French dependency.

Among them is Denise Fisher, a former Australian consul general in Noumea, who has described France’s plan to continue with the December referendum as “the most stunning, the most disappointing and the most consequential decision in the last twenty years.” The refusal to delay the poll “undermines the legitimacy of this decisive vote,” she says.

Vanuatuan prime minister Bob Loughman has called for a delay in the vote, while the five-member Melanesian Spearhead Group, or MSG, has issued a joint statement to the United Nations: “We are deeply concerned, like many New Caledonians, that the prevailing circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic in New Caledonia… does not present a conducive environment for a fair, just, credible, transparent and peaceful conduct of the self-determination referendum.” The MSG warns that “the integrity and credibility of the referendum process and its outcome are seriously at stake.”

This concern is echoed by a group of eminent figures from Polynesia and Micronesia, including former presidents of Kiribati, Palau and Marshall Islands, the outgoing Tuvalu prime minister, a former US congressman from Guahan (Guam) and the outgoing secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum. Through the organisation Pacific Elders Voice they have written to President Macron urging him to “be open to the voice of the leaders of the Kanak people and show consideration and respect for their wishes. We urge this so that the situation does not turn to violence and the dialogue remains open.”

In France, an open letter from sixty-four leading specialists on New Caledonia — historians, anthropologists, researchers and more — questioned the French government’s refusal to delay the vote until 2022: “A self-determination vote in New Caledonia without the Kanaks? It’s not only a political and moral mistake: it is a flashback that evokes the gloomy ‘events’ of 1984–1988 [a period of armed conflict in New Caledonia].” They went on: “We witness with amazement and concern the complete challenge to the 1988 Matignon Accords and the 1998 Noumea Accord which, out of Ouvéa’s ashes, had given rise to immense hope: that of a peaceful and inclusive decolonisation.”

These concerns are echoed by New Caledonian historian Louis-José Barbançon, a leading intellectual among the Caldoche (New Caledonians of European heritage, born and bred in the islands, who often regard with some scorn the “metros” from Paris). Writing in Le Monde, Barbançon says that “in their own country — the only one they have — the Kanak should never be seen as enemies; otherwise, we will always remain in a colonial situation.”

Independence supporters are especially concerned that the French authorities have pressed on with the process in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. New Caledonia avoided large numbers of coronavirus cases for more than eighteen months, but since 6 September there’s been a terrible surge of the Delta variant. The current tally rests at 12,385 cases and 279 deaths in a territory of just 272,000 people.

In this climate, the mood in the towns and tribes is markedly different from the earlier referendum campaigns, which involved large public meetings, street rallies, concerts and other mass events. Today, far fewer flags can be seen — either the blue, white and red French tricolour or the multicoloured flag of Kanaky — and campaigning has been disrupted by a lockdown and declaration of a state of emergency. Even today, with fewer daily cases and the lifting of the state of emergency, large gatherings are still limited until 19 December, curtailing the capacity of political parties to mobilise and enthuse their supporters.

Beyond the FLNKS call for “non-participation,” the lived experience of the pandemic will depress turnout for Sunday’s vote. While people from every community have been affected by Covid-19, the death toll has fallen disproportionately on indigenous Kanak and islanders from the Wallisian community, reflecting disparities in housing, income, and access to information and health services in rural areas and squatter settlements.

The official Institut des Statistiques et Etudes Économiques has confirmed the impact of the pandemic, reporting that “the number of deaths recorded in September 2021, 1.8 times higher than the 2015–2019 average, appears to be quite exceptional.” A recent ISEE bulletin reported, “All causes combined, the municipalities of New Caledonia recorded a total of 310 deaths in September 2021 and 250 deaths the following month.” This is “a 144 per cent increase for September over previous years” and “for October, double the average usually observed.”

With dozens of extended families in mourning, Kanak and islanders face cultural obligations and significant expense to mark the death of loved ones. Many people have little time for the blah, blah, blah of politicians — even for such an important referendum. “We are in national mourning and we are not even out of lockdown,” Basil Citre of the Dynamique Autochtone party told journalists last month. “Talking about politics and referendums when many families are in mourning is not the right option.”

For the French government, the poll will not be invalidated by a low turnout. Voting is not compulsory in France, and national and local elections are often marked by low numbers and abstention.

For Francis Lamy, a councillor of the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, French judicial case law is clear: “A low turnout is not a sign that the ballot is irregular. I remind you that voting is not compulsory in France and that there is no minimum turnout required for this referendum.” Lamy heads the official Control Commission that oversees the vote (alongside electoral observers from the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum).

Les Voix du Non’s Christopher Gygès echoes the government view: “We think that a certain number of independence supporters won’t follow the orders issued by their leaders, but even without their participation, the referendum is legitimate.”

This narrow legalism ignores political realities. A decolonisation referendum without participation by most indigenous Kanak — the colonised people — lacks credibility. The two previous polls have been marked by very high turnout (81% in November 2018 and 85.6% in October 2020). This year, the absence of tens of thousands of pro-independence voters will be a blow to the credibility of the outcome — especially as non-participation will likely be highest in Kanak-majority areas in the Northern Province and outlying Loyalty Islands.

The FLNKS and other pro-independence forces have called for “non-participation” in the vote, rather than an “active boycott” that could lead to disruption of polling or clashes with the hundreds of extra soldiers and paramilitary police deployed to New Caledonia in recent weeks. These include fifteen extra squadrons of gendarmes mobiles, amounting to 1100 officers, supported by a small contingent of military personnel on attachment to the police. Paris is dispatching thirty armoured cars and extra helicopters to support this deployment.

The conservative leaders of Les Voix du Non are not expecting serious problems, because of this show of force. “We are confident that the same message is coming from the loyalists and the independence parties: that the process should be peaceful,” says Gygès. “We think it’s helpful that the French state has deployed the ‘forces of order’ to avoid any disruption. At this stage, we’re confident about a smooth running of the referendum and the period afterwards.”

Former president Thierry Santa acknowledges the vast majority of Yes voters will respect the FLNKS watchword on non-participation. “However there will be some who will vote on 12 December, because there is some pressure from the new generation of independence activists, who complain against the elders who are still in positions of power.”

Santa also thinks that Sunday will be calm. “I’m not worried about conflict because I think the term ‘non-participation’ is designed to avoid any disruption,” he tells me. “By saying ‘non-participation’ instead of ‘boycott,’ I think that’s a way of saying they want the referendum to go ahead. So I don’t think that access to the polling booths will be blocked, or the ballot boxes will be smashed with an axe! I’m quite optimistic about the way that the vote will proceed, apart from a few young radicals here or there. Clearly the independence parties are calling for a peaceful process and not an active boycott of the vote. They’re happy for people to go fishing or to their gardens.”

Regardless of the outcome, this week’s vote marks the last referendum under the 1998 agreement known as the Noumea Accord, a decolonisation process that has framed New Caledonia’s politics and economy for more than twenty years.

The French government now proposes replacing the Noumea Accord, which has devolved many powers to its Pacific dependency and restricted voting for local political institutions to indigenous Kanak and long-term New Caledonian citizens. Overseas minister Lecornu has announced that the transition to new governing arrangements must be completed in just eighteen months, by 30 June 2023, to be followed by a vote on a new political statute.

Southern Province president Sonia Backès — leader of the right-wing Les Républicains Calédoniens, or LRC, party — has called for a revision of the clé de repartition (an agreement that divides revenues among New Caledonia’s three provinces). Criticising the FLNKS for its “lack of political courage” in avoiding the vote, Backès wants a new deal to reduce the share of revenue allocated to the Kanak-majority rural provinces.

“With the clé de repartition, it can’t go on as it is,” says Christopher Gygès, a member of the LRC. “While we need to continue development in the Northern Province and the Loyalty Islands Province, it can’t continue to unbalance the South. We’re all united as well on the voting rights and the electoral roll: the ‘frozen’ electoral roll can’t continue as it is. The French state has also written that after the third referendum, the electoral roll can’t remain frozen.”

Such changes to electoral registration for the local provincial assemblies and national Congress would enable more recently arrived residents to vote for the local political institutions. This pressure for thousands of extra French nationals to be added to electoral rolls will be fiercely resisted by the independence movement.

Gygès regards the outcome of Sunday’s vote as a foregone conclusion: “Regardless of the opinion of the independence movement, the people of New Caledonia will have spoken three times to say that New Caledonia should stay within the French Republic. We’re certainly open to dialogue about what should come next, but it’s up to the independence movement to say when they’re ready to talk.”

That clearly won’t be any time soon. Leaders of all the major pro-independence parties issued a statement last week saying bluntly that “the political timetable for discussion imposed by the French state in the aftermath of 12 December 2021 is not ours and only commits them. Therefore, we reserve the right to initiate discussions with the state after consultation with our respective political structures. We also wonder about the legitimacy of the current interlocutors, even though the national elections have not yet occurred.”

Rassemblement’s Thierry Santa agrees that little can be resolved until there’s a new government in Paris: “It’s clear that any future statute for New Caledonia can only be finalised by the new president, the new prime minister and a new overseas minister, who will only be determined as a result of the ballot in the presidential and legislative elections next year. Personally, I don’t think we’ll see a roundtable involving all three partners until after the elections.

“There will be bilateral talks between us and the French state, between the independence leaders and the French state and even between us here in New Caledonia,” he adds. “But I’m convinced there won’t be three-way talks until the new government is in place after the national elections. The current government can’t solve the problems of New Caledonia in the next few months, especially in the middle of an election campaign.”

UPM’s Victor Tutugoro stressed to me: “They just want to talk about yet another statute, for the nth time. We tired of this discussion of statutes — we want our independence. We will challenge this fake referendum, locally and internationally, at the United Nations, calling for a real referendum for the colonised people.”

And Australia’s role? In recent years, France and Australia have strengthened their strategic partnership in the Indo-Pacific region, concerned over rising Chinese influence. But the relationship has been damaged by the recent decision to cancel the $90 billion submarine contract between Australia and the French corporation Naval Group.

As Australia joins Britain and the United States in the new AUKUS strategic partnership, Thierry Santa says, “It’s absolutely certain that the ripping up of the submarine contract by Australia and the United States has influenced France’s attitude towards New Caledonia. I think that for a long time, France was relying heavily on its relationship with Australia to strengthen the Indo-Pacific axis. The fact that Australia has turned its back on the submarine contract has really made France realise that it’s on its own in the Pacific territories.”

With President Macron publicly describing Scott Morrison as a liar, and both France and Australia moving to elections within the next six months, the issue has become highly politicised. As he seeks re-election in April, Macron faces stiff competition from extreme-right figures like Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, and the short-term temptation to act tough — regardless of the long-term interests of New Caledonians — is overwhelming.

Even a loyal supporter of the Republic like Thierry Santa recognises the significance of rushing to a referendum before the French elections.

“The debate over the submarines has focused attention in metropolitan France about the role of the Pacific territories,” Santa says. “This whole issue will be debated during the French presidential elections, requiring President Macron to show to his more nationalist adversaries that he has a commitment to New Caledonia remaining French.”

Facing a massive boycott, Sunday’s vote does not address, but only delays, the resolution of this longstanding issue: will France remain a colonial power into the twenty-first century?

FLNKS leaders continue to stress that the colonised Kanak people have an “innate and active right to self-determination.” In a statement last month, they reaffirmed that the quest for independence will continue: “We reiterate to President Macron and his government our wish to build a new link with France — a link to tie together the French state with a sovereign state, free to co-construct interdependence. But if we absolutely have to choose between our freedom and these relationships, then we will choose our freedom.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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COP26 has been more challenging than normal for Pacific island delegates. Faced with pandemic restrictions, some delegations have struggled to travel halfway round the world to participate. But those who have made it to Glasgow — official delegates, youthful climate agitators and a roll call of past and present island leaders — aren’t mincing their words. The time for quiet diplomacy is long gone.

Samoan student Brianna Fruean joined a climate action group when she was eleven. Last week, as a member of the youth network Pacific Climate Warriors, she spoke at the opening ceremony of the global conference: “You don’t need my pain or my tears to know that we’re in a crisis. The real question is whether you have the political will to do the right thing.”

For Fruean and many other Pacific delegates, the pledges made at global climate negotiations are more than just words, they are a bond and a commitment. As she stood before the dignitaries assembled at the opening — including US president Joe Biden, Prince Charles and environmental elder Sir David Attenborough — she relayed the Samoan proverb E pala le ma’a, a e le pala le upu (Even stones decay, but words remain).

“They’re promises, and a lot of the time, broken promises,” she said. “If we can really be intentional with how we wield words in these spaces, those are really the compass of how we will move forward in this climate crisis. We are currently living with the consequence of inaction, and we can’t just continuously have these COPs have these conversations and use words that aren’t as ambitious as we need them to be.”

Despite this, Fruean believes that the theatre of COP speeches can still resonate with young people who are watching these summits. “I was walking back to the accommodation and these four Swedish girls stopped me and said ‘E pala le ma’a, a e le pala le upu.’ They were speaking Samoan to me and saying, ‘You’re the one who spoke at the opening ceremony!’ They had memorised the proverb! This was a very heart-warming moment for me. I feel it is an honour for us to share our culture with other people, like those Swedish teenagers.”

Another Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, has been leading youth activists onto the streets of Glasgow, challenging the “blah, blah, blah” of official proceedings. But Fruean contrasts the hope and pride evident among young Pacific islanders at COP26 with the despair shown by many other young people from developed countries. “There is a very strong message coming from the pālagi youth, the global North youth, that their elders have failed them,” she tells me. “But I don’t feel that way with my elders. I know that a lot of young Pacific people don’t feel that either. Our Pacific elders have not failed us, because they have continually told the world that climate change is real and we need to do something.”

She adds, “Even though it is young voices like Greta Thunberg and the school strike that push this conversation forward, in the Pacific we young people stand on the shoulders of giants, who have been doing the work before Greta was even born. I feel that Indigenous people like Pacific islanders have always carried this message.”

Outside the global climate negotiations, youth networks like the Pacific Climate Warriors are developing targeted programs to put pressure on financial institutions that invest in fossil fuel corporations.

“A big part of our work at COP26 has been around finance, particularly divestment from the fossil fuel industry,” Fruean says. “We’ve always been pushing to keep fossil fuels in the ground, in order for the Pacific to survive. So we’ve added a new tactic, with our campaigning to get banks and financial institutions to remove their money from the fossil fuel industry. If these fossil fuel industries don’t have money for their extraction, it will make things so much harder for them.

“Governments have promised us money [through adaptation climate finance] but they’ve also been giving money to the industries that are destroying us,” she adds. “That’s why we are trying to follow the money. We want Lloyds of London and the Bank of England and other financial institutions to take their investments out of coal and oil — and that work goes on beyond COP26.”

Across the Pacific islands, churches, mosques and temples play a crucial social and political, as well as spiritual, role. Through the Pacific Conference of Churches, or PCC, mainline Christian churches are involved in a range of social justice campaigns around the environment, poverty and self-determination for Indigenous peoples.

In recent days, PCC general secretary James Bhagwan has been rushing from meeting to press conference to demonstration in Glasgow. As a member of the World Council of Churches delegation, the Indo-Fijian church leader says he’ll speak to the summit on behalf of the global ecumenical network. “As an official observer, the WCC speaks at plenary,” he tells me. “However on an alphabetical list we are always at the end, so probably I’ll speak at the end of the week very late at night. Given the fact that the Australian prime minister made his speech to an almost empty room, it won’t be much different for me!”

Echoing the appeal on “Faith and Science” issued by Pope Francis and religious leaders on 4 October, Bhagwan argues that “faith communities have been quite clear on the moral imperative around the human and non-human impacts of climate change. We have not just focused on the anthropocentric aspects of climate change, but also the more ecological and biodiversity aspects.”

He stresses the capacity of religious denominations in the Pacific to reach out to every town, village and tribe, a key network for climate advocacy and community education. Faith communities are “very important in terms of mobilisation of communities,” he says. “The key part of this discussion is about the social transformation that has to take place. This is where civil society and faith-based communities have a crucial role.”

Smaller island states like Tuvalu, Kiribati and Marshall Islands have long been crucial diplomatic players at the global negotiations. This year, however, a number of Pacific countries have been unable to send large delegations. The disruption of airline schedules, the diverse quarantine regimes that islanders must transit to reach Glasgow, the added expense of travel in a pandemic, and a fear of bringing coronavirus back to largely Covid-free nations are all factors that have limited the size of most Pacific delegations to this year’s summit.

Dismissing “the circus of COP” — the celebrities and speeches, the salespeople and snake oil merchants — Bhagwan highlights the important work of Pacific negotiators.

“This year, we have a very small number of Pacific negotiators and they have to work two or three times as hard, because they are small in numbers and thin on the ground,” he says. “Everybody is spread really, really thin. Negotiators and delegates need to double up in the spaces that exist, but you may find that people get called out of meetings to go into other bilateral meetings.”

Bhagwan says this is a major problem for Pacific delegations, facing up against legions of fossil fuel lobbyists in Glasgow: “This is one of those places where numbers matter. You can see the strain on our delegations already, just not having enough people. Each thematic area needs at least one negotiator, but you need two or three to back up.”

Beyond his own advocacy work in Glasgow, Bhagwan has found himself in a pastoral role, supporting the exhausted team who are working to advance Pacific agendas: “Our work is talking with our Pacific people and encouraging them, praying with them for those of the Christian faith, to help with the stress that they are under.”

While the northern hemisphere media often highlights the David and Goliath battle of Pacific states, the concrete proposals initiated by island governments are often overlooked. At COP26, for example, Forum Island countries have highlighted the oceans/climate nexus, looking at how warming ocean temperatures will affect the migration of tuna stocks and damage reef ecologies and marine biodiversity. Marshall Islands and Solomon Islands have been campaigning for action on maritime emissions at the International Maritime Organization. Pacific governments championed a recent resolution at the UN Human Rights Council creating a Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights.

A function organised by the Office of the Pacific Oceans Commissioner launched the region’s new Declaration on Preserving Maritime Zones in the Face of Climate Change-related Sea-Level Rise, which seeks to expand international law on maritime rights. The statement, adopted in August, proclaims that the rights and entitlements that flow from the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea “shall continue to apply, without reduction, notwithstanding any physical changes connected to climate change-related sea-level rise.”

A crucial objective of Pacific delegations is to finalise the rulebook for implementation of the Paris agreement on climate change. Another objective is to lock in predictable, accessible and targeted climate finance for developing countries, increasing the global commitment of funding for adaptation, and loss and damage. Joining delegates from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, Forum Island countries amplify their message as members of wider alliances, such as the Higher Ambition Coalition, the Climate Vulnerable Forum, the Alliance of Small Island States, and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.

In Glasgow, Pacific island delegations have established a ‘Blue Moana’ space as an exhibition centre and meeting room. It’s a hub for the united OneCROP team, which assembles the delegates, experts and negotiators from the Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific. But Bhagwan notes that “unfortunately this year the Blue Moana space is much smaller than usual and they’ve been put out of the way. Normally these spaces are a place for our team to congregate, but with Covid protocols in place, it’s really a very, very difficult place for people to work in.”

Australian prime ministers Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull have continued to intervene in political debates since they left office. In the same way, former Pacific island leaders have a level of freedom to speak without the constraints facing current officeholders. They can also present perspectives from island nations that are often watered down in the final communiqués of the Pacific Islands Forum, where Australia often stands against the agenda advanced by its Pacific neighbours.

To complement the urgent voices of Pacific youth, a new network of former presidents, prime ministers and senior officials has entered the fray — Pacific Elders Voice. Its members make up a roll call of island leaders who have been active in COPs for many years, including former Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga and recently retired Micronesian presidents Anote Tong of Kiribati, Hilda C. Heine of Marshall Islands and Tommy Remengesau Jr of Palau. They are joined by leading Chamorro scholar and politician Robert Underwood of Guahan (Guam), and the outgoing secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, Dame Meg Taylor of Papua New Guinea.

In a series of statements, tweets and speeches, the Pacific Elders have played a prophetic role during COP26. They seek more urgent action to maintain temperature rises below 1.5°C, more targeted and accessible climate finance, and call for G20 nations to end fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. They propose a new climate Marshall Plan, on a scale similar to reconstruction after the second world war, to “rapidly decarbonise the global economy and provide the necessary financial support to those most affected by the impacts of climate change.”

While their demands are directed at all OECD countries as well as China, India and other industrialised developing nations, the Pacific Elders place a special focus on Australia, the largest member of the Pacific Islands Forum.

In Glasgow, Greenpeace Australia Pacific launched a new report, Pacific Bully and International Outcast, which documents how successive Australian governments have attempted to use aid money to block a regional consensus on emissions reduction, diluting the official communiqué at the annual Forum leaders’ meeting. Much of the Australian media has underplayed the growing anger and scorn in the Pacific directed towards “The Australian Way” — the Morrison government’s so-called plan for climate action. Nor have the displays from oil and gas company Santos at Australia’s official conference pavilion gone unnoticed — PCC’s James Bhagwan describes them as “a slap in the face to the Pacific community who are calling for an end to fossil fuels.”

Despite Scott Morrison’s belated proclamation of “net zero by 2050,” Australia’s refusal to announce a new emissions target for 2030 has angered Pacific delegates, young and old alike. “Once again, Prime Minister Morrison has failed to deliver anything new,” says former Marshall Islands president Dr. Hilda Heine. “There is very little detail and none of the clear action on fossil fuels required to keep global warming at 1.5°C.”

As the controversy since the signing of the AUKUS agreement highlights, Scott Morrison’s highly personalised diplomacy is damaging Australian strategic interests. His first presence at a face-to-face Forum leaders’ meeting in 2019 ended in bitter wrangling and criticism, and not much has improved since. Last week, former Kiribati president Anote Tong stressed that Morrison’s climate diplomacy is floundering: “We’ve hoped for far more from our Pacific neighbour. The rest of the world hoped for more. This great nation is becoming more and more isolated due to the government’s lack of action and ambition on climate change.”

Even Fijian prime minister Voreqe “Frank” Bainimarama, the current chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, has used social media to make some sharp points. Bainimarama tweeted a welcome to his “good friend” Scott Morrison at the Glasgow summit. It was accompanied by a picture of Bainimarama presenting his Australian counterpart with a copy of Fiji’s newly legislated Climate Change Act — a tongue-in-cheek reference to Morrison’s refusal to legislate even the long-delayed commitment of net zero by 2050.

In his formal national statement to the Glasgow summit, Scott Morrison announced a new pledge of A$500 million for climate finance for Asian and Pacific countries. He highlighted the way that $200 million of this amount will be “invested in our backyard amongst our Pacific island family.”

This gesture was immediately critiqued as too little, too late. In reports like Fairer Futures, Australian environment and development organisations had been calling for much greater increases to meet Australia’s fair share of the global target of US$100 billion of climate finance per annum, with a doubling of current commitments to A$3 billion by 2023.

Former president of Palau, Tommy Remengesau Jr, also made clear that adaptation funding means little unless accompanied by more ambition on emissions reduction: “Prime Minister Morrison cannot buy himself out of a much greater responsibility for urgent and rapid action to reduce emissions at home and to stop the export of coal.”

Island diplomats are concerned by Australia’s reliance on the shrinking Official Development Assistance budget for its international climate finance pledges, at a time when other OECD countries are looking at innovative sources to increase both development and climate finance. In Glasgow, Samoa’s UN ambassador stressed the importance of looking beyond aid budgets as the sole source for climate finance.

“I think it’s important to emphasise that we are looking for new money, not money that you shift from one pocket to the other, because it doesn’t really help us,” Fatumanava-o-Upolu said. “If you put more money to [climate] finance but that comes out of aid to our countries that has funded basic infrastructure or social sectors like education, health, etc., then it’s a no-win situation for us.”

Leaders of Smaller Island States are also angered by Australia’s refusal to reinstate contributions to the Green Climate Fund, or GCF, the global climate finance mechanism created under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Despite complex application processes and long delays, most Forum Island countries have already accessed GCF funding. By June this year, grants to Pacific Small Island Developing States amounted to US$440 million, combined with US$690 million of co-financing.

Playing to a conservative domestic audience, Scott Morrison has long railed against “negative globalism” and an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” In response, a member of Pacific Elders Voice, former Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga, suggests the Morrison government refuses to work through multilateral structures because it fears losing control over decision-making.

“We know that very little of this money will leave Australia,” Sopoaga said. “It will go to highly paid Australian consultants to do projects designed and managed by Australia. Pacific island countries believe in the Green Climate Fund and our own regional mechanisms because they give us access to critical climate finance, as well as ownership and control over how the money is spent.”

Beyond this, Morrison’s outdated, racist imagery of the Pacific islands as “our backyard” wins little support in the region. The Australian leader often presents himself as a Christian committed to the Pacific vuvale, or family. But this language is grating for many, including the leader of the region’s main ecumenical church organisation.

“I’m very concerned about the way Australia throws around the word vuvale as if they’re part of the Pacific family,” says PCC’s Reverend Bhagwan. “They are not honouring the meaning of that word, which talks about unity and working together for the common good and caring for the common household.”

“People need to ‘walk the talk’ of their faith,” he adds, “particularly for those leaders who proclaim to be part of the Christian faith, which talks of justice. They need the moral courage as well as the political courage to stand up. Whether they have the guts to put their political careers on the line for the sake of the future, that’s up to them.” •

The post On the shoulders of giants appeared first on Inside Story.

The protests against the wall-of-death drift-netting, against plans to dispose of nuclear wastes in the ocean, the incineration of chemical weapons on Johnston Island, the 1995 resumption of nuclear tests on Moruroa, and, most ominously, the specter of our atoll islands and low-lying coastal regions disappearing under the rising sea level, are instances of a regional united front against threats to our environment.

Now we can add AUKUS to that list, and the new danger of nuclear proliferation in the Pacific.

Last month US president Joe Biden, British prime minister Boris Johnson and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison announced AUKUS, “an enhanced trilateral security partnership” between the three countries. They professed “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”

This strategic shift is much broader than the commitment to nuclear subs. The United States will deploy vessels, aircraft and US marines more often through Australia, and joint research efforts will focus on new frontiers, from the militarisation of space to “cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and additional undersea capabilities.”

The brutal abandonment of the $90 billion submarine contract with France’s Naval Group, meanwhile, sent Australia’s strategic think tanks into overdrive, to analyse the implications for Indo-Pacific relationships. Amid the reams of commentary, however, little attention focused on the response to AUKUS in the Pacific islands.

Partly this reflects the initially measured response of most regional leaders, who refrained from directly criticising the new Anglosphere partnership. But any hope that Australia’s island neighbours will welcome further nuclearisation of the region is folly. Even as they face current security challenges — including the climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic — island leaders are again talking about nuclear weapons, nuclear waste dumping and their desire for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific.

Scott Morrison likes to say that Australia has a vuvale relationship with its island neighbours. But vuvale, the Fijian word for “family,” carries deep cultural implications, involving bonds of reciprocity, respect and sharing. Respect towards island neighbours has been sorely lacking during climate negotiations, and regional anger over Canberra’s failed climate policy is likely to be exacerbated by the strategic shift under AUKUS.

Within days of the AUKUS announcement, a series of statements from Pacific leaders, community elders and media organisations highlighted the persistence of the deep antinuclear sentiment that Epeli Hau‘ofa identified as a central element of Pacific regionalism.

“Shame Australia, Shame,” tweeted the general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwan. “How can you call us your ‘vuvale’ when you know your ‘family’ stands for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific?”

Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

Recalling British and US nuclear testing on Christmas Island, Kiribati president Taneti Maamau highlighted the trauma of i-Kiribati nuclear survivors: “With anything to do with nuclear, we thought it would be a courtesy to raise it, to discuss it with your neighbours… As small island states,” he added, “we thought we were part of the solution… we are in the Pacific family. We should be consulted.”

Newspapers like the Samoa Observer editorialised against Australia’s plans. “Signing up to a military pact behind the closet and then declaring we in the region will benefit from the peace and stability it would bring is not how friends treat each other,” declared Samoa’s leading newspaper.

In contrast to Canberra’s strategic shift, the New Zealand government quickly reaffirmed the longstanding, bipartisan legislation that has kept NZ ports free of nuclear visits since 1987. While avoiding any direct criticism of AUKUS and reiterating New Zealand’s commitment to ANZUS and the Five Eyes agreement, prime minister Jacinda Ardern pointedly reminded Australia that nuclear submarines are not welcome across the Tasman.

“Certainly they couldn’t come into our internal waters,” she said. “No vessels that are partially or fully powered by nuclear energy is able to enter our internal borders.”

Morrison claimed that under AUKUS “Australia is not seeking to establish nuclear weapons or establish a civil nuclear capability.” These claims were immediately undercut when the Minerals Council of Australia and leading members of his own government called for a domestic nuclear industry to help develop the skills needed to maintain and operate a nuclear-powered submarine fleet. Others are concerned that the AUKUS partnership will rekindle Australian efforts in the 1960s to acquire nuclear weapons, a debate already under way in Australian strategic think tanks.

Unlike Australia, New Zealand has joined nine Forum Island Countries to sign and ratify the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, which prohibits parties from “developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, acquiring, possessing, or stockpiling nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” As the Samoa Observer wrote, “It is a relief seeing Prime Minister Ardern continuing to maintain the tradition of her predecessors by promoting a nuclear-free Pacific; probably she is the only true friend of the Pacific Islands.”

For all of Scott Morrison’s talk of being a member of the “Pacific family,” he clearly doesn’t understand how many actual families were affected during the nuclear-testing era. The last of the more than 310 nuclear tests in the region was conducted twenty-five years ago, but outsiders often underestimate how deep the nuclear legacy is embedded in personal histories and oceanic culture.

Many past and present leaders have personal connections to the fifty years of cold war–era nuclear testing in Marshall Islands, Australia, Kiribati and French Polynesia. Former French Polynesian president Oscar Temaru worked on Moruroa Atoll as a customs officer, suffered family tragedy from the early death of a child and is a supporter of Moruroa e Tatou, the association of former Maohi workers who staffed the test sites during France’s 193 nuclear tests.

As a child in the 1950s, former Kiribati president Anote Tong lived on Fanning Island, close to Christmas Island where the British government conducted hydrogen bomb tests, dubbed Operation Grapple, in 1957–58.

Fiji was a British colony at this time, sending members of the Fiji Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve to support Britain’s H-bomb tests on Malden Island. The first contingent of Fijian sailors in 1957 was led by Ratu Inoke Bainimarama. Today, his son Josaia — known as Frank — is prime minister of Fiji. As a former rear-admiral and commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, the younger Bainimarama is an unlikely champion for nuclear disarmament. But the Fijian politician — who led the military coup in 2006 and now serves as chair of the Pacific Islands Forum — has long stood by Fijian nuclear veterans.

“My father was among those soldiers,” Bainimarama tweeted a fortnight after the AUKUS announcement. “The nature of their mission was not totally clear to any of them until the bombs were going off. To honour the sacrifice of all those who have suffered due to these weapons, Fiji will never stop working towards a global nuclear ban.”

The timing of the AUKUS announcement added complications for the British government, which will host the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow next month. Many leaders from the Small Island Developing States group watched in dismay as France and the AUKUS partners squabbled over arms contracts at a time when development and climate funding is desperately needed. As Bainimarama tartly noted, “If we can spend trillions on missiles, drones, and nuclear submarines, we can fund climate action.”

Even as he challenges the AUKUS partners to make more ambitious COP26 climate commitments, the Fijian PM has spent recent weeks speaking out about nuclear proliferation and the health and environmental legacies of nuclear testing. At the UN General Assembly he stressed that “the commitment of the Pacific Island nations to the elimination of nuclear weapons is not based on an abstraction. It is based on real experience with the consequences of nuclear fallout, and it is at the root of our sense of urgency.”

Announcing the AUKUS deal, Scott Morrison recklessly described the renewed ties to Britain and the United States as a “forever partnership” (no doubt raising eyebrows in Paris, after the Australia–France strategic partnership and a multibillion-dollar contract was sunk overnight by Anglo-American perfidy).

The range of issues contemplated under the AUKUS banner — from transfer of nuclear technology to cyberwarfare cooperation and logistics, transit and basing rights for American forces in Australia — highlights the potential for Australia to be even further integrated into US nuclear war–fighting strategies. Previous Coalition language about the need to “balance” economic ties with the People’s Republic of China and strategic ties with the United States has been abandoned.

Most of Australia’s Pacific island neighbours haven’t abandoned this balancing act, however. At a time of increasing US–Chinese strategic competition, many are wary of being forced into a choice between Washington and Beijing.

Like New Zealand, Vanuatu has declared its land and waters nuclear-free, and like Fiji it is a member of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement. Other states like Papua New Guinea explicitly base their foreign policy on the objective “friends to all and enemies to none.”

Although PNG prime minister James Marape didn’t directly criticise the AUKUS announcement, he did tell ABC correspondent Natalie Whiting that “we will make sure our sovereignty is not influenced by what happens in Australia and elsewhere. [O]ur waters and our sovereignty will be protected by our own specific bilaterals we have with all nations.”

This tension is evident even among some of the United States’ closest allies in the northern Pacific. Although they are contemplating withdrawal from the Pacific Islands Forum, the five members of the Micronesian Presidents’ Summit continue to manoeuvre around longstanding China–Taiwan disputes in the Pacific. Nauru, Palau and Marshall Islands have diplomatic relations with Taipei; Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia, or FSM, recognise Beijing. All, however, are wary of a neat “for and against” logic, despite criticism by Taiwan-aligned leaders like Nauru president Lionel Aingimea and Palau’s Surangel Whipps Jr of Chinese human rights violations and China’s strategic advance.

Even as FSM extends its historical connection with Washington, president David Panuelo continues to support ongoing diplomatic ties with Beijing. In his address to the UN General Assembly in September, Panuelo said that FSM needed support from “all friends, allies and development partners in the global community.”

Micronesia is “family to the United States and a friend to the People’s Republic of China,” he went on, “just as Micronesia is a friend to the Maldives and to the United Kingdom, to the Netherlands and to Spain, to Nicaragua and to Australia, to New Zealand and to South Africa, to Israel and to Norway, to Japan and to Korea.” Friends to all, enemies to none.

In a new book on FSM’s foreign policy, Micronesian scholar Gonzaga Puas says his country “is learning from other Pacific Island nations to better position itself in regard to relations with China without offending the US.” Puas says that island nations like FSM have long dealt successfully with the outside world by drawing on internal social stability and mutual support rather than succumbing to different waves of colonisation. The vast think tank literature on Chinese influence in the Pacific islands often underestimates this skill.

Even so, the three Freely Associated States can’t avoid current regional tensions. FSM, the Republic of Palau and the Republic of Marshall Islands are renegotiating Compacts of Free Association with Washington by 2023, agreements that give the US Indo-Pacific Command strategic denial against third parties. As the United States mobilises against China in the region, US officials are discussing possible military-basing rights with Palau and FSM, as well as new deployments in the US territory of Guahan (Guam), which already hosts major US naval and air force bases.

The AUKUS partners seek the status of “security partner of choice” for island nations. But if they try to force “forever partnerships” on members of the Pacific Islands Forum, the pushback will be significant. As PNG’s James Marape said after the AUKUS announcement, “We have a very peaceful part of planet Earth, we want to protect that peace and serenity… In as far as securing peace is concerned, we’ve got no problem, but if such activities bring disharmony in the region, then we have an issue.”

Nuclear testing has played a major if unintended role in shaping the region’s political development over the past half-century. As Pacific Islands Forum secretary-general Henry Puna reminded participants in a recent Forum webinar to commemorate the UN International Day on Nuclear Tests, “nuclear testing was a key political driver for the establishment of our Pacific Islands Forum fifty years ago.”

For the former Cook Islands prime minister, the signing of the 1985 Rarotonga Treaty for a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, or SPNFZ, was a seminal moment for Pacific regionalism: “Despite thirty-six years of the Treaty of Rarotonga, and twenty-five years since the permanent cessation of nuclear testing in our region, the nuclear threat remains, exacerbated by the permanent, intergenerational consequences and impacts of nuclear weapons.”

Other veteran diplomats echo the importance of SPNFZ, which was developed in the midst of 1980s US–Soviet nuclear tensions. Samoa’s current high commissioner to Fiji, Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia, was a member of Samoa’s delegation at the August 1984 Forum meeting in Tuvalu that appointed the working group of officials to prepared the draft text of a Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. As I reported for Inside Story in 2013, declassified cabinet papers and leaked US diplomatic cables reveal the extent of the US–Australia collaboration at that time, to push back against island governments seeking to ban missile tests and visits or transit by nuclear-powered vessels.

Unlike China, Russia, Britain and France, the United States is the only major nuclear weapons state that still refuses to ratify the protocols of the SPNFZ treaty. Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia stresses that the next step is clear: “We don’t need to look far. The three Protocols of our own Rarotonga Treaty have yet to be ratified by the United States, despite some positive indications made earlier.”

Recent regional efforts have aimed to strengthen SPNFZ and other treaties. New Zealand and Vanuatu co-hosted a conference in December 2018, issuing the Auckland Statement on TPNW to encourage more island countries to sign and ratify the nuclear ban treaty. This push was echoed by the Fijian prime minister at last month’s General Assembly meeting, when Bainimarama urged “all Member States to join and ratify the new TPNW, to free the world of nuclear weapons.”

Signatories to the Rarotonga Treaty held their first-ever meeting of states parties in December last year, more than thirty-five years after the treaty was signed. The Forum has created a Nuclear Legacies Task Force to assist nuclear survivors in Marshall Islands and Kiribati. Since his election last February, secretary-general Puna has reached out to OPANAL — the Latin American secretariat that manages the 1967 Tlatelolco nuclear-weapon-free zone. In a speech to OPANAL on 1 October, Puna offered to host “a meeting of nuclear-weapon-free zones in the Blue Pacific” in 2022, bringing together governments that have created zones across the whole land area of the southern hemisphere.

Australian diplomats, by contrast, regard US extended nuclear deterrence as a central feature of Australian defence policy. They have campaigned against the TPNW and ensured that British nuclear testing at Monte Bello, Maralinga and Emu Field is not on the agenda of the regional Nuclear Legacies Task Force. Meanwhile, UK prime minister Boris Johnson has announced three major changes to Britain’s nuclear posture: to increase the upper limit on its nuclear warhead stockpile by 44 per cent, reduce transparency about the makeup of the arsenal and extend the strategic circumstances in which British nuclear weapons might be used. The United States continues to upgrade its nuclear arsenal, even as the number of nuclear warheads shrinks.

Scott Morrison now wants to go further. If they are ever built and crewed in coming decades (no small problem), the proposed AUKUS nuclear submarines will integrate the Royal Australian Navy more deeply into US nuclear war–fighting strategies, through potential missions such as undersea intelligence collection within China’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

The Rarotonga Treaty also bans the dumping of radioactive nuclear waste in the SPNFZ zone, as well as assisting or encouraging any nation to dump waste in the region. For Henry Puna, the treaty “distinctly ensures that we are a nuclear-free zone, and not just a nuclear-weapon-free zone… the intentional omission of ‘weapon’ from the title of our treaty reflects the desire of states parties to engage on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation in a holistic fashion.”

For this reason, the proposed ocean dumping of contaminated waste water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactor is a major diplomatic setback for Japan in the islands. In recent years, Japan has joined other “Quad” members — Australia, India and the United States — to coordinate pushback against Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. But the Japanese government angered Pacific communities last April by announcing plans to discharge more than 1.2 million tonnes of treated radioactive waste water into the Pacific, starting in 2023. The unilateral proposal breaches previous commitments to consult with island leaders before any dumping is undertaken.

“Japan’s announcement to discharge treated water into the Pacific Ocean has sounded the alarm bells again,” says Samoa’s Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia. “We need independent and verifiable scientific assessment that this method of discharge is indeed safe-proof.” The final communiqué of the ninth Pacific Area Leaders Meeting, in July, highlighted “the priority of ensuring international consultation, international law, and independent and verifiable scientific assessments.” As Henry Puna said, “Only the disclosure of information based on science will satisfy and appease the members.”

The links between climate change, nuclear contaminants and human rights for indigenous peoples are highlighted by the energetic diplomacy of the Republic of Marshall Islands. Marshallese diplomats are active on many fronts: championing the successful effort at the UN Human Rights Council to create a special rapporteur on climate change and human rights; lobbying at the International Maritime Organization for climate levies on bunker fuel; and raising the call at COP26 for “1.5 to stay alive” through the Climate Vulnerable Forum and Higher Ambition Coalition. The Marshall Islands government has created a National Nuclear Commission to coordinate effective responses to the legacies of sixty-seven US nuclear tests in their lands and waters.

Successive Marshall Islands leaders have highlighted the connection between nuclear and climate threats. The poem “Anointed” by Marshallese writer and activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner captures local concern that rising sea levels will leach radioactive isotopes into the marine environment from the Runit Dome on Enewetak Atoll — a relic of twentieth-century nuclear testing. Today, Jetnil-Kijiner is a climate envoy for her nation, contributing to a National Adaptation Plan that uniquely links climate and nuclear concerns. “It’s going to be one of the few National Adaptation Plans that takes into consideration the nuclear legacy,” she says, “and how the nuclear legacy can inform how we plan for climate change action.”

Marshall Islands president David Kabua has called on UN agencies to assist in dealing with these legacies within the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework. Kabua sees UN action as a small recompense for the betrayal of Micronesian rights when his nation was under UN Trusteeship after the second world war, “where — despite our warnings at the time — two Trusteeship Council resolutions remain the only instance in history where any UN organ ever specifically authorised nuclear detonations.” The legacy of these tests, he said, “remains a very contemporary threat, in our waters, our lands and our bodies.”

As Australians debate the costs and consequences of acquiring AUKUS nuclear submarines, David Kabua’s words ring out: “We tirelessly underscore that no people or nation should ever have to bear a burden such as ours, and that no effort should be spared to move towards a world free of nuclear weapons and nuclear risk.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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Australian anthropologist Nicholas Thomas’s new book starts with that knowledge. In this account of what is known about the great historic voyages and voyagers across the Pacific, we journey with him backwards and forwards in time, following winds and currents from the east to the west and north to the south of what was once called mar del sur, the South Sea. Thomas is the umpteenth anthropologist or archaeologist or historian to take readers on this journey, and one of the best.

Knowledge of the great canoe voyages that settled islands as distant as Aotearoa/New Zealand and Rapa Nui/Easter Island resides in Islander histories and culture, and has enchanted human and social scientists for as long as the connection between them has been known. Anthropologists and linguists, archaeologists and historians have tried to pin down where, when, how and, elusively, why the ancestors of Polynesians, Melanesians and Micronesians travelled so far, settling islands thousands of kilometres apart.

Voyagers is a long, richly illustrated essay setting out these arguments. It is also, in one sense, the backstory of Thomas’s own discipline and his position as director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge.

Some of Thomas’s disciplinary predecessors were both from the Pacific and scholars of the Pacific. He sets out the career and ideas of Te Rangi Hīroa (also known as Peter Buck, 1877–1951), for example, Māori physician, anthropologist and director of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. Hīroa wrote Vikings of the Sunrise (later published as Vikings of the Pacific) in the mid 1930s, seeking to publicise Polynesian maritime history, geography and culture, and detailing the navigational knowledge that enabled journeys between Tonga, the Cook Islands, Samoa, New Zealand, Hawai’i, the Marquesas and more.

Hīroa was one of many to consider and reconsider, just like Thomas, the various theses of Pacific migration and ancient connection through seafaring. In the 1930s, he favoured an early Indonesian then Micronesian route over what was then the more popular thesis of a Melanesian entry into the Pacific. “Where” and especially “when” have endured as major lines of inquiry in the archaeology, anthropology and history of Oceania.

The most gripping part of Voyagers, however, is Thomas’s exploration of the “how”: the technicalities of different kinds of Islander wayfinding and navigation, of canoe construction and design. Precisely how mariners, then and now, fix their position and their direction from rising and setting stars, triangulating with islands that are not necessarily, and perhaps even rarely, in view, is fascinating and ultimately more interesting than speculations about “why.”

Thomas explains the technique and tradition of fixed departure points from various islands, coordinated with a specific rising star. He shows how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European navigators noted, with real interest drawn from their own experiential knowledge, how Pacific voyagers typically departed from a particular point on the coast — a point that stayed fixed as the canoe sailed offshore and was then aligned and coordinated with a particular star that was known to direct the way to a known island. There was a temporal dimension, then, to departure: losing sight of that landmark had to align with the rise of the celestial mark, the particular evening star, itself located within a group of surrounding stars as fixed points.

Thomas has been reading and re-reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of Pacific voyages for decades. He knows the British, German, Dutch and French expeditions as intimately as anyone. He doesn’t shy away from the impacts of European colonialism, but this (refreshingly) is not his “lesson” for the reader. His great knowledge allows us to discern a genuine and sometimes even humble interest in the European observers of Pacific voyaging. We can rely on him to keep finding surprising gems therein.

Divided by culture, history and language, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors of so many expedition accounts were not just mariners but often navigators too. Of course they looked and listened and learned from what Islanders were doing. If they remarked on the curious Islander pattern of departing from a particular place, not any place, there was likely something to it; after all, the Islanders had specialist knowledge held by few, if any, others, even the ocean sailors of the world.

Popular fascination with Pacific voyagers is greater than for other seas and other journeys in the oceanic world. Thomas traces and explains the enduring interest that saw generations of re-enactments, canonically the Kon-Tiki expedition in the late 1940s, that have sought to validate theses about connections between South America and Polynesia. Over the 1970s and 80s a sub-industry emerged, both evidentiary and educational, including the longstanding expeditions of the Honolulu-based Polynesian Voyaging Society. With his great museological knowledge, the polymathic Thomas is able to explain to us just where and how these re-enactments modelled their vessels, and how accurately. Those early canoes might have been sketched by artists on the Dampier, Wallis, Cook and D’Urville voyages, but less than a handful of genuinely old canoes remain, and Thomas knows where to find them.

This is a book filled with material culture — pottery, artefacts, a Tahitian adze with coconut-fibre binding collected on one of Cook’s voyages. It is filled also with language, the diverse yet often linked vocabularies across Oceania, and the work of those who tried to make sense of them. And our own wayfinding within this book is marked by charts and maps, a design of real beauty.

The maps and charts that open the book immediately humble anyone who thinks they know the Pacific. We can readily recognise “Oceania” as a whole, from Papua New Guinea and Australia across to Rapa Nui, and from the Chatham Islands south of Aotearoa/New Zealand to Hawai’i. But turn the page and we see all the islands that make up Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, known to few but those for whom they are home, and to brokers like Thomas. Saipan and Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands, and Enewetak and Rongelap in the Marshall Islands, Atafu and Fakaofo in the Tokelau Islands; these are places with specific histories of voyaging that Thomas insists — but lightly — we also need to recognise.

As we would expect, James Cook is important in this account. Thomas is a Cook expert, no doubt about it. As he explains to us, Cook was one of many, including the earlier William Dampier, to think about, listen to and learn from other voyagers within and across the South Sea. Many of them sketched and painted the images from his three Pacific voyages that illustrate this book.

Some of the precious artefacts collected, exchanged or occasionally simply taken during those voyages serve as evidence for Thomas’s adjudication of various theses on the where, when, how and why of Pacific canoe voyages. Some, indeed, are treasured in Thomas’s own museum in Cambridge. Some of the linguistic information gathered by Cook, his officers and his mariners likewise serves as evidence, calibrated alongside many current languages and the archaeological evidence, especially of the “Lapita” pottery.

Occasionally Thomas describes his own, often fascinating, first-person encounters and “discoveries.” He tells us about a conference trip to Taiwan, for decades understood to be the deep-time departure point for that group of linguistically defined migrating Oceanic peoples known as the “Austronesians.” Although he knew the pattern of movement, he didn’t expect to recognise the tattoos in one of the remoter parts of Taiwan that he visited. They were similar to many he had seen across Oceania (he is also co-editor of Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West), offering a different kind of confirming evidence of deep historical and cultural connection.

This vignette reminded me of They Are We, Emma Christopher’s film about an Afro-Cuban community. Cultural practices — dances and songs ­— proved crucial in linking this small community with descendants of the same ancestors in Sierra Leone. The cultural recognition was clear, if direct in that instance and mediated in Thomas’s telling. And yet in Thomas’s instance, the material and cultural connection that survives as tattoos is a link over thousands of years, while Christopher’s instance is a link over hundreds of years.

For years now, historians and anthropologists of early colonial eras and encounters have been interested in the mediators, the go-betweens, the brokers. Tupaia is one of the better-known brokers between his own home and culture in the Society Islands and Banks, Cook and his men, as well as between and with Māori with whom Tupaia found he could talk. In 2018, indeed, Tupaia outshone Cook during Britain’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage in the Endeavour, which departed from Deptford in 1768.

In some ways Thomas is himself a skilled and knowledgeable go-between. With precision and deep learning, he surveys the written accounts, the voluminous expeditionary evidence, our current knowledge of Islanders across the various archipelagos, and extant material objects and artefacts. He is also a skilled broker of scholarly knowledge for the so-called “interested reader.”

Voyagers appears in The Landmark Library, published by Head of Zeus Press, “a record of the achievements of humankind from the late Stone Age to the present day, a kind of history of civilization.” The series is highly successful, with a tried and true brief that would equally be at home in the 1920s and 2020s. But who and what is Head of Zeus Press? This ten-year-old London-based independent publisher seems to have defied the odds, publishing hybrid e-books and strongly designed generalist non-fiction such as this. It has secured seasoned and award-winning authors like Thomas as well as debut authors.

The Landmark Library series offers an old-fashioned idea, “the history of civilisation,” that still has legs. But with books on Shakespeare, the British Museum, Magna Carta, the Royal Society, railways, Stonehenge and the Book of Kells, it’s a metropolitan not a cosmopolitan history of civilisation. Voyagers is a geographic and cultural outlier, and one wonders if it started its publishing-idea life as James Cook. If so, what a blessing to have Nicholas Thomas take it on and twist civilisation around and back again. •

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Later that day, the party that won April’s general election, Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi, or FAST, organised an impromptu swearing-in ceremony under a huge tent on the grounds outside parliament. Adorned in a white dress amid a sea of red-jacketed supporters, prime minister elect Fiame Naomi Mata’afa swore her oath of allegiance. Absent were the O le Ao o le Malo (head of state), the clerk of parliament and the chief justice, who normally preside at such occasions. Also missing was Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, prime minister since 1998, who accused FAST of “treason” and of trying to “steal” his authority.

Five weeks later, on Monday this week, the Supreme Court ruled that the swearing-in had been unlawful and failed to conform with the customary “solemnity” of such occasions. Nevertheless, the judges ordered that the fifty-one members of parliament meet to form a new government within seven days. That deadline expires on 5 July.

The drama started in April when Tuilaepa’s Human Rights Protection Party, or HRPP, lost to FAST by a narrow twenty-five seats to twenty-six, with the balance tipped by a single independent who chose to align with the opposition. Tuilaepa refused to go quietly. First, he sought to use the country’s 10 per cent gender quota to manufacture an extra HRPP seat and bring the tally to twenty-six all. Then he persuaded the O le Ao o le Malo to cancel the election and order a fresh poll.

When the Supreme Court knocked back both manoeuvres on 17 May, only a few days remained before the expiry of the forty-five-day post-election deadline for parliament to sit to select a new government. In accordance with the court’s judgement, the O le Ao o le Malo belatedly ordered the required meeting take place but then promptly rescinded the order for reasons, he said, “that I will make known in due course,” before scuttling away to his home village at the other end of the island. His reasoning remains unexplained.

The Supreme Court, unusually sitting on a Sunday in a devoutly Christian country, upheld the O le Ao o le Malo’s first order but cancelled the second. The outgoing government’s attorney-general walked out of the courtroom in disgust.

Tuilaepa, acting as caretaker prime minister, clearly hoped that delaying official proceedings beyond the forty-five-day limit would create a situation in which a fresh election was the only option. But this left him in open defiance of the court. He accused judges of having close kinship ties with the opposition leadership and insisted that the “court cannot issue demands because all three branches [of government] have equal powers.”

Although the Supreme Court ruled unlawful his effort to secure an extra female HRPP seat, the appeal judges did accept that the 10 per cent gender quota had not been met and that an extra seat might therefore be warranted — but only after twenty-eight election petitions (mostly for bribery and treating) were dealt with. Tuilaepa’s response was to insist that the formation of a new government should await not only the conclusion of petition hearings but also any consequent by-elections.

On this score, he is going backwards. Of the twenty-eight petitions, four have been heard so far; of these, three have entailed HRPP seat losses, strengthening FAST’s claim to be able to form a stable government. Although the judges left open the idea that the final seat tally should await their own deliberations, they have — quite rightly — brooked no further delay in selecting a government.

Tuilaepa’s calculation was that if he were able to force a fresh election, the HRPP might win. That isn’t far-fetched: the HRPP shot itself in the foot in April by fielding multiple candidates in single-member districts, despite the country having switched to a fully-fledged first-past-the-post system. This strategy had served the party reasonably well at previous polls, when unofficial HRPP “shadow” candidates were often co-opted into the ruling party if and when they proved successful. This time the party simply split its own vote, leaving it with a minority of seats despite its 55.4 per cent of the popular vote.

In fact, the HRPP had shot itself in the foot twice. It also banned floor-crossing by amending the Electoral Act so that a “seat of a member becomes vacant” if he or she “resigns from a political party to join another political party during the parliamentary term.” Even “holding” oneself out as a member of a different party to the one under which one contested an election can lead to the forfeiting of a seat. Without the new floor-crossing rule, the HRPP might well have been able to entice a few FAST MPs to switch sides following the April election.

This constitutional crisis may have ended, at least temporarily, a thirty-three-year period of political stability unparalleled among the independent Pacific Island states. But Samoan politics hasn’t always been so stable, and nor is this the first time the courts have ruled against a sitting prime minister.

On 17 September 1982, the Samoan Supreme Court ruled that then prime minister Va’ai Kolone had lost his seat due to “personation” (fraudulent votes cast in the name of deceased or absent voters). As a result, the HRPP government that had emerged from the 1982 elections lost its 24–23 majority. Normally, that outcome would have been conveyed first by the acting chief justice to the speaker, and then to the O le Ao o le Malo, in a process that might have taken at least a week. But on that very same evening the O le Ao o le Malo, Malietoa Tanumafili II, telephoned opposition leader and pre-1982 prime minister Tupoula Efi, who was sworn in as replacement prime minister the next day.

As political scientist Asofou So’o has pointed out, the crises of the 1980s could have caused major social unrest if not for the respect commanded by the O le Ao o le Malo and the courts, and the general adherence to the constitution, democratic principles and the rule of law.

This week’s Supreme Court ruling leaves Samoa at a crossroads. Although the judges rejected FAST’s argument that it had acted in accordance with the “doctrine of necessity” by seeking to form government within the forty-five-day limit, they did indicate a preparedness to revisit that verdict if parliament doesn’t meet within seven days.

The “doctrine of necessity” has sometimes been applied by unscrupulous or intimidated judges to rubber stamp the overthrow of governments. Where they retain some independence, however, judges normally apply the doctrine only in cases where a severe crisis or social unrest creates a legal vacuum that justifies extra-constitutional action with the ultimate objective of upholding the constitution. That Samoa’s judges should contemplate such a course of action indicates the depth of their displeasure that “the executive arm of government has deliberately and unlawfully prolonged the calling of Parliament for plainly political reasons.”

Tuilaepa has not been a bad prime minister for Samoa, but all political careers must eventually come to an end. It is time for him to pass over the reins of office. •

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Under a 1998 agreement known as the Noumea Accord, two referendums have already been held on New Caledonia’s political status. In both cases, a majority of registered voters opposed independence. But the narrow victory for the No vote — 57 to 43 per cent on 4 November 2018 and an even closer 53 to 47 per cent on 4 October 2020 — worried the French government and anti-independence leaders in New Caledonia.

If a majority votes Yes on 12 December, says the French government, local leaders will need to negotiate a new constitution for the independent nation Kanaky New Caledonia, to be put to a popular referendum. But only eighteen months would then be allowed for new agreements on finance, passports, security and other issues between France and the independent state.

A No vote would open the way to a different set of negotiations. The French government proposes replacing the 1998 Noumea Accord, which has devolved many powers to its Pacific dependency. But some local leaders are worried it may unilaterally reform the law that introduced the Accord into the French constitution, rendering unconstitutional the many gains the indigenous Kanak people have made over the past twenty years.

Whether the vote is Yes or No, overseas minister Lecornu says that the transition to new governing arrangements must be complete by 30 June 2023.

While political debate has been intense in New Caledonia, the independence question is exciting little interest in France. Amid austerity, the pandemic and the debate about Europe’s future after Brexit, many ordinary citizens see little point in pumping taxpayers’ money into the network of overseas dependencies that make up the French empire. One opinion poll, taken in late April, shows 66 per cent of those surveyed would support New Caledonia’s “separation” from France. This figure worries anti-independence leaders who say, correctly, that it doesn’t reflect the opinion of French nationals of European heritage living in New Caledonia.

With the second referendum held just eight months ago, calling another vote in December has angered independence leaders, who had proposed that the third poll take place in September or October next year. Anti-independence leaders pushed for the earlier date, believing they can stall the momentum towards independence.

The debate over timing is also driven by domestic French politics. Emmanuel Macron will face off against the extreme right’s Marine Le Pen in next April’s French presidential election. In the second run-off vote, he will desperately need support from centre-right voters and the conservative Les Républicains party. Macron’s own party, La République En Marche, may seek to win friends on the right by promising to back Les Républicains against New Caledonia’s current deputies in the National Assembly — Calédonie ensemble’s Philippe Gomes and Philippe Dunoyer — in next June’s elections for the French legislature.

Over the past two decades, the transition to a new political status for New Caledonia has been monitored by regular meetings of the cross-party Committee of Signatories to the Noumea Accord. But since the first referendum, in 2018, that process has been fraught. With the two votes having raised the stakes, the multi-party government of New Caledonia has often seemed paralysed, unable to agree on key policies and budgets.

Five pro-independence members of the collegial government resigned in February, bringing down president Thierry Santa, leader of the conservative anti-independence alliance Avenir en Confiance. Despite the election of a new eleven-member executive by New Caledonia’s congress in April, Santa has remained caretaker leader because of a dispute over his replacement between the two main pro-independence groups in parliament, UC-FLNKS and Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance.

To break this cycle of mistrust, the young, ambitious Lecornu has promoted informal networks for dialogue. After last year’s conflict over the sale of nickel assets in the Southern Province, Lecornu established the Leprédour group, an irregular meeting of five politicians from anti-independence parties and five from the FLNKS, rather than seeking consensus in the Committee of Signatories.

He then called a meeting of key New Caledonian leaders in Paris between 25 May and 3 June, supposedly for a roundtable discussion but in reality to ram through a series of decisions. Speaking after the meeting, he made clear that the decision to proceed to a referendum this year was made by the French government. “This date is not the subject of a consensus,” he said, “It’s not an agreement. It’s an initiative that we are taking within the strict framework of the powers of the French State.”

Returning to Noumea after the roundtable, Gilbert Tyuiénon, a leading member of the largest independence party, Union Calédonienne, expressed concern that French domestic politics rather than New Caledonian interests were driving the agenda. While he acknowledged that the choice of referendum date is in the hands of the French government, he argued that it had “taken advantage of the constraints of the national electoral calendar, rather than the expectations expressed by the independence movement. The date of 12 December was therefore not the subject of a consensus decision.”

Louis Mapou, a leading independence activist in New Caledonia’s Southern Province and one of two candidates contending for the presidency of New Caledonia, says the rushed timing imposed by the French state is promoting deep anger among grassroots independence supporters. “Our activists are advocating a boycott, because all Kanak say that this is too much of a rush,” said Mapou. “We have long pleaded that the referendum not be held before the end of the year. Can this guarantee that the independence movement will participate? And beyond this, who can guarantee that we in the leadership will be followed?”

When he announced the roundtable in Paris, Lecornu hoped to engage key political leaders across the spectrum. But a number were reluctant to participate, arguing the format would restrict the topics that needed to be discussed. Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance leader Paul Néaoutyine, president of the Northern Province, boycotted the meeting and UNI delegation members Louis Mapou and Victor Tutugoro then refused to attend. Union Calédonienne leaders agreed to travel to France but said they had come to present their point of view, not to negotiate.

Long-time conservative politician Pierre Frogier, New Caledonia’s representative in the French Senate, also declined to participate. He also attacked the “deep state” of French bureaucrats for their lack of interest in the concerns of New Caledonians. His boycott highlights the classic fear among pro-France politicians that sections of the French government are eager to walk away from France’s overseas colonies — a claim that surprises FLNKS leaders who argue, with more evidence, that the opposite is true.

Other politicians — including Milakulo Tukumuli and Vaimua Muliava, leaders of Éveil Océanien — travelled to Paris hoping to participate in the week of meetings. Even though their Wallisian party holds the balance of numbers in New Caledonia’s congress, they were unable to join key meetings. “We did not actually meet the prime minister,” complained Tukumuli, referring to Jean Castex, “quite simply because we did not have an appointment with him.”

Much of the discussion in Paris was framed around an official French government document setting out its views on the legal, constitutional and financial implications of both a Yes and a No vote in a third referendum. A draft of the document was sent confidentially to chosen participants before the meeting, but was quickly leaked to the conservative blog Calédosphere in the hope that elements of France’s response to the vote will scare New Caledonians away from supporting independence.

The leaked draft states, for example: “In the event of independence, as the funding currently granted by the French State becomes null and void, the new State [of Kanaky New Caledonia] will have to mobilise resources to finance its public service and social services. The question of the settlement of financial debts and investments made by the French State, as well as its property and property rights, will also have to be dealt with by the new State.”

It also states that “France does not exercise judicial jurisdiction outside its national territory. In the event of independence, therefore, the judicial system will have to be defined and managed by the new State… In the event of independence of the territory, the overseas tax exemption mechanisms provided for by French law, being reserved for companies present on national territory, will no longer be applicable on the territory of the new State at the end of the transition period.”

The independence movement will shed few tears that the tax lurks and financial subsidies that have benefited a small segment of the European elite in Noumea will be withdrawn. Many Kanak will also welcome the opportunity to reform the judicial and legal system to reflect local realities, replacing the French jurisprudence that has seen indigenous people making up 80 per cent of prisoners in Camp Est, New Caledonia’s main prison. Despite this, French funding for secondary teachers is a major budget item, and there are few Kanak lawyers, doctors and professionals, even after nearly 170 years of colonisation.

The FLNKS has long recognised that a Yes vote will be followed by a transitional period before the new nation can be born. Indeed, an FLNKS policy statement released in 2018 proposed negotiations over finance, technical assistance and security to develop a new relationship with France, but also new agreements on trade and economic support with Australia, New Zealand, the Melanesian Spearhead Group and other neighbours. The decades-long struggle for independence has always been based on the notion that New Caledonia must be better integrated into its regional environment rather than always look to Paris for solutions, even though many of the legal and cultural ties created during the colonial era will persist.

Yet the French government says it will rapidly withdraw funding amounting to more than €1 billion a year, and that future support will be determined only after tough political negotiations. Not surprisingly, anti-independence leaders have seized on the Yes/No document’s tight timeline to argue that New Caledonia will face a fiscal crisis and a collapse of the local bureaucracy before new arrangements are settled.

“Part of the French State’s financial transfers will come to an abrupt end and the other part progressively over time, but in a very short period,” anti-independence leader Sonia Backès told journalists in Paris. “Our degrees will no longer be recognised and it will require lengthy approaches to other countries (France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada…) to have them welcome our students into their countries. Our currency will be devalued: wages may be cut in half.”

Despite the disagreement about the timing of the referendum, Union Calédonienne’s Gilbert Tyuiénon believes the Paris meeting had a number of positive outcomes. The French government made clear the “irreversibility” of the Noumea Accord, he says, “confirming that the accord won’t lead to a political vacuum, whatever the result of the third referendum; that France would not call for the withdrawal of New Caledonia from the list of non-self-governing territories at the United Nations; that an audit of the decolonisation process would be undertaken; that a process involving restrictions on the right to vote would still be possible within the framework of a new agreement; and that a double nationality would be possible for citizens of the future nation.”

The French government also rejected “any form of partition of the country,” he added. For Kanak, the vast majority of the population in the North and Loyalty Islands provinces, this is a welcome response to efforts by some anti-independence leaders to shift more power to the Southern province, in the vain hope that part of the main island might somehow remain a French dependency after independence.

Meanwhile, many New Caledonians will again be making their own calculations about the pros and cons of independence.

A few years ago, I had a long discussion with a French friend about whether he would stay in an independent Kanaky. He gave me a detailed account of the advantages provided by a French passport, with work and education opportunities for his children in Europe and the enormous tax benefits and subsidies that come with living in a French overseas dependency. He had obviously thought a lot about the issue and was reluctant to become a citizen of the new state unless he could also retain French nationality.

The Noumea Accord created a distinct group of New Caledonian citizens — indigenous Kanak and long-term residents — who gain employment rights and can vote for the three provincial assemblies and national congress. (A separate electoral roll with different residency requirements includes New Caledonian citizens seeking to vote in the referendums on self-determination.) But tens of thousands of French nationals living in New Caledonia are ineligible to vote for local political institutions, even though they are enrolled to vote for the French presidency, the National Assembly, the Senate, the European parliament and municipal councils. Anti-independence leaders are pushing for a revision of these voting rights, opening up the local electoral rolls to more French nationals.

The leaked Yes/No report argues that “the restricted, fixed electorate in particular constitutes a restriction that cannot be sustained in its current configuration,” but this push is being fiercely resisted by the independence movement. Many Kanak fear they will be made an even greater minority in their homeland, like Maori in Aotearoa–New Zealand.

Anti-independence leaders are quick to highlight the potential loss of French and EU passports for French nationals who take out citizenship in the new state. “In the event of independence,” says the draft Yes/No report, “nationals of the new State would lose the benefits of European citizenship.” France and the newly independent state might try to negotiate a system of double nationality but “French nationals who have not acquired the nationality of the new State at the same time will also be foreigners in New Caledonia. They will therefore be subject to the law of foreigners determined sovereignly by the new State.”

Some French nationals appear to already be packing their bags. The latest census, in 2019, reported 271,400 inhabitants of New Caledonia, with the population having increased by only 2600 people in the last five years (a much lower number that the period from 2009 to 2014). According to New Caledonia’s official Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies, the decline in the rate of population growth “is mainly explained by an increase in departures, combined with a decrease in arrivals. For the first time since 1983, the migratory balance is negative.”

Many more French nationals are likely to desert New Caledonia if they face losing access to their EU passport and the high salaries and tax benefits that come as a resident of France’s overseas empire. Although the Yes/No report says that, beyond departing French public servants and soldiers, “the number of those leaving is difficult to calculate with precision,” it also claims 10,000 people are certain to leave if independence goes ahead, and “up to 70,000 departures are possible, impacting the labour force, domestic consumption and taxation receipts.”

When Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech on French–Australian relations from the deck of HMAS Canberra in Sydney Harbour in May 2018, he highlighted the potential for an “India–Australia–France axis” in the Indo-Pacific region to help contain China. This re-framing of the Asia-Pacific region as the “Indo-Pacific” has become the new trope as the Biden administration reinforces and expands the US alliance structure in the aftermath of the chaotic Trump era.

With New Caledonia a key pivot point in France’s Indo-Pacific strategy, it’s no surprise that Macron’s administration is encouraging New Caledonian politicians to increase collaboration with Australia and New Zealand. The ANZUS allies now see France as a “democratic, stable and Western power” in the region, and both Canberra and Wellington have given up any public criticism of French colonialism, as they boost defence cooperation.

In Paris last month, overseas minister Lecornu acknowledged that the debate over New Caledonia’s political future is overlaid by geopolitics. The referendum is a time, he said, “when the government looks at what New Caledonia contributes to France. Where we must reflect on France’s ability to be present in the Pacific, where the world is carved up between the USA and China.”

Others were less subtle about playing the China card. “I plan to meet the United States, New Zealand and Australian embassies,” Sonia Backès bluntly remarked en route to Paris last month, “to make them aware of the China threat in the case of independence.”

On 7 June, after visiting the US embassy, Backès met with Australian ambassador Gillian Bird as part of her schedule of meetings with visiting New Caledonian political leaders. A spokesperson from the NZ foreign affairs ministry confirmed that Backès also met with NZ ambassador Jane Coombs, stating that “France remains an important and like-minded partner for New Zealand in the Indo-Pacific region and globally.”

After meetings with prime minister Jean Castex and France’s overseas ministry, some of the New Caledonian delegation also met with the defence ministry and senior military officers to discuss “the role of military forces in the Pacific and the strategic implications of French positioning in the Pacific Ocean and the Indo-Pacific axis.”

The French government claims to take an impartial stand on the outcome of the next referendum. But given the implications for other Pacific dependencies such as French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna and Clipperton Island, it is eager to maintain colonial control in New Caledonia.

Under the Noumea Accord, France retains control of the “sovereign powers” of defence, justice and military security, which has given it increased access to regional security programs through New Caledonia’s membership of the Pacific Islands Forum. But in the absence of a new defence cooperation agreement with an independent Kanaky New Caledonia, the French government is proposing a rapid departure of its military forces in the territory, the Forces Armées de la Nouvelle-Calédonie.

Many Kanak, remembering the role of the French army in the armed clashes of the 1980s and the 1988 Ouvea massacre, would welcome this. But a newly independent government would still need vessels to patrol its fishing grounds and vast exclusive economic zone. Would it seek an extension of French military deployments (as occurred in post-independence Algeria)? Would it look to Australia’s Pacific Maritime Security Program? Or might it perhaps seek support from other partners, in the way Timor-Leste looks to China as well as Australia for patrol boats and security training?

With just six months before the 12 December referendum, there’s no guarantee that the timetable can hold. The FLNKS and other independence forces are discussing the best way to respond to the rushed, unilateral decision on the referendum. The ominous silence of many Kanak leaders should not be taken as consent, and France’s current manoeuvres should worry Australia, New Zealand and other member states of the Pacific Islands Forum. The perception that the French government has broken its word, abandoning a past commitment to forging consensus between supporters and opponents of independence, will have significant repercussions in Melanesian culture.

The decision facing New Caledonians is stark: whether to retain the familiar ties with the French motherland or take a leap into history. The overwhelming majority, both supporters and opponents of independence, have accepted the outcome of the two previous referendums as broadly free and fair. But will they respond in a similar way after this third referendum, if the process has been curtailed to fit in with President Macron’s re-election bid? •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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By then, twelve years after operations commenced on tiny Ocean Island — known to its people as Banaba — the venture had hit a flashpoint. Having watched the landscape being removed piece by piece, the locals “unanimously refused to sell any more land,” wrote the Herald reporter, “declaring that the lands, and the palm and pandanus trees thereon were all they had, and they asked what they should do when the big steamers had taken away all their habitable land.”

Conceding that some readers might sympathise with the owners, the reporter argued that a population of fewer than 500 could hardly be allowed to prevent the exploitation of a product so critical to Australian agriculture and “of such immense value to all the rest of mankind.”

But a solution was at hand. “A humane proposal is afoot to transplant the natives to another island in the Pacific, suitable for the purpose, in order that the valuable phosphate industry may go on unchecked, to the advantage of those industrially engaged in it, and of the people on the land in various parts of the world.”

As Teaiwa observes, “The story reduces the Banabans’ complex connection to their land to basic economics, and clearly the mining was not just for the good of ‘mankind’ but for the profits of the investors.”

The resonances these 110 years later, as the planet heats and oceans rise and Australia clings to its coal-powered economy — even in the cant about how this serves humanity’s greater good — are stark. In a recent presentation, Teaiwa recounted Banaba’s history as “not separate or different from climate change,” but as “the culmination of all the effects of all the resource extraction.” The story of Banaba and places like it, she argued, “can teach us how to observe and understand what happens to people and to the planet when you exploit such resources.”

With communications experts urging the sharing of such stories as our last best shot at salvaging a habitable planet, there’s an urgent challenge here for journalists. Especially for those of us who parachute into places that are not our own as the flashpoints of the emergency play out with increasing tempo and violence. We would like to imagine that the 1912 Herald report is a relic of history, and yet the lens is discomfortingly familiar.

How do we equip ourselves to do a better job? How might we tell these stories more truthfully, holistically, usefully? Opening this conversation with Teaiwa and a network of Pacific climate activists, there’s no shortage of practical advice.

Teaiwa begins her critique where so many outsider stories begin — with arrival. Don’t, is her exasperated counsel. Don’t wade ashore from the tinny. Don’t cross pristine, palm-fringed beaches. Don’t make heart-in-mouth landings at remote/broken-down airports. (I confess priors on both counts.) “And no paradise in crisis.” (Strike three.) “Any entry-point, arrival narrative is just going to reek of every arrival going back to the 1500s,” she says. “Step out of any one of those tropes right away.”

My reflexive defence is that these constructs help lure our imagined reader, ensconced in climate-controlled urban Australia, into raw, remote realities. The outsider narrative allows us to explain the unfamiliar, to weave in context. But yes, in all but the most careful hands, it becomes about Us not Them, sidelining people in their own place. The stories of how climate change is playing out “must centre empowered Pacific people first and foremost — not vulnerable voices, not the voices that everyone thinks are sinking,” says Teaiwa, diving into the heart of another fraught storytelling trope.

She and other Pacific scholars, activists and leaders have for years been calling out the portrayal of doomed “drowning islands,” that ubiquitous rendering of the palm-fringed Pacific emergency. This framing might not be wrong in terms of the unforgiving physics of sea-level rise, but it is distorting, simplistic and fatalistic, they argue, portraying communities as powerless and condemning them to the inevitable. Meanwhile, we with our relentless emissions, consuming ocean islands, wriggle off the hook.

These critiques don’t overlook the catastrophes looming for low-lying atolls and coastal communities. Beyond rising seas and dislocation there’s ocean acidification, depleted fisheries, crop failures, seawater inundation, cyclones, landslides, flood, drought, and vector-borne and water-borne disease. But they also demand recognition of enduring, corroding colonialism. And of the initiative, capacities and leadership of Pacific people facing down those realities. A true telling of these stories would show people as they are — “strong and resilient,” argues Teaiwa. As the Pacific Climate Warriors declare: “We are not drowning, we are fighting.”

Another person I pose these questions to is Fijian climate activist Ernest Gibson. “We have never been victims,” says the twenty-four-year-old, who is a member of the UN Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change. “When the world was ignorant about climate change, when the big five pretended our plight was a hoax, when the Pacific was being used as a dumping ground for nuclear waste, Pacific leaders and communities never backed down. So to talk about Pacific people as feeble victims is disgusting.” Journalists ought to talk instead about how the fight continues, “about the tired eyes, the aching feet and the chapped lips that, day in and day out, fight to ensure we maintain the strides we have made and sustain a culture of progress.”

But how to craft a story that recognises these actors and their actions without romanticising or soft-pedalling on the scale of the crisis confronting them? Doesn’t that risk another handball, like the Australian government’s enthusiasm for talking up community resilience — all care and no responsibility for our “Pacific family”?

Teaiwa isn’t persuaded getting the story right is so hard if reporters strive to shake up their own and their readers’ presumptions. “The Pacific has survived World War II, and then nuclear testing,” she says. Also mining, disasters, and depopulation from introduced diseases. “But people are still laughing and singing, they’re composing and they’re dancing… that’s the amazing part. The thing that white people freak out about is climate change and rising seas. And Indigenous people go, ‘colonialism was just as bad’… People want to talk about climate grief. Mate, it’s your grief — we have seen so many bad things in the Pacific for so long.”

Authentic, true stories require a diversity of voices, but outsider reporters struggle to find them, Teaiwa says. She suspects it comes down to hard-wired assumptions about culture and class. “One of the things that white scholars and white journalists get wrong is automatically assuming that powerful and empowered Pacific people don’t exist in the special places that they’re going to.” Encounters are sifted into categories — the “real people” are on the ground, in the village and vulnerable; the elites in the cities are suspect, playing to their own advantage; the political leaders are the fallback, relied on disproportionately for authority and quotes. Paste these together in a story, and it likely has all the substance of a papier-mâché balloon.

Reporters need to reach past those voices pushing themselves forward, and those who obligingly dish up the quote that supports the journalist’s preconceptions. “I would say 80 per cent of Pacific people you try to collaborate with on the ground will try to help and support you in a way they think white people want to be helped and supported,” explains Teaiwa. “So they don’t always feel free to speak their minds and to speak plainly and truthfully about something… We’ve been trained by colonialism and Christianity to do that. Also to be polite — maybe not so much behind the back.”

Of course, she adds, the other 20 per cent “may tell you to F-off right away.” My observation is that proportion is growing, especially in locations where journalists have trodden before.

“The thing to do is to open up the space for people to speak their own mind, not what they think you want to hear,” says Teaiwa. “People need to feel that there won’t be any terrible consequences for being honest.” Thinking about how this might be achieved I recall a 2019 community radio series by Brisbane-based Papua New Guinean journalist Maureen Mopio, No Land, No Livelihood, No Home, featuring interviews with women in the Pacific Islands and Torres Strait about the effects of climate change. I often recommend it to students because of the tone of her questions — curious, empathetic, respectful, patient. Not framed to elicit the presumed response, but inviting and often yielding surprising insights.

Which goes to the glaringly obvious — the home-ground advantage of Pacific journalists telling their own stories. What more authentic way of decolonising journalism than to get out of their way? Since November 2019, the Guardian Australia’s Pacific Project has provided editorial support and a global platform to collaborate on, publish and pay for some 300 stories by a network of reporters living and working across Oceania. Through fifteen months of travel restrictions, with parachute reporters largely locked out, it’s kept the region highly visible — tracking climate dynamics and political ructions ahead of the COP26 UN summit in Glasgow; the spread of Covid across Papua New Guinea and its containment elsewhere; the seismic politics playing out right now in Samoa. In between, dozens of illuminating, surprising, even joyful stories by local reporters in which the word crisis is nowhere to be found. None of this, incidentally, flows from government programs. It all relies on philanthropy from the Judith Neilson Institute.

In anticipation of the easing of pandemic restrictions and eventual return of parachute journalists, including me, to the Pacific, Ernest Gibson has a few more tips:

“Claim your ignorance”: Oceania is a region of mind-blowing complexity.

“Make connections”: Climate change doesn’t exist in isolation; it is linked to a broken system, so join the dots.

“One full story is better than a few fragmented pieces”: Practices, stories, values are all “determined by everything we see, touch, feel, hear and taste. So when you tell our story, do so completely. This may take a little bit longer, it may make the piece more complex — and even seemingly less logical, but it would be true.”

At the top of Gibson’s wish list is more regard for the reality of activists. “Our advocacy work almost never pays the bills. We’re juggling a million things at a time — making sure we have time with our families, learning about our culture (because this is a continuous journey), work commitments, trying to finish degrees, because we still live and work within a system that wasn’t built for our success. So… be patient. Find ways of meeting people where they are.”

In anticipation of the rising tide of climate stories from the Pacific ahead of Glasgow, a final directive from Katerina Teaiwa. “Drowning islands” stories won’t stop them drowning. “All the drowning stories just make people think about the hordes of migrants… This is the country of ‘stop the boats.’” The stories we need are the ones that persuade Australians “to actually reimagine their values, their lifestyle, their paradigm and their privilege.”

Go find those. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Not drowning, fighting appeared first on Inside Story.

Pottinger was travelling with Alexander Gray, the NSC’s newly appointed director for Oceania and Indo-Pacific Security. Gray’s appointment was a first: never before had a US administration appointed a White House NSC official responsible not only for Australia and New Zealand but also for the Pacific islands.

The White House’s concern was justified. Six months after the visit, Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogavare announced his country would end its long relationship with Taiwan in favour of diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic. Days later, President Taneti Maamau of Kiribati followed suit, leaving Taiwan with just four diplomatic partners in the region. Donald Trump, already in the midst of his trade war with China, announced that the United States would engage more deeply with the Pacific islands.

The Biden administration looks likely to try to maintain this outreach. Island leaders have welcomed the new US president’s early commitments on development funding in the region and his decision to rejoin the Paris agreement on climate change. But they’re aware that Biden’s Pacific strategy is largely driven by the US defence department, and that his emerging “Indo-Pacific” policy is focused less on island nations than on India, Australia, Japan and other larger strategic partners.

Island leaders are particularly worried that they will be trampled in the intensified competition between the United States and China. Some of them are voicing fears that the new Western-initiated strategic concept of the “Indo-Pacific” will downplay the region’s own security priorities. “The big powers are doggedly pursuing strategies to widen and extend their reach and inculcating a far-reaching sense of insecurity,” says Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. “The renewed vigour with which a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy is being advocated and pursued leaves us with much uncertainty. For the Pacific, there is a real risk of privileging ‘Indo’ over the ‘Pacific.’”

Donald Trump’s foreign policy failures were many, but his administration did bolster staffing and resources for Pacific island engagement. To promote the administration’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy, Matt Pottinger and Alex Gray intensified White House engagement with security and intelligence officials in Australia and New Zealand, and — in an unprecedented move for National Security Council officials — visited Canberra, Wellington, Port Vila and Honiara in early 2019.

Pottinger also played a key role in preparing the top-secret 2018 “US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific,” which was unexpectedly declassified during Trump’s final chaotic days in office. Prioritising strategic competition with China, the strategy aimed to strengthen ties to India, Japan, Korea and Australia and “ensure the Pacific Islands (e.g. the US territories, Freely Associated States, the Melanesian and Polynesian states) remain aligned with United States.” (The freely associated states, which have a formal compact with the United States, are the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands.) Among its action proposals were efforts to “solidify our diplomatic, military, intelligence, economic, development assistance, and informational advantages across the Pacific Islands.” The sentence immediately after these words was redacted.

Even as the Trump administration deepened its trade war with Beijing, Australia and New Zealand were becoming increasingly concerned about growing Chinese influence in the islands region. Both ANZUS allies were working on the “step change” in engagement proposed by prime minister Malcolm Turnbull at the 2016 Pacific Islands Forum in Pohnpei.

Three months after deposing Turnbull in August 2018, Scott Morrison announced his own “Pacific step-up” in a major speech at Lavarack army barracks in Townsville. To complement the intensified US engagement, Morrison outlined a range of economic, diplomatic and military policies. Major focuses were infrastructure investment and defence cooperation, including new aircraft and patrol boats under the Pacific Maritime Security Programme, a new Australia Pacific Security College and a new Pacific Fusion Centre for real-time intelligence sharing. Despite its policy differences with Washington, Jacinda Ardern’s government in New Zealand also expanded its “Pacific reset.”

Coinciding with these efforts by the ANZUS allies were media scares about purported Chinese bases in Vanuatu and French Polynesia, and propaganda about Chinese “debt-trap diplomacy.” (The latter has since been debunked by studies showing that most Pacific debt is owed to the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.)

Despite the hyperbole, the growing concern that Pacific Islands Forum countries are engaged in “South–South” cooperation with China is not misplaced. Over the past two decades, Beijing has expanded its economic links with island nations to the point that even Micronesian countries aligned with Taiwan — including Palau and the Marshall Islands — trade extensively with China and receive investment from Chinese corporations.

One of the United States’ northern Pacific allies, the Federated States of Micronesia, has long maintained diplomatic ties to the People’s Republic of China rather than Taiwan. In early 2017, the island nation’s president at the time, Peter Christian, was welcomed to Beijing by president Xi Jinping and accorded a full military review outside the Great Hall of the People. “China was impressive,” Christian said later. “If that’s the way they welcome other countries, we were flattered. I was flattered that for a small country they would exhibit such formality.”

Christian’s state visit was one of Beijing’s many diplomatic exchanges with Pacific nations since 2000 (though these have actually declined in number over the past decade). After visiting Fiji in 2014, Xi Jinping made his second visit to the Pacific islands in November 2018, attending the APEC Summit in Port Moresby along with US vice-president Mike Pence. With US and Chinese diplomats battling over trade policy, the summit ended without a formal communiqué. Pence joined Australia’s Scott Morrison and Japan’s Shinzo Abe to offer infrastructure funding to the islands in competition with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Concerned by Xi’s high-profile engagement, the Trump administration launched a series of diplomatic initiatives across the islands, proposing new diplomatic posts and sending defence attachés to Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia and Papua New Guinea. In January 2019, US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats issued the intelligence community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment, which charged that “China is currying favour with numerous Pacific Island nations through bribery, infrastructure investment and diplomatic engagement.”

On 21 May 2019, Trump held an unprecedented Oval Office meeting with the then presidents of the three freely associated states: Palau’s Tommy Remengesau Jr, the Marshall Islands’ Hilda Heine and the Federated States of Micronesia’s David Panuelo.

Later that year, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo visited Australia and Micronesia, including a first-ever visit to the Federated States of Micronesia by a secretary of state on 5 August. The same month, US interior secretary David Bernhardt led an interagency delegation to the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu. Bernhardt stressed US action on climate change and oceans management — a sharp contrast with his predecessor Ryan Zinke, a former Navy SEAL who hectored the 2018 Forum meeting in Nauru about the strategic threat from China and the blood shed by US marines across Micronesia during the second world war.

The new White House engagement was also reflected in Congress. In 2019, congressman Ed Case of Hawaii co-founded the bipartisan Congressional Pacific Islands Caucus to raise awareness about the region in the US Capitol. In short order, the caucus introduced the Boosting Long-term US Engagement in the Pacific, or BLUE Pacific, bill, which proposed a comprehensive, long-term US islands strategy, an expanded diplomatic presence, greater US security and law enforcement cooperation, diversified trade and strengthened people-to-people relationships.

Then, in September 2019, the Trump administration announced a “Pacific pledge” of US$100 million in additional aid, an increased security presence in some countries, Peace Corps deployments, and revived USAID programs and staffing in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. As an alternative to China’s infrastructure programs, the United States also made an initial grant to the Asian Development Bank’s Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility, including US$23 million to a joint Papua New Guinea Electrification Partnership with Australia, Japan and New Zealand.

For all this, the administration’s overtures to Pacific nations were undercut by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement and stop payments to the Green Climate Fund. In November 2019, Pacific Islands Forum chair Kausea Natano stressed that withdrawal from global climate action undermined the United States’ credibility in the Pacific: “Statements of friendship, expanded aid programs and high-level visits,” he said, “must be better backed by domestic policies and action to reduce emissions, as outlined in the Paris agreement, in order to avert a climate catastrophe.”

Wolf-warrior diplomacy by Pence and Pompeo also reinforced scepticism about Washington’s real interest in island affairs. “The United States and Australia are neighbours, united rather than divided by the vast emptiness of Pacific waters,” Pompeo declared in Canberra during an August 2019 visit, erasing the history, heritage and identity of the Pacific islanders who inhabit that “vast emptiness.” As Pacific Islands Forum secretary-general Dame Meg Taylor remarked at the time, Pompeo’s comment “stands in stark contrast to histories of Pacific people and the Blue Pacific,” a regional effort to resituate the Pacific in international affairs.

To counter the perceived challenge posed by the Chinese military, Mike Pence’s bombastic APEC speech in 2018 proposed more US military deployments, war games and bases in the region. “We’re forging new and renewed security partnerships, as shown by our recent trilateral naval exercises with India and Japan,” he said. “Today, it’s my privilege to announce that the United States will partner with Papua New Guinea and Australia on their joint initiative at Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island. We will work with these nations to protect sovereignty and maritime rights of the Pacific islands as well.”

The US Pacific Command has long held responsibility for military operations across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but the point was underlined when it was renamed “the Indo-Pacific Command” in June 2018. It now seeks to upgrade the US base network spanning the northern Pacific from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii to Naval Base Guam, which dates back to the late nineteenth century. Under Joint Region Marianas, a navy-led joint command, the Pentagon also operates Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and military facilities on Tinian and Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The US base network in the northern Pacific is complemented by new marine and air force rotations through northern Australia.

In the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a Military Use and Operating Rights Agreement guarantees separate funding outside the US-RMI compact of free association. Kwajalein Atoll hosts the US Air Force Space Fence program and the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.

Despite US aircraft carriers becoming vectors for the spread of the coronavirus, US military forces have ramped up deployments and war games across the region, including RIMPAC 2020 and Cope North 2021. Even as the United States and Australia agreed to upgrade Papua New Guinea’s Lombrum naval facilities, Palau has begun discussions with Washington about hosting US forces. “Palau’s request to the US military remains simple: build joint-use facilities, then come and use them regularly,” then president Tommy Remengesau said last September.

While welcoming US and Australian investment in wharfs and facilities, most island leaders have long sought to redirect resources to tackling more pressing security concerns, including the existential challenge of climate change. Steven McGann, former US ambassador to Fiji, Nauru, Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Kingdom of Tonga, highlighted this tension during a recent webinar on Pacific regionalism. “The United States is always searching for mechanisms in which all of its interests can be combined and also meet the growing needs of Indo-PACOM” —  Indo-Pacific Command — “which has to figure out how to pursue the national security objectives of the United States with the human security concerns of Pacific islanders.”

Against this background, the three freely associated states — the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands — have been negotiating the terms of an extension of their compacts of free association with the United States, due to expire in 2023. A recent RAND Corporation study of Chinese influence in the islands notes the strategic importance of the three states, arguing that they are “tantamount to a power projection superhighway, running through the heart of the North Pacific into Asia. It effectively connects US military forces in Hawaii to those in theatre, particularly to forward operating positions on the US territory of Guam.”

Despite his diplomatic postings across the southwest Pacific, Steven McGann acknowledges that US security interests are focused in the Micronesian states. “It’s clear that the United States has an overriding interest in the north Pacific,” he said. “But as it renegotiates the compacts of free association it also needs to investigate how it strengthens the existing treaties with Kiribati.” The compacts of free association forbid the island states from allowing foreign military forces to enter their territory without US permission. “Taken together, the security and defence provisions of the compacts form an essential foundation for US national security interests in the region,” says the RAND study.

The strategic importance of these northern Pacific island nations came to a head in February during an online summit of the Pacific Islands Forum. After their joint candidate for the post of Forum secretary-general was rejected, Nauru, Kiribati and the three freely associated states — all members of the Micronesian Presidents’ Summit — announced they would withdraw from the regional organisation. Although the five Micronesian countries have diverse colonial histories and contemporary partnerships, they are united by cultural connections, shared memories of Japanese invasion and US nuclear testing, and the economic interests created by their vast ocean territories.

US officials often see this crisis through the prism of US–China competition and conflict between Beijing and Taiwan. (Last month, Palau’s new president, Surangel Whipps Jr, made a state visit to Taiwan, accompanied by the US ambassador to Palau.) As Alex Gray wrote in February, the United States, Australia and New Zealand should watch with “grave concern” the “unfolding dismantlement” of the Pacific Islands Forum. “Not only does a diminished PIF mean a diminished voice for the Pacific islands on the world stage, it also means the central multilateral institution in this critical region will lose the very voices most sceptical of Beijing’s malign activity and open to US and allied leadership. A PIF without Micronesian voices is likely to be one far less interested in US priorities and perspectives.”

In the past, budget cuts in Canberra and Wellington have downgraded programs in the freely associated states and American territories like Guam. Despite new diplomatic postings under Australia’s “step-up” and New Zealand’s “reset,” the ANZUS allies still perceive the northern Pacific as America’s turf, a reality acknowledged by Surangel Whipps: “As we know, it’s always been the position of Australia and New Zealand that the north Pacific is ‘Oh, you’re with the United States, you’re kind [of] over there, we stick together in the south.’ It wasn’t about the Pacific brotherhood, let’s bring the Pacific together. It was about ‘We are going to protect our region.’”

Three months into its term, the Biden administration is promising to continue Trump’s engagement, though with more diplomacy, multilateralism and alliance building. Recognising China’s increased profile in the region, Ambassador McGann suggested that Australia and New Zealand needed support. “The United States is moving away from an ‘I’ll hold your coat’ position to much more active engagement,” he said, “largely because there are national security reasons for doing so.”

The Biden administration has yet to prepare a full national security strategy to guide its foreign policy. It has, however, issued an “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” which, among many global priorities, pledges to recognise “the ties of shared history and sacrifice,” to “reinforce our partnership with Pacific Island states.”

A fundamental difference between this administration and its predecessor is climate policy. “We will move swiftly to earn back our position of leadership in international institutions,” says the interim guidance, “joining with the international community to tackle the climate crisis and other shared challenges. We have already re-entered the Paris Climate Accord and appointed a Presidential Special Envoy for climate, the first steps toward restoring our leadership.”

Biden’s choice of Deb Haaland as secretary of the interior is significant, given her department is responsible for liaison with the freely associated states in the Pacific as well as America’s First Nations tribes. (This is the first time a First Nations woman has held a US cabinet post, and stands in sharp contrast to her Trump-era predecessors, including Ryan Zinke, a Montana businessman who resigned in the midst of justice department investigations of his conduct in office).

The congressional BLUE Pacific bill lapsed after the 2020 presidential elections, but congressman Ed Case continues this work under the Biden administration. Once the bill has been improved in consultation with congressional figures and the White House, he says, it will be reintroduced “on a bicameral, bipartisan basis.”

The key official driving Asia-Pacific policy will be Kurt Campbell, the National Security Council’s new Indo-Pacific affairs coordinator. Campbell served under Barack Obama as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs between 2009 and 2013, and was a key architect of Obama’s “Pacific pivot” strategy. “The Biden National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific team is set to be the largest in the NSC, with up to twenty officials in the directorate once it’s fully staffed,” says Foreign Policy magazine. “Personnel is policy, as the age-old Washington aphorism goes, and the new president has made clear that China is the top national security challenge for the United States.” The shift was confirmed when US secretary of state Antony Blinken described the US relationship with China as “the biggest geopolitical test of the twenty-first century” in his first major foreign policy speech on 3 March.

Meeting for the first time at leaders’ level, last month’s summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, boosted ties between the United States, India, Japan and Australia. The Quad communiqué highlighted a “shared vision for the free and open Indo-Pacific” and flagged joint action on climate change, cyber security, Covid-19 recovery and vaccine distribution — adding to existing geopolitical jousting over Covid support to Pacific island states.

Ten days after the summit, on 22 March, the Biden White House announced the Small and Less Populous Island Economies Initiative, designed to strengthen US collaboration with island countries and territories in the Pacific, Caribbean and North Atlantic (despite the different demography, geography and colonial history of the three regions). The US state department has also launched a tender for a project to promote investigative journalism and anti-corruption efforts in Pacific island countries, in line with its “vision of a secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific.” (It will be interesting to see how explicitly Pacific journalists will be encouraged to look at corrupt relations between island politicians and Chinese state-owned enterprises.)

This all adds up to lots of noise, but will the initiatives be sustained? Island leaders have seen it all before: more than three decades ago, congressman Stephen Solarz led a commission on islands policy, arguing that the Pacific should remain an “American lake” in the post-Soviet era. Solarz’s May 1990 report proposed that the United States should play the role of “balancer,” providing regional order and stability through “forward deployed” US forces. Little has changed except the main strategic rival.

Later that year, as the United States began to celebrate its triumph over the crumbling Soviet Union, president George H.W. Bush met Pacific island leaders in Hawaii, pledging economic and commercial opportunities. A Joint Commercial Commission was opened with great fanfare in Hawaii. As the years wore on, however, yet another US commission revealed the JCC to be a failure, with little new US investment or trade in the islands.

Fast-forward to Barack Obama’s “pivot” to the region, and Hillary Clinton’s attendance at the Pacific Islands Forum in 2012 — a first-ever appearance by a US secretary of state. Despite her many pledges, the Obama pivot was focused on Asia rather than the islands, and the follow-through was limited.

Through the waning years of the Soviet Union, successive US administrations warned that “the Russians are coming” to the Pacific, a catchcry echoed by conservative Australian and New Zealand think tanks. Three decades later, the Chinese (unlike their Soviet predecessors) are a major trading partner for many island nations and a significant source of grants and loans. China’s state-owned enterprises are looking to the Pacific islands for timber, minerals and fisheries, even as Beijing seeks more votes at the United Nations. Given the failures of China’s own environmental regulation, “the China alternative” is worrying environmentalists and human rights activists across the Pacific. Island leaders, meanwhile, welcome the leverage provided by this “non-traditional” partner, which has seen Canberra open the purse strings at a time of historically low aid budgets.

Will the Biden administration follow through on its intentions more vigorously than its predecessors? Changes in US climate policy are winning friends, but the remilitarisation of the islands holds little attraction for countries still dealing with the radioactive legacy of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and Kiribati, or the unexploded ordinance that still litters the region from the last time Washington took on a rising Asian power. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post The Americans are coming appeared first on Inside Story.

This is the second referendum held under the Noumea Accord, an agreement signed in May 1998 by the French government, anti-independence leaders and the independence coalition, Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS.

At a time of economic uncertainty, many voters worry whether it’s the right time for change. But for Kanak leader Paul Néaoutyine, “our accession to sovereignty is inevitable.”

In the lead-up to New Caledonia’s first referendum in November 2018, conservative politicians predicted the independence movement would get only 30 per cent support. In the event, 43 per cent voted in favour of independence, disheartening many opponents of independence and opening the way for this weekend’s referendum.

When I ask Roch Wamytan, speaker of New Caledonia’s Congress, whether the independence movement can win, he responds cautiously. “I am hopeful that we will increase our score,” says the veteran member of the independence party Union Calédonienne. “I’m not sure whether we’ll get more than 50 per cent and may have to wait until the third referendum, but we certainly hope to get a few more percentage points beyond the 43 per cent obtained in 2018. This will strengthen us in the discussions that we will have to undertake with the French state.”

If a majority of voters say Yes on Sunday, the FLNKS has proposed a three-year transition to nationhood. Negotiations with the French government would cover the transfer of sovereign powers such as defence, foreign policy, currency and the justice system; partnerships with France on nationality and dual nationality; membership of the United Nations, the World Bank and other multilateral institutions; and funding to replace the many French public servants who staff the local administration.

If there’s a majority against independence, the status quo is retained, maintaining political structures and legislative powers created under the Noumea Accord. But another No vote opens the way to a third referendum in 2022, and the FLNKS has already stated it will continue down this path to decolonisation.

It was the shock result in the 2018 referendum that led to the formation of a conservative alliance of six anti-independence parties, says Kanak politician Roch Wamytan. Dubbed “The Loyalists,” this coalition wants to roll back the achievements of the Noumea Accord.

“Last time, the anti-independence camp was almost drunk, intoxicated by opinion polls that suggested the No vote could be as high as 75 or 80 per cent,” Wamytan tells me. “But the final result on the night of 4 November 2018 showed quite the contrary.” The debate has sharpened since then, says Wamytan. “This time, the anti-independence groups are more on the offensive.”

Louis Mapou is leader of the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance, one of two independence groups within New Caledonia’s Congress. He agrees that this year’s debate is more polarised, and dismisses pledges by the French government that they remain impartial above the fray: “As a partner, the French state has become biased in favour of a No vote for the referendum on 4 October.”

Just three months ago, French president Emmanuel Macron reshuffled his cabinet, appointing Jean Castex as his new prime minister. It took Castex until this week to make a parliamentary statement on New Caledonia, stunning supporters and opponents of independence alike with his prolonged display of apparent indifference.

For months, Union Calédonienne president Daniel Goa has been sharply critical of the new French prime minister. “Since his appointment, we have had no discussion, no exchanges,” says Goa. “He is not interested in this territory. President Macron has also sent us a high commissioner who is nothing more than a governor, and who lacks the profile for New Caledonia, which is in a process of emancipation and decolonisation.”

The FLNKS has long provided a framework to calm the often-fractious relationship between its two largest members, Union Calédonienne and the Parti de Libération Kanak. The two parties challenge each other during provincial and municipal elections, but unity has held during the referendum campaign and a number of smaller parties supporting independence have also joined the campaign.

In the lead-up to the 2018 referendum, the left-wing Parti Travailliste and the trade union confederation USTKE advocated “non-participation,” criticising concessions by the FLNKS and arguing that only the colonised Kanak people should vote. This year, however, both the Parti Travailliste and USTKE are calling for a Yes vote, joining with other indigenous activists to form the Mouvement Nationaliste pour la Souveraineté de Kanaky, or MNSK. Although smaller than the FLNKS, the MNSK will mobilise pockets of support among voters who abstained last time in the rural north and Loyalty Islands.

The Parti Travailliste promotes Kanak sovereignty, but founder Louis Kotra Uregei says the objective is “to truly build the case [traditional house] of Kanaky, to welcome all those who have come to live with the Kanak people and become the people of Kanaky. Our struggle is not just for the Kanak, but for all those who have been recognised as ‘the victims of history’ — people who have been in the country for a long time, and who face the same problems as the Kanak face today.”

The 2018 referendum reflected the broad polarisation of New Caledonia’s politics, with most Kanak supporting independence but most non-Kanak communities opposed. The FLNKS must draw support from non-indigenous voters to win the referendum, given the Kanak people only make up 40 per cent of New Caledonia’s population, and a minority of Kanak voters are still reluctant to support independence.

Today, however, there are signs of a shift towards pro-independence sentiment among younger voters, in rural areas, and even among the many islanders who have migrated to New Caledonia from Vanuatu, Tahiti, and Wallis and Futuna.

The creation in March last year of a new political party, Eveil Océanien, highlights the desire to move beyond a Yes/No binary. Drawing support from the large Wallisian and Futunan community — more than eight per cent of the electorate — the new party has created an “islander majority” in Congress by supporting the independence groups in key votes. Last July, for example, EO’s three votes contributed to the re-election of Union Calédonienne politician Roch Wamytan as head of the legislature.

For the first time, Eveil Océanien has said its supporters should decide for themselves whether to vote Yes or No, a significant shift from the historical loyalty to France in the Wallisian community.

Significant cultural and political shifts are also evident in the Northern Province, which has been managed by a pro-independence administration for more than thirty years. Living and working together is slowly changing opinions among Caldoche farmers, descendants of French colonial settlers, who have lived in the north for generations and were bitterly opposed to independence during the conflicts of the 1980s.

In an interview with Le Monde, provincial president Paul Néaoutyine highlighted the economic “rebalancing” in the north created by the Noumea Accord.

Néaoutyine is the long-time leader of the Parti de Libération Kanak and the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance. He said that his administration is focused on reducing social and economic inequality in the rural north. “In the Northern Province, where I preside, we make sure that the benefit of our political actions goes to these people, and not in the pockets of a privileged minority,” he told the newspaper. “The law prioritising local employment would never have existed without the struggle of the independence movement. But it benefits all the citizens of the country, not only Kanak.”

One key objective of the independence movement since the 1970s has been to break French control over mining and nickel smelting, key sectors in New Caledonia’s economy. For decades, governments in Paris guaranteed a monopoly over smelting to the French corporation ERAMET and its local subsidiary Société Le Nickel, which operates the Doniambo smelter in the capital Noumea.

The signing of the Noumea Accord in May 1998 was preceded by a deal that transferred strategic deposits of high-grade nickel ore to the Northern Province, through its development agency SOFINOR and the SMSP mining company. This opened the way for the construction of a new nickel smelter at Koniambo in the north of the country — a major project that many conservatives predicted would never happen.

Patricia Goa, a key adviser to Paul Néaoutyine and herself a member of the national Congress, lives in the tribe of Baco, outside the provincial capital Koohne. She has seen the rural north transformed by the construction of the smelter in a joint venture between the province, SMSP and the transnational corporation Glencore. She stresses that SOFINOR and SMSP hold 51 per cent control of Koniambo Nickel SAS, an unprecedented deal for a resource project in Melanesia.

“KNS is a major player in the economic rebalancing of our country,” says Goa. “New Caledonia holds one quarter of the world’s nickel and the nickel sector is the largest employer in New Caledonia. But nickel resources are not renewable. We really have to think about how we are working for future generations — that’s what our cultural heritage is saying.”

To add value to New Caledonia’s vast mineral resources, the FLNKS has looked beyond simply exporting ore to traditional markets in France, Japan and Australia. The Northern Province administration has established offshore smelters in South Korea and China, through joint ventures between SMSP and the Korean company Posco and the Chinese corporation Yinchuan.

New Caledonia’s president, Thierry Santa, a leader of the anti-independence Loyalist alliance, recognises that historical differences between elements of the independence movement are being replaced by unity over resources policy. “The attitude taken by Union Calédonienne about control of the minerals sector has sharply radicalised compared to the past,” Santa tells me. “Until now, UC had always been more pragmatic and less doctrinaire. They recognised the necessity of maintaining mining across the territory, and the need for diversity of production — for domestic use, for export, and for use by the overseas smelters. Now we see a united policy from all parts of the independence movement opposed to the export of ore, except to the overseas smelters.”

Among those calling for a Yes vote were hundreds of young demonstrators who marched through central Noumea on 19 September, bearing the multicoloured flag of Kanaky. But the vibrant protest masked a more serious mood among young Kanak, who see training and education as a crucial part of the struggle.

“Even if we are losing our direction, we must continue to go to school to become better trained adults,” twenty-four-year-old Pauline told journalists. “When you have a degree, you have more chance to build our country, to move it forward. You have to be serious. You can’t just go crying ‘Kanaky’ everywhere and expect to change things.”

As hundreds of first-time voters turn out in 2020, it’s worth remembering that the Noumea Accord was signed before they were born. The armed clashes of the mid 1980s are ancient history for voters who have grown up under a multi-party government that includes both supporters and opponents of independence.

Despite this, the 2018 referendum saw a massive turnout of young Kanak voters, and the FLNKS is working hard to mobilise people who are wary of old rivalries among politicians. Last July, FLNKS spokesperson Daniel Goa called for a general mobilisation of all political forces, calling on young people to participate: “Our youth must get involved and be active at local level. It is their fight and it will be their victory.”

Today, as a leading Yes campaigner in the north, Magalie Tingal says the independence movement has been forced to adapt to twenty-first-century realities, using social media and talking to youth who are wary of division within the political elite.

“We can feel on the ground that people want more information,” she says. “There are plenty of young intellectual Kanak who want more and more information about what independence means. Campaigning for independence in this millennium, we use a lot of social media, and even ten years ago we didn’t have that type of campaigning. People are listening but have done their own studies, so we can’t campaign like we did ten years ago.”

She highlights the need to decolonise minds as well as institutions: “Independence is scary for some people here, so we have to educate people through meetings, discussion and information. We are talking about living together.”

This referendum is framed by broader global realities. France has markedly improved its diplomatic relations with neighbouring Pacific states, undercutting historical support for the FLNKS. Australia — as the largest member of the Pacific Islands Forum — has forged a strategic partnership with Paris, seeing France as a bulwark against Chinese influence in the region.

At the same time, the coronavirus pandemic has caused more than 31,000 deaths in France and led to border closures and an economic downturn in New Caledonia. China is New Caledonia’s main export market, but US–China tensions and the global recession create uncertainty in the nickel sector.

The No campaign seeks to roll back many economic, social and political advances created by the Noumea Accord. But the flourishing of bleu-blanc-rouge French flags during their campaign belies the reality that many New Caledonians are looking to regional partners like China, Korea and Australia for trade, tourism and services.

Charles Wea has represented the FLNKS in Australia and says that an independent Kanaky-New Caledonia would maintain ties with France but build new relationships in the Pacific region. “If New Caledonia were to become independent tomorrow, we would establish relations with countries that we share values with,” says Wea. “Secondly, we would build relations with countries where we have economic, political and cultural interests. For example, we already have an offshore smelter in Korea, so that’s the sort of country where we have to establish a bilateral relationship.”

Today, through the Melanesian Spearhead Group and Pacific Islands Forum, New Caledonians have already built new trade and commercial ties to neighbours like Vanuatu and Fiji. The government of New Caledonia has begun to place representatives in French embassies in Canberra, Wellington, Suva, Port Vila and Port Moresby. “For the FLNKS,” says Magalie Tingal, “independence doesn’t mean we close our doors to France or anyone. Independence opens us up to the international stage.”

Patricia Goa agrees that a Yes vote won’t lead to a rupture with France. “I’m not against France,” she says. “I have spoken French since I was six years old, although I have my own language. I breathe French because of colonisation, that’s the fact. I know French history, maybe more than the French themselves. What we are saying is, we’ve come to a stage where the people are asking for sovereignty. What’s wrong with having cooperation with China and others? The difference is, we want to choose that relationship as a free state.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post “Our accession to sovereignty is inevitable” appeared first on Inside Story.

Five weeks earlier, Australia had sent its first diplomat to the Pacific islands seeking information about the level of support for Charles de Gaulle. The London-based Free French leader had called on France’s overseas possessions to rise up against the collaborationist regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain.

It was a crucial time in the relationship between Australia and one of its closest Pacific neighbours, and this history of mobilising defence and diplomacy against a rising Asian power has echoes today.

The path to war during the 1930s had already transformed colonial relations in the Pacific. Facing US embargoes, Japanese militarists looked south to the oil resources of Southeast Asia and to strategic mineral deposits throughout the Pacific islands. New Caledonia’s massive reserves of nickel were also coveted by Germany, and the Japanese had increased their investment and trade with the French colony. From 1933, the fascist powers even began to manufacture solid nickel coins as a way of stockpiling this crucial resource for arms manufacture.

But Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria and the 1937 Sino-Japanese war raised fears of a wider regional conflict. With war raging in China, anti-fascist trade unionists in Australia blocked shipments of slag metal to Japan in late 1938, to the anger of attorney-general Robert Menzies, known forever after as Pig Iron Bob.

Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, some French officials in New Caledonia had tried to limit the sale of nickel to Tokyo, fearing it would be onsold to Nazi Germany. By 1940, Australian officials were negotiating with New Caledonia’s largest producer, Société Le Nickel, to purchase nickel as a way of encouraging the French colony to cease exports to Japan.

Australian politicians had been promoting a policy of “strategic denial” in the Pacific since long before Federation. At the start of the second world war, with Britain and France entangled in the European conflict, the Royal Australian Navy needed more information about political developments in strategically important New Caledonia.

Naval historian Ian Pfennigwerth has documented RAN intelligence operations at the time. “Director of Naval Intelligence Rupert Long had organised some human intelligence sources in Noumea,” he writes. “He had arranged to have William Johnston appointed as Admiralty Reporting Officer Noumea on 15 April 1940. He had also organised through Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Denis, the French military commander in Noumea, that a French naval officer would provide the Naval Intelligence Division with intelligence.”

Anxious to get more of its own information independent of the British, the Australian government decided in mid July 1940 to send a French-speaking lawyer, Bertram Ballard, to Noumea to observe and report back.

Eighty years on, Ballard’s successor as Australia’s representative in New Caledonia is consul-general Alison Carrington. Last month she organised a ceremony in Noumea to commemorate the arrival of Australia’s first diplomatic representative in the Pacific islands.

“This year, we’re celebrating eighty years of an official Australian presence here in New Caledonia,” she tells me. “The nomination of Ballard was quite an important moment: it represents our fourth diplomatic mission overseas. Before Noumea, there was only London, Washington and Ottawa.”

Bertram Ballard had previously served as Australian government solicitor in neighbouring New Hebrides (today, the Republic of Vanuatu). The government’s decision to send him to New Caledonia followed Charles de Gaulle’s famous 18 June call for French overseas colonies to rally to a Free France. “New Caledonia hadn’t actually done that,” says Carrington, “so Ballard’s mission was to come to Noumea, report on political and economic matters and basically take the temperature of the place during this time of global upheaval.”

With the Germans having occupied Paris, New Caledonia’s governor, Georges Pélicier, an ageing colonial civil servant, was wavering between supporting the exiled Free French forces or Marshall Pétain’s regime, headquartered in the French spa town of Vichy. The governor angered Gaullist supporters in Noumea when he published Vichy’s new constitutional laws on 29 July.

Pélicier had asked the Vichy regime to send a warship to Noumea, and it deployed the vessel Dumont d’Urville from French Polynesia in late August, commanded by Toussaint de Quièvrecourt. The French aristocrat, a fervent colonialist, reported to Paris that Australia was subsidising local Free French agitators with the objective of annexing New Caledonia.

A month after he arrived in Noumea, Ballard wrote to Canberra reporting that most New Caledonians would “welcome and follow” a governor appointed by de Gaulle. As Alison Carrington explains, until Australia had someone on the ground in Noumea “we weren’t aware of quite the level of support for Free France here. I like to think that having an official representative on the ground at the time contributed in some small way to assisting the decision to send HMAS Adelaide to escort Henri Sautot into New Caledonia, which ultimately led to New Caledonia rallying to Free France.”

Sautot was French resident commissioner in the neighbouring Condominium of the New Hebrides, which had been jointly colonised by France and Britain. With British support, Sautot had rallied French colonists in Port Vila to support the Gaullist cause. After extensive debate, the Australian government decided to transport Sautot to Noumea, deploying HMAS Adelaide as protection.

John Lawrey’s classic study, The Cross of Lorraine in the South Pacific, documents this successful episode of gunboat diplomacy. The Australian warship, under the command of Captain Harry Showers, escorted the Norwegian ship Norden from Port Vila to New Caledonia, with Sautot aboard. Arriving in Noumea early on 19 September, Showers was under orders not to fire unless fired on by the Dumont d’Urville or French army shore batteries. Facing off against the French ship, Sautot was transferred from the Norden onto the Australian warship. A popular uprising was under way onshore.

An uneasy days-long stand-off ended with the Free French forces prevailing under the watchful eye of the RAN warship. Following an unsuccessful revolt by pro-Vichy officers on 23 September, Ballard and Showers convinced Governor Sautot to arrest the remaining pro-Vichy leadership. To forestall any further trouble, Showers drafted a letter for Sautot to send, inviting Dumont d’Urville to depart. The French ship soon left port, carrying pro-Vichy officials to Saigon in French Indo-China.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, an Australian commando company was deployed to New Caledonia to train “native scouts” for a guerilla campaign against an invading Japanese force. From 1942, Noumea was transformed by the influx of tens of thousands of American troops, preparing to fight their way across the Pacific islands towards Japan.

These tumultuous events inspired a young Australian to write his first book. Hailing from the small town of Poowong in the Victorian farming district of Gippsland, Wilfred Burchett visited New Caledonia in 1939 and 1941. He travelled throughout the islands, gathering stories from a range of ordinary people — nickel prospectors and Javanese mine workers, Kanak villagers and French farmers.

Published in 1941 as Pacific Treasure Island, Burchett’s words from eight decades ago still resonate today, as New Caledonia strengthens ties with Australia and the Pacific region. “Whatever the fate of the French empire,” he wrote, “it is certain that relations between New Caledonia and its Pacific neighbours will become ever closer, and it is high time that all we Pacific neighbours began to know each other a little better.”

This perception of Australia and New Caledonia as neighbours was uncommon in the 1940s. Since then, community contacts between the two neighbours have ebbed and flowed through periods of cooperation, exploration and mutual suspicion.

From the mid 1970s, as Papua New Guinea gained independence and ni-Vanuatu battled Britain and France in the New Hebrides, some Australians engaged with Kanak cultural and political activists. Links expanded through unions and ecumenical church networks, regional sporting competitions, cultural exchanges and the thousands of young Australians who travelled to study the French language.

Even before the founding in 1984 of the independence movement Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, Kanak leaders such as Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Yann Céléné Uregei visited Australia to lobby for government support. Between 1984 and 1988, trade unions, churches and community groups supported the Kanak independence struggle through the period of violent clashes known as les évènements.

As New Caledonia descended into armed conflict, friendly relations between Canberra and Paris disintegrated. France’s ties with the Pacific Islands Forum were already strained because of regional opposition to French nuclear testing. The 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior by French intelligence agents and the deployment of thousands of troops to New Caledonia in 1986 won France few friends, in the region or internationally.

Australia reluctantly followed Island Forum countries to support New Caledonia’s return to the UN list of non-self-governing territories in December 1986. In retaliation, France suspended ministerial visits and expelled Australian consul-general John Dauth from Noumea in early 1987.

Those diplomatic dramas are long past. French nuclear testing ended in 1996; two years later, the Noumea Accord mapped a path to possible New Caledonian independence via political devolution. This transformed France’s profile in the region and ties to Australia.

“Today, we have a very good relationship with Australia,” New Caledonia’s president, Thierry Santa, tells me. “We’re developing many commercial activities because we have a good bilateral relationship. As a government, we’ve undertaken a number of visits to Australia, but the economic discussion is happening more at the level of the states. On the health front, Australia remains the primary location for medical evacuations from New Caledonia. In education, we have a number of agreements for students to move in both directions. So relations are really great.”

Over the past decade, even as independence movements in New Caledonia and French Polynesia continue to call for an end to French colonial rule, Paris has improved its diplomatic relations in the islands region. The government of New Caledonia is also basing delegates in French embassies in Canberra, Wellington, Port Vila, Port Moresby and Suva.

A key turning point, according to Australia’s Alison Carrington, was the decision by regional leaders to include the two French dependencies as full members of the Pacific Islands Forum in 2016.

“This decision really marked an evolution of the relationship for these two Pacific territories more broadly in the region,” she says. “This is something that both France and Australia strongly encourage and endorse: the increasing participation of the French Pacific territories in the Pacific region, the neighbourhood we all share.”

The consul-general says she is seeking to expand cooperation with Australia in agriculture, mining services and especially education.

“More and more Australians are aware that New Caledonia is just a stone’s throw from our east coast,” she says. “Because of that geographic proximity, for a long time there’s been a lot of back and forth between Australia and New Caledonia, for holidays, for work or study. New Caledonians young and old have been travelling to Australia to study English, some to do their primary and secondary schooling, many to study at universities in Australia. In the other direction, New Caledonia represents the closest and easily accessible place for Australians to come and enhance their French-language skills.”

Where wealthy New Caledonians once travelled primarily to France for holidays, by 2010 Australia had become their top destination. “There is a strong flow of tourists headed in the direction of Australia,” Carrington acknowledges. “The number of tourists who come from Australia by plane to stay in hotels is a bit smaller, and that is something that New Caledonian authorities seek to grow. But before Covid, we were welcoming around 300,000 Australian tourists a year on cruise ships.”

Trade between Australia and New Caledonia amounted to $721 million in 2018–19. But that year, China was the number one export destination for New Caledonia, with 31.7 per cent of trade, followed by Korea and Japan — rankings that reflect exports of nickel ore and ferronickel metal. Australia had been a primary export market for nickel ore until rogue politician and entrepreneur Clive Palmer closed the Yabulu nickel smelter in Townsville in 2016. By 2018, Australia only ranked number eleven as an export destination, receiving just 1 per cent of New Caledonian exports.

Alison Carrington sees room for more cooperation in mining services: “The technology and services part of the mining sector is an important part of our relationship. We in Australia are world leaders in this sector and have a lot to offer to New Caledonia.”

Despite this, Australia’s overall trade with the Pacific has stagnated, even as China’s has more than doubled over the past decade. In August last year, just weeks after his election as president, Thierry Santa travelled to his first Forum leaders meeting in Funafuti. “When I met prime minister Scott Morrison in Tuvalu,” says Santa, “he was very enthusiastic about us being part of PACER-Plus, the regional trade agreement between Australia, New Zealand and the independent countries of the Pacific. But we’re not really within that framework — we’d rather improve the bilateral relationship.”

At a time of geopolitical tension between China and the United States, regional interventions by Australia and France are increasingly framed by the concept of the “Indo-Pacific.”

“France is a great Indo-Pacific power,” said French president Emmanuel Macron when he visited Australia and New Caledonia in May 2018, “and it has great power in the Indo-Pacific region through its territories New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna and French Polynesia, as well as Mayotte and Reunion.” The 8000 or more French military personnel in the two oceans “project our national defence, our interests, our strategy; the region has more than three quarters of the vast maritime zone that makes us the second-largest maritime power in the world.”

Macron highlighted the strategic importance of both India and Australia, two countries where the French government is actively promoting arms sales. “Our shared priority is to build this strong Indo-Pacific axis to guarantee both our economic and security interests,” he said. “The trilateral dialogue between Australia, India and France has the possibility to play a central role in this.”

At the time, officials argued that continuing French colonial control in New Caledonia was crucial to France’s Indo-Pacific strategy. “In terms of geo-politics,” the Australian Financial Review reported, “losing control over New Caledonia’s foreign affairs and defence would undermine Macron’s strategy, of which Australia is a stated ally, to strengthen or protect France’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region — presumably as a hedge against China.”

During the visit, Macron and then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull signed a new Vision Statement on the Australia–France Relationship, extending two previous intergovernmental agreements on strategic partnership. This relationship is dominated by Australia’s $80 billion submarine technology deal with France’s Naval Group, and other ADF purchases from the arms manufacturer Thales.

After a decade of negotiation, Australia and France also signed a Mutual Logistics Support Agreement in 2018, a deal promoted as “symbolic of the strategic depth and maturity of relations between France and Australia in the field of defence.” The agreement increases intelligence sharing and allows French and Australian naval and air units to use each other’s ports, fuel and logistics in the Pacific.

Alison Carrington sees cooperation between the Australian Defence Force and the Forces Armées de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, or FANC, as a key part of the burgeoning relationship with Paris and Noumea. “Sitting here in Noumea, where the French armed forces are headquartered, this part of the relationship is a really crucial one,” she says. “For a long time, there’s been a good level of cooperation between Australian and French defence forces, preparing for and responding to humanitarian disasters in the region. But I’d say we’ve gone up from a good level to a very good level now.”

Carrington points out that Australia’s chief of the defence force made his first visit to Noumea, with his New Zealand counterpart, in January this year. She also welcomes a new ADF liaison officer, to be based in Noumea later this year. “That person will share their time between the consulate-general and the French armed forces headquarters. That will only further enhance our interoperability.”

“There’s an alignment between Australia’s ‘step-up’ engagement with the Pacific and France’s Indo-Pacific axis strategy,” says Carrington. “Both of us see ourselves committed to security in the region and meeting the security needs of the region. In that sense, France is a very important partner for Australia.”

The closeness of this relationship will be tested, however, in coming years. New Caledonia will hold a referendum on its political future on 4 October. Fearful of upsetting the global security relationship with France, Australian ministers are loath to publicly champion the “right to self-determination” for colonised peoples. But the Kanak independence movement sees status quo definitions of “security” as reinforcing France’s colonial control. The ebb and flow of neighbourly relations will continue to be affected by their call for sovereignty and independence. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post “Before Noumea, there was only London, Washington and Ottawa” appeared first on Inside Story.

On 4 October, long-term residents of the French Pacific dependency will vote on New Caledonia’s future political status. Despite overwhelming support for independence among the indigenous Kanak people — nearly 40 per cent of the population — most non-Kanak voters want to retain ties with France. In an increasingly polarised debate, supporters and opponents of independence are seeking to mobilise their base, amidst the social and economic crisis caused by the global coronavirus pandemic.

The choice of Parc Brunelet for the rally — a green, open space in the wealthy southern suburbs of the capital, Noumea — was no accident. In the 1970s, conservative politician Jacques Lafleur used the same park to mobilise support for his new anti-independence party, Rassemblement pour la Calédonie dans la Republique. Under Lafleur’s often autocratic leadership, the party was the dominant political force in New Caledonia throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including during the violent clashes of 1984–88 known as Les évènements.

Many conservative politicians look back with longing to that era of right-wing hegemony. Decades later, Lafleur’s Rassemblement party, now led by New Caledonian president Thierry Santa, is just one of a range of conservative, anti-independence parties. This fragmentation on the right reflects widespread uncertainty about the best way to respond to the call for sovereignty from the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, and other pro-independence forces.

In a system without compulsory voting, each campaign must mobilise supporters to turn out to the polls — a process that draws on emotion as well as considered decisions. For this reason, the use of flags has become fraught during the referendum campaign, pitting the bleu-blanc-rouge against the multicoloured flag of Kanaky.

Independence parties unsuccessfully lodged a case before France’s highest administrative court, claiming the partisan use of the French tricolour undercuts the supposed neutrality of the French state during the referendum. For FLNKS spokesperson Daniel Goa, “The use of the French flag is very restricted. Here in New Caledonia, the question is not a choice between France and New Caledonia. It is to prepare for the exit of France.”

Less predictably, Philippe Gomes, leader of the anti-independence Calédonie Ensemble, says that his party’s No to independence “is not a bleu-blanc-rouge No.” Gomes, who represents New Caledonia in the French National Assembly in Paris, says the other anti-independence parties have “bleu-blanc-rouge everywhere” in their campaign materials. “For us, the flag is on the corner of our material, but we’re talking about this country, about New Caledonia. For this reason we couldn’t participate in their radical campaign, that is in part racist, very anti-Islander and very anti-independence. This can’t bring anything good to the country.”

The French state, FLNKS and conservative anti-independence parties reached an agreement known as the Noumea Accord in May 1998, setting out a decolonisation process for New Caledonia. Entrenched in the French Constitution the following year, the Noumea Accord proposed measures of economic and social “rebalancing” and set out a twenty-year transition towards a new political status. After the transfer of legal and administrative powers to local institutions between 1998 and 2018, the colonised Kanak people and other long-term residents of New Caledonia would vote in a referendum on self-determination. Uniquely, the Noumea Accord allowed another two referendums, if a first vote for independence was unsuccessful.

In November 2018, the first referendum under the Noumea Accord posed the question: “Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?” In an unprecedented turnout, 56.7 per cent of voters decided to remain within the French Republic, while 43.3 per cent voted Yes to independence. These bald figures, with a clear majority opposing full sovereignty, suggest a setback for the FLNKS. In reality, the size of the Yes vote surprised most conservative politicians and pundits, who had predicted an overwhelming and strategic defeat for the independence movement.

Today, three anti-independence parties make up the Avenir en Confiance (The Future with Confidence) coalition: Les Républicains Calédoniennes, led by Sonia Backes; Thierry Santa’s Rassemblement—Les Républicains; and the Mouvement Populaire Calédonien, led by Gil Brial. For the 2020 referendum, this coalition has created a new alliance, dubbed “The Loyalists,” with three more smaller parties: Pascal Vittori’s Tous Calédoniens; Nicolas Metzdorf’s Générations NC; and the Rassemblement National (the new name for the extreme right-wing National Front led by French politician Marine Le Pen).

Opponents of independence rally in Parc Brunelet in July displaying France’s bleu-blanc-rouge tricolour. Les Nouvelles Caledoniennes

This unwieldy grouping is united by the goal of boosting the No vote. As President Santa tells me, “Our objective is to improve the tally achieved in the first referendum. Amongst the 33,000 people who didn’t vote last time, the vast majority live in greater Noumea. I think a proportion of these people, who thought the result would be 70/30, didn’t bother to vote. But I think that the result in 2018 really disappointed them, and that will mobilise them to get out and vote the next time.”

On 7 September, The Loyalists alliance released a booklet setting out its vision for the future. Under the influence of Sonia Backes and other conservatives, it proposes policies to roll back advances made by the Kanak people since the 1988 Matignon-Oudinot Agreements and 1998 Noumea Accord.

The Loyalists plan to change the current division of government revenues among New Caledonia’s three provinces, reducing extra funding allocated to the Northern and Loyalty Islands provinces after decades of underdevelopment. Their policy proposes changes to the representation of the two Kanak-majority provinces in the Congress and also membership of the existing collegial, multi-party government that currently includes both supporters and opponents of independence. This change would allow the dominant majority after elections — currently an anti-independence majority — to propose laws to Congress.

The document calls for “dialogue” and “sharing” but promotes policies that will be fiercely resisted by the independence movement, at the ballot box and on the streets.

In spite of this unified statement, significant policy differences still exist within the anti-independence coalition — over nickel exports, the use of indigenous languages in schools and the funding of provincial administrations. But President Santa says it is vital to work together. “The key factor is that we are united and can multiply the number of activities thanks to our alliance,” he says. “We’ll be able to operate at many levels: to mobilise the members of our various parties, and coordinate actions around the country on behalf on one or another group. So I hope that the Loyalist campaign will be more effective than last time.”

Calédonie Ensemble is the only major anti-independence party that has refused to join this alliance. CE dominated local politics for a decade until 2019 provincial elections and is still a significant player: Gomes and fellow CE member Philippe Dunoyer hold New Caledonia’s two seats in the French National Assembly, and CE’s Gerard Poadja sits in the French Senate.

Shocked by the size of the 2018 independence vote, New Caledonia’s non-Kanak electorate punished CE during May 2019 provincial elections. Sonia Backes’s Avenir coalition carried the majority of the European electorate, with campaign meetings featuring the French national anthem and lots of French flags. Wealthy beachside suburbs in Noumea are a bastion of anti-independence support, and during the campaign CE’s Philippe Michel denounced Backes as a “white supremacist from the southern suburbs.”

In March 2020 municipal elections, CE also lost control of its long-term stronghold in the rural town of La Foa, where Philippe Gomes was mayor from 1989 to 2008. To rub salt in the wound, CE was defeated by a breakaway faction — Nicolas Metzdorf’s Générations NC. Metzdorf then took his new party into the Loyalists, stating, “We’re not all best buddies in the Loyalists, but at any given moment, the national interest must come first. We need unity.”

This bad blood is reflected in CE’s decision to run its own No campaign for the October referendum — a division that disappoints President Santa. “I remain convinced that there is no fundamental difference that justifies this parallel process,” he tells me. “When the Loyalist Front launched our social policies, to explain to New Caledonians our vision for the period after the Noumea Accord, we felt that there were many policies that were the same as those presented by Calédonie ensemble. So their claims that we are on a doctrinaire, anti-independence, even racist path, while they are promoting dialogue, negotiation and discussion — well, that’s just the artifice of a politician to justify his decision not to join the Loyalist alliance.”

Not surprisingly, Philippe Gomes says the opposite: “The National Front called for a vote against the Matignon Accords and also against the Noumea Accord. How could we sit around the table with people who have actively opposed the process we’ve undertaken over the last thirty years? We just don’t have the same political beliefs as those people.

“You also have the Avenir en Confiance led by Sonia Backes,” Gomes added. “The last proposal she put forward was for the partition of the country: when the Northern and Loyalty Islands provinces vote Yes for independence, they can become Kanaky while the Southern Province can remain part of France. But for us, the division of the country makes no sense. It is one and indivisible, you can’t cut it up like a sausage!”

In the lead-up to the November 2018 referendum, French prime minister Edouard Philippe and overseas minister Annick Girardin allocated extensive time and political capital to New Caledonia. Wrangling supporters and opponents of independence, Philippe managed to forge a consensus on the date for the referendum, the logistics of polling, who could vote and even the wording of the question.

But Philippe is gone. Just three months before this year’s referendum, Emmanuel Macron reshuffled his cabinet in Paris, appointing Jean Castex as prime minister and Sebastien Lecornu as minister responsible for France’s overseas collectivities.

Louis Mapou, head of the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance parliamentary group within New Caledonia’s Congress, noted: “Until now, Edouard Philippe has been our interlocutor within the French State. The new prime minister — we don’t know him. We’ve met the new overseas minister, but not to discuss all the New Caledonian issues that are on the table since 1998.”

Overseas Minister Lecornu told the newspaper Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes that “there isn’t a day when the president of the Republic hasn’t asked me questions about what’s happening overseas in general and about New Caledonia in particular.”

CE’s Philippe Gomes is not persuaded. He says that New Caledonia is not high on the agenda in Paris, at a time when the new government faces more than 30,000 deaths from COVID-19, post-Brexit debates about the future of the EU and protests over domestic austerity.

“The French government is failing in its duty,” he says. “This year, the president of the French Republic made a major speech on television on 14 July, our national day. He talked for two hours. But the issue of New Caledonia was not even mentioned once, even though within two months we will decide whether to leave the French Republic! When the new prime minister, Castex, made his speech to the National Assembly, not one single word about New Caledonia.”

For, Gomes, this is starkly different from the first referendum. “In 2018, the government was very active,” he says. “The prime minister and the president of the French Republic both visited, they spent hundreds of hours talking with everybody and the referendum was organised after a consensus had been forged. Everyone was on board, agreeing about the manner in which the vote would be held. For this reason, the result could not be questioned, nor was it questioned. Today, the French government hasn’t done its job and the process is under challenge.”

Cynics might note that Gomes, as a member of the French National Assembly, is in a prime position to lobby the government. But he argues that the Macron administration has mishandled the process. “Even though they have a lot on their plate at the moment, they’ve made very bad decisions over the last two years in relation to New Caledonia,” he responds. “I don’t think they realise that 2020 is not simply a replay of 2018. I fear that when they do start to talk about New Caledonia, it will be too late.”

It’s worth noting that the independence movement doesn’t agree that Paris has dropped the ball. They have long argued the French government is actively working against independence, in spite of pledges of impartiality.

I spent weeks in New Caledonia covering the 2018 referendum campaign and trying to gauge the mood on the ground. Reporting from a distance this year, courtesy of pandemic restrictions, it’s still clear that the mood is more polarised and anxious. Opponents of independence seem more fearful of the future, knowing the independence vote last time was tantalisingly close to 50 per cent. And they have many questions. Will citizens of an independent New Caledonia retain their French passport and access to the European Union? Will France continue to fund a range of social services and welfare payments? What about the Chinese?

The FLNKS has mounted a public campaign to respond to these queries, but loyalist politicians have seized on documents showing the independence movement is negotiating directly with the French state, hoping to set parameters for any post-referendum transition to nationhood. The classic fear of a stab in the back from Paris motivates many conservative New Caledonians, especially those who have migrated from Algeria, Vanuatu and other former French colonies.

Given that a third referendum is possible under the Noumea Accord, Philippe Gomes believes that the independence movement can win this year without reaching 50 per cent. “We know that the independence movement desperately wants to increase their score this time, because that would be a very powerful psychological blow for people opposed to independence,” he says. “The same is true for our movement: we want to hold steady or increase our score! If they manage to increase their Yes vote by two or three per cent, our people will feel the independence movement breathing down their neck. This is another element that explains the polarisation of debate at the moment.”

Politics in New Caledonia’s Congress is heating up as the vote gets closer. This month, Calédonie ensemble joined independence groups and the Wallisian party Eveil océanien to vote for a special budget debate, reviewing proposed French loans to cope with the loss of trade and tourism during the pandemic. President Santa sees this unholy alliance as a vote of no confidence in his multi-party government, which includes members from all these groups.

Despite these tensions, New Caledonia’s political elite works together on common concerns through congressional committees, provincial assemblies and the multi-party Government of New Caledonia.

But Philip Gomes argues that personal connections among professional politicians can founder when the stakes get high: “If you look at the press statements by Sonia Backes of Les Républicains Calédoniennes or Daniel Goa of Union Calédonienne, they threaten each other that they’ll go back to the barricades, as we saw in the 1980s. We are in a period where the debate is very black and white, yes or no, for or against. Given this binary choice, people are reacting more and more with their guts and less and less with their head. That’s not good in a small island society with its multiple cultures and identities, which has already suffered too much.”

President Santa agrees that the public debate is sharper. “In my opinion, we are not yet at a stage where we need to worry, but I can’t say otherwise than there’s an increasing mood of tension. We’ve seen a radicalisation of political language. And of course, when political speech is radical, it can create a response from people at the base. This is true for both sides, not just the independence movement, but unfortunately also from the supporters of France.”

With just weeks before the vote, the path to decolonisation still faces many hurdles. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post New Caledonia’s bleu-blanc-rouge vote appeared first on Inside Story.

Among the British, notwithstanding several decades of scholarship that has insisted on and explored the global relationships constitutive of modern Britain, a sense that empire was nevertheless an add-on has endured. Yet Edward Said demonstrated nearly thirty years ago, in the discussion of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park that kicked off his powerful and persuasive book Culture and Imperialism (1993), that slavery and commerce energised the most domestic and provincial dimensions of English life. If it does not make literal, geographic sense to say that the Caribbean was located in England, it was and is true in a more profound sense that England was in the Caribbean and that the Caribbean was in England.

Kate Fullagar is a historian of the eighteenth century who teaches at Macquarie University. Her first book, The Savage Visit (2012), reconstructed the stories of Indigenous individuals who visited Britain from the sixteenth century onwards, some of whom became objects of feverish interest and fantasy, the vehicles for whatever European theory of the exotic was most salient at that moment. If it drew attention to one sense in which empire might have been more a two-way street than is typically assumed, that book’s core argument retained a British focus: it dealt with changing metropolitan interests in the “savage” and exotic. The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist returns to some of the same characters and themes but exemplifies a more genuinely cross-cultural and multi-local history through three intersecting biographies.

The warrior is Ostenaco, a Cherokee born in the 1710s in territory that embraced parts of the modern states of Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas. He became prominent from mid-century in diplomacy and conflict with the British, which was complicated by British–French hostilities in the American southeast, the separate operations of colonial governors and other agents in Charleston, Williamsburg and elsewhere, and older rivalries among native nations.

Following a period of war, Ostenaco led peacemaking with the governor of the Virginia colony, and in early 1762 signalled his interest in travelling to England to meet George III. He undertook a nine-month trip and met the king twice before returning home to difficult years through the 1770s, marked by Indigenous resistance but also by successive Indigenous concessions in the face of the expansion of colonial settlement.

The voyager of Fullagar’s title is Mai, celebrated in Pacific history as Omai, and perhaps the best known of all Indigenous visitors to Britain in the eighteenth century. He was preceded by Ahutoru from the island of Ra’iatea, who was brought to France by Bougainville and spent a year there over 1769–70, and by Tupaia, a priest, navigator and artist whom Joseph Banks hoped to host but who died in Batavia on the Endeavour’s passage home. Captain Cook was disinclined to bring Islanders back to England, but Mai travelled with Tobias Furneaux, the captain of Cook’s consort, the Adventure.

Mai’s motivations for visiting England were well documented: he too was from Ra’iatea — like Tahiti, part of the archipelago of the Society Islands — and his community had suffered invasion by the warriors of Bora Bora. He sought an alliance with George III and weapons that might enable revenge. Hosted by Banks in London, his company was famously celebrated by high society. He joined Banks on several journeys, including a summer tour of Yorkshire, and eventually returned to the Pacific on Cook’s third voyage. Though he reached home with gifts of all sorts, including a suit of armour and a horse, he fell out with Cook as to where and how he should be resettled. He was afterwards able to launch some kind of assault against the occupation of his home island, but with inconclusive results.

Ostenaco and Mai were linked by “the artist” of the title, Joshua Reynolds, who painted them both during their London sojourns. Mai’s celebrity is reflected in the fact that he was depicted not only by the president of the Royal Academy but also by several other eminent painters of the period — Nathaniel Dance and William Parry as well as William Hodges and John Webber, the latter the official artists of Cook’s second and third voyages respectively.

Reynolds notably painted the Polynesian at scale — the finished work is nearly two and a half metres high, an ambitious portrait by the standards of the period. Fullagar is undecided as to whether it was successful. In the context of the twenty-first-century art world, the painting has become a hallmark of British interest in the exotic, though it has been controversially sequestered in a private collection. The contemporary response was apparently muted, though the artist kept the painting on show in his studio, implying that he personally considered it an important achievement. Its oddity is perhaps its relative neutrality: although the tattoos on Mai’s wrist and forearms are accurately depicted, Reynolds otherwise evokes an almost generic non-European, albeit one with a distinctively noble bearing. (A widely circulated print, based on a painting by Nathaniel Dance, localised Mai more explicitly, showing him holding Polynesian artefacts.)

In any event, the work was more successful than Reynolds’s portrait of Ostenaco, painted nearly fifteen years earlier, which the artist himself consigned to storage. In the context of this triple biography, Fullagar’s account of the painter’s career, commitments and interests is absorbing. While scholars have long regarded Reynolds from the vantage point of his success and his prescriptive Discourses on Art, he comes across here less as the establishment’s aesthetician than as an intellectual unable to make up his mind about the most burning issues of the day, and particularly the question that divided his friends Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke: was empire an expression of rapacious injustice or a progressive endeavour that advanced global civilisation through commerce? In fact, as Fullagar puts it, Reynolds was a consummate society artist who found ways of pleasing opposed political constituencies, and was able to sustain a “two-way position with more flair than flailing.”

The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist is imaginatively conceived and engagingly written. It builds on biographic experiments such as those of Natalie Zemon Davis and the historical anthropology of Greg Dening and Anne Salmond, acknowledging that the lives linked by Reynolds’s portraits were not all the same, and not those of “selves” of the modern individualistic sort. Any cross-cultural narrative will struggle to evoke the inner life of Indigenous subjects as precisely or persuasively as the motivations and reflections of those who left personal writings behind or were intimately described by others. If asymmetry is inevitable, it is nevertheless critical that historians attempt to do justice to the diversity of perspectives and experiences that made up “an age of empire” — not least because that age, of global interaction, commerce, conflict, exploitation and danger, is with us still.

In the latest round of the “culture wars,” colonialism has become a thing that people defend or condemn through posts on social media. No doubt contemporary polities and communities need to position themselves by, in effect, voting for or against passages in world history. But our understandings and imaginative lives are enriched not by those sorts of binary adjudications but by stories we weren’t aware of, by going the distance, as Fullagar’s book does. As Julian Barnes once wrote, “There’s one thing I’ll say for history. It’s very good at finding things.” •

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France conducted 193 atmospheric and underground nuclear tests in French Polynesia between July 1966 and January 1996. Two and a half decades later, many Maohi (Polynesians) employed at the test sites on Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls are suffering from cancer, skin diseases and other illnesses.

A scheme to compensate civilian and military personnel for the effects of exposure to ionising radiation, named after then defence minister Hervé Morin, was passed by the French parliament in January 2010. The legislation created a new commission, the Comité d’Indemnisation des Victimes des Essais Nucléaires, or CIVEN, to evaluate compensation claims.

Over the first five years of operation, however, CIVEN approved only 2 per cent of claims. Although reforms since 2017 have improved the compensation process, political and community leaders in French Polynesia see recent changes to the law as a step backwards that will significantly restrict access to compensation.

Among those concerned by the latest change is Father Auguste Uebe Carlson, a Catholic priest and president of Association 193, an organisation that mobilises churchgoers in Tahiti around the legacies of the 193 nuclear tests. He believes that health problems in French Polynesia extend beyond the thousands of workers and soldiers who staffed the nuclear test sites.

“The atmospheric tests impacted on all of French Polynesia,” he says. “The French state has difficulty admitting that radiation-induced illnesses have not only affected the Moruroa workers, but the whole population over many generations.”

For decades, French politicians argued that cold war–era testing left no adverse health or environmental legacies. But there is clear evidence of radioactive fallout from French atmospheric tests between 1966 and 1974. Medical researchers have documented significant increases in thyroid cancer, myeloid leukaemia and other illnesses among the Maohi people across the five archipelagos of French Polynesia.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has documented how radioactivity from underground tests leached into the marine environment around the fragile coral atolls between 1975 and 1996. In 1998, the agency estimated that five kilograms of plutonium were dispersed through the sediments of the lagoon at Moruroa atoll.

Today, many people who once supported nuclear testing have acknowledged these hazards. In a stunning statement to the local assembly in November 2018, French Polynesian president Edouard Fritch admitted that successive governments had made false statements about the health and environmental effects. “For thirty years we lied to this people that these tests were clean,” he said. “It was us who lied and I was a member of this gang! And for what reason did we lie? Because our own leader had seen a bomb explode.”

When the Morin Law was enacted, survivors criticised the fact that compensation decisions were ultimately made by the French defence minister rather than an independent decision-maker. They were also angered that Article 4 of the law deemed that there was “negligible risk” of contamination, leaving applicants with the challenge of proving that significant levels of radiation exposure had in fact caused their illness.

Many Maohi workers lacked health records or documentation of their employment at the nuclear test sites, so this provision created a burden of proof that many found impossible to meet. Data released by CIVEN shows that between 5 January 2010 and 15 March 2015, only seventeen of 862 claims were approved from applicants from France, Algeria and French Polynesia.

Since then, protests by political and community groups in Tahiti and France have led to a series of changes. CIVEN has been transformed from an advisory body to the defence minister into an independent statutory organisation with its own chair (currently senior official Alain Christnacht, who has served successive French presidents as an adviser on Pacific affairs).

The reference to “negligible risk” was removed from the law in February 2017, resulting in a steady increase in the number of successful claims. “For applicants living in French Polynesia,” reports CIVEN, “only eleven claims were accepted between 2010 and 2017, while 154 claims were favourably received between 1 January 2018 and 22 June 2020.”

Despite this advance, the law was changed again in December 2018 through an amendment proposed by Lana Tetuanui, who represents French Polynesia in the French Senate in Paris. Tetuanui is a member of Tapura Huiraatira, Edouard Fritch’s governing party. Her amendment sets an annual radiation dose of at least one millisievert, or mSv, as a measure for making a valid claim. While this is a low threshold, it once again requires applicants to prove their level of exposure — a difficult task when the French government still restricts release of radiation data under national security laws.

The Tetuanui amendment sparked renewed calls for reform of the Morin Law, with criticism led by Moruroa e Tatou (Moruroa and Us). This association unites thousands of Maohi workers, including labourers, truck drivers and scuba divers, who worked at the test sites on Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls and the support base on Hao atoll throughout the testing era.

Following the March 2019 death from cancer of Moruroa e Tatou’s long-time leader Roland Oldham, the association’s new president is Hiro Tefaarere. The former police inspector, trade union leader and politician has long been a critic of French colonialism. Speaking from his home on the island of Huahine in the Leeward Islands, Tefaarere echoes the call for action from politicians and church leaders in Tahiti. “The Tetuanui amendment is a serious problem,” he says. “We want this amendment to be withdrawn but we also want to go much further. It’s not just the Moruroa workers. According to official government figures, more than 20,000 people in French Polynesia died of cancer between 1996 and 2016.”

Tefaarere says he has met twice with CIVEN chair Alain Christnacht, “who I believe is a man of his word. We want him to speed up the compensation of all the victims of nuclear testing — whether they were military or civilian workers or people living on nearby islands who were contaminated.”

On 6 July, French president Emmanuel Macron reshuffled his cabinet, appointing Jean Castex as the new prime minister and Sébastien Lecornu as overseas minister. For Hiro Tefaarere, it’s important for France’s new leaders to engage with nuclear survivors in the South Pacific.

“It’s vital that President Macron, his new prime minister and the new government should meet with us, to discuss all of the concerns that we are raising,” he said. “We hope that President Macron will follow his predecessor François Hollande, not just to recognise the victims but to compensate them.”

Moetai Brotherson, who represents French Polynesia in the National Assembly in Paris, agrees that the compensation process has flaws.

“If the Tetuanui amendment had not been put into law, it wouldn’t be a problem at all,” he tells me from Tahiti. “Before, you only had to prove that you were in French Polynesia during a certain period of time, and you were eligible for compensation if your illness was on the list of diseases that are linked to nuclear testing. The ‘negligible risk’ provision was taken out of the legislation and things were moving smoothly. The number of files addressed was increasing.”

Brotherson was stunned last June when a joint committee of the French Senate and National Assembly reaffirmed that the Tetuanui amendment should remain in the Morin Law. “The most shocking thing about all of this was that the decision was taken without any of the Polynesian deputies or senators being present in Paris because of the Covid crisis,” he says. “So, there was none of us there to defend the fact that we didn’t want this millisievert level put back into the law. That was really a trick played behind our back, I would say.”

A 30 June statement from CIVEN released a complex twenty-page description of its methodology, which acknowledges the uncertainty created by the Tetuanui amendment:

The reversal of presumption is very different to that of “negligible risk”… [I]t is, however, the legal and regulatory norm which CIVEN must adopt. Aware that each case is different, CIVEN admits however that it is possible in certain circumstances to recognise as a victim those people who received a dose less than 1 mSv — especially because of the age of exposure for certain cancers or the location of the worker.

Brotherson calls on the new French government to deal with these inconsistencies in the way the Morin Law is operating. “The difficulty now is that the system will operate on a case-by-case basis,” he says. “We’ve seen lately a decision by the administrative court that supported the applicant, saying that CIVEN had to prove that the person had not been exposed to at least one millisievert of radiation. But decisions of this court can vary and so it’s now on a case-by-case basis.”

In Tahiti, Father Carlson of Association 193 agrees that inconsistencies in application of the law persist, despite recent reforms. He points to the case of two sisters from the Austral Islands, who met all the conditions set by the Morin Law. “One was given compensation, the other was refused,” he says. “We don’t understand why the second application was rejected when both women lived in the same environment. When we questioned CIVEN about this, they said that the commission was given the power to determine levels of exposure by the Tetuanui amendment.” In other words, he says, “the French state is both judge and accused.”

Father Carlson says he shares the pain felt by many victims, having been born in the Gambier Islands, an archipelago just 420 kilometres southeast of Moruroa atoll. “I am one of many witnesses to the generation that was sacrificed in the Gambier Islands,” he says. “Many people have died aged in their forties or fifties, sometimes suffering from multiple cancers at the same time. My two mothers — one biological, one adoptive — both died. What has happened to my family is not an isolated case, rather it is happening to thousands of Polynesians. That is what drives my commitment to this issue.”

President Macron was scheduled to visit Tahiti in April this year, to meet the government of French Polynesia and host a France–Oceania summit with Pacific island leaders. But his trip was postponed when the French government began grappling with the coronavirus pandemic. (France currently has 181,000 Covid-19 cases and has recorded nearly 31,000 deaths.) When the French president eventually arrives, he is likely to face public protests, as church and community leaders call for action on the legacy of twentieth-century nuclear testing.

Father Carlson says that Association 193 has three crucial demands for Macron: “Firstly, the removal of the Tetuanui amendment. Next, we would like to see the creation of an independent study into intergenerational illnesses. Thirdly, if President Macron is to visit Tahiti, we would like the French state to apologise for the many nuclear tests that transformed our island paradise into hell.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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Most Australian and NZ coverage of the crisis has highlighted the role of defence forces in supplying aid to the Pacific islands, and the competition for influence with China. There’s been little news of how local organisations are ensuring food security for the urban unemployed and people previously reliant on overseas supply chains.

Non-government, church and community organisations are supporting the poor in urban centres, networking with rural communities and promoting healthy, local foodstuffs. They are not only drawing on Pacific traditions of reciprocity, family and sharing, but also tapping into new technologies, organic farming and social media.

Development consultant Feiloakitau Kaho Tevi, a former general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, highlighted the importance of family and community in a recent interview for the Global Research Programme on Inequality. “Families in Tonga have distributed their root crops freely in trying to help those in need,” he said. “A barter trade market on the internet is exploding in Fiji where individuals are exchanging goods and services, trying to help each other fare through these difficult times.”

Stories like these are coming in from many Pacific islands, Tevi said. “In some sense, it is not surprising that Pacific islanders react as such, given our communal living and our sense of caring for the other.”

Many people have responded with resilience and creativity — setting up barter networks for those without cash, shifting from export crops to local markets, returning to the village to work on family gardens and, above all, planting, planting and planting. “Our reactions to the pandemic, by far, have been more localised; falling back on our strengths as Pacific islanders: our sense of reciprocity and community living; living off our land,” said Tevi. “It was a consolation of some sort that the solutions to our ‘hardship’ are to be found in our own plantations and villages.”

This sentiment is echoed by the secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, Dame Meg Taylor. When I spoke to her for Islands Business magazine, she welcomed international assistance, but highlighted the local mobilisation across the region: “After health, there’s going to be recovery around food security and environmental security. I think in the bigger islands, one of the good things is that everybody is planting and going back to our natural resources to feed ourselves. My own family and community in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea are getting their gardens going, so if there’s a long period of isolation, they will survive.”

Although the Solomon Islands has recorded no cases of Covid-19, the island nation had its own shock in April when Tropical Cyclone Harold hit, with devastating consequences. The government announced a state of emergency and the associated economic downturn has seen many people leaving the capital, Honiara, to ride out the crisis in their home villages on outlying islands. People in town are turning to family connections for support, and using social media to promote exchange and barter.

Alex Haro, principal of the Woodford International School in Honiara, joined with a group of friends to establish Trade Bilong Iumi, a Facebook page that allows people to barter and exchange necessities during the downturn.

“I started Trade Bilong Iumi because I had a lot of friends who had financial difficulties, so we came up with the initiative of this Facebook page,” Haro tells me. “Basically, there is no money involved, just the exchanging of goods and services. This is for Solomon Islanders if they have problems with their finance — this is their platform.”

Use of the page is gradually increasing. “For example, there were people from the [Weather] Coast, they actually needed some taro. So, they went fishing and then went on the Facebook page and said, ‘We’ve got some tuna and we need some bags of taro or cassava’ — and they actually exchanged the goods.”

For Haro, social media can build on existing cultural values among Melanesian communities. “This is what we have been practising back in the olden days — that’s how our ancestors have survived,” he says. “Our wantok system is very different to the Western world where you look after yourself, but here it’s about the community. If someone’s got a problem, then the brother or the sister or the aunty will step in. That’s how we survive.”

In other countries, activists are using social media to establish non-commercial barter networks, especially for people who have lost their jobs in the waged economy.

In Suva, the Barter for a Better Fiji group has 170,000 supporters and more than 4400 members on its public Facebook page. Administrator Marlene Dutta set up the site to encourage people who are doing it tough to connect with others. “Back in the before when money was sooo tomorrow,” say the organisers, “our ancestrals lived by exchanging what they had for what they needed. Easy eh? How about we do that again now? Some smart gang already doing it one-on-one style… but what if there was a space for everyone to trade? Well folks, this is it.”

In response, people have posted requests for food, clothes or other items, offering to barter an eclectic mix of goods: “My daughter’s tricycle for groceries (Rewa powder milk; 2kg sugar; 4kg rice, 2 tin tuna, eggs, oil, Maggi noodle etc)”; “One rooster to exchange with 2 x stereo speakers”; “A metal sink for fish and cassava”; “Seven kilos of waqa [kava] for a good smart phone.” One person has even offered tattoos in exchange for goods.

A different sort of pandemic-era scheme is running in Lautoka, Fiji’s second-largest town. Widely known as “Sugar City,” Lautoka is located in the sugar-cane belt on the west coast of the main island, Viti Levu. It was the site of Fiji’s first sugar mill, built by indentured labour from India and Solomon Islands and launched in 1903 by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company.

Lautoka also recorded Fiji’s first confirmed cases of Covid-19, after a flight attendant from Fiji Airways was diagnosed on 19 March. Within three days, two members of his family were also diagnosed with the disease.

Having already banned cruise ships and restricted international air travel, the Fiji government moved to quarantine Sugar City to limit the possibility of further community transfer. During the initial two-week lockdown, police roadblocks prevented people from leaving the city, except for essential travel.

“When the lockdown was announced, we thought we were just shutting the office and going home,” Sashi Kiran tells me. “But after a couple of days it was very obvious that people in Lautoka who were dependent on the city — hawkers, casual workers, wheelbarrow boys and other people with day jobs — were asked to stay at home at short notice. People who live week to week or even day to day were asking for food.”

Kiran is director of the Foundation for Rural Integrated Enterprises and Development, or FRIEND, a non-government organisation that has run programs on socioeconomic development, health and welfare in Lautoka for nearly two decades. Kiran says the overnight lockdown of the city created immediate problems for the poorest members of the community.

“Within days we partnered with organisations like the counselling body Empower Pacific,” she says. “Eighty per cent of the calls were people asking for food, and we also had the challenge of people not being able to access their medications. We asked for public assistance and people were very generous and we started doing food distribution. Unfortunately, it was raining very heavily because of Tropical Cyclone Harold and people couldn’t come outside. Our people were going out to impacted areas and to homes to deliver food, so we’ve been on the ground since March.”

Even before Fiji was hit by the double whammy of the coronavirus pandemic and the category-five cyclone, food security and good nutrition had been an issue for some rural communities and people living in peri-urban squatter settlements. The country has significant rates of non-communicable diseases, and studies around the world are showing that the risk of severe illness from Covid-19 is compounded by obesity and diabetes.

During the pandemic, lack of access to food or cash has created new pressures. In response, FRIEND has expanded existing programs to help people grow nutritionally diverse food, to ensure that children don’t face malnutrition.

“For people in town without land, we’ve been doing training on how to grow food in sacks or containers,” says Kiran. “Access to land in the squatter settlements, including the poorest communities, is a major challenge. They don’t have resources where they can plant. Sometimes when we reach people, they say, ‘My children haven’t eaten for the last three days.’ At that time, because of the cyclone, the rain and the Covid lockdown, they couldn’t even go to the shore to fish.”

Lautoka City Council responded to NGO requests for land with two blocks, including almost a hectare near some of the squatter communities. “The youth are preparing that land and planting,” says Kiran. “With this communal garden, the youth will be able to harvest and give people the food they need.”

The Covid-19 crisis is creating opportunities for young people to develop businesses around sustainable agriculture and nutrition. Youth entrepreneur Rinesh Sharma founded Smart Farms Fiji in April, and has been marketing basic hydroponic systems for households without land to grow leafy foods and vegetables, to supplement their diet.

Non-government organisations are also reaching out to rural communities, to support urban workers who have lost jobs and income during the current crisis. “We’ve also spoken with i-Taukei landowners and Indian farmers, and some villages have allocated large pieces of land, five acres or ten acres, to grow food,” Kiran said. “This is getting ready for people from the tourism industry who have lost jobs and who are coming back to their home village.”

In one case, she says, people from Tailevu brought food to people from their villages who are living in Lautoka. “Through these communal gardens, the surplus can be shared with their own people.”

Before the crisis, Pacific governments were supporting farmers’ networks through training and agricultural extension programs. Regional intergovernmental organisations like the Pacific Community, or SPC, have made food and water security a central element of their work on disaster preparedness and climate adaptation. For many years, the SPC has been testing new crops that can withstand the extremes of drought, flooding and salinity brought on by climate change.

In Marshall Islands, for example, the SPC has been supporting the Readiness for El Niño project since 2017. Women from outlying drought-prone islands like Ailuk and Kwajalein have established community nurseries, introduced improved soil management and drought-resistant crop varieties, and expanded water storage. Since the Covid-19 lockdown, new initiatives such as the Seeds for Life project, implemented by the SPC and Manaaki Whenua Land Care Research, have improved access to planting materials in Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

This government work is complemented by the grassroots farmers’ networks of the region-wide Pacific Farmers Association. These local groups have encouraged the development of seed banks, communal gardens and organic farming, while seeking to improve livelihoods and food security for smallholders and village-based farmers. The long-established networks are all the more important today, as unemployed people move back to the provinces to clear land and make gardens.

For twenty years, the Kastom Gaden Association, or KGA, has been supporting farmers in villages as well as urban settlements around Solomon Islands. KGA developed sup sup gardens (backyard plots) in Honiara’s settlements, and its Planting Material Network has nearly 3000 members across the country.

“Kastom Gaden has already created gene banks or germplasm centres in the provinces,” KGA coordinator Pita Tikai explains. “We had some partners that we worked with to establish germplasm collections, like a seed garden. Farmers can access some planting material, especially at this time where people are going crazy looking for seeds, looking for planting materials in order to grow things.”

Tikai says that KGA hasn’t so far seen food shortages, “but you can see people going round who have lost full time jobs, so they are resorting to making backyard gardens,” he says. “People are looking for seeds, people are looking for planting materials. Currently we haven’t got this full lockdown, but people are wondering what the future will be like. People are getting gardens so they will have food stocks if we have a real crisis and confirmed cases [of Covid-19] and the government suddenly gives us a total lockdown.”

The disruption of transport has halted some agricultural exports, along with imports of crucial farming resources like seeds and fertilisers: “Commercial seeds coming into the country are already affected. If you go to shops around town that normally sell seeds, they say, ‘Our orders are yet to come in.’ So here in town, people are flooding to KGA’s main office here in Honiara, asking for nursery seedlings. Our partners are also asking us to raise seedlings that they can supply to their communities.”

Tikai believes that donors and government departments should be working in collaboration with existing networks established by non-government organisations. “I really want the government to work with us, as NGOs, to strengthen these gene banks and seed collections. The government is now thinking about establishing seed gardens, but we at Kastom Gaden already had this network of farmers and seed gardens around the country that people can source planting materials.”

The government’s agriculture ministry has begun distributing some free seedlings, says Tikai, “but it’s time for collaboration between stakeholders, especially from the line ministry, to support us to strengthen this network for when the real disaster comes. If there’s full lockdown, then people can find the materials that they need to survive. That would sustain the food supply and also help avoid a food health crisis that might happen in future.”

Food production is also closely linked to tourism, which makes up more than 40 per cent of the GDP of Fiji, Vanuatu and Palau.

Tourists are also a major earner for the Polynesian atoll nation of Cook Islands. Despite talk of a “tourism bubble” involving Australia, New Zealand and some island nations, the downturn in tourist numbers has damaged Rarotonga’s burgeoning organic agriculture industry. Growers face collapsing sales to tourist hotels, and are looking to find new markets for local production.

According to organic farmer Missy Vakapora, secretary of Natura Kuki Airani, or NKA, the Cook Islands organic farming industry has taken a significant hit as overseas visitors stay away. “The growers that I know are finding it very hard because the majority of them supply the resorts and they are losing money,” she tells me. “For organic growers, it’s often the tourists — whether from New Zealand or America or Australia — who buy our organic produce. So, with the crisis, we’ve lost this market, all up about 60 per cent of our business.”

But there is a positive side. “The majority of us have had to drop our organic prices to normal prices, so now local people have a choice between conventional products and the organic products which are much more affordable than they were before the virus hit.”

Vakapora believes there will be significant shifts in agriculture as long as the pandemic lasts. “The majority of growers are planting short-term crops now, more for the quick turnover,” she says. “There’s a lot more leafy products out there than normal. They’re not growing all the fancy stuff like carrots and radishes that the local people don’t like — they’ve returned to traditional foods like taro, kumara, local snake beans and other local varieties.”

The hit to markets and transport has also disrupted initiatives to expand organic farming in the Cook Islands. In 2015, the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development and the SPC came to Rarotonga to encourage a shift to organic production among local farmers. Growers were trained to use certified bio-organic materials and develop the naturally grown teas or herbs that are popular among older Cook Islanders. Farmers soon recognised the need for an organic seedbank in Cook Islands — an initiative that was almost completed when the coronavirus pandemic hit.

“The seed bank that we’re trying to get up and running is at the prison,” Vakapora tells me. “They actually have a conventional garden, right in the middle of the prison where nobody goes and they decided to go organic. Before the current crisis, it was just starting to get going. Through IFAD and SPC, we got funding for the cooling system for seeds, and we were just about to start generating the seeds for the prison when the coronavirus hit.

“Fiji were just about to send us open-pollinated seeds that were already certified organic, which would have been easier for us to plant at the prison, then harvest and secure the storage for them. However, the virus hit and we couldn’t get the seeds. It’s on hold until the borders open.”

How long will it be until that happens? Until a Covid-19 vaccine is developed and distributed, the global economy faces a long, slow return to pre-pandemic levels of activity. In the meantime, people are looking to develop more sustainable modes of development — and it’s clear that Pacific farmers are even more essential than before to lives and livelihoods across the region. •

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With the Morrison government eager to be “partner of choice” for the Pacific islands, Australia and its allies have been stepping up their engagement in the region. Australia and New Zealand have been at the forefront of the response not only to Covid-19 but also to Cyclone Harold, a category-5 cyclone that traversed the region in early April causing devastation and loss of life in Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga.

The Australian and New Zealand defence forces have been transporting relief supplies to these cyclone-affected nations. Canberra and Wellington have also funded the regional Covid-19 response through a joint team led by the World Health Organization, or WHO, and the Pacific Community, the main intergovernmental technical agency responsible for public health in the islands’ region.

The United States has committed US$27 million, mainly for its three Freely Associating States in the northern Pacific (Palau, Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia). As part of a €2 billion global initiative, the European Union will also redirect €119 million towards support for coronavirus responses in the Pacific, with funding allocated to fifteen Pacific islands countries and the four European colonies in the region. France has used its military forces based in New Caledonia to transport aid to neighbouring Vanuatu and Fiji.

Despite Western concern about China’s intentions in the region, many island governments are eager to diversity their economic and diplomatic ties beyond traditional partners and have welcomed South–South solidarity from China and other nations. Over the past decade island nations have promoted the New Pacific Diplomacy through the Pacific Small Island Developing States group at the United Nations, stressing they don’t see the need to choose between old allies and new partners.

In the midst of this geopolitical tussle, many Pacific nations have been extending their trade and aid links with India, Indonesia, Korea, Cuba and Middle East states, even as they maintain longstanding ties with Japan, France and the ANZUS allies. Taiwan has also been active, seeking to retain its four remaining diplomatic allies in the Pacific — Nauru, Tuvalu, Palau and Marshall Islands — after Kiribati and Solomon Islands switched diplomatic ties from Taipei to the People’s Republic of China during 2019.

As part of this geopolitical manoeuvring, China is seeking to extend its bilateral and regional partnerships in the region during the pandemic. On 10 March, Chinese ambassadors in the islands coordinated a video conference between Pacific health ministers and China’s National Health Commission. Beijing has set up a “China–Pacific Island Countries Anti-Covid-19 Cooperation Fund” worth US$1.9 million and has shipped medical equipment and supplies to Vanuatu, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa and other island nations.

Direct support from the Chinese government is matched by initiatives from state-owned and private corporations. These companies are eager to use the current pandemic to strengthen partnerships with local governments and Pacific business networks, and to protect and advance their economic investment in infrastructure, tourism, and resources. As China analyst Graeme Smith has written in Inside Story, “Chinese capital and development finance appear to be driven primarily by market opportunities and the presence of Chinese companies on the ground in the destination country.”

Chinese corporations involved in regional infrastructure projects are now branching out to supply medical equipment. These goodwill gestures aim to burnish the image of both companies and government, at a time of growing criticism that censorship in China delayed an immediate global response to the pandemic.

One player is CCECC South Pacific Ltd, the Oceania subsidiary of the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, or CCECC. Established with the approval of China’s State Council in 1979, the company initially worked in Africa but now operates in nearly fifty countries, including Tonga, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Cook Islands — and Australia.

Over the past decade, CCECC and other Chinese companies have built infrastructure projects in Vanuatu, often of vast dimensions and varying quality. These include a new parliament building, a national convention centre, a national sports complex, an office complex for the prime minister and a new building for the Melanesian Spearhead Group, the sub-regional organisation hosted in Port Vila. Last year, CCECC won a tender to build a new finance ministry complex. Using concessional loans from the Chinese government, CCECC is also building roads and high schools on the islands of Tanna and Malekula.

As a “good corporate citizen,” CCECC leapt at the opportunity to support Vanuatu’s preparedness for the coronavirus pandemic. The company provided twelve container houses to be used as a new isolation centre at the Vila Central Hospital, and ambassador Zhou Haicheng presented a cheque for US$100,000 to Vanuatu’s caretaker government to support efforts to prevent Covid-19 infections (as yet, there are no confirmed cases in the country).

On 11 April, a plane chartered by CCECC South Pacific Ltd delivered 4.3 tonnes of medical supplies to Vanuatu. According to CCECC, the plane unloaded “ventilators, masks, and testing kits provided by the Chinese government, some procured by the Vanuatu government and some donated from Guangdong Province and overseas Chinese communities in Vanuatu.”

The Chinese charter was still at the airport the next day, when a RAAF C-17 Globemaster flew from Amberly air force base carrying humanitarian supplies. Despite gaining approval to land from Vanuatu officials, the RAAF pilot was worried the Chinese plane was still on the narrow runway. The RAAF flew back to Australia, only returning the next day to deliver the supplies. “There is growing concern within Defence about whether the hold-up was intentional to delay the Australian plane from landing,” reported Sydney Morning Herald foreign affairs correspondent Anthony Galloway.

“We have raised our concerns with officials both in Vanuatu and in appropriate places with the Chinese government,” Australian foreign minister Marise Payne told David Speers on the ABC’s Insiders. “I don’t know whether it was deliberate or not, David. I wasn’t there.”

This diplomatic jousting over Vanuatu, played out through willing journalists, is not new. In 2018, Galloway’s predecessor as national security correspondent, David Wroe, wrote a series of stories about a purported Chinese military base on the island of Santo. Citing American and Australian security analysts, Wroe alleged that the Vanuatu government was in discussions with China about a military facility in Luganville. The claim was quickly denied by then prime minister Charlot Salwai and foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu (who had been at the Non-Aligned Movement conference in Azerbaijan, highlighting his country’s nuclear free and demilitarised status).

The following month, Wroe reported on a potential security threat from a proposed Chinese fish farm in French Polynesia. “The massive fish farm project on Hao Atoll has raised eyebrows in Canberra because it will sit next to the airport the French military previously used to carry out nuclear tests in the Pacific,” he wrote. “Concerns in Canberra focused on speculation Tianrui could seek a lease on their airport, giving Beijing a strategic foothold 11,000 kilometres into the Pacific Ocean.”

The story raised amused eyebrows in Tahiti, where government officials assured me that France would be unlikely to allow China to build a military base in its Pacific colony! Leaving the Nine-owned newspaper, Wroe went on to bigger things — he now serves as a media adviser to Foreign Minister Payne.

Under the FRANZ agreement between Australia, New Zealand and France, the defence forces of all three countries have been transporting much needed medical aid and cyclone relief to Vanuatu in the aftermath of Cyclone Harold. This cooperation enhances the reputation of the Western allies at a time when France is seeking to extend its influence in the region, tarnished by three decades of nuclear testing and the Rainbow Warrior attack. Under both Coalition and Labor governments, Canberra has signed strategic partnership agreements with Paris, perceiving France as a bulwark against Chinese influence in the islands.

But this strategic perspective is challenged by the economic interests of New Caledonia and French Polynesia, the two French dependencies that are full members of the Pacific Islands Forum. China is the largest export market for nickel ore mined in New Caledonia, while successive governments in Tahiti have sought to increase Chinese tourism and investment, as well as exports of fish, agriculture and black pearls. Speaking at a seminar on China’s Maritime Silk Road last November, French Polynesia’s president Edouard Fritch saw little difference between investors from China and other nations.

“It’s the common interest shown by private investors from China and successive French Polynesian Governments that has led to China including French Polynesia in its Silk Road initiative,” Fritch said. “We are open to Chinese private investors, just as we were to American, French, European, Samoan or New Zealand investors, in key economic sectors that open up our markets, such as tourism or aquaculture… If they are honest, they are all worthy of our friendship, whatever their nationality.”

With fifty-eight confirmed cases of Covid-19 — at a time when the France is dealing with more than 133,000 cases and 25,531 deaths — French Polynesia has been seeking medical support from China.

In another example of Chinese corporate largesse, the chief executive officer of Tahiti Nui Océan Foods, Wang Chen, has donated 10,000 masks and other medical supplies to the local government in Tahiti. After delays in obtaining personal protective equipment, or PPE, from Paris, Wang helped facilitate an Air Tahiti Nui flight from Shanghai on 6 April.

Desperate to create jobs in the outer islands, the government has been wooing Wang since December 2016, when Tahiti Nui Océan Foods lodged its proposal for the US$300 million fisheries project on Hao atoll. (Fritch’s government even presented Wang with the honorific of Commandeur dans l’ordre de Tahiti Nui in May 2018.)

Tahiti Nui Océan Foods is a subsidiary of the Chinese corporation Tianrui Group Co Ltd. Chaired by billionaire Li Liufa, the parent company operates from Ruzhou City, Henan Province, with investments in cement, foundries, tourism, mining, logistics, finance and other industries. The long-delayed initiative on Hao, however, had yet to commence operations when French Polynesia went into lockdown in response to Covid-19. Despite this, the company’s chief executive has promoted China’s interest in deeper ties.

“In China, there are also local governments which would be delighted to do something for their sister cities in French Polynesia,” says Wang. “Medical institutions have an urgent need for medical supplies, including personal protection equipment. Because of the grave situation in Europe, China has become an important hope for this region. Chinese pharmaceutical products can now be exported.”

Another Chinese player on the pandemic scene is the Jack Ma Foundation, which has been distributing medical supplies and PPE to the United States, Europe and developing countries, especially in Africa. Now, Ma is reaching out to the Pacific Islands.

The Foundation was established in December 2014 by Jack Ma, co-founder and former executive chairman of China’s Alibaba Group, a major technology and e-commerce corporation. A member of the Chinese Communist Party, the billionaire is typical of the “capitalist roaders” who have flourished in the People’s Republic since the late 1970s. Ma retired from Alibaba last year as China’s richest man and, like Bill Gates, now devotes his time to international philanthropy through his foundation.

In the first use of the newly established Pacific Humanitarian Pathway — established during a teleconference of Pacific Islands Forum foreign ministers on 7 April — the Ma Foundation has supplied tens of thousands of face masks to the islands. To avoid duplication and administrative burden on small island developing states, regional agencies want overseas donors to use this humanitarian pathway to distribute urgently needed medical supplies, equipment and technical assistance.

The Forum’s secretary-general, Dame Meg Taylor, told me that this highlights a collective response to global challenges from the eighteen member countries. Most smaller island states have so far avoided Covid-19 by working together to control their borders, she says. “If you don’t have coordination, you’re going to get every donor ringing every government saying ‘we can put together a charter for you.’ Countries are saying, if you want to bring in an aircraft, you have to abide by our protocols… It’s very clear — island leaders are very concerned about any outside people coming in to their country at all.”

Australia and New Zealand have used their own corridor to distribute assistance, although Marise Payne and NZ deputy prime minister Winston Peters joined island foreign ministers to set up the Humanitarian Pathway. Ironically, the first shipment through the regional coordinating mechanism came not from Australia but from China.

The Jack Ma Foundation flew 50,000 KN95 facial masks and 20,000 other protective masks from Shanghai to Nadi, Fiji, on 20 April. Most of the equipment will be distributed to the four Forum island countries and territories that already have confirmed cases of Covid-19: Papua New Guinea, Fiji, French Polynesia and New Caledonia. The rest will remain in stockpile for future use, with distribution managed through the joint WHO/Pacific Community regional team responding to the pandemic.

The WHO’s central coordination role in the Pacific response has complicated Australia’s diplomacy. The Morrison government, buffeted by international criticism of its climate and refugee policies, is wary of UN multilateralism. In a 2019 foreign policy lecture, Scott Morrison expressed disdain for “negative globalism” and an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.”

Morrison has, for example, followed the Trump administration in refusing new funding for the Green Climate Fund, a vital source of climate adaptation finance for island states. “I don’t need to send a cheque via Geneva or New York or wherever it has to go,” he told me at last year’s Forum leaders meeting in Tuvalu. (The GCF Secretariat is actually based in Incheon, South Korea, as the prime minister should know — Australia was previously co-chair of the Fund’s, and Australian diplomat Howard Bamsey served as the secretariat’s executive director.)

Following Donald Trump’s decision to suspend funding to the WHO, China responded with a further grant of US$30 million to the UN agency. Now Australia has echoed Trump’s call for an international review of the WHO. Foreign Minister Payne has also issued a public call for a review of the pandemic, even before other OECD countries had agreed to the proposal. The subsequent public jousting with China’s ambassador to Australia, Cheng Jinye, gives lie to the notion that “we’re all in this together.”

Even as the US and Australian governments have criticised China’s purported influence over the UN agency, the important role of the WHO office in the Pacific has been acknowledged by Marise Payne. “Australia shares some of the concerns of the United States in relation to the operation of the World Health Organisation,” she said on Insiders. “But importantly, for us, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, in the Pacific itself and in Southeast Asia, we do some extremely valuable work with the World Health Organization. They rolled out in early February a regional impact process for the coronavirus pandemic in the Pacific, which both Australia and New Zealand have funded. Their multilateral impact in the Pacific is very significant.”

As with climate policy, the current brawl over the WHO highlights how Australia’s global strategic interests and alliance with the United States can come into conflict with the realities of the Pacific islands. But at a time of geopolitical change and rising US-China tension, many of Australia’s neighbours are still eager to work with partners from all corners of the globe. As Dame Meg says: “I think our island countries want to help themselves. It’s like the climate issue — the voice of the Pacific needs to be heard.” •

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Later, as a university student increasingly absorbed in the anthropology and history of the Pacific, I retained this sense of Cook as an indomitable but apparently one-dimensional explorer, a man who wanted only to put lines on a map. Beginning research on the Marquesas Islands, I was fascinated by a drama of shamanism, taboo, tattoo, unfamiliar gender relations and cross-cultural exchange. Even as I began reading mariners’ journals for what they revealed of early encounters, Cook, the most celebrated of them, seemed a fixture of national histories rather than a character who might himself be an actor or locus of interest. Yet I was surprised when I read his account of first contact at Kamay, or Botany Bay, where the Endeavour’s crew was famously resisted by the Gweagal. After the seamen had tried fruitlessly to initiate relationships with local people, Cook candidly acknowledged, “it was to no purpose, all they seem’d to want was for us to be gone.”

I was still more surprised, a few years later, to come across a monumental but obscure book by one of the participants in Cook’s second voyage. Joseph Banks had been expected to again accompany Cook, this time on an expedition that sought to establish once and for all whether any southern continent existed. But Banks wanted to take a larger scientific party than he had on the Endeavour, and angrily withdrew after rows about the suitability of the accommodation on the ships selected for the new voyage. The hastily nominated substitute as natural historian was Johann Reinhold Forster, a polymath even by Enlightenment standards, who turned out to be both a brilliant observer and a difficult and contentious character, during and after the voyage.

Though Forster avidly collected natural specimens, he was intensely interested in the Pacific peoples encountered over the three years of the voyage. Cook’s method was to use the summers to search for the hypothetical continent in far southern latitudes, and he interspersed those forays with extended cruises in the Pacific tropics. He sought refreshment at places he had previously visited, including Tahiti and New Zealand; he investigated the situations of islands identified by earlier mariners; and he came upon other islands previously unknown to Europeans. Some visits were brief, others extended, and some repeated: the Europeans would visit Society Islanders twice and at length, and the people of Queen Charlotte Sound three times, as well as meeting, for the first time, people in Vanuatu and New Caledonia among other islands and archipelagos.

From the Admiralty’s perspective, the second voyage’s findings were negative: there was no great south land other than what might lie beyond ice, and certainly no land that offered produce or trade. But for an empirical philosopher like Forster the wealth of discovery was extraordinary. He was prompted to write a 600-page book of “observations” made during the voyage, the bulk of which reflected on “manners and customs.” He painstakingly detailed the behaviour, the institutions and the social condition of the various peoples the mariners encountered. He was particularly interested in the condition of women, especially in places like Tahiti, where they were evidently of high status and influential in political affairs. Separately, he wrote the first extended essay about the moai, the great ancestral statues of Rapa Nui. That manuscript was lost in a Polish library until just a few years ago, reflecting the extent to which Cook voyage research is not done and dusted: even now, new material continues to be found.

Forster’s intense curiosity regarding practices that were for him exotic, and the sheer variety of Islanders’ lives, was fully reciprocated by Pacific peoples. Some, like Indigenous Australians, were indeed cautious, and sought to avoid intruders, or at least maintain distance. But across Polynesia, local people, and particularly local people of high status, were eagerly interested in understanding these visitors from beyond the known universe, who came in great ships, bearing extraordinary things. Islanders keenly traded for fabrics, not least because Indigenous forms of beaten and woven cloth were of exceptional importance in their own regimes of value. The Tahitian chief Pomare, among many others, not only wanted novel things, but relationships. He understood that Cook was King George’s emissary, and presented the mariner with gifts for his sovereign. He wanted to extend the alliances he already had with the chiefs of other islands by embracing Peretania, as Britain was rendered in Tahitian.

In the Pacific, the decade of Cook’s voyages was thus an extraordinary time. The mariners’ encounters with Islanders were sometimes tense, there were misunderstandings and moments of violence. Yet there were also sustained diplomatic interactions, and much generosity. People revealed new worlds to each other; Europeans discovered Islanders, and Islanders discovered Europeans; Islanders also rediscovered each other, in the sense that Society Islanders and Māori joined Cook’s ships and visited other parts of the Pacific, encountering peoples to whom they were ancestrally related. One, Mai (generally known as Omai), also travelled to Britain, a precursor of many Pacific Islanders who visited Europe early in the nineteenth century.

Over the last twenty or so years, new scholarship focused on Indigenous perspectives has revealed and explored local experiences of these encounters. Extraordinary work by Indigenous artists has made the diversity of these perspectives and experiences public and prominent for the first time.

The decade from 2018 onwards has been and will be marked by a series of 250th Cook anniversaries, from that of the Endeavour’s departure from England through first contacts in New Zealand and Australia and other events of Cook’s second and third voyages to the anniversary, on 14 February 2029, of his death at Kealakekua Bay. These events seem defined less by the rich, unpredictable and difficult world of the voyages themselves and more by the long history of commemoration and argument about Cook. The little life itself is typically eclipsed by successive afterlives, pageants and re-enactments.

In the early twentieth century, Sir Joseph Carruthers, premier of New South Wales in the years after Federation, was an ardent Cook champion, advocating Cook statues and memorials in London and Hawaii and playing a key role in the dedication of the Kurnell landing area as a national park. Carruthers’s conservative historical imagination was challenged by writers on the left, one of whom, D. Healy, felt it important to contribute an essay on Cook’s death to the Communist, a Sydney journal “for the theory and practice of Marxism.” There was “something fascinating,” he noted, in the story of “an empire-builder who was actually worshipped by a primitive people but made the fatal mistake of being found out.” “No more than the usual arrogant, harsh and stupid British naval commander,” briefly misrecognised as a deity by the Hawaiians, Cook then died in a banal confrontation. The explorer’s death might prefigure a wider modern demystification of false gods, Healy hoped.

Mark Adams’s Cook Memorial, taken at Meretoto-Ship Cove, Totaranui-Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand. Silver gelatin prints. Courtesy of the artist

Debate of this kind periodically resurfaced. At the time of the 1970 anniversary there was growing awareness of just how damaging European settlement had been for Aboriginal people. Yet the tenor of events was nevertheless essentially celebratory. That mood has since been shaken repeatedly by war, economic challenges, environmental crises and acrimonious debate about nationality and immigration.

A consequence of an increasingly polarised politics has been much controversy about the global order’s antecedents. Some historians have sought to rehabilitate empire, suggesting that colonial rule broke up old hierarchies and hegemonies and brought the benefits of modernisation. From another direction, the legacies of slavery and other forms of oppression have been denounced by a new generation of anticolonial activists, exemplified by the “Rhodes must fall” campaigns, which sought (successfully in Cape Town, unsuccessfully in Oxford) to have statues of Cecil Rhodes removed from university precincts. In both Australia and New Zealand, monuments to “Captain Crook” are occasionally vandalised.

Cook’s own writings from the voyages make it evident that the morality of cross-cultural contact was a problem at the time. Cook was conscious of the legacies of his expeditions and was deeply troubled by the deleterious impact of sexual traffic on the health of Indigenous populations. Referring to sexual contact between sailors and local women, he wrote “I allow it because I cannot prevent it.” He was still more disturbed by the fact that the mariners’ demands appeared to have motivated Māori men to make prostitutes of their women. He feared that the trade in goods introduced new wants, and hence disease, and served “only to disturb that happy tranquility they and their Fore fathers had injoy’d.”

Cook extrapolated these reservations globally, to the whole business of European colonisation: “If any one denies the truth of this assertion, let him tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.” Early in his naval career, Cook had met dispossessed Beothuk of Newfoundland: he knew what he was talking about.

Among the many ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the cancellation of commemorative events associated with Cook’s arrival at Kamay. No doubt the messages offered would have been more reflective and representative than those foisted on schoolchildren such as me in 1970. But celebration, anti-celebration and even commemoration that aspires to cultural balance will inevitably diminish the rich mess of encounter, exchange, novelty, violence and moral murk that Islanders and mariners contributed to and suffered through the 1770s.

Community members studying artefacts collected during Cook’s 1769 visit to Turanganui-a-kiwa, at the Tairawhiti Museum, Gisborne, New Zealand, in September 2019. Courtesy Tairawhiti Museum

There is another story altogether. Things that people invent can, over time, assume absolutely different values from those that motivated their creation. During the Endeavour voyage, Joseph Banks, James Cook and others made extensive collections not only of natural specimens but also of Indigenous works of art and artefacts. The material they gathered, mainly through gift exchange, constituted the very first such collection to be systematically made, documented and subsequently deposited in museums.

Whatever values the Endeavour collections have had in academic, historical and artistic terms, they are unambiguously now cultural resources of unique significance. They exemplify Indigenous life and Indigenous culture; they include implements that reflect day-to-day subsistence, and art forms associated with genealogy, sanctity and ritual. They amount to material archives of sustainable ways of life. They bear the hands and values of ancestors.

To be sure, we could just cancel Cook. But the commemorative programs in New Zealand and Australia have provided occasions for artefacts to be returned for extended exhibition, on a model very different from those of standard museum loans. In Gisborne — near the sites of first contact between Cook and Māori in October 1769 — taonga, ancestral treasures normally cared for in Cambridge, were taken from the airport to the local tribal meeting house, where they were blessed, handled and deployed in performance by community members. Prior to the opening of Tu te Whaihanga, an exhibition at the Tairawhiti Museum, a series of community study visits took place, enabling descendants of the people who traded artefacts with members of the Endeavour’s crew to engage more intimately with the historical pieces. Ahead of the event, elder and artist Steve Gibbs looked forward to being able “to honour our ancestors by bringing back something very special to us all here at Turanganui-a-kiwa.”

In Australia, at the National Museum in Canberra, the spears appropriated by Cook 250 years ago are exhibited alongside a set made recently by Dharawal man Rod Mason. “The most important thing,” he has said, “is our connection to the things like the spears, that were taken from Botany Bay, and how we’re still making spears today — no one can take that away from us, because we’ve been doing it all our lives.” Shayne Williams from the Aboriginal community at La Perouse adds, “It makes me feel proud to see those spears from 1770. They are extremely valuable, not just for us at Botany Bay but for Aboriginal people right across the nation.” •

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In response to the last of these developments, the Vanuatu government wisely closed its borders on 26 March, and promoted social distancing by closing kava bars and restricting large gatherings and domestic travel. No confirmed cases of Covid-19 have so far been recorded.

Foreign aid flowing into the country in response to Cyclone Harold — especially from Australia, which has given $4 million to date — has been subject to strict quarantine controls to prevent contamination. Recognising the risk of the spread of coronavirus, which would overwhelm its fragile health system, the Vanuatu government has restricted arrivals of foreign personnel and is relying on local capacity.

The unenviable task of dealing with the impact of Cyclone Harold amid this unprecedented cascade of disasters has fallen to the National Disaster Management Office. In severely affected areas, the NDMO’s work is complemented by the Vanuatu Climate Action Network, a consortium of resident non-government organisations in Vanuatu, under its secretary, Willy Missack. To the extent that resources allow, local relief efforts have successfully stepped up, but far more funds are needed not just to deal with the immediate need for food, shelter and water but also to assist the process of rebuilding and recovery, which will take months and years.

The parts of Vanuatu’s northern islands most severely affected by Cyclone Harold have only started to receive aid over the past week or so. With communications being slowly restored, we have been receiving heart-wrenching images of utter devastation. Early, we saw aerial shots from flyovers surveying the damage on Pentecost island and a long drive-by video showing the widespread damage in Luganville town, Espiritu Santo. Friends sent images of their houses with roofs missing, walls breached and rice supplies ruined. About 60 per cent of all dwellings were seriously affected and even major concrete structures were crushed. Particularly shocking are recent reports from the remote west coast of Santo Island.

At Melsisi, in central Pentecost island, the magnificent Catholic church, the largest in all of Vanuatu, was reduced to a rubble of wood, twisted iron and concrete. Only its magnificent back wall, with its rainbow cross and brightly painted altar, still evokes the church’s former glory. Two deaths were reported on Pentecost, an elderly woman at Lekaro village in the central region and a younger woman from Melsisi who was sheltering with others in the church hall when a concrete wall collapsed. Everywhere, houses made of concrete and corrugated iron succumbed. Homes made from local materials — plaited bamboo and sago palm thatch — were quickly swept away.

Remains of Église de Saint-Joachim, Baie Barrier, southeast Pentecost. Shirley Jedrick

A series of images showed the sweep of destruction down the island’s west coast, at Melsisi, Barvet and Waterfall in the central region, and in every single village in the south — clinics, schools, churches and homes all obliterated, the coastal road washed away and the mobile phone tower at Lalwori lying like a crippled praying mantis.

Newly elected south Pentecost MP Marc Melsul describes the remains of that west coast road strewn with boats, hurled up hundreds of metres from the coast. A recent helicopter survey revealed no more than a handful of buildings intact in any village in the south. “In most villages, almost every building is gone or it’s a heap of rubble,” the MP says. “Our region is totally destroyed. Crops, houses, bamboo and sago palm groves for housing construction and almost every piece of infrastructure — all gone.”

Images and reports began to emerge from the more remote southeast of Pentecost a week ago. The area is further from airports and roads, and the swells of the ocean on the east coast can be savage at any time. The road from Lonorore airport on the central west coast — a dangerous but stunningly scenic drive through rainforest and ravines surging with water — passes over the southern highlands and ends at Ranwas village in the southeast. Reuben Bong, a Penama provincial councillor from Bunlap and Londar, reports that almost every house in the twelve kastom villages has been damaged or totally destroyed.

“We are picking up what food we can find on the ground from our damaged gardens,” he says. “Our yam gardens, almost ready for harvest, are now destroyed. The food we have now will only last a week or two then we don’t know what will happen. The young men are collecting water from mountain springs in plastic containers, but we are fearful of landslides.” In his most recent communication, Bong stresses the villagers’ urgent need for food, tarpaulins and building tools. What remains of the damaged food in their gardens is starting to rot.

Nearby, the beautiful Church of Christ village of Ranwas, nestled on the southeast coast, has been utterly devastated. But the Ranwas School building, recently built to cyclone code with assistance from a joint British and ni-Vanuatu non-government organisations, the Tanbok Project, has survived. Similarly, school classrooms at the Catholic community of Bay Barrier, damaged by Cyclone Pam five years ago but restored and cyclone-proofed with assistance from the Rotary Club of Byron Bay, has also survived. About 400 people crammed into the classrooms during the tempest.

Providing much-needed solace was a batch of non-food aid — shelter kits, cooking utensils, blankets — sent to Pentecost by the Red Cross on 11 April. More food aid is desperately needed. Vanuatu’s director-general of climate change, Esline Garaebiti, confirmed on 14 April that the NDMO was loading ships with food supplies for severely affected areas. On Easter Monday, a delegation from the FRANZ partnership, which coordinates Australian, New Zealand and French aid, visited a number of villages on the west coast of central Pentecost.

Meanwhile, some of the people from Pentecost living in Port Vila have formed their own South Pentecost Disaster Committee, chartering a private helicopter to survey the damage and a boat to send supplies of rice, water and fuel to kin in south Pentecost. Fuel will be crucial to power the chainsaws needed to clear debris and rebuild. But the logistical challenges are enormous, especially in the isolated villages of the southeast, which we have visited and lived in over decades, receiving warm hospitality and welcome engagement with our linguistic, anthropological and community development projects.

In recent years many regional communities in Australia have formed mutually beneficial relationships with seasonal workers from Vanuatu, who come each year to work on fruit and vegetable farms and, more recently, in the tourist industry. We now have a chance to go some way towards repaying the enormous debt we owe to the people of Vanuatu.

We plead with the professionals involved in the disaster response, the newly formed government of Vanuatu headed by prime minister Bob Loughman, and especially the Australian government to give more and deliver it as quickly as possible to all those severely affected. This disaster obviously comes at a difficult time for the Australian government, whose attention is focused on the coronavirus pandemic. But given the billions being spent to protect our way of life, we sense that Australia could afford more than the $4 million presently committed. We may be isolated at home because of Covid-19, but thousands of people in Vanuatu have been left with no homes at all.

The aid currently promised is only one-tenth of the amount given five years ago after Cyclone Pam, also a category 5 system. With almost 40 per cent of Vanuatu’s population affected by this current crisis, the need is just as great. Historically, storms of this destructive power have occurred in Vanuatu, on average, every twenty-five years, but two powerful category 5 cyclones within five years is consistent with what climatologists have recently predicted. If Australia is serious about its “step up” in the Pacific, this is the moment to take a leap. •

To urge more Australian aid to Vanuatu write to the Parliamentary Friends of the Pacific Family. Donations for Cyclone Harold relief and recovery can be sent by international transfer to Account Name: Green Wave Vanuatu; Account No: 00696261010013; Swift Code BREDVUVU; at Bred Bank PMB, 9065 Lini Highway, Port Vila, Vanuatu. The Vanuatu Climate Action Network contact is Willy Missack.

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Nowadays, despite rising Chinese influence in the region, the US Seventh Fleet maintains American naval dominance in the Pacific. And one of its largest nuclear-powered aircraft carriers is the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a vessel whose firepower reflects Roosevelt’s foreign policy maxim: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

Today, this aircraft carrier — together with Roosevelt’s latest successor, Donald Trump, and the 170,000 people of Guam — is tangled up in the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a tale that highlights the militarisation of this American territory and the lack of security experienced by Pacific islanders under colonial administration.

The Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Guam last month after visiting Vietnam. Authorities now believe a number of the carrier’s 5000 crew members had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 during shore leave in Vietnam. By late March, more than a hundred sailors had been diagnosed with Covid-19. The aircraft carrier held only around 800 testing kits, but the Pentagon announced it would fly in enough kits for everyone aboard.

Anchored off Guam, the warship’s commanding officer, Captain Brett Crozier, sought permission to put nearly 3000 sailors onshore in order to limit the rate of infection in the cramped below-deck quarters (a hazard on cruise ships around the world, as we’ve seen recently). “This will require a political solution but it is the right thing to do,” Crozier wrote to US Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii. “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our sailors.”

To the anger of the Pentagon and the White House, the memo was leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle. On 1 April, Crozier was relieved of his command. As one Washington Post columnist commented, “The only official in the entire government who has been publicly disciplined to date for mishandling the coronavirus is a navy officer who acted to save his crew from an outbreak. This makes no sense save in the upside-down moral universe inhabited by the Trump administration.”

With the US presidential election scheduled for November, Captain Crozier’s removal quickly became politicised. According to Democrat contender Joe Biden, “Donald Trump’s acting navy secretary shot the messenger — a commanding officer who was faithful to both his national security mission and his duty to care for his sailors, and who rightly focused attention on a broader concern about how to maintain military readiness during this pandemic.”

So far, 155 Covid-19 cases have been confirmed among the crew of the carrier, with sailors who test positive being transported to the US Naval Hospital on Guam. But the furore in the US media has largely focused on the impact of these events on the US military and Captain Crozier, who has since been diagnosed with Covid-19 himself. Little, if any, attention has been given to the indigenous Chamoru people, who make up 40 per cent of the population of the island they call Guåhan.

Despite a rising number of cases, Donald Trump waited until 28 March to make a major disaster declaration for Guam, finally opening the way for federal assistance to the territory government and local non-profit organisations. The territory’s health service is already stretched by 112 confirmed diagnoses, and the decision to move thousands of US sailors into local hotels angered many residents. The Guam government had turned away the cruise ship MS Westerdam in February, fearful of a spread of Covid-19 from infected passengers, but Guam has no authority to block a US warship from its harbours.

Coming under the mandate of the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation, Guam was first listed as a UN Non-Self-Governing Territory in 1946. That territorial status means Guam’s residents lack effective representation in Washington. As American citizens, they can vote in this November’s presidential election, but with Guam holding no votes in the US electoral college it is effectively a straw poll. Guam’s membership of the US Congress also lacks force: Michael San Nicolas might sit as the territory’s delegate in the US House of Representatives, but Guam’s political status means he doesn’t have full voting rights.

“This century has been called the Pacific Century due to a noticeable shift in power from the Atlantic Rim to the Pacific Rim,” writes Chamoru academic Michael Lujan Bevacqua, co-chair of Independent Guåhan, which promotes the case for independence. He believes this has fuelled a renewed American interest in militarising Guam.

“We see other Pacific nations working to develop partnerships with countries around the world,” he says, but Guam’s status means it can’t take advantage of the shift. “We should reject remaining a colony. To advocate for status quo means to accept the idea people on Guam are different than everyone else.”

The Guam Commission on Decolonisation, which has been working towards a plebiscite on self-determination, has mounted an education campaign centring on three options for future governance, including independence, but progress has been slow after the US Court of Appeal ruled that a planned plebiscite could not proceed if it is limited to “native inhabitants” of Guam.

Despite a rising number of Covid-19 infections, Guam’s governor, Lourdes Leon Guerrero, has been measured in her criticisms of American policy. Leon Guerrero and Representative San Nicolas are both members of the Democratic Party, and thus face a high risk of political backlash from the White House.

They are also likely mindful of President Trump’s hostile reaction to criticism from local officials in Puerto Rico, another US territory, after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017. In the aftermath of the Category 5 hurricane, President Trump shamefully abused San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who had criticised Washington’s “slow and inadequate” response. After nearly 3000 deaths, local residents were appalled when Trump visited the island and announced his main concern: “I hate to tell you Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack, because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and that’s fine.”

Local women’s and community organisations in Guam are angered that the US government isn’t matching its care for the infected military personnel with support for the local community. “The hospital I work in, we only have fourteen ICU beds — the other civilian hospital has even less,” says Pim Limtiaco, a health worker at one of only two civilian hospitals in Guam. “We may not have enough beds to ventilate those that are very critical.”

Limtiaco tells me there may come a time where hard decisions need to be made about which patients get a ventilator: “It is already bad enough that we don’t have the manpower and resources. It’s very scary.”

A Westernised diet means that diabetes and other non-communicable diseases are already a major challenge for Guam’s hospitals, she says, and the increase in coronavirus infections could lead to more fatalities among existing patients: “You have to go to the root of the problem and look at why we have such levels of diabetes, through the introduction of colonial foods like Spam. We used to have a good diet: people farmed, we fished, we had taro and breadfruit.”

With a drop in international tourism, local businesses are eager for the US government to pay for the rehousing of crew members from the carrier in largely empty hotels. Sailors from the USS Theodore Roosevelt have been accommodated at the Hyatt, the Sheraton Laguna Guam Resort and other luxury hotels in Tamuning, Tumon and other tourist districts. But community groups would prefer they were staying in the island’s US military bases, including the Apra Harbor Naval Base in Santa Rita and Andersen Air Force Base in Yigo.

Concerned about the reluctance of their politicians to take a strong public stand over the USS Theodore Roosevelt, Chamoru groups have been calling for action. On 1 April, with the support of seven other local community organisations, the Chamoru women’s organisation I Hagan Famalåo’an Guåhan wrote to governor Leon Guerrero.

“We feel for the sailors aboard, but we don’t have the resources to give that can accommodate an outbreak that is growing so rapidly that the ship’s captain is pleading for more help from the Navy,” they wrote. “The governor must keep in mind that the average sailor aboard the USS Roosevelt is in their early twenties and are not considered an at-risk age group, while our large manamko [elderly] community are the most vulnerable to serious illness or death. A decision to house infected military personnel off-base is one that will impact the health and safety of us all, especially the immuno-compromised and our manamko.”

Despite controlling a third of Guam’s land mass, the US Department of Defense “has decided to use Tumon to house personnel from an infected vessel,” the letter went on. “Tumon is a central village where countless members of the local community are still working and living during this uncertain time… This puts our dedicated service workers in the hotel industry and their families at a higher risk.”

Pim Limtiaco shares the concern that quarantining thousands of sailors in upscale resorts increases the risk for everyone. “Just because they are negative now doesn’t mean they can’t get infected later,” she tells me. “That poses a risk not just to themselves but to the locals who are serving them, especially the hotel staff. These staff don’t have the proper protective equipment when they’re meeting the sailors or cleaning their rooms or preparing food. Because we have Covid-19 on Guam already, we also don’t know if locals will expose them as well.”

This crisis has caused debate and division in the community. Local businesses derive income from sailors and marines on rest and recreation, most Chamoru families have members serving in the US military, and Micronesian culture prides itself on hospitality to visitors. But even before the arrival of the aircraft carrier, people in the capital, Hagåtña, were angry that twenty US airmen who were meant to be in fourteen-day quarantine had travelled to work on US military bases.

“It’s already really hard at the local level because not everyone is taking the quarantine seriously, creating burdens to us here at the hospital,” said Limtiaco. “The military claim they are going to have very strict requirements for the sailors from the aircraft carrier. But there were already photos circulating in Guam proving that some US airmen are not following the existing quarantine laws. They show ten or more people gathering at the beach. I can only imagine how we can keep the military accountable for this, if already some of the branches are not following local laws.”

As she observes, the story of Captain Crozier and the aircraft carrier has made national and international headlines, “but Guam is like an asterisk. The captain saved 5000 sailors but at the expense of the local indigenous population.”

President Trump’s mixed messages about the pandemic have been echoed by the Pentagon, with officers under orders not to contradict White House pronouncements. In late February, according to the New York Times, US defense secretary Mark Esper urged American military commanders overseas “not to make any decisions related to the coronavirus that might surprise the White House or run afoul of President Trump’s messaging on the growing health challenge.”

As the crisis evolved, US chief of naval operations Admiral Mike Gilday sought to calm community anger: “Our two top priorities are taking care of our people and maintaining mission readiness. Both of those go hand in glove. We are confident that our aggressive response will keep USS Theodore Roosevelt able to respond to any crisis in the region.”

As they prepare for the RIMPAC 2020 wargames, scheduled for waters off Hawaii in June, US naval commanders are concerned that the crisis aboard the carrier signals wider problems. The ANZUS allies, concerned about China’s political influence in Pacific island nations, are eager to show they are in control.

But the USS Theodore Roosevelt debacle also raises fundamental questions about the health and wellbeing of people living in American and French colonial territories in the Pacific. With politicians in Paris and Washington consumed by domestic crises involving thousands of dead and millions of unemployed, the fate of populations in far-flung territories is not a central priority.

Nor is it any surprise that the Pacific islands with the highest rates of infection are all under colonial administration, lacking full control of borders, health budgets and political governance.

At time of writing, the independent nation of Fiji had fifteen confirmed cases of Covid-19 and Papua New Guinea just two, despite a combined population of nearly ten million. No other cases have been reported in independent nations in the region. By contrast, Hawaii had 387 cases with five deaths, and the US territory of Guam 112 with four deaths; and cases have been recorded in the US Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas (eight with two deaths) and the French collectivities of French Polynesia (forty-seven) and New Caledonia (eighteen).

Even the isolated Chilean territory Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has five cases. Local community leaders have tried to restrict overseas arrivals, but Chile’s health minister, Jaime Mañalich, announced that the government would reopen travel to the island after a short lockdown.

The pandemic will reshape international geopolitics. The Trump administration is already criticising Chinese president Xi Jinping for the authoritarian censorship that delayed the global response to the pandemic. But the crisis has revealed that both emperors have no clothes. Trump’s shortlived plans to open up the US economy by Easter just highlighted the folly of cost-cutting in health and welfare services.

The crisis also raises the obvious question about human security: what use are nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers when doctors don’t have enough beds for the sick and dying? •

The post Coronavirus carrier appeared first on Inside Story.

Then the world turned upside down.

As the Covid-19 coronavirus spread from Italy into France, Macron proposed a change of dates for the Tahiti summit and then postponed his trip. I wavered, thinking I could still interview ordinary people rather than presidents and prime ministers. But with airlines cancelling flights and governments closing borders, the decision was soon out of my hands.

French Polynesia’s representative to the French National Assembly in Paris, Maina Sage, returned to Tahiti on 7 March. Four days later, French Polynesian president Edouard Fritch announced that Sage was his country’s first confirmed case of Covid-19. She had sat on a parliamentary commission in Paris with French culture minister Franck Reister, who was one of five members of the National Assembly soon confirmed with the virus. Tested on her return to the Pacific, she was diagnosed with Covid-19 and isolated at home. At the time of writing, French Polynesia is in lockdown, with twenty-five infections a fortnight after the first confirmed case.

The relative isolation of small island nations should provide natural protection from global pandemics, as long as quarantine systems and border controls are in place to monitor arrivals. It’s no small irony that the first confirmed cases of Covid-19 occurred in French Polynesia, Guam, Hawaii and New Caledonia, all of them American and French colonial dependencies (apart from Papua New Guinea, these territories also had the highest rates of HIV infection during the AIDS pandemic). The first coronavirus-related death in the Pacific was announced in the US territory of Guam on 22 March.

Infections have now been confirmed in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, and other island nations are likely to report cases soon.

Naturally people in the Pacific see parallels with the impact of the global influenza epidemic after the first world war. The New Zealand ship SS Talune travelled from Auckland to Apia, the capital of Western Samoa, in November 1918. On board were passengers suffering from a highly infectious pneumonic influenza, known as Spanish flu. Although the ship had been quarantined in Fiji, sick passengers were allowed to disembark in Samoa. An estimated 90 per cent of locals were infected and 22 per cent of the population died.

Today, health departments across the region are urgently sharing basic information about handwashing, social distancing and dealing with coughs and sneezes. But personal hygiene is constrained in countries where easy access to running water and sanitation is limited, especially in outlying rural areas and peri-urban squatter settlements. According to the Pacific Community, “approximately 45 per cent of all Pacific islanders continue to live without access to basic drinking water facilities and some 70 per cent live without access to basic sanitation — the highest of any region of the world.”

While many communities are still unaware of the enormity of the pandemic, years of work to prepare for natural disasters and climate change provide an invaluable base to build on. As I’ve reported in Inside Story, extensive efforts have been put into establishing community disaster committees, mapping local vulnerabilities, engaging women and young people, and developing culturally appropriate community education. The value of this work can be seen today: in the Fresh Water settlement on the outskirts of Port Vila, for instance, community leaders have rigged up bamboo poles to store water for handwashing where individual households lack soap and running water.

When reports emerged of mass infection on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan and the Grand Princess in the United States, Pacific governments moved quickly to ban such visits. Then, in late March, Tuvalu, Nauru, Tonga, Vanuatu and Samoa all declared states of emergency, with other countries to follow.

On 8 March, the Republic of Marshall Islands took the unprecedented step of banning all flights into the country. What seemed an extreme step is now a commonplace measure, as countries close their borders and airlines cancel flights. But the collapse of the global aviation industry poses particular challenges to island nations: national and international carriers are a vital economic lifeline, carrying tourists, imports and exports, development workers and migrant labourers. The decision by Australia and New Zealand to close their borders created problems for the many islanders who must transit through Sydney, Auckland or Brisbane to reach home, but both governments are now waiving the fourteen-day quarantine period for some Pacific citizens to transit.

Pacific seasonal workers face a particular challenge. Many have travelled to work in the largest members states of the Pacific Islands Forum — in New Zealand, under the Recognised Seasonal Employer program, and in Australia, under its Seasonal Worker Programme and Pacific Labour Scheme. Employers in Australia are pushing for their visas to be extended, but social justice and workers’ rights are not high on the agenda.

As Henry Sherrell and Peter Mares have highlighted, this international labour mobility comes at a time of structural shift in the Australian economy towards temporary migration. More than 1.8 million overseas migrants now live in Australia on temporary visas, including New Zealand citizens who are visa holders with work rights under the Closer Economic Relations agreement. Countries like Samoa and Tonga receive more than a quarter of their GDP from remittances sent by their citizens working overseas. With massive job losses in Australia, will temporary labour migrants be welcome again?

As in Australia, interruptions to air and maritime transport, loss of tourism and increased health spending will damage island economies in coming months. Rural communities have the advantage of being able to continue farming and fishing, but other key industries will shed waged jobs. In Palau, Vanuatu and Fiji, for example, more than 40 per cent of GDP comes from the tourism sector. The loss of revenues and remittances will create added pressures on governments already forced to budget for increased health spending. Many countries and territories lack health infrastructure, equipment, qualified personnel and the crucial laboratory equipment to analyse tests on site. Papua New Guinea and some other countries have had to send Covid-19 samples to Australia for analysis, adding delays to diagnosis and treatment.

Even as Australia and New Zealand hunker down, support is needed for health systems in the region. Both countries are jointly funding the Pacific regional coronavirus response plan of the World Health Organization, which includes the WHO Joint Incident Management Team in Fiji. The regional technical agency, the Pacific Community, is the lead agency for public health in the islands region and is working with donors to provide funding, training and support to national governments.

But as borders close and each nation faces its own crisis, Pacific governments will bear the brunt. Even as the first cases are confirmed, governments are dealing with myriad tasks: acquiring laboratory and personal protective equipment; setting up screening services at airports; identifying isolation and quarantine facilities; and developing case management protocols and public awareness campaigns. The danger remains that the spread of infections may overwhelm the health systems of many smaller island states, which lack specialist medical staff and even intensive care facilities at their main hospitals.

Takeshi Kasaim, WHO regional director for the Western Pacific, says that Pacific nations face two major challenges: “First, healthcare facilities could rapidly become overwhelmed, even with a relatively small number of Covid-19 cases. This means that health facilities may not be able to focus on treating the most vulnerable and severe cases. Another major risk is that people with even mild symptoms may come to the health facilities, potentially amplifying the virus’s spread by infecting other patients.”

These weaknesses in public health systems were highlighted by a measles epidemic across the region during 2019. Samoa was worst hit, with eighty-three deaths and 1860 hospitalisations by year’s end, but another 661 cases were reported in Tonga, Fiji, American Samoa and Kiribati. The chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Tuvalu prime minister Kausea Natano, stressed that people should ignore anti-vax propaganda circulated on social media: “In order to prevent further outbreaks in the region, I want to ask all our Blue Pacific family to heed the advice of your governments and health professionals, and get vaccinated against measles as soon as possible.”

The Covid-19 pandemic will stretch out for months, testing government and community capacity. Under the Coalition, Australia’s aid spending has increased in the Pacific (at the expense of development assistance to Africa and South East Asia). But the shift of resources towards multibillion-dollar infrastructure programs has come at the cost of funding for health services. As Labor’s shadow international development and Pacific minister Pat Conroy has argued, “Total health funding to the Pacific between 2014 and 2018 was cut by 10 per cent. So, while we’re providing some short-term assistance to deal with this crisis, it’s on the back of significant cuts to health assistance to the Pacific.”

Although Labor has been supportive of most government responses to the pandemic, Conroy has been sharply critical of the minister for international development and the Pacific, Alex Hawke: “He’s missing in action in terms of basic provision of public information,” says Conroy. “Minister Hawke is the public face of the government’s Pacific Step-up, and unfortunately he’s in witness protection.”

In the most brutal way, the coronavirus pandemic highlights the reality that the greatest security threat to island nations arises from environmental threats rather than the risk of armed conflict. The Pacific Islands Forum’s 2018 Boe Declaration captured the theme with its call for “an expanded concept of security inclusive of human security, humanitarian assistance, prioritising environmental security, and regional cooperation in building resilience to disasters and climate change.”

Despite Donald Trump’s crude attempt to rebrand Covid-19 as “the Chinese coronavirus,” the pandemic will redefine this regional security debate.

The circulation of misinformation about Covid-19 is yet another challenge throughout the region, given the widespread reliance on Facebook and other social media for news. Pacific media organisations are valiantly trying to support public education efforts while continuing to critique government preparations and messaging.

The same challenge faces the Australian media, which normally reports only briefly on crises in neighbouring Pacific countries, but is now likely to focus even more closely on domestic coverage. This will be exacerbated by the Coalition government’s constant funding cuts to international broadcasting in recent years. Six years ago, Inside Story reported on the gutting of Radio Australia by the Abbott government. The national broadcaster sacked experienced journalists with deep networks in the Pacific and years of experience across the region, then shut a number of foreign-language services. In January 2017, the ABC closed its short-wave broadcasting service — a penny-pinching decision taken without surveys of listeners in Melanesia reliant on short-wave rather than digital broadcasts.

Alongside the billions being allocated to the Covid-19 response in Australia and New Zealand, we could make a vital regional contribution by expanding information services to the region through radio and online. Even as the ABC withdraws its correspondent from Papua New Guinea, the decision to remove geoblocking on ABC iView is a useful step, allowing Pacific islanders to access news and information services. Radio Australia staff have taken great initiatives, such as the new children’s program Pacific Playtime, broadcast across the region every Friday morning to help families in social isolation. More can be done, drawing on the expertise of Pacific journalists on the ground.

Another crucial task is to mobilise and educate faith organisations about the pandemic. Across the Pacific, most people are regular churchgoers (or in Fiji attend church, temple or mosque). The “mainstream” denominations — Catholic, Methodist, Anglican and Lutheran — are now joined by a diverse range of evangelical churches and American-style Pentecostal sects.

This diversity of theological doctrine adds complications to the response to Covid-19 — a problem already seen with the religious response to global warming, the status of women and gay rights. Many people in fundamentalist church congregations have challenged the need for action on climate change, for example, citing biblical injunctions like God’s promise to Noah after the Flood: “Neither will I ever again smite every thing living as I have done” (Genesis 8:21). In contrast, mainstream theologians use the story of Noah and the ark as a parable of the need for preparedness and human agency.

The same debates will play out in coming weeks and months. Some fundamentalists will likely portray Covid-19 as God’s punishment for (add favourite sin here). Other denominations will be more active in responding to the virus. The Pacific Conference of Churches has already invited member churches to limit mass gatherings and change sacraments that involve personal contact or sharing the communion chalice. As one church leader joked, “God will protect us, but He still wants us to wash our hands!”

Meanwhile, the extent of the social and cultural impact is still sinking in. What happens to kava and rugby? How will schoolchildren fare with limited options for online schooling? Will official pronouncements be translated into local languages? How do you keep safe when you can’t afford soap and tissues?

Yet today’s lockdown has parallels with other crises in the region. During the war on Bougainville in the 1990s, life was transformed for people living behind the blockade. The lack of antimalarial drugs and medical care took a heavy toll, tragically undermining maternal and child health. But these years were also marked by innovation and creativity. Cars were kept running using coconut oil instead of petrol, electricity was generated by mini-hydro schemes and biofuels, and imported food was replaced with locally grown, nutritious produce. Courage was displayed by health workers like Sister Ruby Mirinka, who dodged the PNG defence force’s Australian-supplied helicopters and patrol boats to bring medical supplies from the Solomon Islands to Bougainville.

The spirit of self-reliance and confidence forged during those days was reflected last November when 97.3 per cent of the population voted in support of independence for Bougainville. Mirinka served as a member of the Bougainville Referendum Commission that supervised the vote.

As the islands region faces months of uncertainty and anguish, the pandemic will reveal the fault lines — of class, race and gender — evident in every society. But the experience of coming months will also forge a confidence and capacity to tackle other global challenges. There will be no return to business as usual. Around the world, governments are throwing billions of dollars into health and welfare services, transforming jobs and workplaces, discussing nationalisation of essential industries, creating government and industry task forces, and drawing on scientific expertise to guide policy. Isn’t this the way we need to tackle climate change, which the Boe Declaration describes as “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific”? •

The post “God will protect us, but He still wants us to wash our hands!” appeared first on Inside Story.

In those ten years or so, “Indo-Pacific” shifted from a way of looking at the map to an arena for a mounting contest — and a label for a US strategy (the “free and open Indo-Pacific”). From mental map to military map, the journey has been short and sharp.

“Asia-Pacific” had dominated for thirty years, from 1980 to 2010. In a swift remaking, Indo-Pacific became its replacement for the United States, Japan, India, Australia, the ten ASEAN states of Southeast Asia, and Europe.

The crucial absence from the convert list is China. Beijing charges that the Indo-Pacific is a device to contain and constrain its ambitions. That’s true. An equal truth, though, is that China reaps what it sows; its behaviour made pushback inevitable.

The Indo-Pacific is pushback aimed at achieving balance. Uniting the two oceans is ambitious and driven by power. Much meaning crowds onto the new map:

• the rise of China and its ambition to dominate Asia

• India’s arrival as a major player

• the relative decline of US power

• the need to achieve balance in a multipolar system (or avoid war)

• the geoeconomics and geostrategy of the two joined oceans, webbed by the shipping lanes that are the Indo-Pacific’s arteries

Rory Medcalf, an Australian apostle of the Indo-Pacific, says that the idea’s rise has heralded a new era of power rivalry, a world away from the optimism of globalisation. The Indo-Pacific became the “global centre of gravity, in wealth and population, but also the heartland of military might and latent conflict,” he writes. “Confrontation was trumping cooperation. From the Gulf of Aden to Papua New Guinea, the board was uncomfortably set for a great game with many layers and many players.”

Medcalf’s book expresses his hope that the Indo-Pacific will become a metaphor for collective action. If diplomacy fails, he fears, it will be the theatre of the first general war since 1945.

One of Medcalf’s many strengths is that he’s an intellectual who writes like a journalist; he started in hackdom, getting a Walkley commendation in 1991 for his reporting for the Northern Star newspaper in Lismore. From journalism, he became an Australian intelligence analyst and diplomat (postings to New Delhi, Tokyo and, as a truce monitor, Bougainville), then took think-tank duty at the Lowy Institute. Now he’s the professor heading the National Security College at the Australian National University.

Many moons ago, introducing him as a speaker, I listed his CV and asked if he’d ever had a real job. It’s the jibe of one journalist to another, because all hacks are plagued by the question of what they’ll do when they grow up (happily, after forty-nine years of hackdom, I’m still to decide). In Rory’s case, the jest is a tribute to someone from that nebulous place where strategists and analysts try to pin down what’s happening and imagine what’ll happen next. It’s a job you hold in your head, not your hands.

Medcalf has helped redefine the way Australia thinks of its region, bringing into being the geographic realm in which the hard-edged realists will do duty seeking balance or fighting the battle. “Words shape the world,” he writes. “An imagined space on a map both reflects and influences real and palpable things like military deployments, patterns of prosperity, and calculations of risk among the world’s most powerful leaders.”

His book offers an origin story for today’s Indo-Pacific, and some fine thinkers step forward. The first modern academic article to mention the Indo-Pacific as a geopolitical term, by the Canadian naval scholar James Boutilier (a bon vivant who savours all the joys of strategy jousts), appeared in 2004.

The following year, the term was used by the New Zealand strategist Peter Cozens (who also champions Kiwi wine as “liquid sunshine”). Catching an idea arriving with the times, a great Australian journalist in Asia, Michael Richardson (late of the Age and the International Herald Tribune), wrote in the Australian Journal of International Affairs in 2005 about what Australia should aim for as a founding member of the East Asia Summit:

The economic and geopolitical landscape of Asia has changed dramatically in recent years, providing Australia with an unprecedented opportunity to become an integral and significant player in a wider Indo-Pacific region as it charts its future and seeks to manage tensions while shaping a new architecture of cooperation.

By then, having served as an Australian diplomat in New Delhi from 2000 to 2003, Medcalf was back in Canberra as an intelligence analyst, and he was an early adopter:

The logic that Australia’s region was changing to a two-ocean system, with China turning south and west and India turning east, accorded both with the evidence and the need to define Australia’s place in the world.

That word “logic” is at the heart of Medcalf’s Indo-Pacific explanation. The logic is driven by those key factors — China up, America down, India in — and by the geostrategic and geoeconomic drives of a multipolar system.

In the Medcalf telling, this logic sweeps aside other important constructs, such as the Asia-Pacific and the “Asian century.” The logic case he builds is strong, but logic doesn’t explain everything. It’s not to deny Medcalf’s argument to note that other factors were in play. As a former secretary of Australia’s defence department, Tony Ayers, used to chide his minions: “You’re being logical again, stupid, I’ve warned you about that!” Ayers was a supremely logical operator, but his jest was tough and true.

Logic can crash against personality and power and history and happenstance and pride and… (please add your pick). As Medcalf says, “Mistakes happen and accidents matter.”

Beyond logic, why were Japan and Australia among the first countries to place the Indo-Pacific atop their foreign policy? The question has weight because Japan and Australia were crucial players in the creation and embrace of the Asia-Pacific, especially in forming the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, or APEC, back in 1989.

Medcalf argues that the Asia-Pacific was overthrown by history and geography and the shifting balance of power, whereas an integrated two-ocean perspective has an ancient pedigree:

It is a more enduring way of understanding Asia than twentieth-century notions like the Asia-Pacific… [T]he precursors of the Indo-Pacific in this geopolitical sense also go back thousands of years, to a proto-economy of regional maritime trade and migration beyond recorded history.

The two-ocean view is a frame, rather than explanation, for the surprisingly rapid shift by Japan, a conservative, bureaucratic state that mirrors the consensus culture of its society. The change agent wasn’t just logic, but the character and drive of a single leader, Abe Shinzo. (One Abe-era change: Japan drops Western name order and turns back to Asian tradition, putting the surname first.)

In fact, Medcalf begins his book with a meeting between Abe and India’s Narendra Modi on a Japanese bullet train in 2016. He gives much credit to Abe for the creation of what he calls the Indo-Pacific “fever” that has since swept governments.

Adopting the new geographic vision feeds into the effort by Abe to remake how his nation acts in the world. A more conventional Japanese leader (or leaders) wouldn’t have overturned the Asia-Pacific consensus. Japan still puzzles about whether Abe, its longest-serving prime minister, is a one-off outlier or the model for future leaders.

Australia’s abandonment of the Asia-Pacific identity it had done so much to create wasn’t achieved by the push of a strong leader. The shift emerged from strong cross-currents within a Canberra wavering between the sunny optimism of the Asian century and the darker forebodings of the “Indo-Pacific.” The two terms describe the same set of players and forces, but arrange them in different orders with different weightings.

Asian-century usage blends liberal internationalism with an optimistic view of Asia entering a new phase of deeper and broader engagement, privileging geoeconomics over geopolitics. The Indo-Pacific gives more weight to geopolitics, shifting the focus from economic bonanza to surging strategic rivalry. Little wonder ASEAN’s new Indo-Pacific Outlook seeks “dialogue and cooperation instead of rivalry.” Cooperation is what we desire, rivalry is what we’ve got.

“Asian century” versus “Indo-Pacific” is also a way to describe a Canberra debate among diplomats, econocrats and defenceniks. The econocrats bleat that the security agencies are today running the show. Or as the ever-vivid former prime minister Paul Keating puts it, “the nutters are in charge.”

The econocrats describe Medcalf’s book as “the American alliance framework resuscitated and reimagined with Indian heft.” The Indo-Pacific is seen as a maritime security construct trying to tie together the four democracies, Australia, Japan, India and the United States, in the Quad security dialogue: “It’s sure in its distrust of China but unsure of whether and how to build a coalition to counter it.”

The Asian century hit its Canberra high point in 2012 with the Gillard government’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper, which opened this way:

Asia’s rise is changing the world. This is a defining feature of the 21st century — the Asian century. These developments have profound implications for people everywhere. Asia’s extraordinary ascent has already changed the Australian economy, society and strategic environment… The Asian century is an Australian opportunity. As the global centre of gravity shifts to our region, the tyranny of distance is being replaced by the prospects of proximity. Australia is located in the right place at the right time — in the Asian region in the Asian century.

Whatever truths the white paper delivered, Gillard also served political and personal interests — she had to create foreign policy not owned by the man she’d toppled, Kevin Rudd. The Asian century was Gillard making her own big-P policy.

The Asian-century language came from Treasury, and the quintessential Treasury man of his generation, Ken Henry, got to write the policy (although as Henry’s draft blew out towards 500 pages, the head of the Office of National Assessments, Allan Gyngell, was drafted to slash it to 300 pages and add a pinch of foreign policy coherence).

While Gillard had most of Canberra doing Asian-century duty, the defence department defected to the Indo-Pacific. Although it takes only a few minutes’ drive from the Russell Hill defence complex to the other side of the lake where parliament, the PM’s department and Foreign Affairs reside, sometimes the Kings Avenue bridge marks a major conceptual chasm.

Defence hated the Asian century tag because the headline dropped the United States from the equation. That’s conceptual poison for a department that sees anchoring America in Asia as a fundamental interest.

The 2013 defence white paper gave minimal linguistic obeisance rather than conceptual obedience to Gillard’s vision, citing the Indo-Pacific fifty-eight times and the Asian century white paper just ten times.

When the Liberal–National coalition won the 2013 election, the Asian-century usage became Canberra cactus — too prickly to touch and quickly discarded. Change the government, change the language. As Ken Henry laments, his paper has had “no impact on policy, not even on the tenor of public policy debate in Australia.”

Political cleansing was delivered as policy vandalism when the prime minister’s department deleted the Asian century white paper from its digital record (the polite term is archived). Savour the irony that the Asian century paper is still available on the defence web site. Defence understands the need to record the history of your victories; and it’s a major win when your department hands Canberra the new construct for the region.

Indo-Pacific has become Canberra’s uniform usage. The 2013 defence white paper marked the jump-off point, with further restatements in the 2016 defence white paper and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

Medcalf reports that when the Indo-Pacific map was promoted by the official in charge of writing the 2013 defence white paper, Brendan Sargeant, “it was initially controversial within parts of the Australian defence establishment and reportedly met bewilderment among American officials still focused on the Middle East.”

Medcalf dismisses as “rather conspiratorial” the view that “Australian defence officials promoted the Indo-Pacific to gain ascendancy over economic agencies that had pushed the Asian Century idea — but this overlooks that the Indo-Pacific had already been aired in the Asian Century white paper and was being taken seriously in foreign policy circles too.”

Australia doesn’t get too many masterworks on foreign policy, but we are in a fertile period, as tough times summon books to define the era. Three important books in three years — each distinctly different — have responded to an age that ponders US resolve, China’s purpose and possible paths for Australia.

Medcalf sits beside Allan Gyngell’s Fear of Abandonment on the fearfully pragmatic heart of Oz diplomacy, both offering magisterial views that highlight and explain.

With them on this literary peak is Hugh White’s How to Defend Australia, calling for a massive remaking of Australia’s defence force and an equally dramatic rethink of strategy. White presents Australia with a binary choice, while Medcalf sees a multipolar solution (“a many-sided world with no nation especially in charge”). White thinks that without the United States we’re on our own. Medcalf says many partners are available.

White says Medcalf portrays a vast region stretching from Hollywood to Bollywood that “will stand united and work together to contain China.” White’s riposte is that India is more likely to cut a deal with China to divide the region between them. India, White writes, won’t save Australia:

The Indo-Pacific concept is so popular in Canberra and elsewhere precisely because it is so reassuring. It is an invitation and an excuse to assume that Australia’s worries about its future in Asia will be solved by other countries, especially India, without much effort of its own. It is the old, familiar story of Australians expecting a “great and powerful friend” to look after it. Australia should be so lucky.

Medcalf argues that New Delhi won’t accept a deal on Beijing’s terms, relegating India to the role of a permanent second-tier power, restricted to South Asia. “Ultimately, India fears China’s superior economic and strategic weight,” Medcalf writes, and will resist by tilting away from its habit of strategic autonomy. “India is getting serious about cooperating with Indo-Pacific democracies to slow and moderate China’s expansion in the Indian Ocean.” He sets out what the newly imagined region must achieve by describing the dangers it faces.

China is joining a race to establish military bases to do dual-use duty with the networks of trade, investment and infrastructure. The bases are “less mighty bastions of territorial dominance and more lightly fortified lily pads” yet the race feeds the fears of a region “under the nuclear shadow of mutually assured destruction, and the cyber cloud of mutually assured disruption.”

This is not yet a region gripped by the prospect of total war, says Medcalf, but neither is it business as usual in the military balance. The Indo-Pacific has become “the vast ground zero for nuclear deterrence and risk: it is the epicentre of a ‘second nuclear age.’”

A plausible security future for the region is “a state of permanent coercion,” where the shadow of nuclear war doesn’t discourage conflict but exacerbates it at a lower but still dangerous level: “If nuclear weapons become the lone pillar for deterring China in the ocean of ambiguity between peace and Armageddon, then the contest is lost.” Nukes won’t deliver peace in a shifting system, “especially when the new geopolitical motorway is being built faster than drivers can learn the rules of the road.”

The potential crash points proliferate. What’s crucial, and far more contestable, is Medcalf’s contention that time isn’t automatically on Beijing’s side.

Widen the equation beyond the relative decline of the United States and China’s rise. Judged against the dynamic Indo-Pacific, Medcalf says, there’s good reason to think Chinese power “has already peaked.” He offers four factors limiting China’s ability to dominate or map the future:

• China’s Indo-Pacific and Eurasian ambitions along the Belt and Road have a perilous momentum: “pushback is happening and more is inevitable.”

• The rest of the Indo-Pacific is becoming wealthier and stronger too: “China’s power relative to its region may never be so great again.”

• America may be down but it’s far from out. Rather than having to dominate, the United States can work with others to balance China’s power.

• China’s internal problems — debt, demographics, environmental stress, discontent and now the Covid-19 crisis — could compound the external challenges to China’s “imperial over-stretch.”

If fully fledged cooperation with China is unrealistic for the foreseeable future, Medcalf writes, try to discourage confrontation and move the dial towards “competitive coexistence.”

Medcalf’s instruments to construct an Indo-Pacific to “absorb or deflect” China will be development, deterrence and diplomacy. The qualities underpinning the instruments will be solidarity and resilience.

The United States is vital — for investment, trade, alliances, technology and security — even if it can’t or won’t lead. Just as important will be the ambition and action of “the middle”: Japan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea and Australia. By the 2040s, he writes, “the combination of Japan, India and Indonesia is projected to outweigh China in GDP, military spending and population. Add just one or two more nations and this would be a hefty coalition, especially given the natural advantages of geography, namely its combined oversight of much of the strategic waterways of the Indo-Pacific.”

Dealing with China will require a fresh, if fraught, regional order. The task will be to stop China ruling or writing all the rules. Medcalf ends with an upbeat flourish, rendered in dark colours:

A path can be charted between conflict and capitulation. The future is not solely in the hands of an authoritarian China or an unpredictable, self-centred America. In the end, the Indo-Pacific is both a region and an idea: a metaphor for collective action, self-help combined with mutual help. If things go badly awry, it could be the place of the first general and catastrophic war since 1945. But if its future can be secured, it can flourish as a shared space at the heart of a reconnected world, in ways its early voyagers could have scarcely imagined.

The new Indo-Pacific will be built by pushback against China, the rise and strength of the rest, and American endurance.

The recipe is for what Medcalf calls “a kind of full-spectrum staring contest.” The vision is of a multipolar Indo-Pacific where lots of the poles line up together. The great staring contest will have myriad players. Protect the wealth, avoid the war. Lots of staring mediated by lots of sharing.

Hang together or hang separately. Hang tough or go hang. •

The post The heart of a reconnected world appeared first on Inside Story.

This fundamental change in the understandings and imaginings of the islands was delivered by the UN’s creation of 200-mile exclusive economic zones. Once the 1982 law of the sea convention had done its legal magic, the South Pacific transformed from islands in a far sea to a “sea of islands.” The old map of tiny specks in a vast expanse of blue gave way to a group of big nations in a connected Oceania. Truly, new map, new world.

Map: Geoscience Australia

That’s paradigm-shifting with diplomatic and economic punch, not least in transforming the way islanders understand themselves and their place in the world.

These thoughts on the sea of islands come from Epeli Hau‘ofa, a wonderful islander who grew up in Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Fiji. He attacked the European framing of the islands, which was as much about mentality as maps:

Nineteenth-century imperialism erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories that we know today. People were confined to their tiny spaces, isolated from each other. No longer could they travel freely to do what they had done for centuries. They were cut off from their relatives abroad, from their far-flung sources of wealth and cultural enrichment. This is the historical basis of the view that our countries are small, poor, and isolated.

Epeli embodied the phrase “scholar and gentleman” and his work lives on. The core expression of today’s regionalism, the Blue Pacific, is built on Epeli’s “new Oceania” and the social networks he called “the ocean in us.”

All this is by way of an introduction for Greg Fry’s major work of scholarship, forty-five years in the making, on power and diplomatic agency in Pacific regionalism. Framing the Islands started germinating in 1975, with Fry’s fieldwork for an Australian National University thesis on regionalism in the early postcolonial period.

Fry’s fine history will help you understand much about where the islands have been and where they could go. While you’re downloading it free from ANU Press, get a copy of its companion volume, The New Pacific Diplomacy, a book Fry co-edited in 2015.

The new book was launched in Canberra by one of the leaders of the South Pacific, the formidable and admirable Dame Meg Taylor, secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum. She lauded its celebration of often-overlooked Pacific action in regional and global affairs, and praised it as a “clear and robust” guide to “the contested past, present and future of Pacific regionalism.”

Taylor says Framing the Islands shows the “political savvy and adaptability” of Pacific regionalism through “the constitution of a strategic political arena for the negotiation of globalisation,” “the provision of regional governance,” “the building of a regional political community” and “the operation of a regional diplomatic bloc.”

Fry writes of the puzzle of Pacific regionalism, ranging from security, conflict resolution and fishing to shipping, trade, nuclear issues and the environment:

The Pacific is invoked sometimes as a regional cultural identity; sometimes as a political community with its own values, norms and practices; sometimes as a collective diplomatic agent; and sometimes as a site of political struggle. Situated between the global arena and local states and societies, it also appears as a mediator of global processes — sometimes as an agent for outside forces and sometimes as a “shield” for local practices.

Under the Old Mates Act, I declare I’ve been learning from Greg for decades; he was my teacher twenty-five years ago when I’d flit from the parliamentary press gallery to the ANU to study international relations.

Greg, too, is a scholar and a gentleman, with the broad grin of a happy warrior. He has greatly influenced my thinking on the islands, not least because we often disagree. We’re as one on the importance of the South Pacific; beyond that begins an argument about meaning and interpretation — and, especially, Australia’s role.

Greg is scornful of Oz hegemonic approaches; I tend to ask which big power you’d prefer. If not Oz, then…?

His book tracks the effort by Fiji’s Frank Bainimarama to expel Australia from regional membership. (My description is that Fiji was the revisionist power fighting Australia as the status quo power.) He reports how island leaders rejected Fiji’s expulsion campaign, instead embracing Australia (and New Zealand) as of and in the region. He doesn’t dwell on the logic that Bainimarama just last year created a new vuvale partnership with Australia, both for the benefits on offer and for the deeply pragmatic reason that we’re a known entity with a long record.

The Oz history in the South Pacific is both asset and handicap; they know and remember us much more than we know and remember the islands.

Fry’s summation of Australian standing is acid but accurate. Australia and New Zealand, he writes, are not emotionally part of the Pacific regional identity (a charge that won’t cause heartburn in Canberra but will provoke a lot of Kiwi pushback). Even so, Fry concludes, the Oz–Kiwi claim to be part of the Pacific “family” is accepted:

In many ways, the Pacific island states retain a surprisingly generous stance towards Canberra and Wellington. They still describe them as “big brothers” and see them as part of the Pacific “family,” even if they currently feel they are acting as “bad brothers” and not conducting dialogue within the family in a respectful way. A major contingent factor for the future of Pacific regionalism is therefore the degree to which Australia can overcome the preconceptions that have always flowed from its tendency to see this region as its “own patch.”

The “our patch” line points to Australia’s oldest instinct in the South Pacific — strategic denial. And discussion of the future of regionalism faces the fundamental issue of how much integration the islands want or need as they create a collective Pacific identity.

Strategic denial — the effort to exclude other major powers from the region — is Australia’s deepest instinct in the South Pacific. With complete dominance impossible, the instinct is beset by a faint, constant ache. Throughout the twentieth century, that ache was directed variously at France, Germany and Russia. It became a fevered nightmare during the war with Japan.

Today, Australia sees its interests and influence in the South Pacific directly challenged by China. The challenge rouses the same impulse that fostered Federation in 1901 and was expressed in the Commonwealth of Australia’s founding document. Our Constitution has one clause stating the parliament’s power over external affairs, while the next clause specifically expresses the denial impulse, identifying authority over the “relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific.”

As Greg Fry observes, the hegemonic agenda has a long history. He quotes a nineteenth-century observation from Otto von Bismarck about the “Australasian Monroe doctrine,” referring to the policy that opposed European colonialism in the Americas.

The same sphere-of-influence intent prevails today, Fry writes, as Canberra asserts its leadership and management role: “Australia’s preferred regional order is one in which it is the leading external security partner to Pacific island states and the undue influence of other metropolitan powers, particularly China, has been denied.”

Australia and New Zealand, he notes, have had “enormous influence on Pacific regionalism — on its finances, agenda, policy directions and institutional development.” Yet, Australia is the frustrated, edgy hegemon; the problem for Oz leadership is generating enough island followership. As Fry puts it, “Power as capacity has not easily translated into power as legitimate influence.” So Australia’s influence in the islands is at times limited, and may be declining.

Australia’s habits and interests bump up against “the ‘new’ Pacific diplomacy,” Fry says, as island leaders project an assertive regional identity and seek to act as “a diplomatic bloc promoting a Pacific voice in global arenas.”

Climate change has given Pacific diplomacy urgency and unity, raising doubts about Australia’s regional membership, much less leadership:

In many ways, climate change has become the Pacific’s nuclear testing issue of the twenty-first century; it has brought an urgency and emotional commitment to regional collaboration. Where the Pacific states might in the past have tolerated some frustration with the domination of the regional agenda by Canberra and Wellington to pursue the war on terror or to promote a regional neoliberal economic order, this tolerance reached its limit in relation to the climate change issue.

The islands have acted to “securitise the climate emergency” by expanding the concept of security, declaring climate change “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific.”

Fry says the islands have resisted what he calls “coercive” European-style integration. Since the end of the cold war, he writes, Australia has been the chief exponent of coercive integration, using the Pacific Islands Forum to push for regional norms to govern island development and governance.

A notable element of Australia’s 2017 foreign policy white paper was its adoption of integration as a key objective. “This new approach,” it said, “recognises that more ambitious engagement by Australia, including helping to integrate Pacific countries into the Australian and New Zealand economies and our security institutions, is essential to the long-term stability and economic prospects of the Pacific.”

Integration shows Australia’s problem of winning followership. Indeed, integration has become the i-word — the Oz policy that can’t be named — though it got an embrace from Dame Meg at the launch:

Contrary to Greg, I don’t think we should be dismissive of opportunities for regional integration in the Pacific, whether they be economic, political or based on something else. I would argue that the Rarotonga Treaty can be considered as an example of regional integration through which national sovereignty has been transcended [by] delineating a shared ocean space that is subjected to regulatory actions. Therefore, to dismiss “coercive integration” from the beginning as irrelevant to the region would seem to go against the dynamic and contingent approach to regionalism that is the strength of Greg’s conceptual framework.

Canberra shouldn’t read too much into Taylor’s words. In my conversation with her after the launch, she was emphatic that her words implied no endorsement of Australia’s integration agenda.

In her Griffith lecture in Brisbane the same day, Taylor offered three examples of the “political strength of the collective,” to show what regional resolve and solidarity look like. First was the Rarotonga Treaty, which establishes a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Pacific and was adopted by Pacific leaders in August 1985. Second was the Biketawa Declaration, adopted by leaders in 2000, which provided the framework for the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, or RAMSI. And third was the Pacific’s “instrumental role in concluding what was perhaps the toughest global negotiation ever — the Paris Agreement.”

Australia was central to the nuclear-free zone and RAMSI; the Paris climate negotiations are a different story.

As an example of how our strategic instincts can be used by the islands, Taylor points to Australia’s establishment last year of the Pacific Fusion Centre, bringing together information from across the region on security threats such as illegal fishing, people smuggling and narcotics trafficking. Taylor says the centre is “region-led and owned,” aligning a regional priority with “the aim of Australia’s national foreign policy for stronger security integration across the region.”

Australia’s effort to assert its interests, influence and values in the South Pacific must grasp the “region-led and owned” mantra. The region, too, must adapt and accommodate as it becomes a sea of islands.

The South Pacific coming together is about identity, but also the forms and forces of cooperation that can reach towards regional integration. How best can the islands serve the needs of their people? Sovereignty and security — and identity and culture — are based on strength, not weakness; Australia and New Zealand should be natural sources of help in building that strength.

As Asia grows and pushes and demands ever-greater attention, Australia too often swings between being in and out of the South Pacific. Accepting a region-led version of the Pacific future will reduce the attention swings, bolstering Australia’s fundamental interests in the stability and economic progress of the arc that runs from Timor-Leste through Papua New Guinea into the islands.

Australia has spent decades adjusting to the reality that it must find its security in Asia, not from Asia. In the same way, Australia’s need to be at the heart of South Pacific security must be matched by an understanding of what beats in the heart of island regionalism; this is about identity as well as instinct and interests.

Australia can best serve its instinct in the islands by striving to be the first among equals. And achieving economic and strategic integration must be based as much on island needs as Oz interests. If Canberra truly believes integration is the answer, it’ll have to be built on that “region-led and owned” vision.

Fry argues that Pacific regionalism is more than an arena for governance, but constitutes a “regional political community — a term that connotes a deep level of commitment, affiliation and identity beyond the nation-state.”

The instincts of Australia’s history can embrace that idea of region. To hold the South Pacific close, Australia must hold the islands high, and help them to hold together. •

The post Of maps and minds appeared first on Inside Story.

The recent opening of British high commissions in Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu has been widely touted in the Australian media as a sign of this global engagement. At a time when China is building stronger economic and political ties with many island nations, Australia has welcomed Britain’s increased activity, along with France’s renewed focus on the region under president Emmanuel Macron.

Courtesy of its fourteen dependencies — whose maritime domain spans 6.8 million square kilometres — Britain effectively controls the world’s fifth-largest exclusive economic zone, or EEZ. But the post-Brexit dream of a revived British empire has limits.

Although its withdrawal from Europe has significant implications for all these territories, only Gibraltar was eligible to participate in the 2016 Brexit vote. Residents of The Rock, desperate to retain economic ties and easy access to Spain, voted 96 per cent in favour of remaining in the EU.

The European Commission can still negotiate direct agreements with Britain’s overseas territories as part of the EU Overseas Countries and Territories network. But Britain’s only remaining colonial possession in the Pacific is Pitcairn — the bolthole for the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions after they escaped Captain Bligh’s bad language. Fewer than fifty people remain on Pitcairn, but its EEZ, designated as a protected marine reserve, covers 834,333 square kilometres.

The tiny island symbolises the decline of British imperialism in the Pacific. In December 2004, the government in London announced the closure or downgrading of thirty diplomatic missions in the developing world, aiming to save £6 million a year. As a consequence, Britain formally withdrew from the Pacific Community, the main technical agency serving the islands region.

With reduced diplomatic capacity, Britain channelled significant development assistance to the region through the European Development Fund. Post-Brexit, this pathway to influence is closed.

But the push to create a post-Brexit “Global Britain” means that British Conservative governments have begun re-engaging with the region. At the April 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, or CHOGM, then foreign secretary Boris Johnson announced that London would open or reopen nine new diplomatic posts in Commonwealth. The new posts, he said, “are in regions which provide huge potential and opportunity post-Brexit for British businesses and will help us to deepen our relationships across the Commonwealth.”

The initiative followed Australian lobbying to draw more funding for Pacific nations from Britain’s overseas aid agency, DFID, at a time when Australia’s official development assistance is at the lowest level ever recorded as a proportion of gross national income. Three months after CHOGM, the 2018 Australia–UK meeting of foreign and defence ministers reaffirmed the importance of Britain’s “Pacific pivot.” “At CHOGM in April,” the ministers said, “we committed to launching an Enhanced Partnership for the Pacific to support regional stability, security and resilience. Australia welcomes the UK opening three new diplomatic missions in the Pacific, which will make it the best-represented European country in the region.”

The new missions are now in place: British diplomat Karen Bell re-opened the resident high commission office in Port Vila in July 2019, and the outgoing high commissioner to Vanuatu, David Ward, presented his credentials in Samoa in December 2019. After an absence of fourteen years, the British high commission in Nuku’alofa has reopened, with the delightfully named Thorhild Abbott-Watt taking up her post as high commissioner to the Kingdom of Tonga this month.

All this is being done on the cheap, however. During a visit to London in January 2019, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern agreed that British diplomats could co-locate with their NZ counterparts and “utilise New Zealand’s current infrastructure to make the UK’s work in the region more cost-effective and collegiate.”

Global Britain is desperately trying to draw on support from the Commonwealth, which marked its seventieth anniversary in 2019. Eleven of the fifty-three Commonwealth members are in Oceania and — in a royals-led recovery — the British government is using longstanding regional attachment to the House of Windsor as a diplomatic tool across Pacific Commonwealth states.

In 2018, just three days after the media furore over a purported Chinese military base in Vanuatu, Prince Charles and Australia’s foreign minister at the time, Julie Bishop, visited Vanuatu aboard an RAAF VIP plane. In October that year, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex toured Oceania promoting the Invictus Games for injured service personnel. In November last year, the Prince of Wales made his first-ever visit to the Solomon Islands, making a speech in pidgin and launching a new ocean conservation initiative and malaria elimination road map.

But even the royals are struggling. Charles’s younger brother, Prince Andrew, hasn’t visited the South Pacific since 1998, and is currently off the diplomatic roster because of his association with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Even as the Invictus Games celebrate the courage of wounded warriors, Prince Harry’s 2018 visit to Fiji was notable for his silence about Fiji’s nuclear veterans, who are suffering the health effects of their service in the British armed forces during the 1950s British nuclear testing program in Kiribati. Post-Megxit, the new Royal Sussex brand is more likely to find markets in North America than the South Pacific, even though British troops did burn down the White House in 1812.

Throughout this year, Boris Johnson will be renegotiating Britain’s trade relationship with the EU. Hedging his bets, though, Bojo is also looking to Commonwealth countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada as potential trade and security partners. Conservative politicians have tried to talk up liberalised trade with former British dominions and colonies, with one-time international trade secretary Liam Fox even promoting a post-Brexit “Empire 2.0.”

When I met the Commonwealth secretary-general, Baroness Patricia Scotland, at the 2017 Pacific Islands Forum, she was boosting a 2015 research report, The Commonwealth in the Unfolding Global Trade Landscape, suggesting the global network can advance the trade interests of both Britain and the Commonwealth countries.

“As the UK comes out of the European Union,” she told me, “it enables them to be freer in terms of the nature and extent of the agreements they are able to make. But trade facilitation opportunities are already there. Although we are looking for trade agreements, we need to exploit that 19 per cent advantage we already have now. What the United Kingdom had already indicated and identified even before Brexit was that there was literally gold in terms of the intensity of our relationship. There was already an awakening of a keen interest in how we trade with our whole Commonwealth family.”

But the Anglosphere powers of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, while eager for free trade deals with post-Brexit Britain, are not blind to the economic reality. Only 1.4 per cent of Australian exports go to the United Kingdom, one-third of the amount going to other EU countries. Highly regarded London Times columnist Matthew Parris, formerly a Conservative MP, describes Empire 2.0 as “a dangerous post-Brexit fantasy,” noting that “over the past half-century Australia’s trade with Asia has risen from less than a third to more than four-fifths of her total. Nothing — and certainly not Brexit — is going to reverse that trend.”

Beyond this, both the European Union and Britain have failed to expand trade relations with the island states of the Pacific, even during the good times. For twenty years, the EU failed to finalise an Economic Partnership Agreement with the Pacific under the 2000 Cotonou Agreement, despite years of fruitless preparation and negotiations. Under World Trade Organization provisions, Britain has wound down subsidies for imports of Fijian sugar. The current negotiation of a post-Cotonou treaty, to be finalised this year, prioritises African nations over smaller Caribbean and Island states.

The main interest among ANZUS allies is Britain’s potential strategic and security roles in the Pacific, through the Five Eyes intelligence network, counterterrorism coordination and possible deployments of the Royal Navy in the South China Sea. The navy has already announced that the new HMS Queen Elizabeth carrier strike group could be deployed for freedom of navigation operations alongside the US navy in the South China Sea.

But even the security sector is fraught with complications. Five Eyes relations are strained by the Johnson government’s recent decision to allow the Chinese technology giant Huawei to play a role in Britain’s 5G mobile network rollout, a policy that is anathema to hardliners in Washington and Canberra. Many analysts also question whether the Royal Navy has enough capacity and funding to prioritise naval deployments in the Asia-Pacific region at a time when the Trident nuclear submarine force is draining Britain’s defence budget. As British naval specialist Geoffrey Till has asked:

Is a significant naval presence in the Indo-Pacific really feasible these days given the dramatic decline in the Royal Navy’s numerical strength, both in platforms and people? And second, would a significantly more substantial naval force in the area contribute to regional peace and security, and would it be cost-effective for Britain itself?… There are certainly risks that it could all go horribly wrong, especially if the British return with a bombast that antagonises, or at least worries, local opinion.

The Royal Navy is also spooked by the possibility of an independent, nuclear-free Scotland — a far more likely outcome than Empire 2.0 — which could force the relocation of Trident submarines from their Scottish base in Faslane.

Despite their public enthusiasm for greater British involvement in the Pacific region, island governments are hedging their bets. In 2016 the Pacific Islands Forum formally invited Germany to become a Forum Dialogue Partner, recognising Berlin’s central role in the EU and in global funding for development.

Under Emmanuel Macron, France too is seizing the new geopolitical opportunities. In April, the French president will visit Tahiti to host a France–Oceania summit with island leaders. The 2016 decision to admit the French colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia as full members of the Forum has allowed Paris to assert a growing influence on regional policy on the oceans, fisheries and the exploitation of deep-sea minerals, oil and gas (despite the ownership of these resources by the colonised Kanak and Maohi peoples).

French diplomacy in the Blue Pacific is amplified by the uncertain EU status of Britain’s overseas dependencies. Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, French government ministers have been gleeful about the many opportunities the Brexit vote creates for France. At the 2017 Pacific Islands Forum, France was represented by secretary of state Sébastien Lecornu, who told me that “Brexit will create something new in the Pacific.” With France now the only member nation of the European Union in the region, “the three overseas collectivities, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Wallis and Futuna — the pays et territoires d’outre-mer as we call them — are the incarnation of Europe in this part of the world after Brexit.”

One symbol of France’s new assertiveness is the appointment in September last year of the French ambassador to Fiji, Sujiro Seam, as the new EU ambassador to the Pacific.

For France, with its far-flung colonial empire, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea provides significant advantages. Metropolitan France has only 340,290 square kilometres of EEZ in Europe, but its overseas dependencies add eleven million square kilometres of EEZ worldwide. Without these territories in the Pacific, Caribbean, Indian and Atlantic Oceans, France’s EEZ would rank forty-fifth in the world, rather than second.

More than seven million square kilometres of France’s EEZ are in the Pacific. French Polynesia has an EEZ of more than 5,030,000 square kilometres, while New Caledonia adds 1,740,000 square kilometres and Wallis and Futuna a further 300,000. Even uninhabited Clipperton Island — near the vast seabed resources of the Clipperton-Clarion fracture — has a larger EEZ than metropolitan France.

This vast maritime domain has a geo-political as well as economic role for France and the EU. As a 2014 French Senate report noted:

These are spaces which involve both the reaffirmation of the role of France’s overseas territories, but also the place of France and Europe in global governance in the 21st century… the 11 million square kilometres of EEZ and their potential resources pose an opportunity both for France and for Europe in the economic competition on the international stage. Furthermore, by their specific characteristics, France’s overseas possessions bring Europe an opportunity for opening unequalled in the world.

As the EU moves to finalise a new treaty with the members of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States, Brexit will reverberate far beyond the English Channel. Will Britain’s old enemy across La Manche benefit most from the changing geopolitics in the South Pacific? •

The post Global Britain’s frayed edges appeared first on Inside Story.

Fiji’s ordinary citizens, most of them struggling to pay their own bills, were donating to help Australians hit by our disastrous bushfires. “We’ve raised about F$5000 [A$3800],” a volunteer told me late in the afternoon. Asked why Fijians were so moved, she gave the reply I’d heard from many others: “When Cyclone Winston hit us, Australian aid was the first to arrive.”

The link will be made more explicitly this year as the bushfire crisis subsides. But Fijian leaders are already making the point obliquely. A few days earlier, when prime minister Voreqe (“Frank”) Bainimarama farewelled the fifty-four Fijian military engineers sent to assist the bushfire fight in southeastern Australia, he mentioned that other soldiers were cleaning up from the latest cyclones of the season to cross Fiji islands.

“Today is a proud day to be Fijian, as our nation comes to the aid of the climate-vulnerable on two fronts across Oceania,” Bainimarama said. “As Australians battle the bushfire crisis and Fijians recover from cyclones Sarai and Tino, we are bearing witness to the powerful resilience of the Pacific spirit. I have long said that we are all in the same canoe when it comes to combating climate change.”

His foreign minister, Inia Seruiratu, pressed the point: “As Oceania suffers a new and frightening range of climate-induced disasters, Fiji stands prepared to confront this challenge alongside Australia and all of our Pacific partners by continuing to advocate on the world stage to address the underlying causes of our changing climate.”

My embarrassment partly came from seeing the people of a nation far less wealthy than Australia giving their cash to a country enjoying massive trade and current account surpluses and pretty healthy public finances. But it mainly came from the fact that Australia continues to snub their leaders’ calls for more joint action on the climate change fuelling more ferocious cyclones and bushfires.

Scott Morrison started his prime ministership sixteen months ago with what he called a “Pacific Step-up,” outlined most explicitly at the November 2018 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Port Moresby. Its core was a number of hard-power projects: a new naval base on Manus Island, more island patrols by navy ships, more training with local security forces, efforts to edge Chinese companies out of undersea fibre-optic cabling, and a longer-term scheme with Japan to bring electricity to 70 per cent of Papua New Guinea’s people.

In soft power, Morrison employed his trademark combination of Pentecostal evangelism and blokiness, stressing his Christian faith to leaders of island nations made highly pious by two centuries of missionising, and playing up his enthusiasm for the Cronulla Sharks in a region where Australia’s rugby players, league and union, are household names.

One other plan, to insert Australian commercial TV soaps and gameshows into local channels so we can all grow up watching the same things, has quietly lapsed. Islanders already have what they want of Australian programming, and many of the series he had in mind were not his to place. Moreover, the more remote places say they need shortwave radio, accessible when cyclones knock out power, which would mean reviving a version of Radio Australia; and that would require more money for the ABC, a no-go for the Coalition.

The Step-up went well for a few months, including during a prime ministerial visit to Fiji that seemed to establish a new cordiality with Bainimarama, and official visits to Canberra by PNG’s new prime minister James Marape and the Solomon Islands’ Manasseh Sogovare.

But then came a disastrous performance at the region’s annual summit, the Pacific Islands Forum, in Tuvalu last August. When the island leaders went in hard on climate change, Morrison was either unprepared for the strength of feeling or convinced that his support back in Australia depended on resisting anything more than existing commitments to emissions reduction.

According to Vanuatu’s foreign minister, Ralph Regenvanu, the Australian delegation played it tough in drafting the traditional joint communiqué from the summit. Out went all references to coal, limiting global warming to less than 1.5°C and net zero emissions by 2050.

When pressed by the other leaders, Morrison showed the truculent side of his character so rudely that Bainimarama went public with his frustration. “I thought Morrison was a good friend of mine; apparently not,” he told a reporter from the Guardian. He went on: “The prime minister at one stage, because he was apparently [backed] into a corner by the leaders, came up with how much money Australia have been giving to the Pacific. He said: ‘I want that stated. I want that on the record.’ Very insulting.”

As one Fijian adviser put it: “It was like bringing kava to a session, then when you are all sitting down drinking it, reminding everyone that you paid for it.”

That was not the end of it. Bainimarama has made climate action the hallmark of his continuing prime ministership. To some extent, his advocacy has helped him climb back into diplomatic respectability by transitioning from military-backed ruler to elected leader, and to extricate himself from sanctions that had seen him excluded from the Pacific forum and meetings of the Commonwealth. But it also reflects genuine fear.

On the whole, Fiji is not like the coral-atoll nations, where a rising sea level is the main existential fear from climate change. Although many of its main roads run along sea shores only a metre above high-water, its main islands are craggy volcanic upthrusts, and the government began moving the first of forty-five villages to higher ground five years ago — an emotional business for people leaving behind ancestral burial grounds and abandoning land and foreshores that have provided food for generations.

Then, in February 2016, Cyclone Winston delivered the same kind of shock Australians have just felt from their firestorms. The tropical low moved into Fiji waters and turned westward, hitting the northeast coast of the main island, Viti Levu, with winds of more than 300 kilometres an hour. This was a category five cyclone, the strongest storm ever known to make landfall in the southern hemisphere. It killed fifty-four people, destroyed thousands of homes, ripped up infrastructure, and wrote off a third of Fiji’s GDP.

The fear is that this is the new normal. A cyclone like that hitting the southern “coral” coast of Viti Levu, the strip of resorts and light industries from Suva to Nadi, would set Fiji back for decades.

Bainimarama kept up the pressure on Morrison through the last months of 2019. Meeting in Canberra in September, the pair signed an agreement declaring their common membership of a Pacific vuvale (family), but Bainimarama went on to give a clear message at the Australian War College, noting that friendship requires “a degree of frankness that might sometimes offend but is essential to preserving any relationship.”

“I understand that politics is the art of the possible,” the Fijian PM told the assembled brass and officialdom, who included Morrison’s assistant minister for Pacific affairs and defence, Alex Hawke. “I understand the depth of feeling in coal-producing communities in Australia and the wider economic imperatives at state and federal level. But I also hope that we can eventually find more common ground in our vuvale on the climate issue…

“Millions of Australians — along with their vuvale in the Pacific — are already bearing the brunt of climate change. And as we have seen with the recent Australian bushfires, the ongoing drought and the fact that some Australian cities and towns face severe water shortages, the outlook is worsening.”

It was vital for everyone to “unite behind the science,” he concluded, reminding his audience that the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had called for the average global temperature to be capped at 1.5°C above that of the pre-industrial age. “It is a matter of great regret that certain fossil fuel producers have insisted that the IPCC report not be included in the ongoing global climate negotiations. What has been removed from the table must be put back on the table.”

Bainimarama was no doubt inclined to say more, but opted to be a polite guest. Pressed, Morrison and Hawke might have mentioned the A$500 million they had allocated to a new peacekeeping and disaster relief training camp being built near Nadi, and to diplomatic help in having Fiji’s peacekeepers in the Middle East forgiven by the United Nations for blackmarket sales of fuel and cigarettes.

Returning to his theme in December, Bainimarama made poignant calls to protect the oceans while announcing bans on single-use plastic bags and styrofoam containers. “For us, the climate emergency is an oceans emergency,” he said at a Commonwealth climate meeting. Our oceans — and the mangroves, seagrass and kelp fields they contain — are removing massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. But the absorption of carbon emissions is coming at a dangerously high price. If reckless levels of global emissions continue, our oceans will more closely resemble lifeless wastelands than the bustling, beautiful ecosystems my generation has sadly taken for granted.”

He also took another shot at Australia. To achieve the 1.5°C limit, the world must cut emissions by half in 2030 and achieve net zero emissions in 2050. “And for the international community to achieve net zero emissions, we must accept zero excuses,” he said. “Frankly, I’m tired of hearing major emitters excuse inaction in cutting their own emissions on the basis they are ‘just a fraction’ of the world’s total… As a retired seaman myself, I can tell you this: You can’t fix a leaky boat with Kyoto credits!”

After the bushfires, Morrison will find it tough to keep words like “coal” out of the next Pacific forum statement. So far, the visible signs of his Pacific Step-up have been prayers, self-congratulation and displays of Australian military power. But the big threats to security in the Pacific are not phantom Chinese military bases; they are things like measles, corruption and climate change. Morrison may have to accept that there is a wisdom here unknown on the Coalition backbenches. In the new Pacific vuvale, it seems, they don’t accept Australia as the father who can always say “no.” •

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For a short review, the degree of misrepresentation is remarkable. On Fiji (clearly his patch) Robertson mistakes a description of the artificiality of a tourist resort for an analysis of race-relations. The chapter’s crucial phrase, however, is that “in the resorts, Fiji worked as it didn’t in reality.” The rest of the chapter offers multiple alternative accounts of Fijian social relations but these are ignored. The chapter on Tonga receives a similarly myopic treatment. The view that I actually think people in Tuvalu use drums to counter the effects of climate change is textual analysis at its most obtuse.

Readers of Inside Story deserve better. The region is in the news and there are few recent accounts of contemporary Pacific life. Regrettably, the book’s stories, characters, humour, irony, descriptions, unreliable narrator, regional perspectives and multiple voices, as well as its accounts of urbanisation, climate change, disasters, nuclear legacies and cultural resilience across ten countries have all but eluded this reviewer. •

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The more I travelled, the more there was to write about, as each country and each island and each atoll slowly began to reveal its stories, its presents, and its pasts in response to my queries. It was liberating to arrive in a new place with only the intention of asking questions about what seemed interesting.

Bamforth focuses on a wide range of issues — interaction, race, colonisation, climate change, nuclear testing, resistance, cultural preservation, urban life and so on — using, as he admits, “random encounters and points of contact” that are “biased and partisan.” And this is precisely what we get: interesting and potentially insightful commentary garnered during short visits.

“[M]emories, stories and cultural traditions in the region, like the currents of its large ocean states, are longer and stronger still,” Bamforth concludes.

But things are changing, and low-lying island states face an uncertain future… The vast currents of that great ocean are not as immutable as they once were. As the island choirs gather, once more to stand their ground, we must listen to their drumming and their song.

But whose drumming and whose song? Regionality might unite the Pacific but the states it embraces — whether independent or not — are incredibly diverse in terms of their peoples and languages, the size and scope of their lands, their populations (Papua New Guinea has nearly nine million people, Fiji one million, Vanuatu and New Caledonia 300,000 each, Samoa 200,000, Tonga and Kiribati over 100,000 each, while the Cook Islands has 18,000 and Tuvalu only 12,000) and economies, not to mention levels of education and international voice. All experienced colonialism and some still do so. The test for any travel writer in the Pacific is to convey that diversity while seeking to find common ground. The task becomes harder if source material is uncontextualised or is shaped to conform to an author’s concerns.

Elements of this exist in Bamforth’s book. Transiting through Nadi en route to Tuvalu, for instance, we are presented with that well-worn Fiji image of beaming, handsome indigenous Fijians at tourist reception counters while Indo-Fijian clerks and accountants profiteer in backrooms. “Bar the tourists clad in singlets and thongs,” Bamforth reflects, “this must have been what pre-resort Fiji looked like in 1960: an immaculate pre-independence European playground of instantly met needs and exotically pliant locals.” It is an unfortunate date to have chosen as the heyday of colonial privilege. During 1959 and 1960 Fiji was paralysed by anti-colonial turmoil as its transport industry shut down and cane farmers went on strike. Rebellions, civil unrest and strikes were far from new; in fact there has probably never been a time when colonialism was not contested in Fiji.

That image of colonial serenity hangs uneasily over the book whenever the colonial past and the present “lethal mix of postcolonial influences” are contrasted. Bamforth describes the murder in 2001 of the Red Cross’s director-general John Scott, an important go-between during the attempted Fijian coup in 2000 (one of the instigators of which, George Speight, is wrongly described as a former army officer), as that of “a member of a European elite who may never have fully realised that the days of untouchability in Fiji were over.” His mentally unstable homophobic murderer is portrayed also as “a victim of the country’s mutating politics and traditions.”

The restoration of the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva provides scope for further reflections on colonial order and postcolonial disorder. Eight years after Fiji’s fourth coup — led by naval officer Frank Bainimarama — at the end of 2006, the hotel has become “a grandly fossilised world” for the new elite of diplomatic missions, development agencies and regional businesses. That was also the year of Bainimarama’s transition from coup leader to elected prime minister. Bamforth describes Bainimarama’s 2014 electoral victory as a result of the exclusion of the admiral’s competitors. Previous coup leaders like general Sitiveni Rabuka had certainly done that after 1987, the year of Fiji’s first two coups, but Bainimarama presented Fiji with a new constitution that removed the gerrymanders that benefited the country’s old elites. A simple proportional electoral system returned him 60 per cent of the vote and 60 per cent of the parliamentary seats, his opponents having run but failed to attract as much support.

Bamforth’s fossilised colonial world continues with the Suva Yacht Club, its old Europeans “decaying together” at the bar, Tonga as a comical miniature Raj of the Pacific, and Vanuatu’s politics presented as unstable and cut-throat. A ni-Vanuatu coup and countercoup in 2015 is described casually and without context — indeed, with no mention that the first “coup” had been an attempt by ministers to evade corruption charges. Fiji’s efforts to deal with the consequences of Cyclone Winston in 2016, for which it earned international praise, are reduced to aggrandisement by the Fijian military and government efforts to make Australian aid workers grovel for the past sins (sanctions) of their nation after 2006. Interspersed are comments about competition between the infrastructure and education ministers for media attention in the wake of the cyclone. Bamford meets the latter unexpectedly on a bus in Levuka, in Fiji’s east, but disappointingly we learn nothing more. I have no doubt these petty plays occurred, but they need contextualising lest they consume the whole story of disaster relief in Fiji.

Not unexpectedly, Levuka is also seen through the eyes of a visitor feasting on colonial relics and decrepitude. In contrast, Noumea is “European colonialism restored to its prelapsarian heyday.” In the Solomon Islands’ Auki, a German guesthouse owner tells Bamforth that “most places have gone to shit.” His local wife has a different perspective: “We have lost so much.”

Fortunately, not all the bones picked here are without flesh. On the Marshall Islands, Bamforth describes the “untold disaster” of urbanisation resulting from nuclear testing, underfunding and US military apartheid. Something of the same message emerges from his description of one of the outer Cook Islands, and of the shanty towns and villages around Port Moresby.

By the time we get to Bougainville, the limitations of a book based on anecdotes and random encounters are obvious. Tales of violence and government ineptitude, the social and environmental impact of colonial and mining towns, and the human cost of rebellion cry out for deeper analysis. Unfortunately, as Bamforth confesses at the start of his book, his purpose is merely to present “background noise,” a goal he finds “liberating.” But its results may mislead. In Tuvalu, for example, we learn that “the solution to rising sea levels, migration, urbanisation, and the decline of outer island life (it seemed) was to drum louder.” He adds: “The effect was of a musical centrifuge whose forces ever magnified and tended inwards — the focus was the disappearing point at the centre.”

Yet appearances can be deceptive, as Bamforth willingly acknowledges when he compliments a Lebanese woman on her tan. He is at pains to acknowledge the dynamic character of the countries he visits, and the fact that most are “viable [and] stable,” have “well-managed finances,” and have preserved their languages and cultures. The Rising Tide might be about casual observations, but they are presented as adventure story and travelogue, with honesty and without pretension. •

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The diplomatic jousting in New York symbolises the crisis facing the government of Indonesian president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. In the 1990s, Jokowi’s predecessors lost the support of the generation of young Timorese who had grown up under Indonesian occupation and joined the campaign for independence. Today, a new generation of West Papuans is protesting in the streets of Jayapura, Wamena and other towns in the region Jakarta views as the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua.

Since the withdrawal of the Netherlands from its Melanesian colony half a century ago, West Papuans have only known Indonesian rule. The young people facing off against Indonesian soldiers are responding to a crisis generated by Indonesia’s failed development model in West Papua, which has brought in hundreds of thousands of workers and farmers from other parts of Indonesia, converted customary Melanesian land into freehold, and encouraged commercial extraction of gas, copper, gold and timber.

Human rights groups have long reported violations by Indonesian police and military, but concern escalated in December last year when the army extended its operations around Nduga district, following the shooting of construction workers on road-building operations. This year, West Papuan monitoring groups have reported more than 180 deaths in the district, and more than 40,000 people displaced. Healthcare facilities, churches and schools have been damaged, and families have fled into the bush with limited food and shelter.

A further upsurge in conflict began in Surabaya, East Java, in August, prompted by West Papuan student protests against Indonesian racism. Falsely accused of showing a lack of respect for the Indonesian flag and angered by taunts against Melanesian “monkeys” and pigs,” thousands of students across Indonesia launched mass demonstrations against racism, which soon expanded into street protests in West Papua.

Since September, protests have continued in towns across the western half of the island of New Guinea. Indonesian police and military have shot dead at least thirty West Papuan protesters, and many others have been injured in Jayapura and Wamena. In Wamena, killings and violence against non-Papuan migrants saw people fleeing to police barracks for protection.

Chanting “We are not white and red, we are Morning Star,” young Papuans have flourished the illegal West Papuan flag, first raised in December 1961 when West Papuan nationalists were seeking to create their own government under 1960 UN General Assembly resolutions on decolonisation. But US cold war support for Indonesia led to the 1962 New York agreement to introduce a UN transitional administration, opening the way for Indonesia’s military to move in. Then came August 1969’s widely criticised “Act of Free Choice,” when 1022 carefully selected Papuan leaders voted under pressure to accept Indonesian rule.

The current repression in West Papua rolls back the peaceful diplomacy Jokowi attempted during his first term of office. A regular visitor to West Papua, the Indonesian president won early plaudits by granting amnesty to key West Papuan prisoners and launching a series of development projects. Progress looked so promising that the leaders of the Melanesian Spearhead Group — Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front of New Caledonia — declared in 2015 that Jokowi “is someone whom the MSG can dialogue with.”

Five months into the president’s second term, Indonesian politics is more polarised. There are worrying signs of a regression towards authoritarianism: last year’s blasphemy charges against the mayor of Jakarta, for instance, and the appointment of the well-known former general, Wiranto, as coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, despite his role in human rights violations in East Timor during the 1990s. Recent attempts to weaken Indonesia’s anti-corruption institutions and last month’s legislation promoting fundamentalist rules on culture and sexuality highlight the ugly turn.

Contributing to the shift in Indonesia’s diplomacy on West Papua has been the death of former independence campaigner Franz Albert Joku in June this year. Over the past decade, the charismatic West Papuan — a prominent landowner who lived in exile for many years in Papua New Guinea — had joined fellow activist Nick Messet to advise and represent the Indonesian government.

When I met Joku and Messet at a Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Kiribati in 2000, both men were supporters of independence. Their organisation, the Papua Presidium, had emerged during a surge of West Papua nationalism after the collapse of Suharto’s dictatorship in 1998, a period dubbed the Papuan Spring. A national congress in Jayapura had remobilised the independence movement and brought in a new generation of activists under the leadership of customary chief Theys Eluay.

The Papuan Spring was supported by Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia’s president at the time, who was seeking to chart a path to democracy and de-fang Indonesia’s military after decades of repression in Timor, Aceh and West Papua. But Wahid lost the presidency in 2001, and incoming president Megawati Sukarnoputri crushed the Papua Presidium. Indonesian special forces soldiers murdered Eluay.

Abandoning his support for independence, Joku returned to Jayapura, the capital of Papua province, in 2008. Jakarta’s 2001 Special Autonomy Law, he declared, provided a pathway to greater autonomy and peaceful development. In recent years, Joku and Messet served as frontmen for Indonesian diplomatic efforts, seeking to blunt growing international support for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.

Joku was the garrulous and good-humoured voice that argued Indonesia’s case on the international stage: travelling in Indonesian delegations to the MSG and Pacific Islands Forum, lobbying in UN corridors, even briefing Indonesian student groups at universities in Australia and New Zealand. He put a human face on the ugly rhetoric of Indonesian military leaders who have long benefited from their business interests in the eastern provinces of Indonesia.

“I believe I am still working for the emancipation of my country,” he told me when we crossed paths in Wellington last year. “The Special Autonomy Law, however incomplete it may be, is an acceptable political compromise. We need to grab hold of it and make it serve our interests.”

Security minister Wiranto and defence minister Ryamizard Ryacudu are much less diplomatic when they push back against Pacific island governments and human rights advocates. Visiting Australia in November 2016, Ryamizard chastised island nations that had spoken at the United Nations in support of West Papuan rights. “Please tell Solomon Islands and those six nations never to interfere or encourage West Papua to join them,” he said. “Those countries better keep their mouths shut and mind their own business. It is better that Australia speaks to them gently. If it was left up to me, I would twist their ears.”

Indonesia has joined the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation, alongside Fiji and Papua New Guinea, partly to block any move to have West Papua relisted as a non-self-governing territory by the United Nations. Indonesian diplomats, like their French counterparts, were horrified when Tuvalu, Nauru and Solomon Islands successfully moved a motion through the UN General Assembly in 2013 adding French Polynesia to the list.

In July this year, Indonesia hosted a trade and tourism conference in Auckland as part of its Pacific engagement effort. Looking beyond current trade negotiations with Papua New Guinea and Fiji, Indonesian foreign minister Retno Marsudi said that Jakarta was seeking to extend its influence in even the smallest island nations: “We are connecting the dots between the 17,000 Indonesian islands and the thousands of Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand. One of the steps that we are taking to connect is by opening diplomatic relationships with Cook Islands and Niue.”

But charm only goes so far. The Indonesian government is clearly hostile to any country that raises its voice in global institutions. When island nations promoted a resolution at the UN General Assembly in August on cooperation between the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum, it was adopted in a vote of 137–0, with Indonesia abstaining. Its UN representative regretted that “one member of the Pacific Islands Forum continued to interfere with Indonesia’s domestic affairs,” a not-so-subtle reference to Vanuatu.

No doubt mindful of possible repercussions in other parts of the region, Pacific Islands Forum leaders aren’t calling for independence for West Papua. At their most recent meeting in Tuvalu in August, they reaffirmed their recognition of Indonesia’s sovereignty over the two provinces, but also acknowledged reports of escalating violence and human rights abuses and “agreed to re-emphasise and reinforce the Forum’s position of raising its concerns over the violence.”

In their final communiqué, they called on Jakarta to facilitate a long-mooted visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet. They “strongly encouraged” Indonesia and the commission to agree on timing for a visit that Indonesia has stalled, calling for “an evidence-based, informed report on the situation” to be published before next year’s Forum leaders meeting in Vanuatu.

“This is the first time that Forum leaders have called for a United Nations human rights visit,” West Papuan leader Benny Wenda told me in Tuvalu. Wenda chairs the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, and was in Funafuti with spokesperson Jacob Rumbiak to lobby island leaders for support. “This is step by step,” he added. “This is the starting point and the fact is that the resolution is a really, really important step for us to go to another level.”

Efforts to extend support to West Papuans have often been stymied at the Forum by Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. The two larger Melanesian nations have also defended Indonesia’s interests at the Melanesian Spearhead Group, backing associate membership for Jakarta. After rejecting a West Papuan bid for full MSG membership at their 2013 summit in Noumea, Melanesian leaders agreed to “invite all groups to form an inclusive and united umbrella group in consultation with Indonesia to work on submitting a fresh application.”

In December 2014, Vanuatu churches and customary leaders hosted a meeting in Port Vila aimed at transcending longstanding divisions between three key strands of the nationalist movement: the West Papua National Coalition for Liberation, the Federal Republic of West Papua, and the National Parliament of West Papua (which includes the National Committee for West Papua that has mobilised most of the recent protests). The meeting was successful, and these groupings came together as the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.

But there’s still a way to go in gaining stronger support from the largest countries in the regional organisations. Both Australia and Papua New Guinea border Indonesia and have a range of strategic reasons — from trade and investment to anxiety over the movement of refugees — for maintaining good relations with Jakarta. In recent years, their stand has been backed by Fiji under prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama, who led a coup in 2006 and then oversaw Fiji’s return to parliamentary rule in 2014.

Since the post-coup regime was suspended from the Forum and Commonwealth in 2009, Fiji’s international diplomacy has expanded beyond its traditional partners. In recent years, Indonesia has been a key ally in Fiji’s bid for leadership roles in bodies like the Non-Aligned Movement, the G77-plus-China group and the Asia-Pacific bloc within the United Nations.

“Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua cannot be questioned,” Bainimarama declared at the MSG’s 2015 summit. “The best hope for improving the lives of the people of West Papua is to work closely with the Indonesian government, one of the most vibrant democracies in the world.” Despite this, the 2015 summit gave observer status at the MSG to Wenda’s United Liberation Movement for West Papua, the first major diplomatic breakthrough.

In contrast to Papua New Guinea and Fiji, Vanuatu has long championed self-determination for West Papua. Lora Lini, daughter of Vanuatu’s first prime minister Walter Lini, has been appointed as special envoy on decolonisation of West Papua to the Pacific island states. Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s foreign minister, is a key international champion of the West Papuan cause.

Vanuatu is supported within the MSG by the Kanak independence movement, FLNKS, which reaffirmed its longstanding support for its fellow liberation movement as the Indonesian repression mounted in September 2019. The Solomon Islands, under prime minister Mannaseh Sogavare, has also appointed a special envoy on West Papua.

With decisive action within the Forum and the MSG blocked by the larger powers, a separate Group of Seven has been taking initiatives in support of West Papua in international forums. Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau and the Marshall Islands presented a joint statement on West Papua to the African, Caribbean, and Pacific Council of Ministers in Brussels in May 2017. Leaders of these island nations have spoken out at the UN General Assembly, and Vanuatu and Solomon Islands have lobbied this year at the UN Human Rights Council. Pacific church and community groups have ensured that West Papua remains on the Forum agenda, using their annual dialogue with island leaders to promote action on human rights.

Pacific nations, however, are facing a changed geopolitical context. As with other Asian powers — China, Taiwan, Korea and India — Indonesia is a new regional player, extending its diplomatic and political relationship with Forum members and providing new pathways for aid, trade and investment. Not surprisingly, Jakarta is seeking a diplomatic quid pro quo in the form of silence on human rights abuses and public acceptance of Indonesian sovereignty over the western half of the island of New Guinea. Jokowi’s administration is wooing or threatening those who speak out on the issue.

Next year, forty years after Vanuatu gained independence in 1980, the Melanesian nation will host the fifty-first Pacific Islands Forum. Foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu hopes that meeting will build on this year’s call for an urgent visit to West Papua by the UN human rights commissioner.

“In the last few years, the resolution has been about constructive engagement with Indonesia on the issue,” he says. “But I think the leaders realised that the open and constructive engagement had not necessarily achieved the improvements in human rights that are desired. I think the situation in Nduga over the last year has caused Forum leaders to elevate the tone of the resolution.”

The UN’s Michelle Bachelet could provide an “honest and frank account” before the next Forum leaders’ meeting, Regenvanu told me. The Forum secretariat and member states “need to make sure the commissioner gets to go,” he said. “Indonesia should see that there is a very clear concern and we hope this this statement will make them come to the table and work with the commissioner to make sure this mission does happen.”

But time is short. “The situation in West Papua is getting worse and worse,” says Benny Wenda. “This is the next East Timor — it’s beginning. Sixteen thousand additional Indonesian troops have now been deployed to bring violence to West Papua, working with the new nationalist militias. How long does the world need to watch my people being slaughtered like animals before they intervene? Fifty-seven years of this is enough.” •

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Eighteen men were driving home to the Kanak tribe of Tiendanite after a meeting of the newly formed independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS. Ambushed at Wan’yaat by members of the Lapetite and Mitride families — local settlers opposed to independence in New Caledonia — ten were shot dead and another five wounded, with just three others living to tell the tale. Today, their two rusting, burnt out trucks, sheltered from the elements in a newly refurbished memorial on the road to Tiendanite, are a reminder of the massacre.

The murder of his brothers and clansmen was a terrible blow for Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the charismatic leader of the FLNKS. Tragically, he too was assassinated on the island of Ouvea, on 4 May 1989, together with his lieutenant Yeiwene Yeiwene.

On 4 May this year, the thirtieth anniversary of Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s death, hundreds gathered at Tiendanite, the Kanak tribe that was his home, twenty kilometres into the mountains above Hienghène. People arriving by early morning joined a Mass in the community hall, followed by the laying of wreaths and flowers on Tjibaou’s grave. The priest urged the congregation to follow the message of hope from “our papa, our brother, our friend Jean-Marie.” Later, people travelled down the road to Wan’yaat, where a new memorial and sculpture to the 1984 massacre was inaugurated and blessed.

Other ceremonies were being held in the outlying Loyalty Islands. On Mare, friends and family mourned the loss of Yeiwene Yeiwene, Tjibaou’s right hand man. Yeiwene, a leading figure in the movement for Kanak independence, campaigned alongside Tjibaou during the period of armed conflict that wracked New Caledonia between 1984 and 1988. Known as les événements, these years pitted the Kanak people against the French armed forces and settler militias.

On Ouvea, in the tribe of Gossanah, people gathered to remember Djubelli Wea, the Kanak activist who killed the two FLNKS leaders in May 1989, before being shot dead by Tjibaou’s bodyguard Daniel Fisdiepas.

Speaking after the ceremony in Tiendanite, Tjibaou’s son Emmanuel tells me that remembering his father and others killed during les événements is a vital part of looking to the future. “The importance of this day is to commemorate their fight, to celebrate their life, but also to reflect on the reasons that we honour such men,” he says. “Their political vision has led us to where we are today. To commemorate them through custom, through prayer, is our way of making them live again, their words, their commitment.”

The day also reminds local people to take up their own responsibilities, he adds. “Looking back over thirty years, it’s time for us to take stock, and look forward to making the right choices for our country. This is not a matter of history. It’s a matter of integrating their vision into our action today, thirty years later, to lead our country to independence and sovereignty.”

For a younger generation, the events of decades ago might seem irrelevant to the needs of today. But Tjibaou remains an emblem of the Kanak struggle for self-determination. After he took a leading role in the independence party Union Calédonienne, or UC, in the 1970s, a central part of his work was promoting Kanak culture and identity that had been marginalised by French colonial society. In 1975, he organised the Melanesia 2000 festival, an unprecedented celebration of local culture, music and dance. Two years later, UC called for independence rather than greater autonomy within the French Pacific dependency.

In Tiendanite, current UC president Daniel Goa says that Tjibaou’s vision of an independent Kanaky–New Caledonia still resonates with both old and new generations of independence supporters. “His words are still relevant today, and they are especially relevant for the young people who are seeking to find their place in society,” Goa tells me. “Jean-Marie’s words can still guide them. You see here today that there are many young people. It’s a way of returning to the source to rediscover their culture.”

Beyond this, the commemoration ceremony united people across the political spectrum. Representatives from different independence parties and the Kanak Customary Senate were joined by New Caledonia’s representative in the French Senate Gerard Poadja, and Jean Pierre Aifa, a charismatic political leader from the 1980s and long-time friend and rival of Tjibaou.

Standing at the graveside beside Tjibaou’s widow Marie-Claude, Poadja — a member of the anti-independence party Calédonie ensemble — recalls their work together for the Melanesia 2000 festival: “He was a man we respected enormously… Today, I am here because we cannot forget what we lived through together.”

The ceremonies in Tiendanite, Ouvea and Mare were held just eight days before New Caledonia’s national elections. On 12 May, voters elect seventy-six representatives for New Caledonia’s three provincial assemblies and national Congress, political institutions created after the 1988 Matignon–Oudinot Agreements and the 1998 Noumea Accord.

In Tiendanite, Jean-Pierre Djaiwe of the Parti de Libération Kanak tells me that the day went well beyond the current electoral contest: “For us it’s a day of commemoration, a day of remembrance, a day to recall this man who was for us an extraordinary figure, a man who by his bearing, by his words, is still with us in our hearts. His words were spoken many years ago, but they remain in our hearts and are still relevant today.”

The Ouvea crisis of May 1988 and the assassination of Tjibaou and Yeiwene a year later were milestones in New Caledonia’s troubled path towards a new political status. After nearly four years of conflict, the FLNKS had decided to boycott the May 1988 elections for the French president and a new local government. The independence movement had planned a nationwide mobilisation to highlight its opposition to French militarisation, but the uprising took place only in Canala, on the main island of Grande Terre, and in the outlying Loyalty Islands.

On Ouvea, a local group of Kanak independence activists attempted to take over a police station at Fayaoue on 22 April 1988. In the subsequent melee, three French gendarmes were killed and another mortally wounded. Twenty-seven others were taken hostage and hidden in caves, most in the north of the island near the tribe of Gossanah.

The Ouvea crisis led to a major military mobilisation and the torture and maltreatment of villagers by French troops trying to locate the hostages. Djubelli Wea, a former Protestant theology student and leading independence activist from Gossanah, was dragged from his sick bed, questioned about the location of the hostages, and tied to a tree. His father, beaten by French troops, later died.

The assault on the caves to free the captured police coincided with a final (and unsuccessful) attempt by French prime minister Jacques Chirac to glean votes between the two rounds of the 1988 presidential elections. On 5 May 1988, the French government abandoned negotiations and launched a military attack, with elite police and a commando unit storming the cave. Nineteen Kanak activists were killed, at least three of them executed after surrendering. Their leader, Alphonse Dianou, was shot in his knee during capture, and left to die. Two French special forces soldiers died in the assault.

Twenty-nine men from around Ouvea, including Djubelli Wea, were arrested and transported to jail in Paris. Ouvea was left with a legacy of bitterness and tragedy: men from over half the villages on the island were dead or in jail, and there were sharp tensions with the FLNKS leadership.

The tragedy made all parties step back from the brink. Incoming French prime minister Michel Rocard proposed negotiations, and the subsequent Matignon and Oudinot Accords, sealed by a handshake between Tjibaou and anti-independence leader Jacques Lafleur, included amnesties for crimes committed before August 1988. For the families of the dead soldiers and of the nineteen Kanaks killed, this could not resolve the legacy of grief and division.

A year later, Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Yeiwene Yeiwene came to the island on 4 May 1989 to mark la levée du deuil, the end of a period of mourning for the nineteen.  At the ceremony in Hwadrilla, Tjibaou and Yeiwene were shot and killed by Djubelli Wea, who was immediately gunned down by Tjibaou’s bodyguard.

Isolated by the death of key leaders, the local community could not recover for many years. Over time, though, a customary reconciliation process — between the Gossanah community, the family, clan and supporters of the slain FLNKS leaders, and the families and supporters of the four slain police officers — built up trust.

The impact spread nationally. Religious and customary leaders began charting a path towards dialogue, moving from Tiendanite to Ouvea, then to Yeiwene’s home on the island of Mare, always using the traditional paths that link clans across the country. The signing of the Noumea Accord in May 1998 opened the way for France’s overseas minister to travel to Gossanah in August that year, the first of many more public gestures of reconciliation involving the French state. (Last year, president Emmanuel Macron visited Hwadrilla for the thirtieth anniversary of the hostage crisis.)

The churches played a crucial role. Jean-Marie Tjibaou was a former Catholic seminarian; the leader of the Ouvea hostage takers, Alphonse Dianou, had trained for the priesthood at the Pacific Regional Seminary in Suva; Djubelli Wea did pastoral training at the Pacific Theological College in Suva; and leading Kanak theologians Jean Wete and the late Pothin Wete are originally from Gossanah.

Ecumenical figures like Pastor Jean Wete and Father Rock Apikaoua played a central mediating role between the Wea, Tjibaou and Yeiwene families, promoting face-to-face meetings and ultimately reconciliation between the wives, then the children, and then the clans of the three central figures. Although some family members were reluctant to participate in the process and many tears were shed, this process was vital in sealing a breach that could not be healed by judicial mechanisms.

Today plaques in Ouvea, Mare and Tiendanite highlight the day in July 2004 when people transcended the bitterness of the past. The plaque next to the gravesite of Djubelli Wea pays homage to the three Kanak leaders who died in 1989, and to the reconciliation that followed: “To all generations to come — remember that on the night of 4 May 1989, blood was spilt on Ouvea. Pardon — Haiömonu me ûsoköu.” A similar plaque marks Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s grave in Tiendanite: “Pardon — do kan ôdavi vin mala da — so a new dawn can rise.”

For Emmanuel Tjibaou, it is the strength of Kanak culture that made reconciliation possible. “Just as in Papua New Guinea, or Solomon Islands or Vanuatu, custom is what makes us Pacific islanders,” he tells me. “The yam, the sacred, respect for others, respect for the community, the dimension of justice, of sharing: it was through these cultural values that we were able to reconcile with the family of Djubelli Wea, who killed my father…” His hope is that this spirit of reconciliation will “inspire others — in Bougainville, in Solomon Islands — to bridge the gulf between combatants and their clans still living with the loss. We hope to share our experience of reconciliation, in the tradition of Wantok — one way, one spirit.” •

The post Thirty years on, a spirit of reconciliation in New Caledonia appeared first on Inside Story.

Former Australian diplomat David Tough writes mainly from the former perspective in this account of the 212 Fijians — 200 men and twelve women — who enlisted in the British Army in November 1961. For much of his book he tracks the careers of “the 212,” as they became known in Fiji. Then, towards the end of this training-to-trenches narrative, he veers to the big picture, writing about Fiji’s first military coups, in 1987, and the involvement of some of the ex-soldiers as either supporters or opponents.

As an Australian diplomat in Suva from 1989 to 1992 — “the most interesting three years of my working life” — Tough was on the spot as Fiji dealt with the consequences of the coups. Then and now, Fiji confronts the reality that the military is a powerful tribe that claims a unique right to oversee national politics.

In his early weeks in Suva, Tough met the first of many of the 212, quickly realising that “they were a remarkable group” who would have been “a talented cross-section of colonial Fiji’s youth” in 1961. Almost all of them had served out the period they enlisted for, and “about a third of the men extended their service for up to twenty-two years or more before returning to Fiji, remaining in the UK, or settling elsewhere.”

Tough decided to write a composite biography. His mosaic of individuals stretches from Fiji to Britain, covering service on the fringes of fading empire, in Borneo during confrontation with Indonesia, in Northern Ireland, with NATO and during the Falklands war.

The story starts in 1961, when the British army was struggling to find volunteers after the abolition of national service in Britain. Recruiting teams were sent to three colonies, Jamaica, the Seychelles and Fiji. In Fiji, British racial attitudes bumped into local racial sensitivities. The governor of Fiji told the recruiters to get a balance of “60 per cent Fijian, 30 per cent Indian and 10 per cent part-European,” and the racial mix of the 200 men conformed to this formula. Back in Britain, the thinking was that no unit should ever have more than 2 per cent “coloured” soldiers.

Remarkable group: the twelve young female British Army recruits and their chaperone — from left, Tausia Cakauyawa, Vaciseva Tabua, Lily Pirie, Doreen Petersen, Munivai Aisake, Edwina Eyre, Vicki Grant, Frieda (guide/chaperone), Fane Sivoki, Emma Heffernan, Louisa Peckham, Betty Foster and Laurel Bentley — photographed in Sydney, en route to London. Betty Foster

The director of the Women’s Royal Army Corps, brigadier dame Jean Rivett-Drake, made a failed attempt to prevent any Fijian women being recruited. She called for more information about the “position and status” of women in the colonies, “and in particular their customs with regard to marriage.” She worried that Fijians would be “jet black and woolly haired” and would “present considerably more problems to us than the coffee-coloured Seychellois.” Three of the women were discharged to marry or return to Fiji within a year of arriving in England, but the remainder served their full six years.

When the recruits reached England, they were bothered as much by cold and the class system as by racism. The winter of 1962–63 was the coldest in a century, and the weather, says Tough, was an “extreme culture shock.” Few of the Fijians “recall racist attitudes within the army itself during their service”; barracks banter was that if rations ran short, Fijians could exploit their cannibal heritage and munch on a mate. The Fijians represented the army at almost every sport possible, although, as one journalist noted, “they did less well at qualifying for good conduct medals.”

Many of the soldiers returned to Fiji in the mid 1980s. Several of the men were “ardent supporters” of the 1987 coups mounted by colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, Tough writes, while others “were equally strong objectors. The divide remains.”

One of the returnees, Sam Pillay, entered parliament at the 1987 election, representing an Indian communal seat in the new coalition government. He was sitting in parliament when Colonel Rabuka entered the chamber with a group of “balaclava-clad soldiers brandishing automatic weapons.” Pillay “briefly considered trying to disarm the soldier standing close behind him but quickly realised the foolishness of such thoughts.” Fiji as coup-coup land was born.

The longest-serving of the 212, Joe Tuwai, who retired from the British army in 1997, was one of those who decried Fiji’s new “coup mentality.” Tuwai said the model Rabuka established for a Fijian soldier rests on the idea that “one does what one feels is right” because a coup will be followed by a decree waiving charges of mutiny or treason.

Tough puts his mosaic together by structuring the book in two halves: the first nine chapters tell the story of the 212 from 1961 until the 1987 coups, while ten following chapters trace individual careers serving as gunners, sappers, signallers and infantry, or in the Special Air Service, transport, ordinance, skilled trades or armour (“a third class ride in a tank is better than a first class walk in the infantry”).

Individual warrior stories abound. Seven of the Fijians served with the elite SAS, most winning medals for bravery or distinguished service. The MBE citation for Fred Marafono, who served twenty-one years in the SAS, referred to his “legendary” status as a visual tracker and his contribution to anti-terrorist techniques and jungle warfare.

After he left special forces, Marafona had a second career as a mercenary. “Three months short of Fred’s sixty-ninth birthday,” reports Tough, “an SAS officer involved in rescue operations in Sierra Leone was surprised and delighted when he boarded a Sierra Leone gunship to be greeted by Fred as the door gunner.”

While some of 212 followed the warrior life, others found God and left the army to become ministers. Such are the many colours in a mosaic made up of individual soldiers. •

The post Military mosaic appeared first on Inside Story.

Whether the region’s plan to take greater control of its fate will be squeezed or helped by the two much larger narratives rising up at its edges — the Washington-led Indo-Pacific partnerships and Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative — is largely up to the Pacific Islanders themselves. At least that’s the message from Pacific Islands Forum secretary-general Dame Meg Taylor and Vanuatu’s foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu.

The pair, whom I interviewed for the latest Little Red Podcast, believe that the Pacific is up for the challenge, though the two big-power narratives will need some tweaking to fit with the concerns and hopes of Pacific Islanders, particularly about climate change and jobs.

Awkwardly for the current US and Australian administrations, neither leader sees security for the Blue Pacific as a matter of building military bases on Manus Island or dealing with skulduggery around the Luganville Wharf. Climate change is the leading security concern, as Dame Meg explained.

“If you look at the Pacific Rim countries,” she said, “you’ve got to ask yourself, who is really committed to the one issue, the most important issue that faces this region: climate change? It’s not just the sea-level rise. Sea surges, tsunamis, cyclones. But you’ve also got drought, water. And it’s very, very real. It’s not as if a country [such as China] can come in and do something physical. What they have to do is make sure their emissions are down to 1.5 or even lower so that we can survive.”

Beyond resilience and survival come Pacific livelihoods. Here the hopes of the Pacific are clear: access to labour markets (including Australia’s, of course), training for Pacific youth, and meaningful opportunities after graduation. Here, China runs into a problem not so much with the Belt and Road narrative as with the reality on the ground created by its companies and its migrants.

Vanuatu’s foreign minister outlines the dilemma for Pacific leaders — they know pragmatically that nations can’t afford to forgo the roads, ports and hospitals built by Chinese aid. But the experience of many Pacific Islanders is that Chinese nationals, if not the Chinese government, are taking their jobs.

“There’s a lot of concern about the new retail shops being opened, all being controlled by Chinese and owned by Chinese,” says Regenvanu. “There’s lots of concerns about Chinese labourers being used on construction sites to do jobs that ni-Vanuatu feel they can do… There are high levels of unemployment, kids graduating who can’t find jobs. And you see people who you perceive as foreigners having jobs, having businesses. And you think, you’re a local and you can’t have that access. That obviously becomes a problem.”

Riots targeting Chinese shopkeepers have a long and less-than-glorious history in the Pacific, complicating the Belt and Road’s emphasis on people-to-people connections. Vanuatu’s neighbours — Papua New Guinea, Tonga and the Solomon Islands — have all seen serious violence directed at “new” Chinese communities.

As yet, Vanuatu has seen no hint of violence, but a rise in the number of Chinese nationals there — from 500 or so a decade ago to around 4000 today — has seen online rumblings. Discontented locals, whose views are reflected in Facebook groups such as Yumi Toktok Stret, divide the blame between the new arrivals and the government for failing to act.

A recent post, reacting to last year’s 60 Minutes episode The China Syndrome: Is China Taking Over the South Pacific?, contrasted China’s infrastructure loans with those of other countries, arguing the “main condition is ONLY Chinese engineering or construction companies are to be employ to do the Job. Blame your leaders not Chinese. Money istap lo China [the money stays in China].”

Ironically, the Chinese shopkeepers themselves put the sudden rise in Port Vila’s Chinese population down to migration from less-safe Pacific countries, as well as a growing middle-class group that has come to Vanuatu for health or lifestyle reasons. As one restaurant owner put it, “When I first arrived, I was shocked. I thought I’d been tricked. The airport was falling apart. The capital city doesn’t even have a set of traffic lights. But then I came to see how happy people were. When they smile, it’s not like people in China, they smile with their whole body.”

Vanuatu also holds appeal because of its proximity to Australia and New Zealand, offering the prospect of short, sharp periods of under-the-table work for Chinese nationals on tourist visas.

On the Indo-Pacific side, both sides of Australian politics are waking to the realisation that Pacific nations really do care about labour mobility, and that domestic politics may have to be put to one side.

One area where the Belt and Road appears to be stealing a march on the Indo-Pacific is the ramping up of scholarship and training opportunities. As Dame Meg explained, “We’ve raised this with other large powers that want to come back into the region about giving scholarships to our students. And the response I got was, ‘That’d be a really hard thing to sell right now.’ So there you are… they’re not prepared to really look at the needs of the region and our young people, then I’d be questioning, ‘Well why come back?’”

It’s a fair question. •

The post Where the Blue Pacific meets the Belt and Road appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite the idyllic scenery, Ouvea carries a tragic burden of history. New Caledonia’s referendum on self-determination, which takes place on 4 November, is the culmination of a twenty-year decolonisation process that began with the Noumea Accord, an agreement between the French state and local parties signed on 5 May 1998. That was the tenth anniversary of a crisis — the 1988 Ouvea massacre — that almost tipped the country into civil war. The polarisation of those days, though muted today, still echoes through political debates.

The overwhelming majority of Ouvea province’s population is indigenous Kanak, and members of independence parties have dominated nearly every provincial government over the past thirty years. But they preside over a declining population. With limited employment available on the island, some working-age people seek education, employment or enjoyment on the main island of Grand Terre. At the last census, in 2014, only 3374 people were living on Ouvea.

According to Benjamin Malie, principal of the Guillaume Douare junior secondary college, the lack of a senior high school on Ouvea contributes to the outflow of locals. “We don’t have a lycée on Ouvea, so many families move to Grande Terre to assist their children complete schooling,” he told me. “After they’ve finished, however, some of them don’t return, so many people from Ouvea are still living in the capital, Noumea, or other towns on the mainland. Our college has dropped from 200 pupils to just eighty-nine this year, and the Protestant and public schools have also seen reductions.”

Ouvea’s food and water security is threatened by a changing environment. The reef still teems with marine life, but on the ocean side of the island, near Saint Joseph, the effects of coastal erosion can clearly be seen. Local authorities are focused on dealing with the immediate effects of climate change on water and food; three desalination plants operate, and tankers deliver fresh water to homes and schools at times of water stress.

Despite these constraints, local authorities are working to create a sustainable model of development for the island and trying to overcome the challenges of expensive transport and communications, with a new wharf and warehouse welcoming three boats a week delivering supplies.

Like most outlying islands across the region, the pace here is different from the hassle of the capital. Beyond their beauty, Ouvea’s beaches are a crucial economic resource, acting as a drawcard for overseas and domestic tourists. In recent years, there’s been a particular emphasis on small-scale tourism, with gites (bungalows) established in Kanak tribes to tap the ecotourist market. The provincial government seeks to lure Noumea-based public servants looking for a beach escape during the school holidays. Locals run a range of small businesses, promoting walking tours, fishing and boating.

But New Caledonia’s economy essentially relies on the extravagant wages and bonuses paid to French public servants and the “value-adding” on imports by local business elites. Backpackers in the Loyalty Islands will find that the beer is more expensive than in independent Vanuatu or Fiji.

Even when you focus on Ouvea’s economic future, however, it’s hard to avoid traces of the past.

Driving along the island’s main road, you pass the tall green fence, topped with barbed wire, of the police station in Fayaoue. At nearby Hwadrilla, there is a roadside memorial to “the nineteen,” the Kanak martyrs of 1988. In the northern tribe of Gossanah, the old building for the École Populaire Kanak (Kanak community school) is festooned with banners calling for non-participation in this year’s referendum, an echo of the boycott of New Caledonia’s last failed referendum in 1987.

Next to the sporting field at Gossanah is the gravesite of Djubelli Wea, an independence leader from Gossanah, with a plaque that pays homage to three Kanak leaders who died in 1989, and to the reconciliation that followed: “To all generations to come — remember that on the night of 4 May 1989, blood was spilt on Ouvea. Pardon — Haiömonu me ûsoköu.”

Much as people have reconciled since the armed conflict of the 1980s, it’s impossible to understand the present without remembering the past. Next month’s referendum is the culmination of a twenty-year transition under the Noumea Accord, an agreement signed by the French state, the independence movement Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, and anti-independence politicians led by Jacques Lafleur.

In 1987, in the midst of the French army’s militarisation of New Caledonia, the FLNKS boycotted a referendum organised by France that purported to determine the future of the country. Despite an overwhelming Yes vote to stay with France, the referendum was meaningless without the participation of the colonised Kanak people.

The following year, Jean-Marie Tjibaou and the FLNKS leadership called for a boycott of the French presidential elections, in which conservative prime minister Jacques Chirac was challenging the incumbent Socialist Party president François Mitterrand. During the FLNKS protests, a group of Kanak independence activists led by Alphonse Dianou attempted to raise the flag of Kanaky over the police station at Fayaoue. In the subsequent melee, three gendarmes were killed and another mortally wounded. Twenty-seven others were taken hostage and hidden in caves in the north of the island, near the Kanak villages of Gossanah and Takedji.

The Ouvea crisis led to a major military mobilisation on the island. Villagers were mistreated and even tortured by French troops trying to find the hostages. The assault on the caves to free the captured police coincided with a final (and unsuccessful) attempt by Chirac to glean votes to win support before the second round of the presidential elections. On 5 May 1988, his government abandoned negotiations and elite police and an army commando unit stormed the cave. Nineteen Kanak activists were killed, with at least three executed after surrendering. Dianou was shot in the knee, and left to die.

The Ouvea tragedy made all parties step back from the brink. France’s incoming prime minister, Michel Rocard, proposed negotiations. The subsequent Matignon and Oudinot Accords, sealed by a handshake between FLNKS leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou and anti-independence leader Jacques Lafleur, provided for amnesties for crimes committed before August 1988.

The legacy of grief and division contributed to the assassination of Tjibaou and fellow Kanak leader Yeiwene Yeiwene the following year. They had come to the island on 4 May 1989 to mark la levée du deuil, the end of a year-long period of mourning for the nineteen. At the ceremony, Tjibaou and Yeiwene were shot and killed by Djubelli Wea, who was immediately gunned down by Tjibaou’s bodyguard.

It took a decade and a half to reconcile the families, clans and supporters of these dead. Led by customary chiefs, priests and pastors from the Protestant and Catholic churches, this cultural process of reconciliation and pardon has been vital in sealing a breach that could not be healed by judicial mechanisms.

One person who seems keenly aware of the continuing sensitivities is French president Emmanuel Macron, who visited New Caledonia in May this year, and included Ouvea on his itinerary. For the first time, a French president tried to pay homage at the memorial to the nineteen Kanaks killed by the French army.

At his home among the Kanak tribe of Gossanah, Djubelli Wea’s brother, Maki, tells me there was local opposition to Macron’s visit. Because of this, the French president left Ouvea without placing a wreath on the memorial at Hwadrilla. “They announced Macron’s arrival here without contacting the customary chiefs on the island, without contacting the families of the victims,” he says. “The FLNKS announced it in the media, but the people of Gossanah were surprised and we raised our finger to all the people over there.”

For the first time in thirty years, the people of Gossanah didn’t place flowers on the graves of the nineteen on the anniversary, he says. “The high commissioner even lobbied us over Macron’s visit. But we didn’t cede ground — we’re not like the people of the FLNKS who give in.”

“We say no”: Maki Wea of the Kanak tribe of Gossanah. Nic Maclellan

Meanwhile, like other low-lying atolls around the Pacific, Maki Wea continues to advocate for Kanak Socialist Independence, the guiding slogan of the 1980s. Since July, he has been speaking out in public, calling for non-participation in this year’s referendum, both as a member of the small Parti Travailliste (or Labour Party) and also as “a child of Gossanah.”

“Today, I can’t just act like an old man, working in the gardens, without saying something, because I think of the next generations, the sons of my sons and their sons after them. For they will ask, ‘Papa, what did you do when the French state and the local right-wing parties and the leaders of the FLNKS moved away from the objective for which so many have sacrificed their lives — the goal of indépendance Kanak et socialiste?’”

He criticised those independence groups on Ouvea who campaign for a Yes vote on self-determination within France: “There are plenty of fine speeches out there: ‘Vote Yes, to remember those who died for independence.’ But we say no, this referendum is just neo-colonialism.”

As I was hitchhiking up the forty-six kilometre road that runs along the spine of the island, a young man stopped to offer a lift. We talked about fishing and Australia and the weather, and then drifted on to politics.

“I’m part of the generation who grew up after les évènements,” he told me. “So thinking about independence is different for me compared to my parents. We look differently at the referendum and I have questions about what it means.” Does that mean he will vote No or stay at home on 4 November? “Oh no, I’m voting Yes, for independence. But we have to build this independence. We have to be involved to make it happen.”

For the first time since 1958, the looming referendum poses a clear option — whether to stay within the French republic or leave as a sovereign nation. New Caledonians will vote on the question: “Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?”

Some people may go fishing on 4 November, but Wea’s call for non-participation is not accepted by most independence supporters on the island. Activists from the largest independence parties, Union Calédonienne and the Parti de Libération Kanak, have been out for weeks, seeking to mobilise people to turn out on the day. At the last provincial elections in 2014, only 65.2 per cent of eligible residents of Ouvea went to vote, so the FLNKS is seeking to boost numbers, organising community meetings to explain the significance of this year’s decision.

One quiet night, I joined a small team of activists at Hulup, near Ouvea’s airstrip. In a local community hall, twenty-five people had gathered to hear a presentation about the referendum, followed by discussion on reasons to vote (and to vote Yes).

The FLNKS has produced a short film highlighting the economic and political milestones achieved by the independence movement since the mid 1970s (such as the 51 per cent local control of the Koniambo nickel smelter in the Northern Province, an unprecedented example of engagement with a transnational resource corporation in Melanesia).

Then there’s a PowerPoint presentation setting out the FLNKS vision of a sovereign Kanaky–New Caledonia, with the current Congress transformed into a national assembly and an elected president replacing the French high commissioner. There’s also a presentation about public finances and budgetary options for an independent state, an attempt to calm fears that a Yes vote will lead to Paris turning off the financial taps.

And then there are questions and sharp comment, with a wide-ranging discussion over what independence might mean. Much of the discussion is in the local languages of Iaai and Fagauvea, leaving your correspondent adrift, but the tone of one woman’s voice suggested that the FLNKS activists have some questions to answer about who will pay for her pension.

Ouvea’s deputy mayor, Robert Ismael, talks of the potential to give greater capacity to the local municipal council, if the Article 27 powers are transferred from Paris to Noumea (currently, New Caledonia’s provincial assemblies and local Congress come under the authority of the government in Noumea, but the communs, or municipal councils, are still controlled and financed as French state institutions).

Ismael also cites the possibility of extending development partnerships with Australia, New Zealand and neighbouring Melanesian countries, along the lines of the municipality’s current engagement with health authorities from Vanuatu. “We need to decolonise our heads and be proud like Vanuatu,” he declares.

With just a week to go before 4 November, time is running out for mobilising Ouvea’s 4351 registered voters — some on the island and some planning to use “delocalised” voting booths in Noumea. Local activists are planning a final festival on the island to promote a Yes vote, and will then join a major national rally in the capital, organised by the FLNKS at Ko We Kara on 30 October. •

The post Ouvea looks forward, and back appeared first on Inside Story.

Quoting Menzies at a Liberal government is always a good tactic, so here’s more from the founding father, from April 1939:

I have become convinced that, in the Pacific, Australia must regard herself as a principal, providing herself with her own information and maintaining her own diplomatic contacts with foreign powers… It is true that we are not a numerous people, but we have our vigour, intelligence and resource, and I see no reason why we should not play not only an adult, but an effective part in the affairs of the Pacific.

Menzies offers an enduring truth while stating the bleeding obvious. Over the decades since then, though, Australia has ceased using media power to play an intelligent and effective part in the affairs of our region. As one former senior ABC staffer puts it, our programming for regional audiences is simply “risible.”

To be clear, “broadcasting” is a catch-all covering a lot of ground: analogue to digital to satellite, Facebook to FM. Content converges: radio and TV become video and audio and text. Broadcasting is publishing. TV and radio are reborn online. The digital age both unites and atomises.

When the Abbott government axed the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV in 2014, just a year after it began, a communications minister named Malcolm Turnbull argued that there was no need for the Oz voice in a crowded regional arena. If people wanted international stuff, Turnbull said, they could go to the BBC or CNN.

The ghost of Menzies would have raised both eyebrows, because Menzies said the purpose of getting close to great and powerful friends was to bolster our interests, not hand ’em over — insurance policy, not giving away the store. During his three years as prime minister, the same Malcolm Turnbull came round to the “speak for ourselves” viewpoint.

In a key foreign policy speech last year, he reflected on the digital revolution:

Technology has connected local aspirations and grievances with global movements.

Hyper-connectivity has amplified the reach and power of non-state actors, forcing us to reassess how we, as nation states, assert and defend our sovereign interest…

Now, in this brave new world we cannot rely on great powers to safeguard our interests. We have to take responsibility for our own security and prosperity while recognising we are stronger when sharing the burden of collective leadership with trusted partners and friends.

The gathering clouds of uncertainty and instability are signals for all of us to play more active roles in protecting and shaping the future of this region.

Take responsibility. Don’t expect the great powers to safeguard our interests. Act to shape the future of the region. Menzies would nod at this description of the value of a powerful Australian voice — and the need to speak for ourselves.

And yet, these are the worst of days for Australian international TV, which is twenty-five years old this year. And they are the hardest days for Radio Australia, which reaches its eightieth birthday next year. They are gasping, limping shadows. The cash drips slowly; much life has departed.

In 2010, the ABC spent $36 million on international services (about $42 million in today’s dollars). These days, a guesstimate of the international broadcasting spend is $11 million. The ABC is vague about the exact figure; perhaps it’s an embarrassed reticence. Yet tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

To remake Australia’s international media thinking, the government and the ABC will have to separate domestic bickering from foreign policy. The government can overturn poor decisions that have damaged our international voice if it wants to, and the ABC has the capacity to recover its role as an international broadcaster, a core charter responsibility that Aunty has been shedding.

Surveying international broadcasting’s decline means picking through the ruins of past decisions by government and the ABC. The debris still remains from the Abbott government’s decision to axe the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV just a year after it began. That was a sad example of Australia’s international interests being trampled by domestic argy-bargy driven by deeply entrenched hang-ups about the ABC. The Liberal Party’s fear of the ABC was succinctly expressed long ago by John Howard’s consigliore Graham Morris: “The ABC is our enemy talking to our friends.”

The enemy–friends tension is a backhanded tribute to the ABC’s influence across Australian society. For many decades, ABC power also reached beyond our borders; domestic political arguments have obscured the ABC’s traditional role as a major media voice in our neighbourhood. It discarded its South Pacific audience by reducing electricity to its shortwave broadcast towers, degrading the signal and cutting off listeners, and then announced there was no longer a shortwave audience. The broadcaster decided what it was prepared to give, not what the South Pacific required.

A broadcasting recovery involves listening to what the Islands say they need, rather than telling them what they’ll get. Reviving South Pacific shortwave should be part of a bigger project: to restore the ABC as an international broadcaster and create a twenty-first-century Australian voice across the Asia-Pacific.

For its part, Canberra stopped thinking about what good journalism could do for the region, and for Australia’s vital interests. The fashionable chatter was all about new technology and soft power, losing sight of deep truths about the role of journalism. Soft power trumped hard news.

Discarding our journalistic heritage in our region is poor history, lousy policy and appalling judgement — and it meant that lots of old media agendas became fresh headaches for Australia. Propaganda and polluted facts are back, rebadged as fake news. Canberra laments challenges to the rules-based system in a tone tinged with a bewildered sense that things shouldn’t be like this. A media rethink can start with putting in the journalistic vision so lacking in last year’s foreign policy white paper.

The paper was happy to talk about “media” (fourteen instances) but didn’t once mention “journalism” or “broadcasting.” This was strange, given that the final chapter, “Partnerships and Soft Power,” stressed the “vital” need for persuasive Australian soft power to influence the behaviour or thinking of others. The closest reference to journos was a domestic tick for Australia’s “robust independent media.”

“Global governance is becoming harder,” the white paper judged, and the international order is contested by “measures short of war,” including “economic coercion, cyber attacks, misinformation and media manipulation.” The paper fretted that Australia must be ready to “dispel misconceptions and ensure our voice is heard when new and traditional media are used to sow misinformation or misrepresent Australian policies.”

The “ensure our voice is heard” line was where I expected to find journalism. Instead, the answer to the “voice” conundrum was lots of soft power and digital engagement — a reasonable start, not a full answer. Australia needs to rediscover the power of hard news as the sharp edge of our soft power.

For twenty-five years, Australia’s international TV voice has been a political plaything and a broadcasting afterthought, constantly facing chops and changes. This history of chop, change and political spasm is evident in the eight changes of identity and ownership over that quarter-decade:

1. First came Australia Television, or ATV, in 1993, when the Keating Labor government gave the ABC start-up funding. Unlike the rest of the ABC, though, ATV carried commercials. Canberra wanted it, but didn’t want to pay for it.

2. Channel 7 was given control in 1998 (twice — once with news, then as a pure shopping channel). The commercial network made a hash of it, didn’t make any money and lost interest. So…

3. In 2001, it went back to the ABC as ABC Television International.

4. A year later, it was rebranded as ABC Asia Pacific.

5. Then, in 2006, came another name change: the Australia Network.

6. In the 2014 budget, the Coalition cut all funding to the Australia Network. It closed, to be replaced by a drastically cutdown operation.

7. The Australia Network’s replacement, Australia Plus, started in September 2014.

8. From 1 July 2018, the network has been renamed ABC Australia.

Neither side of politics emerges with much credit from this zigzag. Canberra’s level of interest has been as changeable as the name.

The moment of creation under Labor illustrates recurring themes of limited attention, political crosscurrents, and plenty of vision but little money. Launching ATV to broadcast to the Asia-Pacific, the Keating government boasted of its significance for regional engagement and interests, ranging from media and education to business and foreign policy. Confident talk wasn’t matched by cash or commitment.

The ABC sought to establish an international version of its domestic service, but couldn’t devote proper resources to ATV, not least because the government didn’t want to pay for what Australia needed. Programming suffered because the ABC had domestic copyright to broadcast programs but didn’t own international rights. The Keating government knew ATV was worthwhile, but wouldn’t give anything more than start-up funding for the satellite service. Once established, it would have to pay its own way with advertising.

The refusal to launch ATV as a fully funded public broadcasting service (like the rest of the ABC) was telling. A hybrid design — part ABC, part commercial — was the half-arsed response of a half-hearted government. That half-in, half-out problem continued.

Domestic politics too often derails discussion of international TV. The Keating cabinet’s debates about establishing ATV veered off into rant-and-rave sessions about how ABC domestic reporting was hurting the government. Much bile was directed at ABC managing director David Hill, who’d fought budget cuts with a famous campaign proclaiming the ABC cost each Australian only “eight cents a day.”

A couple of times when ATV was on the cabinet agenda, Hill came to Canberra to support the idea. Having the ebullient ABC head in the cabinet anteroom was a disastrous provocation. After navigating past Hill, ministers would have another ABC hate session, then defer decision.

Themes from the creation story recur over the twenty-five years:

Politics overturns policy: Each change of federal government — Keating to Howard to Rudd to Abbott — has been a chop-change moment for international TV. The Liberal–Labor foreign policy consensus has never translated into agreement on the worth of our broadcasting service to the regions. (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are different regions with different audiences.) Thus…

The gap between big interests and little cash: The high rhetoric of Asia-Pacific engagement is negated by low commitment of dollars.

The ABC as problem and solution: All federal governments come to fear/distrust/hate ABC reporting on them; that perennial rant-and-rave problem obscures a clear understanding of what public broadcasting can do for Australia in the Asia-Pacific. The problem has a funny dimension: politicians know the power of the ABC, but they’re not willing to use that power to serve our international interests.

International ABC can’t be domestic ABC: The ABC’s domestic programming is vital to the international service, but that’s the start, not the finish. Reaching and holding audiences in Asia and the South Pacific is about talking with, not just talking to. Diverse audiences have different needs. Programming has to be for them, not just rebroadcast from Oz.

Chop and change hurts: International broadcasting is expensive and complex because a lot of power is in play. Australia’s constant and growing interests in the Asia-Pacific demand a constant and growing broadcast conversation, using all converging media.

A strong, consistent voice in our region serves Australian foreign policy. Get the zigzag pattern off the screen and adjust the international TV picture.

The wrack and roil afflicting the international system matches the digital disruption of news media. The rules and norms of the foreign policy game and media world shake, shift and suffer.

Australia frets about threats to the rules-based system as the tectonic plates of geopolitics and geoeconomics crunch. Not least of those truths is the one to be found at the heart of seven Australian defence white papers over forty years: geography matters.

Traditionally, Australia wanted a strong international broadcasting voice in what defence-speak calls our region of primary strategic interest: Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean. That broadcasting tradition is looking very modern. Geography is back. Or, more accurately, the demands of geography never went away — we’re just feeling the weight with fresh force.

In the foreign policy game, the word “influence” stands besides “interests” at the calculating, cerebral end of the field. But influence and interests must always be within shouting distance of values and beliefs, which tend to reside in the heart and hearth part of the arena.

The qualities of good journalism — “reliable,” “independent,” “factual” — are exactly the same as are needed in the foreign policy of a country seeking to persuade others, protect interests, project influence and promote values.

Amid all the disruption, there’s a perfect media instrument ready to serve as Australia’s voice in the Asia-Pacific, to do journalism that’ll serve our interests and values. Well-tested by history, with a proud heritage of great journalism and a prescient charter, that instrument is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Simple as ABC, really.

Or it should be. To illustrate the ABC problem, come into my anecdotage while I recall a previous life as an ABC correspondent. Two decades ago, a sardonic line rattled around ABC executive ranks: “A peasant in Longreach is more important than a peasant in Lombok.” The bitter point of the comparison — central Queensland versus an Indonesian island — was that the ABC must devote scarce cash to its domestic users, not its potential international audience. Axing South Pacific shortwave last year affirmed that old corporate view.

But power politics zoom back, the digital revolution rages and Australia’s foreign policy dilemmas demand that the ABC get back into the international journalism game, bigger and better.

Three distinct decision strands must combine for the back-bigger-and-better conclusion to be realised. Strands one and two reside in Canberra: first, political and policy consensus; second, the shift from agreement to action.

Canberra’s troubled consensus: In international affairs, tectonic plates are crunching and lava is melting the rules-based system. Canberra’s agreement on how nasty things are looking is expressed in the 2016 defence white paper, the 2017 intelligence review and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

The defence white paper frets about fraying international rules: the word “rules” is used sixty-four times — forty-eight of these in the formulation “rules-based global order.” The stress on rules expresses the fear of what’s failing. “Rules-based global order” is a big phrase to cover such disparate forces as jihadism and China’s rise. Mostly, though, it’s about China.

The intelligence review identified three big trends: fundamental changes in the international system, extremism with global reach, and accelerating technological change. And the foreign policy paper got a lot into one stark sentence: “Today, China is challenging America’s position.”

The Canberra consensus fuels the substantial Liberal–Labor unity ticket on foreign policy. The ticket is tacit but important. As always, argument rages about whether the government or opposition will do a better job on China or the US alliance or in the South Pacific. What’s not disputed is the trouble in the trends. Beneath the usual politics, there’s a shared sense of foreboding.

From description to prescription: It’s always tough moving from anxiety to action. What can/should/must we do?

A strong broadcast voice in the Asia-Pacific, based on the ABC, is part of the answer to regional challenges. Australia must move from the agreed description of problems in strand one to a new Canberra consensus on the use of the ABC to support our interests, influence and values in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond.

We must rebuild a powerful and consistent broadcasting voice so we can rejoin regional conversations and contests. Tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

Canberra has to agree on the prescription, set the policy response and do the budget numbers for a sustained media commitment.

ABC changes: Recent decades show that the ABC will always choose Longreach. ABC priorities are domestic, not international. The institutional response is logical, yet it fails to serve Australia beyond our shores. We need a future ABC that can do what Australia needs for Lombok and Lautoka and Lae.

The domestic–international tensions inherent in the ABC charter must be resolved. The international responsibility must be more than a declining division of the ABC — it must become a new planet in the Australian policy universe. That planet must be created by the ABC and draw on its values and resources.

To serve Australia’s interests, influence and values in the Asia-Pacific, we need an Australian International Broadcasting Corporation, or AIBC. The AIBC would resolve the domestic–international tensions in the ABC charter, giving proper expression to the charter’s international dimension.

The charter is at the heart of the 1983 Act that remade the ABC from a Commission to a Corporation. In the charter’s foundational clause, the law gives equal weight to the ABC’s domestic and international responsibilities.

Domestically, the ABC must produce innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a high standard — programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community, with a specific mention of “programs of an educational nature.”

Internationally, it must transmit news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural programs that will “encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs; and enable Australian citizens living or travelling outside Australia to obtain information about Australian affairs and Australian attitudes on world affairs.”

The habit of rebroadcasting domestic fare has been maintained in the relaunch of the Asia-Pacific TV service, rebranded as ABC Australia. The ABC says the service “will deliver distinctive content to culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences and to Australian expatriates, encouraging international awareness and understanding of Australia and Australian attitudes.” Fine words, but the ABC’s reach falls short of its grasp.

The programming offers rebroadcasts of ABC news programs, “slice of home” shows and Australian Rules football. For an expat, an excellent menu. But for forty countries of the Asia-Pacific — those “culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences” — this is lots of Oz attitudes, about Oz for Oz.

Australian content is necessary but not sufficient for an Asia-Pacific service. Australian content needs to be the start, whereas at the moment it’s the finish.

To do more will need cash and commitment from Canberra — and the AIBC to deliver the focus. The aim is to talk with neighbours, not merely broadcast to neighbours; that supposes media conversation of many types, not just an oration from Oz.

Atop the excellent foundation of good ABC shows, the AIBC must offer reporting that matters in the lives of Lombok or Lautoka or Lae. The new organisation should be born of the ABC, reflect ABC traditions and standards, and draw on ABC resources — but it must have its own corporate identity as an expression of its distinct, international purpose.

The AIBC would have its own chair and board and its own separate budget. The deputy chair of the ABC and the ABC managing director should be on the board of the AIBC, but so should the head of the Special Broadcasting Corporation.

Replicating the successful ABC model, the board should have a staff-elected member, and then gather board members with international experience from business, diplomacy, aid and one of the major generators of Oz soft power in the years ahead, the universities.

Under its Act, the ABC can establish subsidiary companies, so in theory no new legislation is required. But in line with my argument that Canberra must pay for what Canberra wants, the AIBC must have its own budget allocation. Don’t leave it to the ABC. Aunty can’t pay for what Australian foreign policy demands.

The AIBC must have a separate identity so the international effort doesn’t get drawn into the domestic fights that are a natural part of the ABC’s existence. Like the ABC, it must be a fully funded, independent public broadcaster — not a state broadcaster.

Give the AIBC the right to seek partners where it sees a natural fit in such realms as development aid, philanthropy and universities. Its core, though, is as a public broadcaster.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking Australia can have an important foreign policy instrument on the cheap. If the AIBC is going to have heft, it must be richly funded by Canberra; the ABC doesn’t have a lazy $30 million to redirect to Oz foreign policy, much less $50 million or $75 million.

Canberra has to see the need and fund the instrument. Australian interests, influence and values demand an Australian voice in the Asia-Pacific. •

The post The sharp edge of soft power appeared first on Inside Story.

“Her family is in Iraq but she been here for more than five years,” a family friend told me. “She is sick on medical and no help from hospital. They give her tablets but these make her crazy. If she raises voice at hospital, no one help us. Always cry, no one help her. No one help us.”

As a correspondent for Islands Business magazine, I’m a regular reporter at the annual leaders meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum. This year, though, I hadn’t been confident that I’d be given accreditation for the regional summit. I’m a longstanding critic of Australia’s multibillion-dollar offshore processing regime, and host nation Nauru has long been sensitive to criticism of its support for Australia’s refugee policy.

As of May 2018, 821 recognised refugees were living on Nauru, including more than 110 children, alongside asylum seekers who have been refused refugee status. Since it got under way in 2001 — with a hiatus during the first government of Kevin Rudd — the offshore detention program has cost Australian taxpayers billions of dollars. The beneficiaries have been corporations like Broadspectrum, Wilson Security, IHMS and Canstruct. The toll on the asylum seekers has been immeasurable.

But the program has also left hidden scars on the communities that host the refugees. “I was a child when the asylum seekers came,” one young Nauruan man told me during the Forum. “I was really pleased. I thought I could learn something about another culture. Now, I hate them. They are always attacking my country, criticising my leaders. I wish they would leave.”

Successive Australian and Nauruan governments have responded to criticism of indefinite mandatory detention by taking aim at the messenger and withholding vital information. When he was immigration minister, Scott Morrison was notorious for his lack of transparency, refusing to comment about “on-water” matters as he implemented the Abbott government’s policy of “stopping the boats.”

Nauru’s president Baron Waqa has argued that media organisations, human rights groups and UN agencies have relied on second-hand “fake news” about his country. But the Nauru government itself has limited the capacity of journalists to travel to the island for first-hand reporting. Nauru requires journalists to pay a US$5000 visa application fee, non-refundable if the request is refused — a significant disincentive for anyone wanting to look beyond government spin.

In line with standard practice for the regional summit, Nauru waived visa fees for accredited journalists at this year’s Forum leaders meeting. But it limited the number who could attend and introduced unprecedented restrictions on the stories they could cover outside the formal Forum agenda. The government attributed the rules to the complex logistics of hosting a large number of delegates in a small island nation, but it’s well known that President Waqa and his justice minister, David Adeang, have been angered by foreign media reporting of their alleged corruption. Their dislike of Australia’s national broadcaster, banned from the meeting, seems particularly intense.

That ban was also a significant blow for broadcasters from the islands region, which often relay news from Radio Australia and Radio New Zealand rather than send one of their own journalists to regional meetings. (My small gesture of solidarity was to comment from Nauru for ABC current affairs, Radio Australia and Radio New Zealand.) Other Australian media that critically report on refugees, local corruption or domestic opposition to the Waqa government, including the Guardian and SBS, also applied for accreditation but didn’t make the cut.

The Forum media contingent thus included reporters from the Murdoch press (the Telegraph and the Australian) alongside a larger New Zealand press pack. They were joined by a small team of Pacific journalists coordinated by the Pacific Islands News Association, from island nations including Fiji, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa, Papua New Guinea and the Cook Islands, together with a few media from Tahiti, Japan and Finland.

Speaking to Pacific journalists before the Forum, Nauru’s health, education and land management minister, Charmaine Scotty, expressed frustration over “fake news” and the international reporting of the plight of asylum seekers on the island. For Scotty, the problem lies with the media rather than in government secrecy.

“If media is going to be reliable and going to be printing the facts, we are happy for them to come to Nauru,” she said. “The reason we have put this new policy in is because of the fake news. Before Trump made fake news popular, Nauru experienced that. We already had fake news, so we understood what fake news was all about.”

Unfavourable overseas reporting risks making the Nauruan people afraid of the refugees, she went on. “All this hyped-up news about the refugees calling Nauru hell on earth and all these kind of things. Nobody wants their country to be called that in the international media. This was making the transition between the locals and the visitors very hard.”

The government issued media guidelines that went far beyond the normal practice for previous regional summits. The restrictions included the following:

You are only authorised to report on or take photos of the Pacific Islands Forum. Any other subjects must be approved by the Republic of Nauru.

You must not travel to or visit restricted areas, for the safety and security of residents.

No photo or video may be taken on Nauru of any resident on Nauru who is an asylum seeker to protect their personal safety…

Refrain from interviewing Canstruct and other contractor staff as they have signed confidentiality agreements.

In true Pacific manner — on the principle that it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission — most journalists attending the Forum worked around these “guidelines.”

Meanwhile, Nauru’s chief spin doctor, Lyall Mercer, was introducing the Murdoch press to refugees, resulting in a front-page story in the Australian, complete with full-face photo of mother and child. Other journalists, such as a team from Tahiti’s TNTV, ventured into the camps to produce compelling interviews with distressed refugees.

Deriding the image of refugees living behind barbed wire, President Waqa was eager to stress that they were “living and working happily amongst the community.” During the day, it was possible to meet refugees in the streets, and I had a number of intense discussions arising from casual meetings.

But Nauru police had obviously been warned to monitor the conduct of journalists, all of whom sported a bright yellow badge and lanyard. After TVNZ journalist Barbara Dreaver was spotted talking to a refugee outside a restaurant, she was detained by police. Her phone and camera were taken for three or four hours, with technicians brought in to search for compromising material. On her release, her accreditation was briefly withdrawn, though it was later returned after negotiations.

As I was taking photos in the island’s Yaren district, I was approached by a young Iranian man. The twenty-six-year-old, who has been living on the island for five years, was eager to show me his workplace. “I didn’t want to just sit in the camp,” he said. “I need to do something, so I got a job. I like my boss from Nauru. I don’t want to end up crazy like the others.”

At this point, he made a maniacal face, distorting his features and holding up both hands with claw-like clenched fingers. His cartoonish gesture reminded me of the famous Diane Arbus photo “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park.” Unlike many refugees I met, he seemed resigned to the lengthy process that might lead to resettlement: “Some people go to America but Donald Trump doesn’t like Iran, so I cannot go.”

“Would you like to stay in Nauru?” I asked.

“Of course not!” he replied, in a tone that suggested I was mad. “Australia, good. New Zealand, good. Anywhere, good. I would like to go somewhere where I can meet a girl. Here, if we go with a girl, the Nauruans hit us.”

Management of the overseas media has become a preoccupation for some Pacific island governments. They are turning to public relations companies and spin doctors to promote their views.

Health minister Charmaine Scotty acknowledged that her government found it hard to respond to media queries. “Because of all the media coming in, it’s like a tidal wave that just drops and washes over you. So we’ve needed to get our act together and be more resilient and proactive in this area.” That’s why the government has contracted a PR agency to work with it, she said. “It’s helping teach our people in the media for them to be able to respond quickly to things and not take things at island time.”

Nauru uses the Brisbane-based public relations company Mercer PR. Founded by former journalist Lyall Mercer, who was omnipresent at the Forum, the company’s clients have included the Hillsong Church and the Queensland Liberal National Party. According to the company’s website, it assists clients “to manage their public messages, achieve real outcomes and develop proactive media strategies. We also assist our clients to minimise adverse publicity.”

On this last criterion, the Nauru government should be asking for its money back. Through Mercer PR, it has long disputed reports of refugees in distress and incidents of self-harm, rape or attempted suicide. Just before the Forum, President Waqa angered human rights groups by claiming that children were being “pushed” into self-harm by their families and refugee advocates. “It’s the way of working the system,” he said, “probably short-circuiting it, just to get to Australia.”

Such claims were dismissed out of hand by the refugees I spoke to, with one Somali man stating angrily, “Children growing crazy. They tried to suicide. No future.”

Facing obstruction on the broader issue of resettlement, international human rights groups have ramped up pressure in relation to children. The Refugee Council of Australia has launched a Kids off Nauru campaign, prioritising the relocation of vulnerable children as a first step.

According to a report released by the council during the Forum leaders’ meeting, “Australia’s policy has traumatised children so much that they are giving up eating and trying to kill themselves. Australian courts are increasingly forced to step in so that people can get the medical treatment they urgently need, as the Australian government repeatedly ignores doctors’ advice and does everything it can to avoid people being transferred to Australia, including sending them to Taiwan and Papua New Guinea.”

Refugee advocates are encouraging Nauru and Australia to take up New Zealand’s offer of 150 places for resettlement, but both governments are reluctant to budge, partly to avoid derailing the current US resettlement initiative.

“If Australia refuses to change course, it must not stand in the way of others who are willing to offer these people the protection they so desperately need,” says Amnesty International’s Pacific representative, Roshika Deo. “New Zealand’s prime minister this week reaffirmed a longstanding offer to take in 150 refugees per year from Manus Island and Nauru — Australia must facilitate, and not obstruct, this process.”

Pressure like this has not swayed the Australian government or its Nauruan counterpart. As she talked to journalists, Charmaine Scotty shifted blame towards the families of distressed children: “This child abuse that is happening — where are the parents? What is happening to the care of the children?” She called for UN agencies to upgrade their presence beyond a joint, locally staffed office in order to obtain accurate information on the ground.

Pacific governments have legitimate criticisms of some overseas journalists, who parachute into regional meetings without knowing the local agenda. It is a constant complaint in the islands that Australian and New Zealand media organisations do not invest in the region. Most media groups don’t allocate the travel budgets (let alone fund the overseas bureaus) that could benefit domestic audiences as well as the wider islands region.

But Waqa’s denial of the problems has been undercut by reality. As was highlighted by the release of notes kept by Roman Quaedvlieg, the former head of the Australian Border Force, Australian officials often despair at the challenges of operating in Nauru. Quaedvlieg’s notes from 2015 were released in the Australian parliament while the Forum was meeting, during the bitter battle with his former boss, home affairs minister Peter Dutton. The former Border Force head describes a case of self-immolation on Nauru, crumbling medical infrastructure and lack of staff training at the processing centre. (He recalls asking a young Nauruan liaison officer about drugs in the camp, at which point the man “asked me what I wanted and how much.”)

Quaedvlieg’s somewhat patronising take on Nauru masks the larger problem: the original sin lies in Canberra, not Yaren. Five years ago, reporting on Australian policy in Nauru, I wrote that “the legitimate focus on the plight of refugees on Nauru has overshadowed the impact Australian policies have had on the host nation, a closely integrated society of just 11,000 people.”

When I talked to Nauruan officials during this month’s Forum, the pressures on the economy, environment and livelihoods of Nauruan citizens are all the more apparent. While these officials seek to deal with the challenges, the presence of hundreds of asylum seekers and refugees in Nauru is placing an extra burden on the island’s water, energy and food security.

Berilyn Jeremiah, Nauru’s commerce, industry and environment secretary, said that climate variability and natural disasters are already affecting the country. “Nauru is susceptible to droughts which, in the past, have had significant impacts on health, food security and the economy, as it can put a strain on our national budget,” she said. “Drought periods can also increase the risk of fires, and for a country that is very remote, losing critical infrastructure and services such as power, water, schools and hospitals can be disastrous.”

Improved water security is vital, she said. “Food insecurity is also a major risk for Nauru, given our dependence on imported foods and our geographical isolation. Most agricultural activity is carried out by individual households and is constrained by limited availability of suitable land and water.”

Nauru has developed a twenty-year master plan for water security but lacks the resources to implement it. The environment department is seeking to increase the number of desalination plants, but they are costly to run and difficult to maintain. In the meantime, water tankers carry water to local communities on a regular schedule.

A heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels means that the cost of power generation in Nauru is also very high. Only 3 per cent of Nauru’s electricity is provided by renewable energy — a very modest share compared to other small island states in the region. An ambitious Nauru Energy Road Map seeks to increase renewable sources to 50 per cent by 2020.

Nauru also has some of the poorest health indicators for non-communicable diseases in the Pacific islands. A decade ago, according to the country’s new strategy to tackle the health crisis, it ranked second to Afghanistan in the age-standardised mortality rate for these diseases.

Dr John Auto, a Solomon Islander who coordinates public health programs for Nauru’s health ministry, declined to talk about refugee health but described the many programs the government is mounting to address obesity, diabetes and a junk food epidemic. Nutrition is a central element of the country’s current action plan on non-communicable diseases.

Recent surveys have highlighted the difficulty of growing fruit and vegetables, and the high cost of importing nutritious, fresh food aboard Nauru Airlines planes. “We have WHO standards like ‘are there servings of fruit and vegetable in the diet?’” Auto said. “But 95 per cent of Nauruans in that survey reported not having the recommended amount of vegetables and fruits.”

Nauru certainly needs resources to respond to these challenges. Beyond targeted aid and money channelled through Australian corporations like Canstruct, the Nauru government raises significant revenue by charging Australian taxpayers a monthly visa fee for hosting the refugees and asylum seekers. But these financial benefits — worth millions of dollars — must be balanced against the structural damage to Nauru’s economy and society as the refugee regime drags on.

We’ve seen this all before. In 2001, when offshore processing was first established by the Howard government, Australia pledged that asylum seekers would be processed within six months or “as soon as reasonably possible.” These timelines were implausible then and remain implausible today.

When Labor prime minister Julia Gillard revived the Pacific solution in 2012, it was clearly foreseeable that the same script would play out. Most asylum seekers would quickly be granted refugee status, but third countries would be reluctant to take them for resettlement. Medical research has shown that people’s mental and physical health then deteriorates under indefinite mandatory detention, leading to psychological crises and self-harm.

Governments in Canberra have long hoped that a third country would rescue Australia from this brutal and futile policy, but options are limited. Third countries welcoming refugees want to take the best and the brightest, professional people with good skills and qualifications and young people with good prospects for education and a healthy life. As the numbers are whittled down, Nauru will be left with people who have been refused refugee status, have complex medical problems, are in divided families or have received adverse security rulings.

The Obama administration’s bilateral agreement to resettle up to 1250 refugees from Manus and Nauru was begrudgingly affirmed by Donald Trump in his notorious phone conversation with Malcolm Turnbull early last year (although a leaked transcript of their conversation revealed that President Trump was bemused as to why Australia would not take people who had been granted refugee status and security clearances).

US interior secretary Ryan Zinke, who led the American delegation to this year’s Forum dialogue in Nauru, confirmed that the Trump administration would continue taking refugees from Nauru and Manus Island, but stressed in no uncertain terms that this would be a lengthy process. “We honour our commitments,” he said, “but the [security] vetting process has been frustratingly slow, especially from countries with no database, where the records are unclear.”

As Malcolm Turnbull emphasised to President Trump during their phone call, the United States doesn’t have to take the full number of 1250 refugees: “Every individual is subject to your vetting. You can decide to take them or to not take them after vetting. You can decide to take 1000 or one hundred. It is entirely up to you. The obligation is to only go through the process.” Going through the process — or just going through the motions — will continue to distort the economy and social structure of Nauru.

As chief secretary of the government of former Nauruan president René Harris, Mathew Batsiua played a crucial role in establishing the offshore processing program in Nauru. Today, he is a leading opponent of the Waqa government. (Just days after we spoke, Batsiua’s lawyers won a permanent stay on serious criminal charges relating to a 2015 protest outside the Nauru parliament.)

As a former MP and justice minister, Batsiua continues to support the offshore processing program as a contribution to a regional solution to the international refugee crisis. But he now argues that the mismanagement of the program is causing long-term problems for Nauru’s economy.

“Nauru goes into these arrangements with the view that it’s a transit country, so everything is temporary,” Batsiua told me. “The quicker people move on, the better for them, the better for everybody. They can move on with their lives, because we are dealing with human beings. It’s something we’ll try to deal with as best we can.

“But I’m talking about Nauru’s ongoing viability as an economy. When the numbers dwindle, and they will, the government hasn’t paid any attention to our local industry. All the industries that were thriving when they took over — the rehab, the phosphate mining, the fisheries — they are all struggling. In the phosphate industry, the number of buyers has gone down, certainly the tonnage has gone right down, there’s a lack of capital equipment and they’ve had to retrench people.”

Batsiua believes that the government has overwhelmingly focused on the refugee processing centre and “gloried in the revenues derived from that, at the expense of investing in our permanent industries.”

But there’s one fundamental difference between Pacific solutions Mark I (2001–07) and Mark II (2012–ongoing), and that is the fact that Nauru signed the 1951 Refugee Convention in 2011. As a party to the convention, it is obliged to provide sanctuary for refugees, assist their wellbeing and not return them to unsafe countries. As the program winds down, the danger is that future governments in Canberra may justify walking away from the remaining complex cases because Nauru is a sovereign country with its own obligations under international law.

For the young Iraqi woman, the young Iranian man, the traumatised children and the other asylum seekers and refugees on the island, as well as the people of Nauru, this shameful business cannot end too quickly. After the looming Australian elections, will an incoming Labor government have the courage to develop new policies? •

The post The island making everyone crazy appeared first on Inside Story.

That the figure of James Cook (1728–79) should feature simultaneously, and so prominently, in two different hemispheres — joined, it’s true, by more than 200 years of colonial history — is powerful testament to a legacy that has been vigorously debated not only in Australia but also in other places where his shadow still falls: in Canada, New Zealand and a succession of Pacific islands from Tonga to Fiji to Hawaii.

Through much of Australia’s modern history, Cook was the archetypal “hero of Empire,” the very embodiment of civilised British virtues. His “discovery” of the eastern coast of the continent is still widely regarded as the founding moment of the modern Australian nation. But his legacy has been clouded by a reconsideration of the violence perpetrated on Indigenous peoples, not only during the voyages themselves, but also during the process of colonisation after he took possession of Australia on 22 August 1770.

The first of those two views of Cook was captured in the early twentieth century in E. Phillips Fox’s imagining of his landing at Botany Bay (above); the second can be seen in Daniel Boyd’s reworking of that image in We Call Them Pirates Out Here, painted just over a century later. Both are on display at the British Library in an exhibition that valiantly ventures beyond the dichotomy they encapsulate. What the library’s curators attempt to offer — using an enormous array of documents, artefacts, maps, videos and other installations — is a more complicated appraisal of the man in his historical context.

Viewing this exhibition as an Australian is both a privilege and a provocation. Cook is not a figure towards whom indifference is possible; but nor is he someone whose legacy we should let be plundered for political purposes. Like all treasurers, Scott Morrison is accused of cooking the books for political advantage; the metaphor is apt here, as our evaluation of the man and the figure of James Cook is subject to another kind of cooking the books.

At the behest of both the British Admiralty and the Royal Society, James Cook undertook three voyages to the Pacific Ocean, first as Lieutenant James Cook aboard the Endeavour in 1768–71, and later as Captain James Cook in command of the Resolution and Discovery in 1772–75 and 1776–80. The voyages were remarkable feats in their way, arduous and exacting, involving years away from the comforts of home amid storms at sea, towering icebergs in the far southern latitudes, and near shipwreck off the Australian coast. The toll was enormous. Disease, bad food, and the physical rigours of voyaging meant that many were never to return. By the time of his final voyage, Cook was worn down by the pressures of command, a punishing workload and illness, fated to be killed in a confrontation with Hawaiian islanders.

Using the words of Cook’s own journals and the writings of the naturalists who accompanied the voyages, the exhibition curators seek to do justice to both the geostrategic and the scientific purposes of the expeditions by showing us how its members interpreted oceans, lands and peoples previously (largely) unknown in Europe. Aboard the Endeavour were Joseph Banks, gentleman botanist and later president of the Royal Society, and Daniel Solander, a favoured former student of the great Swedish botanist and natural historian Carl Linnaeus. Father-and-son German naturalists Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster travelled on Cook’s second expedition. Other naturalists on the various expeditions included the Swedish naturalist (and another former pupil of Linnaeus) Anders Sparrman, and the Scottish surgeon and naturalist William Anderson, neither of whom, sadly, feature much in this exhibition.

The expeditions were partly the product of the Enlightenment. That renovation of European intellectual, artistic, scientific and religious endeavours gave rise to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, economic and cultural globalisation, unprecedented movements of population, and new patterns of global encounter and exchange. The Enlightenment was also entangled with Europe’s slave trade and its eventual abolition, and it played host to the first conflict that can genuinely be considered a world war (the Seven Years’ War), which reached into all theatres of European imperial rivalry, including the Americas, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Philippines and India. It was this conflict that gave the young Cook his first commission, enabling him to display his talents as mathematician and cartographer as part of Britain’s conquest of the French colony in Canada.

From France and Sweden to Scotland and Germany, intellectuals engaged in the task of reconstructing and reordering knowledge, not just of nature but of society, history and humanity itself. Cook’s voyages were inspired by efforts to investigate and to catalogue the world, and the voyages themselves (and the works they inspired) became favoured sources of data and matters of debate among intellectuals who never left Europe.

In anticipation of their significance, all three expeditions were accompanied by naturalists, botanists and astronomers. Each was expected to observe, record and write about what he saw and heard and learned, and to communicate these findings to an eager public. The artists who accompanied the three expeditions all worked under trying conditions. Alexander Buchan, Herman Sporing and Sydney Parkinson, each of whom travelled aboard the Endeavour, were botanical illustrators who soon found themselves painting landscapes and even portraits inspired by the scenes and the people they beheld. The expedition also claimed their lives, first Buchan’s and then Sporing’s and Parkinson’s, but not before they had created a rich record of cross-cultural encounters.

The formally trained professional artists who accompanied the second and third Cook expeditions were more fortunate. William Hodges (Resolution, 1772–75) and John Webber (Resolution, 1776–80) each left a considerable body of accomplished images, often framed by dramatically rendered scenery or classically posed figures that echoed the neoclassical sensibilities of the period. They also amplified a more overtly propagandistic image of Cook the peace-maker and Cook the civiliser, benevolently spreading Britain’s Empire. Both men also produced arresting portraits and social scenes that provided the ethnographic insights for which there was an insatiable appetite in Europe.

A Canoe of Tongatapu by William Hodges, 1774. British Library

The exhibition presents a great variety of images — landscapes, seascapes, portraits, botanical illustrations, drawings, paintings and sketches — some of which reveal the artists’ attempts to work out exactly what it was they were seeing. In Parkinson’s sketch of a kangaroo, for instance — the first known European drawing of the marsupial — we can see on the paper a rapid search for the right lines, the correct bulk and heft.

Inevitably, the magnificence of Hodges’s dramatic scenes and the humanity of his intimate portraits make the most vivid impression. A high point of the exhibition is the pairing of Hodges’s preparatory sketches and portraits with finished works such as his large painted cartoon of the Tahitian war fleet. These images, surely difficult to execute aboard the ship, would serve as preparatory sketches for paintings to be finished back in London.

By contrast, scenes from the earlier voyage — Buchan’s depiction of the interaction between Cook’s crew and a group of Tierra del Fuegan people at the A View of the Endeavour’s Watering Place in the Bay of Good Success (below) and Parkinson’s curious image of a New Zealand War Canoe Bidding Defiance to the Ship — are less stagey and self-conscious records of encounter. Buchan seems to show the prosaic search for communication in trade. Parkinson’s image is more of a mystery. His journal, like those of Cook and Banks, testified to complex encounters between British and Māori, in both eager trade and loud defiance. But what did he depict in this image? This is no haka. Was the botanical artist trying things out again, searching for the forms and rhythm of the scene?

A View of the Endeavour’s Watering Place in the Bay of Good Success by Alexander Buchan, 1769. British Library

The encounters with Indigenous people were often charged with tension and mutual incomprehension. They could end in violence, though frequently a more peaceful exchange of goods and of information took place. The curators of Captain Cook: The Voyages want to make us aware of how the travellers sought to understand peoples so different from themselves, and how they earnestly tried to convey their humanity to audiences at home, there to be reinterpreted by other writers and artists. In the process, the distorted lens of colonial travel and observation was further distorted by a range of factors, from ignorance to arrogance and from prurience to commercial interest. To its credit, the exhibition challenges the distorted lens through which episodes of violent contact were viewed, and especially the accusations of cannibalism made in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Arguably the most potent case of a distorted lens was the depiction of the death of Cook himself. The circumstances are hazy and the eyewitness accounts vary. The bald facts are that, having spent a month peacefully in Hawaii in 1779, the Resolution and Discovery departed amid signs the islanders were sorry to see them go. Was the departure regretted because ties with the Europeans provided the islanders with access to prestige and knowledge of use to them in island politics? Was Cook’s departure mourned because his arrival had coincided with the harvest festival of Makihiki, and he regarded as the personification of the god Lono?

Whatever the case, when the Resolution returned to Kealakekua Bay a few days later, after breaking its foremast, the islanders were tense. Quarrels and arguments broke out, and the travellers described the islanders’ behaviour as “insolent.” When Cook attempted to assert his authority by marching through the town with his armed marines and seizing King Kalaniʻōpuʻu-a-Kaiamamao, an angry crowd gathered. Stones were thrown, and Cook was hit. He fell, and was clubbed and stabbed to death in the crowd. Guns were fired. Four marines were also killed, and two wounded. Cook’s body was taken by the islanders and disembowelled, the flesh baked off the bones in accordance with islander funerary practices. Some of the remains were eventually returned to the distraught crew for burial at sea.

Whether or not Cook had been deified by the islanders, news of his death led to his European deification, or apotheosis. Omai: Or, a Trip Round the World, a play produced in 1785, culminated in the figure of Cook rising heavenward above the island, borne aloft by the figures of Fame, blowing her trumpets to the ages, and Britannia, the female embodiment of Britain’s national and imperial identity. The island and ocean he did so much to chart and claim recedes beneath his ascent, inviting other Britons to follow in his wake. The image of the apotheosis was based on a drawing by Webber, and the shipboard artist was front and centre in the myth-making. James Cook the man would become Captain Cook the imperial icon.

The exhibition uses the death of Cook as an opportunity to explore the unreliability of eyewitness reports and the shifting tropes of representation. The small selection of images depicting Cook’s death includes Webber’s, which appears to show a peaceful Cook — arm extended to dissuade his marines from firing — about to be stabbed by sinister, crowding islanders. Webber, who was on board the ship that day, would not have seen the events close up, but his image appeared to provide a powerful verification of European assumptions about islander savagery.

Other artists used Cook’s death as a subject for grand historical drama. In George Carter’s 1783 Death of Captain James Cook (below, but not in the exhibition), violence on both sides is emphasised, and Cook himself is implicated, his musket raised as if to club assailants who are imagined as very dark-skinned and sinister. In Johann Zoffany’s unfinished painting of 1795, The Death of Captain James Cook (also below and not in the exhibition), the islanders are used to epitomise “savagery” in muscular, neoclassical forms, hinting that these were people, like Europe’s ancient Greeks and Romans, of another, less civilised age.

Death of Captain James Cook, George Carter, 1783. British Museum

The Death of Captain James Cook, Johann Zoffany, 1795. Royal Museums Greenwich

Whose savagery? Which civilisation? What benevolence? Why violence? The voyages raise so many intersecting questions, amplified by a visual legacy that includes the meticulous maps and charts that Cook himself produced. Visitors to the exhibition are shown how science and art, mathematics and emotions, knowledge and ignorance were all decisively intertwined, bequeathing a compelling and complicated legacy.

That legacy is entwined with the mantle of “discovery.” Cook’s expeditions encountered peoples who were in no sense in need of “discovery.” The Pacific had been voyaged across and its islands populated hundreds of years before the arrival of Cook and the other European travellers who preceded and followed him.

The curators of Captain Cook: The Voyages have striven to represent Indigenous agency and register their orders of knowledge. They draw attention to the Tahitian islander Tupaia, who (with his companion Taiata) accompanied Cook for part of the Endeavour voyage. (He would die in Batavia, or modern Jakarta.) Not only did Tupaia leave images indicating how he saw these newcomers and others along the way, he also provided vital information about local Pacific islander geography and languages. Cook valued his knowledge even as he appropriated it in his own maps and charts.

Banks and a Maori, Tupaia, 1769. British Library

On the Resolution voyage, the Ra’iatean islander Mai (Omai) accompanied Cook all the way home to Britain, where he became, to Cook’s chagrin, a social sensation. But Cook was annoyed by more than Mai’s fame: he had been embarrassed by the Admiralty’s publication of his own journals from the Endeavour expedition, prepared by a professional writer, John Hawkesworth. These editions, beautifully produced in bound volumes with accompanying maps and engravings, sold like hot cakes. The suggested sexual improprieties of Banks with the Tahitian “Queen” Purea (Oberea) sparked ridicule. (Cook, who was scrupulous in such matters, had good reason to fear unregulated sexual relations between his crew and islanders; they could easily lead to tension and bloodshed, as they had on Captain Wallis’s voyage to Tahiti aboard the Dolphin in 1767.)

Further controversy — this time over which imperial nation was responsible for spreading venereal disease among the islanders — would erupt in the pages of published accounts of Cook’s expedition and in contemporaneous publications based on the French expedition under Louis Antoine de Bougainville.

The exhibition doesn’t avoid uncomfortable truths about colonial encounters in the Pacific. But it prefers to dwell on perceptions: who was looking at whom, and what did they see? Through Tupaia’s images, and through William Parry’s portrait of Mai with Banks and Solander, it allows us to see the moment of “discovery” from the other side. Colonial encounters were moments of seeing that were seen; the discovery was mirrored. One arresting image in the exhibition is Tupaia’s sketch of Indigenous Australians — people he and other Pacific islanders had not (to our knowledge) ever encountered before — fishing from their canoes. Who discovered whom here?

This is a reminder that it is time, finally, to retire “discovery” from the vocabulary that for so long framed Cook’s expeditions. It is like a mantle of lead, cast over Cook’s shoulders, bearing the impression of Empire. It’s no wonder that the human has sunk beneath the waves without trace, leaving only monuments in his place.

Monuments of empire cast long shadows, and Australians should be willing to cast more light into the gloom to see what the shadows conceal. In 1768, the British believed that Cook’s expedition would cast its own new light of knowledge. Aboard the Endeavour, Banks and Solander, working in conjunction with the illustrators who accompanied them — Sporing, Parkinson and Buchan — undertook an enormous amount of botanical work. Among them they collected, catalogued and illustrated 110 plant genera previously unknown in Europe and 1300 new species.

The ostensible purpose of the voyage, though, was not botany but astronomy. Cook was instructed to observe the Transit of Venus, which offered an opportunity to map the path of the planet between the Earth and the Sun. The calculations involved were not only of scientific interest, but also promised significant advantages in navigation. That the British should be so interested in better navigating an expanse of ocean still largely unknown to Europeans spoke of their rapid rise to global imperial status. It is therefore highly significant that Cook was also instructed, having completed the observation from Tahiti, to proceed south and to “discover,” chart and take possession — “with the consent of the natives” — of the presumed vast southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita.

It is his compliance with those orders that still divides Australians to this day. By his act of possession, he turned Terra Australis into British imperial territory and, as some see it, created the lie that this could be done because that territory was also a terra nullius, an empty, unpossessed, unowned land. In reality, he did no such thing. The characterisation is simply too crude. At no point did Cook declare or assume that Australia was a terra nullius. Indeed, he famously expressed his own misgivings about the imperial quest on which he was embarked (others, such as William Anderson, gave voice to more strident criticism).

Nonetheless, it was Cook’s Endeavour voyage that facilitated (and Banks and others who avidly promoted) the colonisation of Australia. Cook’s second and third expeditions also consolidated British claims and ambitions against other rival European imperial powers (notably France, Spain and Russia) on the northwest coast of Canada, in the central Pacific and in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He did this not just by raising flags and firing guns to take possession of various locations, memorably also by scratching out the inscription of prior Spanish claims to possession of Tahiti. He also did it by enabling the colonisation of knowledge.

The exhibition celebrates the scientific legacy of the expeditions, especially in the field of botany. Even here, though, a more critical appraisal would be welcome. In the eighteenth century, botany had become a kind of master science of European colonisation. It was a means to render known the untapped potentials of nature, to map landscapes, and to appropriate local knowledge in the authoritative cadences of scientific credibility. Colonial travel and exploration were the means whereby new catalogues of plants and new possibilities for harnessing their potential could be exploited.

It was for this reason that Solander and Banks accompanied Cook aboard the Endeavour in 1768–70. By ambitiously botanising at each and every port of call, they were claiming new ground for European knowledge, just as Cook was claiming seas and territories for Britain’s Empire. Both claims were a form of colonisation, extending a new dispensation that echoed in new names for places and for plants, where they presumed no prior names should remain. To botanise was to give purpose to colonisation by collating and curating the means to turn “wasteland” into Empire. To collect and catalogue plants on new shores was to botanise in terra nullius.

The exhibition allows us to see how intimately scientific activities were interwoven with colonial aspiration. Cook’s own journals from the expedition attest that Banks and Solander were direct participants in the key moments of colonial contact throughout the expedition. When the two men ventured ashore, as they did at every opportunity, they collected and catalogued as many plants as they could find. In 1768, at Tierra Del Fuego, they became lost gathering plants on shore and almost died from exposure to the extreme cold. (Two of Banks’s servants actually did die.) The following year, on Tahiti, Solander assisted Cook in making his important astronomical observations, and was also an unwitting subject of the islanders’ efforts to acquire the sacred prestige of the newcomers by picking their pockets, in his case depriving him of his spyglass. As unfortunate as that sounds, it was not as bad as the theft of Captain Cook’s stockings one night from under his very head.

Later that year, on Aotearoa/New Zealand, Solander accompanied Cook and Banks on their first landing and meeting with the Māori. And in Australia on 29 April 1770, he again accompanied Cook and Banks on their first encounter with Indigenous Australians. It was an inauspicious meeting: the Indigenous warriors they saw on the beach all ran off at the sight of the boat coming ashore. Cook and his party resolved, Cook wrote, to “throw them some nails, beads, etc., a shore, which they took up, and seem’d not ill pleased with, in so much that I thought that they beckon’d to us to come ashore; but in this we were mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us, upon which I fir’d a musquet…” They threw a spear in reply. Cook then fired “a Second Musquet, load with small Shott,” which hit one of the warriors.

It was in this way that the colonisation of Australia began: with misunderstanding, shouted threats, thrown objects, and gunfire. Banks and Solander were there again at another and even more telling incident on 22 August 1770. On this day, at a place forever since named Possession Island, Cook recorded:

I landed with a party of men, accompanied by Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander… Having satisfied myself… [that] from the Latitude of 38 degrees South down to this place, I am confident, was never seen or Visited by any European before us… I now once More hoisted English Colours, and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern coast from the above Latitude down to this place by the Name of New Wales, together with all the Bays, Harbours, Rivers, and Islands, situated upon the said Coast; after which we fired 3 Volleys of small Arms, which were answer’d by the like number from the Ship.

This was a moment of profound significance in Australia’s recent history. Despite the continuous 60,000-year (or more) inhabitation of the land by a people rich in culture and knowledge, subjects of laws and of lore since time out of mind, as fully in possession of themselves as it is possible for a people to be, by this simple act of possession they and the land on which they lived became subject to another’s ownership. Australia, from Cook’s act of possession forward, was to be irrevocably colonised.

In the early days after Federation in 1901, Captain Cook was a useful symbol to reassert British identity and imperial belonging. In his reimagined majesty he became the semi-divine presence invoked in statuary and art — an anaesthetising balm for a hapless nation of arriviste white-skinned ex-colonials earnest to deny the antiquity of prior inhabitation by a peoples they were engaged in supplanting, and troubled by their isolation in a region teeming with other peoples they feared would do the same to them. Cook became an image of how Australians of a particular pedigree wanted to see themselves: as bold, brave, heroic and civilised.

In 2018, Cook certainly continues to symbolise, but what exactly? Most recently his likeness in heroic bronze has intensified the dispute over the date of Australia Day (since 1988, commemorated on the anniversary of the landing of the first British convict-colonists in 1788) and the accusation that the date commemorates a colonial genocide.

The bronze relics of Australia’s colonial insecurities in the early twentieth century have attracted new commentary.

Boyd’s We Call Them Pirates Out Here, like the British Library exhibition, is a provocation to think carefully about our national symbols. Symbols are never just symbolic; they tremble with a latent power. Cook as a pirate is an image that confronts us with the reality that European colonisation was a theft, not just of land and resources but also of whole peoples’ futures. Those thefts were sanctified with laws and justified by the other peoples who inherited the theft by building their own futures.

Pirate, hero, coloniser, civiliser, scientist. Who was James Cook? The question lingers over another recent reimagining, Michael Parekowhai’s The English Channel, on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A larger-than-life figure of a dejected-looking Cook, fashioned in highly polished stainless steel, it is sitting on a sculptor’s tripod and positioned to look down through a large window onto Sydney Harbour (but not Botany Bay, where he actually landed). This Cook reflects all attempts to answer that very question.

Michael Parekowhai, The English Channel, 2015.

He seems weighed down by his own legacy, and we see ourselves reflected but weirdly out of shape. We might be led to ask why we remain so convinced that the figure of Cook should bear images of ourselves.

This is not a question the British Library exhibition asks directly, but it is a question that it invites us to consider. The decision by the federal government to fund the renovation and enlargement of the memorial to Captain Cook might seem an anachronistic gesture if not for the fact that our colonial and military past has become so relentlessly politicised, mined for bullets in the pitiless war for momentary advantage, and carried on in confected tones of aggrieved and indignant pride or sentimental advocacy.

Captain Cook: The Voyages is the kind of exhibition that might provide impetus for a more complicated public appraisal of Cook. But few Australians will have the opportunity to see it, or to hear the videotaped views of Indigenous Australians, Māori, Canadians and Pacific Island peoples who have the opportunity, in the course of the exhibition, to reflect on Cook’s complicated legacy.

Not long ago, the Australian government dismissed the latest attempt by Indigenous Australians to present their own vision for the future, in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Cook is not the appropriate avatar of Empire to embody this continued denial, but his persistent enrolment as national icon ensures that his legacy will continue to shadow the nation’s future. Would it be too much to ask that, instead of avatar or icon, hero or villain, we begin to see Cook with fresh eyes? We might then begin to see beyond him, beyond the reflection of our wished-for selves, and begin to perceive new possibilities. ●

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Sixty years ago, on 28 April 1958, the British government exploded a 2.8 megaton thermonuclear weapon at Kiritimati Island in the central Pacific. (Kiritimati, known at the time as Christmas Island, was part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, which are now known as Kiribati and Tuvalu.) Codenamed Grapple Y, this was one of nine detonations on Malden and Kiritimati islands that made up Operation Grapple, the program to develop the British hydrogen bomb.

Many Grapple participants have suffered from cancer, leukaemia and other illnesses over the intervening decades, conditions that can be caused by exposure to ionising radiation. Sailors and soldiers from Britain, New Zealand and Fiji have long called for the British government to assist in dealing with persistent health problems.

Operation Grapple was inspired by the United States’ program of hydrogen bomb testing, which had begun in the Marshall Islands in 1952. After hearing of the fifteen-megaton Bravo test in March 1954, prime minister Winston Churchill decided Britain must develop its own thermonuclear (or hydrogen) bombs. In a letter to US president Dwight D. Eisenhower immediately after Bravo, Churchill recognised both the power of the hydrogen bomb and the hazards posed by fallout:

I am told that several million people would certainly be obliterated by four or five of the latest H-bombs. In a few more years, these could be delivered by rocket without even hazarding the life of a pilot… Another ugly idea has been put in my head, namely, the dropping of an H-bomb in the sea to windward of the island or any other seaborne country in suitable weather, by rocket or air plane, or perhaps released by submarine. The explosion would generate an enormous radioactive cloud, many square miles in extent, which would drift over the land attacked and extinguish human life over very large areas.

Nearly 14,000 British troops travelled to the central Pacific for the tests. But it was truly a Commonwealth bomb, built with the support of other Anglosphere leaders.

Australia was already well integrated into the British weapons program, having hosted twelve nuclear tests — at Monte Bello, Emu Field and Maralinga — between 1952 and 1957. In 1956, the Menzies government had signed a contract with Britain’s Atomic Energy Authority to supply uranium for British nuclear weapon development using ore mined at Mary Kathleen in Queensland.

Canada was active too: the Chalk River nuclear reactor generated plutonium, tritium and other crucial nuclear materials for the British program, and its government allowed local airbases to be used to transport nuclear components from Britain to the central Pacific. New Zealand sent aircraft and two naval frigates with 551 New Zealand sailors on board. Fiji, still a British colony, supplied 276 members of the Royal Fiji Military Force and the Fiji Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

Dozens of Gilbertese islanders worked as labourers to support the military operation. Radiation monitoring stations were established in Australia as well as in the NZ colonies of Western Samoa and Cook Islands, and in British dependencies such as Fiji and, of course, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands.

After three unsuccessful tests on uninhabited Malden Island in May–June 1957, the British government decided to continue testing from its base on Kiritimati Island, where thousands of British, NZ and Fijian troops were located. This saved the time and expense of sailing a naval task force south to Malden Island for each test, but increased the risk of radiation exposure for the troops and Gilbertese plantation workers living on the island.

By mid 1957, Britain was under pressure from a looming global ban on atmospheric nuclear testing. Under prime minister Harold Macmillan, it urgently sought political and logistic support for the tests from the Australian, NZ and Canadian governments. Researching my book Grappling with the Bomb, I found evidence in Britain’s national archive that all three Commonwealth governments backed the plans and offered support from their armed forces, but pressed for secrecy to avoid adverse public reaction.

Macmillan met with Robert Menzies in London in late July 1957. Menzies, whose government had won a fourth term in December 1955, had long been a supporter of the British nuclear program, personally approving atomic testing in Australia without seeking cabinet or parliamentary approval. Macmillan was anxious to bolster Menzies’s support for further operations in the desert of South Australia, and briefed his Australian counterpart about the planned expansion of H-bomb testing. (Previous British A-bomb testing at Maralinga had ended in October 1956, but the British were eager to use the desert test range again to develop atomic triggers for the thermonuclear weapons.)

Not long after, Macmillan sought the support of NZ prime minister Sidney Holland. Writing to Holland, he expressed concern that growing pressure at the United Nations for a Partial Test Ban Treaty might force a halt to the British testing program before Britain could finalise development of its megaton weapons:

I have spoken to Menzies, who is here, and he is very anxious that we should proceed and will give us all the help that we require from him. I may be questioned in parliament before we rise, in which case I shall merely try to keep my hands free and say that until such time as there is an international agreement on tests we must be free to proceed, but I shall of course give no indication of our decision. No doubt in the course of the next period there will be a certain leaking because of personnel involved, but I think we can ride this as long as none of us makes any definitive statement.

Holland pledged that New Zealand would support further tests with a naval deployment. He also highlighted concern among Commonwealth governments about growing international pressure for a test ban treaty:

I fully understand reasons for United Kingdom’s wishing to continue and complete Grapple in face of possible United Nations and popular pressure… For my own part I am quite willing to agree that New Zealand should give whatever assistance is possible on lines similar to that accorded for the tests.

I can appreciate that your present planning does not permit you to give me any precise idea of date of any tests, but I do hope that it would be possible on this occasion to keep me fully informed as to your intentions, especially in view of fact that they may very well coincide with date of the New Zealand general elections.

Like Australia and New Zealand, Canada had joined Britain and the United States in the 1947 UKUSA treaty, which opened the way for joint intelligence and surveillance operations between the five Anglosphere nations. Macmillan now turned to newly elected Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker for support for the H-bomb program. Would he allow overflights by RAF aircraft carrying the nuclear weapons from England to the Pacific? “We would be glad to cooperate in the manner you suggest,” Diefenbaker wrote. “I assume that the same precautions in regard to safety will be followed as were followed in the earlier operations of the same nature, and it will not be necessary to give publicity to these flights over Canada.”

In the decades since the tests, successive British governments have argued that radioactive fallout posed no danger to participants. But independent medical studies, such as research conducted by Professor Al Rowland at Massey University in New Zealand, have documented significant chromosomal translocations among the NZ sailors who joined the naval task force for Operation Grapple.

The evidence of genetic damage raises concern about the children and grandchildren of participants. Testimony from current residents of Kiritimati show that children of Gilbertese plantation workers on the island in the 1950s suffered eye damage and other health effects. To pursue the issue, survivors on Kiritimati have formed the Association of Cancer Patients Affected by the British and American Bomb Tests.

Meanwhile, people across the Pacific islands continue to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Many Commonwealth governments in the region — New Zealand, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Fiji, Vanuatu and Samoa among them — have signed the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. (The Australian government has refused to sign, ahving joined the nuclear weapons states in boycotting the treaty negotiations). The treaty obliges countries to support environmental remediation and assist the survivors of the nuclear weapons testing and use.

Sixty years after Operation Grapple, the ageing British, NZ and Fijian soldiers and sailors have called on prime minister Theresa May to take urgent action. They want the British government to provide compensation, medical support and environmental rehabilitation to people affected by Operation Grapple. They seek funding for an independent medical study to investigate potential intergenerational health effects for the children and grandchildren of participants from New Zealand, Kiribati and Fiji.

If the Commonwealth truly wishes to show its value to the people of the Pacific, CHOGM might start by pressing May to clean up the 1950s nuclear legacies of British colonialism. ●

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Yet the reports seem to be based on something. Fairfax journalist David Wroe is well respected, and judging by the fact that his sources are notably reticent and he attended a Lowy Institute security workshop just last week, it could be based on information from intelligence agencies.

Plausible deniability is built into the story. Wroe argues that a dual-use facility will be developed incrementally around the Luganville Wharf on Santo Island. He isn’t claiming that we will see it immediately transformed into a base for troops ready to protect China’s interests in Vanuatu. And those interests — beyond fishing, possible future seabed mining, and a handful of business migrants with whom the Chinese party-state has a troubled relationship — are negligible.

Incremental or otherwise, we are a long way off a permanent Chinese military presence in the Pacific. Military-to-military ties in the region are minimal (Timor-Leste is the only country hosting a Chinese defence attaché) and only two other countries in the South Pacific — Papua New Guinea and Fiji — have defence forces. The Vanuatu Mobile Force is a paramilitary outfit answerable to the police and will likely stay that way, although it has aspirations that the People’s Liberation Army could conceivably feed.

Perhaps foolishly, I made an on-the-record prediction that China is likely to have a base in the South Pacific within the next five to ten years. Despite the fact that Luganville would make an excellent harbour, Vanuatu would not have been my first pick: Tonga, Fiji and even Papua New Guinea look more likely. It might even be the case that this week’s controversy isn’t about Vanuatu at all — that it’s really an amplified message to Pacific leaders from Australia’s political and defence establishment. Papua New Guinea, whose foreign minister is currently visiting China ahead of the APEC summit on a promise that China will “promote greater development of [the] bilateral strategic partnership,” won’t have missed the memo.

President Xi Jinping will be visiting Papua New Guinea for the first time in November for the summit, and will announce substantial aid, military and commercial initiatives. Canberra’s message could be that two out of three are welcome. More scholarships and help for PNG’s cashflow crisis are likely, but those providing this information seem to hope it won’t extend to defence matériel or an exchange of defence attachés.

The messaging could also have a domestic dimension. In diplomatic terms, there’s a case that China has been putting in more effort than Vanuatu’s “strategic partner of choice” (that’s Australia, according to foreign minister Julie Bishop). Vanuatu’s prime minister, Charlot Salwai, has been to China twice in two years but has yet to visit Australia. Canberra gives more aid than Beijing does; but Chinese aid is responsive to the needs of Vanuatu’s leaders. Moreover, further cuts to the Australian aid budget have been mooted, with entire sectors said to be in treasurer Scott Morrison’s crosshairs.

But let’s entertain the notion that the intelligence provided to Fairfax has some basis. Leaving aside Vanuatu’s potential strategic importance, another explanation emerges if we step back from “China” to unpack which Beijing-linked figures are active on the ground in Vanuatu.

The main Chinese contractor on the Luganville Wharf is the Shanghai Construction Group, or SCG. This company, like the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation and various arms of China Railway Group, is ubiquitous across the Pacific. I’ve come across them in many places, and even helped extract one of their managers from a police lock-up (despite the clumsiest effort at bribery in recorded history). The SCG is ambitious and more than willing to lean on and lubricate Pacific officials to achieve its goal of rapid expansion across the region.

In the case of the wharf, where Australian spooks might see a calculated plan to link to the airport, expand communications facilities or maintain and refuel ships, SCG sees Phase II, III and IV. Chinese contractors are legitimately looking for more work, and once you’re established in a remote island nation with plant and labour on hand, why not find ways to keep working rather than pack up and go home?

While these companies are usually state-owned, giving them the heft to negotiate finance from the Chinese state, their Pacific-based managers enjoy considerable autonomy. Just as Chinese companies reverse-engineer aid projects by pitching them to agencies back home in coordination with Pacific partners, a reverse-engineered facility is not out of the question. The China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation in particular was heavily involved in the Djibouti base.

A space-tracking facility to coordinate with Chinese research and space-tracking ships makes more strategic sense than a naval base. WikiLeaks cables revealed an offer to build a radar array in Timor-Leste to monitor shipping in the Wetar Strait. The offer, reported to US officials by then deputy prime minister José Guterres, was declined. China did build a space-tracking station on Tarawa atoll in Kiribati in the late 1990s, although targeted dollar diplomacy saw the government there flip recognition to Taiwan in 2003, so the equipment couldn’t have been crucial to Beijing’s efforts. But space is a higher priority now, one of three “strategic frontiers” for the People’s Liberation Army’s Strategic Support Force.

A fully fledged base, Djibouti-style, is unlikely. Vanuatu takes its non-aligned status seriously, and it’s not clear what People’s Liberation Army troops would do in the middle of the Pacific, far from crucial sea lanes and commercial interests. While it’s unwise to rule out anything in Xi Jinping’s new era, the current version of this tale looks baseless. •

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But look out Hollywood, move over Bollywood. Operation Red Sea comes from China and is the latest in a series of blockbusters that combine explosive special effects with classic Hollywood clichés and propaganda motifs from the People’s Republic. Directed by Hong Kong film-maker Dante Lam, it is China’s second-highest-grossing movie of all time, raking in US$551 million in foreign sales during the five weeks after its release last month.

It’s a mixture of Black Hawk Down, Die Hard and The Perils of Pauline. Elite Chinese navy commandos are deployed to the fictional North African country of Yewaire to rescue Chinese citizens trapped between government and rebel forces in the middle of a coup d’état. During the operation, a beautiful French-Chinese journalist persuades the commandos to go beyond their mission and take down a group of Islamists who are fleeing with stolen radioactive materials. Many bangs and much bloodshed ensue as our eight heroes take on a stream of bad guys.

Zhang Yi stars as Yang Rui, the leader of the Jiaolong Assault Team (in real life, an elite Special Forces unit of the Chinese navy). Hai Qing, who was named the first UN Women national ambassador for China in 2015, plays the journalist who must persuade the tough-as-guts marines to disobey orders and save the day. It’s all great fun if you like gunfire, explosions and non-stop twists and turns.

The real significance of the film, however, lies in its propaganda value for the Chinese navy. Operation Red Sea was inspired by the 2015 evacuation of nearly 600 Chinese citizens from Aden during Yemen’s civil war, one of a series of similar recent deployments by Chinese forces.

This new kind of intervention was triggered by the deaths of Chinese civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2004. China’s president at the time, Hu Jintao, issued new guidelines on “diplomacy serving the people” (waijiao weimin), which required the military to protect Chinese nationals overseas. The policy faced its first real tests in 2006, when Chinese nationals were caught up in riots and disturbances across the Pacific. In April, China evacuated 310 nationals from Honiara after anti-Chinese rioting following the Solomon Islands elections. Later that month, another 243 Chinese were evacuated from Timor, fleeing armed clashes in the capital, Dili. In November, another 193 Chinese were flown out of Nuku’alofa after riots destroyed a number of Chinese and local businesses in the Tongan capital. Chinese small-business owners and workers from state-owned corporations were also targeted in anti-Asian rioting in Papua New Guinea in May 2009.

These responses were part of a global trend. China is becoming more internationally engaged under Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative and the expanded reach of Chinese state-owned and private corporations. According to the latest data, more than five million Chinese passport holders — diplomats, tourists, construction workers, development technicians and others — now live outside China, especially in the developing world. It’s hardly surprising that significant numbers of them face hazards.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has documented a range of Chinese interventions to protect civilians over the last fifteen years, including evacuations from Chad and Thailand in 2008, Haiti and Kyrgyzstan in 2010, and Egypt and Syria in 2011 during the Arab Spring. These evacuations generally use civilian aircraft and vessels, but the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, has also weighed in with military hardware. The Jiaolong Special Forces were first in the public eye during a 2008 mission to accompany three Chinese warships protecting commercial ships from Somali pirates as part of a UN mandate. Since then, they’ve been more active.

The PLA’s largest deployment was part of the evacuation of more than 35,800 Chinese citizens from Libya in March 2011. The operation involved civilian planes as well as the PLA Jiangkai-II class frigate Xuzhou and four PLA air force Ilyushin transport aircraft sent to Sabha in southern Libya. In March 2015, as the Yemen crisis escalated, 563 Chinese citizens and 233 foreign nationals from thirteen countries were evacuated to Djibouti by the PLA navy. In a region where the Belt and Road Initiative is expanding, China is constructing a naval logistics base in Djibouti, alongside existing military facilities used by the United States, France and Japan.

Given Beijing’s responsibility to protect the growing Chinese diaspora in Oceania, it’s possible that we’ll see more interventions by Chinese forces in the South Pacific. It’s a trend worrying Australian defence planners and politicians, who see the Pacific islands as “our patch” and are wary of the influence of “non-traditional” partners.

Until now, Chinese nationals have been evacuated from the Pacific in civilian aircraft. But some Australian defence analysts are anxious about wider strategic implications, fearing that the PLA’s growing role in “overseas citizen protection” will be used to deploy Chinese military forces in the South Pacific. In this light, films like Operation Red Sea are seen as part of a broader propaganda effort, supporting a strategic plan by the Chinese government to justify military deployments into the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

“Given the potential for anti-Chinese riots in the South Pacific, the requirement for Chinese ‘overseas citizen protection’ may become a reality in Melanesia in the near future,” argues Colonel Peter Connolly, director for international engagement with the Australian army. “In a hypothetical development where a PLA amphibious element arrives to protect evacuees in Papua New Guinea alongside the contingents from Australia and other traditional regional partners, there is scope for accidental friction leading to tension and suspicion of intent.”

There is a certain irony in Colonel Connolly’s concern — indeed, the words “pot” and “kettle” spring to mind. The Australian Defence Force, or ADF, has long deployed military forces to the Pacific in times of crisis, using the evacuation of Australian civilians as justification.

In May 1987, Operation Morris Dance saw the first operational deployment of an Australian infantry unit since the Vietnam war, in response to Sitiveni Rabuka’s coup in Fiji. During Operation Plumbob in June 2000, as conflict escalated between rival militias in the Solomon Islands capital, Honiara, HMAS Tobruk was used to evacuate 426 Australian nationals.

But perhaps the most noteworthy intervention took place between October and December 2006. The ADF deployed SAS troops and three warships off the coast of Fiji as tensions grew between the government of Fiji and the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, or RFMF, led by Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama — a political crisis that culminated in a military coup on 5 December.

The intervention, Operation Quickstep, ended in tragedy when a Blackhawk helicopter carrying the SAS troops crashed during a landing on HMAS Kanimbla, causing two deaths. Commenting on the board of inquiry report into the crash in 2008, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston noted the helicopter was participating in training that “involved performing special operations assaults.” The aim of the assaults, he wrote, “was to deliver Special Forces troops on to a specific target area quickly and at the first attempt in order to maximise surprise and minimise exposure to threat.”

On 29 November, RFMF troops in full battle gear had secured strategic sites, including the Telecom headquarters, Fiji Electricity Authority and government offices, and soldiers had set up roadblocks around the capital, Suva, and fired illumination rounds into the sea. A week later, Commodore Bainimarama seized power. Ironically, some observers in Suva felt that the RFMF used the Australian naval and SAS deployment as an excuse to move forward the date of the coup.

Given past problems with logistic capacity, the Australian government has recently launched HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide, two Canberra-class landing helicopter dock vessels, which can carry troops and helicopters for amphibious assaults. But with China now serving as Fiji’s largest aid donor, the next naval deployment to Suva harbour may not involve the ADF at all. ●

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In the region itself, Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele suggested that the minister’s remarks could “destroy” Australia’s relationship with island nations. He zeroed in on China’s willingness to provide aid to deal with the impact of climate change. The media director of the Vanuatu Daily Post noted that while “we are right to question the design, implementation and price of some of these projects… these roads are not ‘roads to nowhere.’ They lead to our homes.”

Where did the senator’s remarks come from? What is fuelling the differences opening up between the Coalition and Labor on our relationship with China, quite at odds with the Liberal Party’s traditionally pro-business ethos?

A hint came in an opinion piece by Maurice Newman, former chair of the ABC, the ASX, the Australia–Taiwan Business Council and the government’s now-defunct Business Advisory Council. Writing in the Australian earlier this month, Newman revealed that his expertise extends beyond his well-known conspiracy theories about the Bureau of Meteorology, and takes in China’s engagement with the Pacific. The title of the piece — “China Emerges as All-Powerful New Deity in Pacific Cargo Cult” — gave an inkling of what was to follow.

Newman may not have chosen the headline — or the accompanying cartoon, which features a huge panda ready to devour an uninhabited Pacific island — but he went on at length about cargo cults, a term that no credible anthropologist still uses. In fact, I first heard about Newman’s article when one of my doctoral students emailed me to protest that “‘cargo cult’ belongs in the savage slot that anthropology disowned decades ago. No serious anthropologist uses the term anymore.”

Beyond hurting the feelings of anthropologists, though, the piece might reveal where Senator Fierravanti-Wells’s thinking on the Pacific and China comes from. The most striking thing is that Newman’s Pacific is terra nullius. No Pacific Islanders are quoted in an article purporting to be about their welfare, save for Kiribati’s “President Anote Tong,” who is scolded for daring to suggest that his island is sinking like the Titanic. Alas, Newman can’t even get this right.

Tong is the former president of Kiribati, and the incumbent, Taneti Maamau, used the Titanic analogy to convey more or less the opposite, in a YouTube address launching Kiribati Vision 20. “Climate change is indeed a serious problem,” Maamau said. “But we don’t believe that Kiribati will sink like the Titanic ship. The Titanic ship is different. It is built by human hands whilst our country, our beautiful islands are created by the hands of God.”

Where it does appear, Newman’s Pacific is home to passive folk ripe for exploitation by Leninist China, which has “de facto colonialism” as a “probable objective.” We aren’t given a percentage on this, but under the spell of the cargo cult (which seems to apply to the entire South Pacific), “the people of the Pacific are very open to seduction.”

Similarly, in Fierravanti-Wells’s world, Pacific politicians are “duchessed.” This wonderful word suggests that flattery and a top-notch banquet are enough to make Pacific elites sign over anything. But portraying the Pacific’s leaders as passive, corrupt and slightly dim is probably not the best way to win them over.

We’ve been here before. A 2006 Senate report, China’s Emergence: Implications for Australia, had an entire chapter dedicated to warning of the dangers in the southwest Pacific. Analyst after analyst after think-tank expert lined up to warn that China was “going for the jugular” with “lavish banquets” targeting “tiny, fragile Pacific states.” Many of the experts were from the Centre for Independent Studies, of which Newman was a founding member.

Underprepared Chinese aid contractors find the Pacific far from passive. China Jiangsu International saw its workforce in Port Moresby robbed twice in two days when locals discovered it had no security guards watching over the construction site for the National Convention Centre in Waigani. The management of China Shenyang International Economic & Technical Co-operation Ltd begged nearly every other Chinese contractor in Papua New Guinea to take over their Pacific Marine Industrial Zone project. Far from the company benefiting from the A$196 million project, it was local spivs who profited, receiving such vastly inflated payments as four million kina (A$1.5 million) for a gate.

Newman sees China’s presence in the Pacific as monolithic and entirely controlled by Beijing. While he is right that China under president Xi Jinping is a different proposition from that of the Deng Xiaoping era, to conclude that “the emergence of a more assertive, Leninist China means all bets are off” is an astonishing leap, particularly for a leader of the Australian business community.

While much of China’s own propaganda would like you to believe Beijing calls the shots, the reality in the Pacific is far from Newman and Fierravanti-Wells’s vision. The Chinese government has little sway over what happens there. It simply lacks the personnel to oversee aid projects, leaving the field open to Chinese companies, their subcontractors and their Pacific partners, who reverse-engineer projects for approval by China’s Export-Import Bank.

While there is no shortage of white elephants to show for Chinese companies’ work — my own favourite is a seldom-used aquatic centre outside Apia whose mascot was a white elephant, hastily repainted yellow — Pacific leaders are more discerning buyers than they were in 2006, when China unveiled its first round of concessional loans. Even in those early days, where Pacific officials had the right institutional settings in place, Chinese contractors were able to deliver high-quality projects with long-lasting benefits, such as the dormitories at the University of Goroka. What matters is not the source of development finance, but the capacity of the host nation to use or misuse it.

In the past, Chinese diplomats were notorious for not showing up to donor coordination meetings, or showing up late, or spending the entire meeting taking calls. Under Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, China is making an effort to improve the quality of the staff it posts in the Pacific. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce are appointing personnel who can engage with other development partners.

Lack of personnel will continue to hamper China’s efforts, but it is now more interested in working with other nations on development issues. And not all Chinese aid contractors are bent on a race to the bottom. Chinese companies with long-term commitments to the Pacific — such as COVEC PNG and the Guangdong Foreign Construction Group — have adapted to host-country concerns, localised their workforces, and learned how to work with multilateral and bilateral donors, including Australia.

Aid in the Pacific is one area where Australia can look to cooperate and coordinate with China. Roads in the Pacific rarely lead to nowhere; they help Pacific islanders get access to healthcare, education and markets for their goods. It would be unfortunate if the minister’s outdated view of China and the Pacific got in the way of our building them together. ●

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On the outskirts of town, we’re halted by a contingent of French gendarmes. The police block both exits from the bus and send a sniffer dog through, searching for drugs. After the dog reacts to one bag, a young Kanak girl is taken off for questioning. She returns shamefaced after the gendarmes had rummaged through her bag in front of everyone, waving her underclothes in the air, without finding any pakalolo.

New Caledonia has changed a lot since the armed conflict of the mid 1980s, known as les évènements (the Troubles). But interactions like this suggest that inter-community reconciliation still has a way to go.

Last September, a fight between students outside a high school in Noumea saw police deploy a helicopter and thirty-five gendarmes to break up the fight. With footage of the incident going viral, there was much pontification on social media about the problems of the younger generation, and quite a bit of racist abuse aimed at young Kanaks, the indigenous Melanesian people of New Caledonia.

Media commentary frequently portrays young people as delinquents, as layabouts, as a “social problem,” belying the commitment and enthusiasm of young New Caledonians. Given the opportunity, they surge forward to have their say.

They have similar aspirations — about jobs, sexuality, family life and getting involved in community activities — to their counterparts’ in other island nations. But in a colonial society, core differences remain between young Kanaks and those from other ethnic communities.

Despite efforts to improve education and vocational training for Kanaks, vast disparities in qualifications and employment still exist. As young Kanaks move from rural areas to the capital, seeking education, employment and enjoyment, they face competition from the sons and daughters of French bureaucrats arriving from Paris. The new arrivals are armed with better qualifications and fewer cultural obligations to clan and community. With public servants receiving massive subsidies courtesy of the French taxpayer, housing costs have been pushed out of reach of many locals.

With the referendum campaign intensifying, anti-independence politicians have tapped into the prejudice against young Kanaks, making coded complaints about “youth delinquency.” As with Aboriginal and Islander youth in Australia, a climate of moral panic leads to demands for tougher action in the courts.

“Where do we see the benefits from this process of decolonisation that’s under way?” asks a leader of the local branch of the National Front. “In these bands of hooligans, eyes red from alcohol and cannabis, who threaten tourists, or smash up and burn cars?”

Youth leader Bilo Railati of the Association Jeunesse Kanaky Monde, or AJKM, says the justice system lacks appropriate programs for youth diversion and alternatives to incarceration. “They always talk about delinquency, but it’s a word I don’t like to use,” he says. “It’s true we have an upsurge in carjackings and home break-ins. But 90 per cent of prisoners in the Camp Est prison are Kanak, even though we only make up 40 per cent of New Caledonia’s population.”

For Railati, the solution lies in better training and job opportunities. “There are waves of people going overseas for training, however I think we need to change our structures here at home,” he says. “Earlier this year, there was a demonstration because there are many Kanaks, Tahitians and Wallisians [Polynesians from Wallis and Futuna] who can’t find a place in higher education.”

Teacher and historian Paul Fizin has worked as a youth consultant with New Caledonia’s Customary Senate, which brings together chiefs from the country’s eight cultural regions. Many of those leaders recognise the need to support young Kanaks and address their concerns over cultural values, the environment, jobs and training.

“The figures are stark,” he says. “Nearly half the population of New Caledonia is aged less than thirty years, but only two out of five young people have a job. There are enormous educational disparities. One in every two Europeans has a higher degree — the figure is nearer one in twenty for Kanaks and Wallisians.”

With support from the Customary Senate, Fizin helped to organise a series of youth consultations in each of New Caledonia’s eight cultural regions. These were followed by three national congresses for Kanak youth between 2010 and 2015. Other programs focus on cultural activities, tapping the widespread creativity in dance, painting, hip-hop and kaneka — the fusion of reggae, rock and traditional Kanak rhythms popular with young people around the country.

Fizin says all young people have common concerns over education, jobs, family and sexuality, but there are variations between people living in outlying rural areas and those in the working-class suburbs of Noumea.

“There is a problem that urban youth are sometimes accused of not being ‘real’ Kanaks,” he says. “Growing up in the quartiers populaires, they don’t know village life and aren’t fluent in their traditional languages. But they have their own culture and identity in the twenty-first century, often outside the churches and the traditional political parties.”

Walking around Noumea or the bush, you often see young people wearing hoodies emblazoned with the Kanaky flag or pictures of three icons of rebellion: Bob Marley, Che Guevara or Eloi Machoro (a Kanak independence leader gunned down by French police in 1985). But in spite of these symbols, many young people are not fully aware of the history of Kanak nationalism in the 1970s and 80s.

As one teenager told me, “Our parents don’t talk much about les évènements, even though they were on the barricades. In school we don’t hear much about that time, so you have to go and ask if you want to understand the struggle of the Kanak people.”

Next year, eighteen-year-olds who are registered to vote will have the opportunity to participate in a referendum on self-determination. This will be the culmination of a twenty-year transition under the Noumea Accord, which has seen economic, social and political “rebalancing” across the country and the transfer of powers from Paris to the local administration.

But first-time voters were not born when the Noumea Accord was signed in May 1998. Daniel Goa, president of the independence party Union Calédonienne, highlights the need to register thousands of young voters, mobilising them in the face of a widespread lack of interest in elite politics.

“Currently, about 40 per cent of Kanaks — or at least 30 per cent — don’t vote,” he tells me. “So we must work at the level of the family, to provide information so these people can be found. We will find a way to reach out to each tribe, to each extended family, to contact people who are not registered to vote or who abstain. Our objective for 2018 is to mobilise the majority of electors who might participate.”

Bilo Railati says that AJKM, which is aligned with Union Calédonienne, the oldest political party in New Caledonia, is reaching out to young people, trying to stress the importance of next year’s vote. “The fundamental problem we have now in New Caledonia,” he says, “is that we’re heading towards a referendum, but there are still some people who don’t know what the Noumea Accord or the transfer of sovereign powers means.

“For a small minority, they don’t want to participate in the electoral process, because for them democracy in New Caledonia is a fraud. But this is only a minority view. The real problem is that there are many young Kanaks who’d like to vote, but they have problems enrolling because they lack the necessary documentary proof and have been turned away by bureaucrats at their mairie [town hall].”

Without compulsory voting, mobilising the electorate is a major challenge. Many voters in Kanak-majority areas abstained from voting in the French presidential elections in June this year. In the Loyalty Islands, for instance, less than one in ten eligible voters turned out, while in the Northern Province, participation ranged between 20 and 30 per cent. Voting was higher in areas where many Europeans live, such as the capital Noumea (62.9 per cent) and surrounding towns like Dumbea (61.4 per cent), Mont-Dore (57.4 per cent) and Paita (58.8 per cent).

But Railati thinks that most young Kanaks understand the importance of next year’s referendum. “I truly think that people will turn out,” he says. “Every month we go out to the villages, to the tribes to talk to people. Everyone knows that next year’s vote is different to the French presidential or legislative elections — it’s a decision on our own destiny. Many young people are waiting for 2018 with impatience.”

For non-indigenous New Caledonians, the referendum debate poses complex questions of sovereignty and reconciliation. New Caledonia has a large community from Wallis and Futuna, with many migrants arriving from their Polynesian homeland during the nickel boom of the 1970s. Today, more Wallisians live in New Caledonia than on their home islands. For a younger generation born in Noumea and surrounding towns, the Melanesian nation is their home.

Although most Wallisians are opposed to independence, some support Kanak sovereignty through the USTKE trade union confederation or the Rassemblement Démocratique Océanien party. Arnaud Chollet-Leakava, president of the RDO’s youth wing, Mouvement de Jeunesse Ocèanienne, believes that younger Wallisians must stay to build the country. “Whatever the outcome of the 2018 referendum,” he says, “our future is here in Kanaky-New Caledonia and will never be elsewhere. We will make all efforts to see the emergence of a new country, this new nation, the Caledonian people.”

Women will also play a vital role in the referendum campaign. A few years ago, arriving by helicopter at the site of the new Koniambo nickel smelter in New Caledonia’s Northern Province, I noticed that all the firefighters at the airport were Kanak women. The construction of this nickel processing plant had created new jobs in the north, and Koniambo Nickel Society — 51 per cent controlled by the Northern Province — proudly proclaimed that a third of its workforce was female.

Since the independence uprising of the 1980s, the lives of women have changed in many ways. Under the Noumea Accord, a major focus on education and training has created new pathways for women to enter non-traditional employment. Since the end of the conflict in 1988, women have seized opportunities in training programs such as 400 Cadres and Cadres Avenir. In 1989, women only made up 20 per cent of participants; by 2015, the figure was 42 per cent.

The French parity law, ensuring equal participation of men and women in electoral lists, has transformed municipal councils and the national Congress. In 2004, Marie-Noelle Themereau and Dewe Gorode served as the first elected female president and vice-president in the Pacific islands. Today, women make up 46 per cent of the Congress, a sharp contrast to neighbouring Melanesian nations, where women are rarely present in the legislature. In an unprecedented victory, Sonia Lagarde was elected mayor of Noumea in 2014.

But all these role models have not ended violence against women in the home or workplace, nor cultural constraints that limit participation in some community activities.

Rose Waen Wete, who comes from a family of leading Kanak theologians, lived much of her childhood in Fiji and Australia, where her parents were undertaking religious studies. Today, she is president of the Yaqona Koneksen Sunset, a kava circle that links a polyglot mixture of young people — French and New Caledonian, Kanak and Caldoche, with the occasional Aussie or Kiwi thrown into the mix.

“We hold regular talanoa nights around the kava bowl, to debate politics and culture and the future of our society,” she says. While many members are actively involved in political activity, they are often critical of an older generation of leaders, and eager to debate the type of society that might follow any change in political status for New Caledonia.

In her poem “Being a Modern Kanak Woman,” Wete writes about the dilemmas of juggling cultural obligations, career and family:

I have lived and grown up all my life outside my Island home
I have lived and grown up in a Pacific mixed culture
But when I returned to my Island home, I always return to my roots
I know my history, culture, custom and family tree
I have become a woman now and I see myself as modern
Not because I’m educated, employed or have material wealth
But because I do not always agree with what my parents want of me
I am independent, I don’t need a man, don’t need to get married, and don’t need to link my clan to another
I am modern, I work and have a career and I am very ambitious!
Yes, I contribute to my “obligation coutumier”
I send money for engagements, weddings and funerals
But hey, enough is enough
I have my responsibilities as a mother, to bring food to the table, to pay bills
I love my culture, my “coutume,” but I love my children even more!

As voters prepare to decide on the future of their country, this concern for the next generation will play a key part in the decision — whether to stay with France or take the leap into the future as a new sovereign nation. •

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In the program’s second report on Fiji, Hagar Cohen maps out how the Fijian government keeps a lid on this and other sensitive stories with the help of an American PR company, Qorvis. The firm’s other clients include the Saudi government, which it promotes as a supporter of counterterrorism and women’s rights. Two former departmental secretaries describe a climate of fear within the Fijian government and media.

But the program’s most damning evidence comes from a Qorvis consultant in Fiji, Graham Davis. In a leaked email to the government-friendly Fiji Sun, Davis lambasts the quality of the paper, which “is only helpful to the government,” he wrote, “if it retains its credibility.” He described himself as “deeply concerned about the feedback I am getting generally around town about the Sun. ‘Zero credibility,’ ‘rag,’ ‘cocksucker,’ is the general drift. Sorry to be brutal, but it’s the truth.”

A key message of this second program is that it’s not the agents of influence we need to be worried about, it’s the targets of influence, some of whom are promoting what might be called illiberal development or illiberal state building.

The point was driven home to me when one of my students accused me of dodging a question from the presenter of Sunday Extra, Hamish Macdonald, during a discussion of Background Briefing’s first report last week: “You said there’s nothing necessarily sinister about Chinese influence in the region. I think it’s fair to say, though, that the perception of Chinese influence is fairly negative. Should we be more concerned about Chinese influence in the way it invests, the way it creates military and diplomatic ties? Should we view it differently to the way America might…?”

Part of the answer to that question is straightforward. Long before the current American administration blundered into office, the United States had removed itself from the South Pacific — despite Hillary Clinton’s best efforts as secretary of state to get the Senate worked up about China’s influence. As one political staffer put it to me a few years back, “Only two things get [Capitol] Hill interested in the Pacific: China and tuna.” (It works best with an American accent.) Australia and New Zealand have been criticised for “losing the Pacific” to China, but with Obama’s “pivot to Asia” abandoned and the America First crowd walking away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the United States won’t be returning in a meaningful way anytime soon. Australia’s view should differ from Washington’s, not because the Pacific is ours to lose but because we’re still here in the Pacific.

The fears about Chinese influence in the Pacific rest on a few misconceptions. China does not have an overwhelming diplomatic presence in the Pacific, as claimed in the 2006 report of an Australian Senate committee, which expressed worries about the impact of “lavish banquets” on Pacific leaders (as if free feeds would lead them to sell out their people). On the ground in the Pacific, China’s embassies have a ghostly feel. Commerce ministry representatives, charged with managing China’s investments abroad, are overwhelmed by their workload, although anecdotal evidence suggests that the standard of representation has improved in the latest round of postings. There are also signs that China is looking to upgrade its level of military engagement with the Pacific.

Muscular state interventions, like the show arrests in Fiji, are likely to become more common as the Chinese government — with an eye to the domestic audience — looks to live out the tagline of this year’s state-endorsed box office sensation, Wolf Warrior 2: “Whoever attacks China will be killed no matter how far the target is.” But it is companies, both state-owned and private, that are building deep links with political elites, bureaucracies and (in some cases) civil society in the Pacific. Despite the Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to link Chinese infrastructure investment to national goals, Chinese companies in the region are still playing their own game.

Chinese capital and development finance appear to be driven primarily by market opportunities and the presence of Chinese companies on the ground in the destination country. Unlike Chinese state agents, company managers and engineers aren’t on three-year postings, looking to impress bosses in Beijing. They have skin in the game, and will be the enduring source of Chinese “influence” in the Pacific.

Unlike at any time over the previous three decades, Jamil Anderlini observed in the Financial Times last week, Chinese officials are no longer talking about democracy as the ultimate goal of China’s reforms. This avowedly illiberal regime, emboldened by the anti-democratic and isolationist stance of the Trump administration, has become more assertive abroad. The unapologetic brutality of the show arrests in Fiji demonstrates this. But I don’t think it follows that Chinese players in the Pacific are looking to export an illiberal model of development, at least intentionally. Chinese companies want to do business, and with as little fuss as possible. (Not that they always behave well: efforts by Beijing to get them to be more socially responsible abroad have been extensive but ineffective.)

In fact, as much as Australian politicians and officials like to lecture the Pacific about governance, the controversies over Chinese influence in Australia and New Zealand have arisen from flaws in our own systems of governance. In Australia, the culprit is a venal system of party financing and the long-term under-funding of universities; in New Zealand, it’s the lax procedures for vetting candidates for both major parties.

Some Pacific institutions, including universities and church groups, have pushed back against Chinese companies, often leading to improvements in corporate practices. And some Chinese companies have dealt with local concerns, hiring more local labour, using more local materials and being willing to work in regions (such as the PNG Highlands) where other firms, even local ones, fear to tread. Compared to other companies — Malaysian logging outfits in PNG, for example — China’s firms are still innocents, just as often finding themselves the victims of Pacific political shenanigans as the beneficiaries of corruption.

The outlook for China’s role in the Pacific is less sanguine than it was five years ago, not just because of China’s greater economic clout but also, crucially, because of the willingness of some Pacific leaders to promote illiberal development. Hagar Cohen’s investigation featured a local Chinese-Fijian businessman celebrating the Chinese removal of the alleged criminals because it saved Fiji from the “rigmarole” of the legal process — the same legal system he presumably hopes will safeguard his own rights. This week’s Background Briefing provides an insight into how far the Fijian state is willing to go to save itself and a foreign power from the rigmarole of media scrutiny, but in doing so Fiji has opened itself up to a whole new set of geopolitical risks. China might be the least of its worries. ●

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Ri’s declaration is the latest contribution to an unprecedented war of words between Washington and Pyongyang. But if the North Koreans were to carry out “the most powerful detonation of an H-bomb,” in Ri’s words, it wouldn’t be the first time that a thermonuclear weapon has been launched by missile to detonate over the Pacific.

Fifty-five years ago, in the lead-up to the Cuban missile crisis, the United States launched a series of missiles from Johnston Atoll in the central Pacific, detonating hydrogen bombs that lit up the sky across the Pacific. Washington had already conducted atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in the area: sixty-seven of them between 1946 and 1958 on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls in the Marshall Islands.

In 1962, after a brief moratorium on nuclear testing, president John F. Kennedy pushed ahead with this further series of tests, just in time to avoid the terms of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which ended nuclear testing in the atmosphere by the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.

Map by John Waddingham

Operation Dominic, the 1962 series, involved atmospheric nuclear tests on Christmas (Kiritimati) Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (today, the Pacific nation of Kiribati). Rocket launches codenamed Operation Fishbowl were made from Johnston Atoll. The first phase of the US program was conducted in a rush. Between 25 April and 11 July 1962, twenty-four atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted at Christmas Island, with weapons dropped from US aircraft.

In October 1962, five more airdrops were detonated in the vicinity of Johnston Atoll, a US possession located between the Marshall Islands and Hawaii. Johnston (known to the indigenous Kanaka Maoli people as Kalama) had been claimed for the Kingdom of Hawaii in July 1858, with the support of King Kamehameha. With the US takeover of Hawaii in 1898, Johnston effectively became a US possession, although the Territory of Hawaii continued to claim jurisdiction over both Kalama Island and neighbouring Sand Island well into the twentieth century.

Johnston Atoll had first been used for US nuclear missile tests in 1958. Two rocket launches from Johnston, codenamed Teak and Orange, both involved 3.8-megaton explosions from missile-borne nuclear warheads.

The Dominic series included five successful attempts to loft rockets into the atmosphere from Johnston Island and create high-altitude nuclear air bursts: Starfish Prime (8 July), Checkmate (19 October), Bluegill Triple Prime (25 October), Kingfish (1 November) and Tightrope (3 November). These rocket-launched tests, collectively designated Operation Fishbowl, were designed to study the effects of nuclear detonations as defensive weapons against incoming ballistic missiles.

The 1.4-megaton high-level explosion from Starfish Prime lit the sky from Australia to Hawaii, causing an enormous electromagnetic pulse that put out streetlights in Honolulu, 1300 kilometres away. The blast pumped radiation into the Van Allen belts, destroying or seriously degrading the orbit of seven satellites.

Not all the Fishbowl tests went smoothly. The successful operations were preceded by a number of aborted nuclear missile launches from Johnston, including three that caused the plutonium contamination that still lingers on the island today.

The first failed test, Bluegill, was aborted on 2 June 1962 when radar lost track of the Thor missile carrying the warhead. Range safety officers ordered that the missile and warhead be destroyed.

The next Starfish test on 19 June led to massive contamination of Johnston Atoll. The launch was aborted just one minute into its flight, and a self-destruct order blew the missile apart at about 30,000 feet. Large pieces of radioactive debris (including pieces of the booster rocket, engine, re-entry vehicle and missile parts) fell back to the island.

In 2000, the impact of this test was assessed by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which conducted the Johnston Atoll Radiological Survey, or JARS:

More debris landed in the surrounding waters and on adjacent Sand Island, where residual plutonium from the test device was found. A large collection of alpha contaminated scrap was isolated during the initial clean-up… It is likely that some portion of the plutonium was pulverised and consequently dispersed in the winds occurring between the destruct altitude and the ground and thus did not contribute to contamination at Johnston Atoll. It is, however, also likely that residual plutonium, in addition to that recovered from Sand Island, fell into the waters of Johnston Atoll.

The most serious contamination came in July 1962 as a result of the test codenamed Bluegill Prime. After ignition, but before the rocket had lifted off, officials destroyed the rocket by remote control because of a malfunction on the launch pad. The JARS reports that the explosion of the Thor missile scattered debris in all directions:

Plutonium material, mixed with the flaming fuel, drained into trench cables and was carried away in the smoke from several fires. This resulted in a deposition of alpha contamination on the launch pad complex that represented a major contamination problem. Contaminated debris was scattered throughout the wire-enclosed pad area and neighbouring areas. Metal revetment buildings were highly contaminated with alpha activity.

Burning fuel flowing through cable trenches caused contamination on the interior of the revetments and all equipment contained therein. Fuel, which spilled and flowed over the compacted coral surrounding the launch mount and revetments, resulted in highly contaminated areas. Prevailing winds at the time of the destruction caused general contamination of all areas downwind of the launch mount.

In an effort to continue with the testing program, US troops were sent in to do a rapid clean-up. The troops scrubbed down the revetments and launch pad, carted away debris and removed the top layer of coral around the contaminated launch pad. The plutonium-contaminated rubbish was dumped in the lagoon, polluting the surrounding marine environment. The JARS report politely notes:

Sea disposal of radioactive waste for control of the radiological hazard was then considered expedient and proper… [T]here was no effort made to analyse the magnitude and extent of the radiological hazard resulting from the destruction of a nuclear device on a launch complex.

At the time of the Bluegill Prime disaster, the top-fill around the launch pad was scraped by a bulldozer and grader. It was then dumped into the lagoon to make a ramp so that the rest of the debris could be loaded onto landing craft to be dumped out into the ocean. An estimated 10 per cent of the plutonium from the test device was in the fill used to make the ramp. The ramp was covered during later dredging to extend the island. (The lagoon was dredged in 1963–64, with sediment used to expand Johnston Island from 220 acres to 625 acres.)

According to the JARS report:

Much of these [contaminated] sediments may have been incorporated back into the islands in the 1964 dredging and filling work, and thus much of the plutonium contamination from Bluegill Prime may have been redeposited on the island. Any contamination not redeposited on the island through dredge and fill still contaminates the lagoon.

The Bluegill Prime disaster seriously affected the health of US Naval Air Force personnel who were present at Johnston Island. Crew-member Michael Thomas reported that the flight crew and ground support staff were trapped on the island following the destruction of the nuclear warhead.

In later years, the squadron members present during that episode suffered an 85 per cent casualty rate of illness and cancers: non-Hodgkin lymphoma was the biggest killer, followed by thyroid cancer, throat cancer, oesophageal cancer, kidney cancer, multiple myeloma, and various skin cancers. Nearly 30 per cent of the crew experienced reproductive problems, with their wives suffering stillbirth or giving birth to babies with deformities.

On 15 October 1962, another test misfired. In this test, the Bluegill Double Prime, the rocket was destroyed at a height of 109,000 feet after it malfunctioned ninety seconds into the flight. US Defense Department officials confirmed that when the rocket was destroyed, it contributed to the radioactive pollution on the island.

The following day, 16 October, the United States and Soviet Union began the ten days that threatened to destroy the planet — the Cuban missile crisis. •

This is an edited extract from Nic Maclellan’s new book Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests, published by ANU Press.

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It was easy to overlook the enormity of what he had done in planning and implementing Fiji’s first military coup, to be seduced by celebrity and captivated by the excitement of the moment, and to plead its inevitability as the final eruption of long-simmering indigenous discontent. A generation would pass before the consequences of the actions of Fiji’s strong man of 1987, Sitiveni Rabuka, would be fully appreciated but, by then, the die had well and truly been cast. The major-general did not live happily ever after. No nirvana followed the assertion of indigenous rights. If anything, misadventure became his country’s most enduring contemporary trait.

Rabuka understood from the very beginning that the path he took in overthrowing a new and democratically elected government on 14 May 1987 might ultimately prove his undoing, and not only for logistical reasons. Assertions of racial exclusivity or supremacy hung uneasily in a world that was still mired in postwar politics. Globalisation and its accessory, multiculturalism, had yet to be fully comprehended, let alone embraced globally — not that his followers paid much attention to how the world viewed their actions.

Rabuka declared himself the saviour of tradition in a country whose indigenous peoples still saw themselves as respectfully hierarchical. Democracy threatened the paramountcy of what they held to be indigenous interests; it threatened Fijianness and the traditional relationships that Fijianness entailed. This was justification enough, and Fiji’s first coup followed this script. Soon after, the country’s traditional chiefs met and returned leadership to the Fijian elite, which had ruled the country since independence in 1970. There the matter might have rested, perhaps uncomfortably but with seeming inevitability. Unfortunately for the coup’s architects, political actions tend to have unintended consequences that are less easily dismissed.

Rabuka came to power by overthrowing a democratically elected government that many Fijians viewed as illegitimate because the basis of its power lay predominantly with the votes of the descendants of Indian migrants. But he did so by first overthrowing his own military commander, a high-ranking Fijian chief. Within five months, he would also turn his overwhelmingly Fijian military machine against the same chiefs to whom he had initially entrusted power. He believed that they were about to cut a deal with the very politicians he had overthrown, leaving him out in the cold and possibly exposed to charges of treason. This unscripted intervention, however, brought its own difficulties.

Declaring Fiji a republic could not hide for long the fact that the military was not itself well positioned to seize control. Nonetheless, this second coup set the scene for a new and prolonged confrontation with the Fijian elite, even after Rabuka changed his mind after three months, restoring the Fijian elite to power and delivering a new constitution heavily weighted in its favour. When solely communal elections were finally held in 1992, Rabuka emerged as the country’s first elected, republican prime minister. For commoners like himself, democracy enabled a more meaningful future. But the experience took its toll. Within a short time he would learn that democracy is best practised by reaching consensus with all of a country’s citizens. In other words, apartheid and aristocratic privilege could not form the basis for the economic growth and prosperity everyone craved, especially the Fijian people on whose behalf he claimed to act in 1987.

Reaching that point proved difficult, not least because accommodating his country’s marginalised minorities and introducing a new democratic power-sharing constitution in 1997 meant challenging everything he had at one time stood for, including his popular support base. Rabuka would not be the first political leader to discover that hero status has a short shelf life. More importantly, he would learn that there were others less persuaded of the value of his transformation who would seek to emulate him and, in time, earn his country the epithet “Coup-Coup Land.”

The Rabuka legacy was not confined to military coups. It also ensured that democratisation didn’t extend fully to the economy. In part, this was both a colonial and postcolonial legacy, but the retention of centralised economic control was also a contemporary defensive mechanism. Rabuka could only avoid the personal consequences of his actions and maintain control over the levers of power by prioritising the growth of his military, buying elite support with state resources, paying off cronies and increasing the roles of traditional chiefs. Despite the politically important rhetoric of affirmative action for Fijians, these political priorities meant paying lip service to economic and social development for the mass of his people. For those of Indian descent, at best it meant neglect.

By their nature, coups focus on control of the state; hence, they are unlikely to weaken the state’s centrality in economic and social life. Despite some attempts after 1987 to suggest that Fiji’s early coups followed a determinedly postcolonial economic trajectory, they were far from revolutionary. If anything, they were backward-looking, embracing a false memory of peaceful communal harmony and order, though with one important difference: the colonial era was over and government had been restored to Fijian leadership. That was the central purpose of the coups and it would remain the raison d’être of post-coup administrations.

There were limits, then, to what ordinary Fijians could expect from the restoration, as Rabuka told an Australian journalist in 1988, “Fijian people will have the political say in their country and [a constitution to] safeguard their birthright, their land, their forests, the minerals and things; but not one that would make them so strong that they do not need a central government.” In other words, authority would never be decentralised, civil society would always face constraints and development would continue to be bureaucratically led, as it had been ever since the country’s high chiefs and colonial authorities had created the golden age of Fijian administration back in the 1940s. Rabuka never had any intention of challenging the legacy of its chief architect, Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, even if sometimes — when he was out of favour with the chiefs, and particularly Sukuna’s protégé, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara — he articulated the frustration it engendered in neglected commoners.

Central government should never be challenged, Rabuka reminded a group of Fijian trade unionists in 1991. It was “the goose that lays the golden egg.” But for whom did the goose lay its egg? Clearly not ordinary Fijians — at least, not those who subsisted in rural villages and certainly not those who increasingly flocked to urban slums looking for work. There were limits to what they could expect if hierarchies of administration and power were to be respected.

This view, while not originating with Rabuka, had tremendous repercussions for the small state. Fiji might have the largest and most diversified economy among the independent island states of the southwest Pacific, but its economic performance over the next two decades served only to promote emigration and spiralling poverty. That poor performance added to the background dissatisfaction that Fijian rivals would employ to challenge Rabuka electorally in May 1999 and, a year later, to mount their own “civilian coup” against the political coalition that they had inadvertently caused to succeed him.

That coup could not succeed without military backing, but it did enable the formation of a new post-Rabuka political force that, over the next six years, would achieve the kind of Fijian political unity Rabuka had only been able to dream of, in part by reaching accommodation with supporters of the abortive 2000 coup. Yet, in terms of economic strategy, it was essentially Fijian Paramountcy 101, the post-1987 strategy reasserted and with a similarly narrow group of Fijian beneficiaries intent on capturing for themselves what wealth remained to be squeezed from the nation.

In itself, this did not doom the government, which won fresh elections in 2006 and finally made significant overtures to its parliamentary opposition by forming a multiparty cabinet, as the 1997 constitution had intended. Multiracial accommodation now seemed possible. But the coup attempt in 2000 left another, less easily resolved legacy by exposing deep fractures within the military that, within months of the coup’s resolution, exploded into a bloody mutiny designed to remove the military commander, Frank Bainimarama, and restart the coup. The mutiny collapsed but, from that moment in November 2000, the commander became increasingly intolerant of the government he had put in place and especially of its efforts to accommodate those responsible for the 2000 coup, against which he publicly campaigned. An increasingly shaky multiparty cabinet and continued controversy over affirmative action programs provided his officers with additional ammunition to question the direction of the Fiji state and to launch its “coup to end all coups” in December 2006.

Unfortunately, like all coups, the immediate impact of this fourth coup was simply to make long-term planning more difficult. Its economic consequences proved as disastrous for the beleaguered nation as those experienced nearly twenty years before. It further debilitated already weakened state institutions and bitterly divided once-thriving civil organisations. Despite fluid promises to introduce transformative constitutional changes, the military consolidated its role as the nation’s final political arbiter, leaving citizens to wonder at the state in which they found Fiji when they emerged from the glare of elections in 2014 to survey their new democratic landscape.

Those tumultuous years didn’t take place within a vacuum. They were part and parcel of the human story that is every bit as connected to the world as any other national story. Fijians exist because they derive from a wider set of Pacific migrations and interactions that began over 6000 years ago, far away in the South China Sea. During the nineteenth century, their diverse descendants were enveloped by the global reach of European economic, social and political activities, their peoples Christianised and their social structures transformed. For the first time they became Fijians, rather than Lauans or Kai Colo, although those late pre-colonial identities persisted, at least for political purposes, in the contemporary era. Any form of identity, whether based on race, religion or nation, is a social invention.

Becoming a British colony from 1874 further deepened change: new political structures and a colonial economy based on sugar and the labour of imported Indians, whose own country had been even more transformed as a result of British conquest. Fijian chiefs fought to retain some measure of control over their people and were accommodated in so far as the colonial system of indirect rule proved effective in maintaining order. But historically, accommodation was short-lived; during the 1960s the global anti-colonial “winds of change” swept across the Pacific and, from late 1970, Fiji found itself an independent Third World nation, active on the world stage in pursuing postcolonial agreements on trade access and sugar, the law of the sea and peacekeeping duties for an increasingly pressed United Nations.

Fiji may be small and relatively insignificant compared with large Pacific rim countries, but it is just as integrated into the globalised world of aid, education and training, health, labour, media, militaries, migration, mining, NGOs, politics, religion, regions, tourism, trade, transport and unions; the list is endless. It might seem odd today that a country that is so successful in utilising global opportunities for the benefit of its people has been so undermined by insular introspection. But, in the age of Donald Trump and Brexit, we should more easily recognise Fiji as an unexceptional example of humanity, one whose study offers insights as useful for understanding our world as those offered by any society.

Central to an examination of both are notions of development and modernity. We sometimes patronisingly assume that development is a concern only for countries seeking to catch up with already “developed” countries. Indeed, since the second world war, modernising and collectively improving society has become a central goal of almost all societies, and a vast array of multilateral and international civil organisations now exists to assist states to achieve economic growth or direct attention to human and social development. But this focus should not seduce us into overlooking the reality that development concerns all societies, however they rank themselves globally. Commonality is often obscured by the shifting character of development debates, which range from basic infrastructure and social wellbeing to issues concerning ageing populations, changing technologies, economic competitiveness, inequalities and climate change.

If we were able to return to the early nineteenth century, when a quickly evolving industrial revolution created the most dramatic changes human societies have ever faced, we might be less inclined to view development in binary terms. Many of the features of what was once called Third World development were in evidence, as people sought to reconstruct states and systems of governance to cope with the stresses of change and their consequences for regional balances of power. At that time, development came to be conceived of as progress, and its leaders took great pride in asserting that it also denoted national or racial superiority, using development to justify acts of aggression against neighbours or distant peoples.

What we sometimes call the age of colonialism or imperialism — a time that saw the world carved up between a few leading industrial nations but also afflicted by devastating wars — was simply one manifestation of the desire to actively develop and change societies. And, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, notions of fitness and human evolution were used to justify either the occupation and incorporation of whole societies or the rapid expansion of inequalities within societies. Development, always universal, carries with it tremendous baggage.

Part of that baggage is our tendency to dichotomise the world. How easily do oppositions such as First World–Third World, developed–developing, north–south, East–West, tradition and modernity roll off our tongues, encapsulating generalisations and stereotypes that have long since lost their validity, if indeed they ever held any. Nation-building responses to industrialisation over the past two centuries have also led us to regard nations as essentially natural homogeneous units, to neglect or suppress evidence of internal diversity, and to reify culture and modernity. Consequently, we still tend to believe that homogeneity is an essential element for successful development, with the result that we fail to accommodate diversity within our models for growth.

Contemporary globalisation renders failure more dangerous. One only has to listen to debates on multiculturalism and migration to appreciate the continued strength of attachment to perceived national norms. Because many developing countries were created with attention to essentialised differences rather than national norms, their inability to successfully pursue the development examples purportedly set by the early industrialising countries, those we often misleadingly describe as the West, has been attributed — over the past half century or more — to their plurality or lack of cohesion. The argument becomes more convoluted still if we claim that the basis of Western development lies in free markets and democracy, something that most Western countries didn’t enjoy until recently. In other words, these features were products of development, not its prerequisites.

Democracy is often held to be the result of a peculiarly Western cultural inheritance traced back to classical Greece or the English Magna Carta. This interpretation obscures the complex social and economic struggles that made different forms of democracy possible, a triumph of mass society and the growing middle-class nature of developing societies. Democracy was never a historical feature of European societies or something that grew naturally from their past. Many only became democratic after 1945 and some have only experimented with democratic institutions since 1989. Even the United States only extended full democratic rights to all its adult citizens in 1965, Australia in 1967.

Of course difference can always be used to rationalise pathways and institutions that are markedly dissimilar to the norms of many comparatively wealthy countries today. Invariably such arguments amount to little more than political pointscoring. Development is not a Western project. The goals of development and the circumstances under which it occurs constantly change. At one time, development was simply a state project. Today, it is far more diverse, enveloping everything from the individual to regions.

It is important to understand the fluid nature of human relationships and development. Nothing is homogeneous or static. Everything interacts and is in constant flux. Under such circumstances, dichotomies do not describe reality, only perceptions of reality. We might look at subsistence farmers and regard them as traditional, but how traditional are they if they also produce for an urban market, make use of motorised transportation, and use mobile phones to mobilise market data?

Globalisation also fosters novel relationships and enables ways of seeing the world that prioritise human empowerment. It is this agenda that is often perceived as a threat to “traditional” powerholders who exploit the modernity–tradition dichotomy for self-serving purposes. Thus, globalisation, democracy and contemporary social movements have more in common than many people realise. Rather than assume an opposition between modernity and tradition, we might better argue that almost all societies are modern because they are all engaged — however unequally — with a globalised world.

Modern Fiji in 1970 confronted development through the lens of race and privilege. When development failed to satisfy Fijian expectations and constitutional paramountcy tempered by multiracialism failed the privileged elite, Fiji’s coup season began with Rabuka’s 1987 attempts to mandate absolute Fijian dominance. When they too failed to deliver economic transformation, Fiji restored multiracialism in 1997, hoping that communal electoral reform alone might compensate for its development biases.

That initiative was doomed by two responses. First, a civilian coup in 2000, which swept aside a multiracial government and, through the military, reinstated the country’s elite to power; and, second, a military coup in 2006, which rejected the communal basis for multiracialism and sought to address the biases inherent in Fiji’s development strategies. That latter coup has, to date, endured; following elections in 2014, Bainimarama emerged as prime minister, leading a new multiracial party that overwhelmingly dominates the new parliament. A weakened and confused iteration of the old party of the Fijian or Taukei elite survived; an echo of the past, it would soon be led by the very man who had first sought to transform Fiji by military means — a resurrected and much older Rabuka, a man now haunted by his past. •

This is an extract from The General’s Goose: Fiji’s Tale of Contemporary Misadventure. Buy a print copy, or download it for free from ANU Press.

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Most participants extolled the achievements of the A$2.75 billion mission. Solomons prime minister Manasseh Sogavare, once a ferocious critic, described RAMSI as heaven sent. Jimmy “Rasta” Lusibaea, once the most notorious of the militant commanders, whose activities during the unrest of 1998-2003 first brought RAMSI to his country’s shores, thanked RAMSI for assisting the country in its “darkest hour.”“Mission accomplished,” declared former Australian prime minister John Howard in the Sydney Morning Herald, describing the fourteen-year intervention as one of his government’s “finest policy achievements.”

Despite all the acclamation, only a few could recall precisely what the mission was initially intended to accomplish, or assess how it might be judged. Australia’s first special coordinator, Nick Warner (2003–04), claimed that RAMSI had brought not only security but also prosperity for Solomon Islanders, an assessment difficult to reconcile with the notoriously squalid conditions at Honiara’s “Number Nine” Central Hospital or the country’s low per capita income (around US$2000 per annum). The Solomon Islands is undoubtedly more “stable” than during 1998–2003, but it nevertheless experienced urban riots in the capital in April 2006, November 2011 and May 2014 and saw the collapse of governments in April 2006, December 2007, and November 2011.

Warner’s successor, James Batley (2004–06), said that RAMSI had been “conceived, designed and operated as a broad and long-term state-building exercise, not simply as a security or peacekeeping operation,” and that it had “demonstrably strengthened” the police, the courts and government ministries, which were “the basic building blocks of what we think of as the modern state.” Subsequent special coordinators Tim George (2006–09), Graeme Wilson (2009–11) and Nicholas Coppel (2011–13) tended to offer a much more minimalist set of objectives, to redefine the mission as a “short-term” and narrowly “peacekeeping” one, and even on occasion to contest the “good governance” and “state-building” focus of their predecessors.

The Howard government did indeed conceive and design RAMSI as entailing a long-term radical transformation of the Solomon Islands state, but even before this had commenced it had provoked a major political crisis. It was in response to that crisis that Australian police activities were toned down, strategic ambitions were tempered, and operations were constrained around the narrower framing of RAMSI’s objectives.

RAMSI’s special coordinators had a high local profile in Solomon Islands, but their role was primarily an oversight one, and their activities centred on public relations, the media and the civilian programs. The core military and policing components of RAMSI were under separate command, at times triggering some friction. Special coordinators were ultimately answerable to the Australian foreign minister and through “whole of government” accountability mechanisms established back in Canberra.

Although RAMSI occurred under the auspices of the Pacific Islands Forum, Island leaders played little or no role in the Canberra-centred command and control. Their participation was restricted to occasional expert missions, and more regular in-theatre consultation exercises. They also supplied troops and police personnel, and Pacific Islanders played an important but often unacknowledged role in the civilian ministries.

RAMSI commenced in 2003 in the wake of five years of civil unrest, which had resulted in around 200 fatalities. The high point of the disturbances (locally known as “the tensions”) was 1999–2000, culminating in the coup of 5 June 2000. After a flawed peace agreement in October of that year, the conflict morphed into a criminalised extortion racket perpetrated by militia groups who refused to surrender their weapons.

When RAMSI arrived in July 2003, as a first mission under the auspices of the Pacific Islands Forum’s 2000 Biketawa Declaration, its big achievements were on the security front, and they came quickly. Guns were surrendered and destroyed, and militant leaders incarcerated. This was accomplished almost entirely by Australian military and police officers organised in an institutionally separate Participating Police Force. The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force, or RSIP – described by senior Australian Federal Police officers as too corrupt to participate in RAMSI’s operations ­– was shunted aside. Policing accounted for the vast majority of RAMSI personnel and it swallowed the bulk of RAMSI expenditure, although most of this was sent home as expatriate salaries.

The courts, too, were soon staffed by expatriate judges and legal professionals, as was the Ministry of Justice. Once the tension trials were completed around 2009, the foreigners went home, leaving an understaffed and underqualified legal administration.

The ramifications of the “two forces” policing model became painfully apparent around 2009–10, when several reports highlighted the continuing poor state of the RSIP. Severe demoralisation among the senior officers pre-dated the RAMSI years, and reflected the RSIP’s failure to tackle the tensions without outside assistance. In June 2000, the RSIP’s paramilitary arm, the Police Field Force had orchestrated a coup in conjunction with the militia group, the Malaita Eagle Forces. Many senior officers had collaborated with the militants thereafter.

That humiliation was reinforced after RAMSI’s arrival, when RSIP officers watched as their better equipped, better-trained and much better paid Australian and New Zealand counterparts restore security. Surveys indicated that the general public held the RSIP in low esteem, while RAMSI’s policing efforts had a stellar reputation. Around two-thirds of the RSIP were retired, arrested, dismissed or otherwise decommissioned over the initial RAMSI decade, and around 70 new police officers were recruited per annum. The result was a youthful and inexperienced police force, with a weak leadership, but the payoffs of this work may well be generational. It is the success or failure of this police-building project that will ultimately be critical for the longer-term evaluation of RAMSI, not the limited governance programs brokered in the other ministries.

Outside policing, prisons and the justice ministry, RAMSI’s activities were mostly piecemeal. Programs in the Ministry of Finance mainly entailed new software systems that were never likely to endure over the longer-term without ongoing foreign oversight. Tax collections rocketed under the influence of officials from New Zealand, but RAMSI never gained control over government expenditure, much to the displeasure of the “shared sovereignty” enthusiasts in the donor community. Sensible programs were pursued in the auditor-general’s office, in parliamentary support services and, episodically, in the elections office, but most of the country’s twenty-four ministries continued as before, with little or no RAMSI engagement. Other major donor-driven achievements include halting the spread of malaria, at least in the easier eastern part of the scattered country, although this was the fruit of sensible bilateral programs rather than RAMSI.  

RAMSI is best seen as a three-phase mission, interrupted by a major political crisis. In the initial phase, John Howard’s government – and particularly the abrasive foreign minister Alexander Downer – insisted on economic liberalisation and “good governance” as the price for security assistance. Downer once thumped his fists on the Solomon Islands’ cabinet table, insisting that politicians do his bidding and that RAMSI was an “all or nothing” take-it-or-leave it package. This was the declared state-building project aimed at reconstructing the country from the top downwards. Yet, unlike contemporary UN missions to East Timor and Kosovo, RAMSI never had formal executive authority to achieve its objectives but was reliant on collegial persuasion or cash conditionality. Solomon Islands politicians wanted help to subdue the militant groups, but most were less keen on external advisers’ activities in the ministries, particularly finance.

Downer and his colleagues tended to describe all resistance as driven by corrupt politicians or businessmen. In some cases it undoubtedly was, but not in all. Behind the scenes, even close allies of RAMSI, whose images appeared in the glossy anniversary pamphlets celebrating the mission’s success, would contest the mission’s intrusiveness, or its ignorance of local custom, and warm to local leaders offering a project of national re-assertion. Conversely, many of the most notorious local backers of RAMSI were themselves unscrupulous businessmen known for their intrigues in search of casino licenses, or for using logging cash to broker favourable Melanesian governing coalitions. The prime minister who initially invited RAMSI to Solomon Islands, Allen Kemakeza, had himself been sacked for corruption in 2001, and he was also imprisoned – albeit long after RAMSI’s arrival – for his role in orchestrating a militant attack on a local law firm during the tensions.

Sir Allen was prime minister during the early years when RAMSI’s authority was at its zenith. Yet he fared poorly at the first post-RAMSI election in April 2006. With backing from local Chinese businessman Tommy Chan, the country’s 50 MPs selected Snyder Rini – Kemakeza’s former deputy, who had a poor record on corruption issues – as new prime minister. Rini was also opposed by the Australian government, as evidenced by a leaked email recording Australian high commissioner Patrick Cole’s behind-the-scenes efforts to avert that outcome.

Rini’s election sparked riots outside parliament, culminating in the destruction of Honiara’s Chinatown district. He lasted only eight days before resigning to avoid an impending no-confidence defeat. His successor, Manasseh Sogavare, had been prime minister at the height of the tensions (2000–01), and his second term (2006–07) saw Cole expelled. The country’s Australian police chief, Shane Castles, was also declared persona non grata for unwisely authorising a raid on the prime minister’s office to search for evidence of illegal activity.

If RAMSI had been unpopular, Sogavare would surely have succeeded in ending the mission. (Parliament was entitled to terminate RAMSI with three months’ notice.) Instead, it was Sogavare who was terminated, ousted by his own parliament in a no-confidence vote in December 2007. A month earlier, John Howard’s government lost the Australian election, and was replaced by Kevin Rudd’s Labor administration.

The second phase of the RAMSI operation, sparked by the failure of the Howard–Downer strategy, entailed a major change in the mission’s dynamics. Just as Sogavare had been unable to rally support for the expulsion of RAMSI, so too had Downer’s “all or nothing” bluff been called. The new prime minister, Derek Sikua, was much more favourably disposed towards RAMSI than his predecessor, but many of Sogavare’s ministers survived in cabinet. Sikua appealed to RAMSI for more funds, particularly for rural development and for education, but Australian officials were wary of the danger of mission creep. Rudd’s government wanted to roll out “partnerships” across the Pacific, and to focus on the millennium development goals, but most of the assistance to health and (largely from New Zealand) to education was organised on a bilateral basis rather than through RAMSI.

Unsurprisingly, Solomon Islanders barely noticed the difference. RAMSI’s second phase was much more cautious than the first: it was already oriented towards an exit strategy. The mantra was that RAMSI’s departure would be determined by the completion of tasks rather than by some arbitrary deadline. Since RAMSI’s departure was now firmly on the horizon, its critics felt less threatened and, accordingly, became less vociferous.

The last phase of RAMSI commenced in 2013, when RAMSI was disassembled and its military contingent departed. All civilian programs were disbursed to multilateral or bilateral agencies, mostly to the Australian and New Zealand high commissions. The claim that the mission would end only when its tasks were completed vanished without trace. All that continued under the RAMSI auspices was a slimmed-down police assistance program. In itself, this was an acknowledgement of unfinished business. So, too, was the continuing appointment of Australian police commissioners, and the announcement of a post-RAMSI bilateral police assistance program.

The main change in mid 2017 is therefore the removal of the Pacific Islands Forum’s jurisdiction. Former critics, including three-time prime minister Sogavare, now feel able to embrace what was left of RAMSI, which is, after all, confined to the police-assistance program that Solomon Islands politicians always preferred.  

Intervention missions are never easy to judge. Is the appropriate yardstick subsequent stability or achievement of democracy? Should success be assessed relative to declared objectives or some wider standard? Australia’s initial expectations were undoubtedly ambitious, but these were resisted by Solomon Islands politicians who retained both office and legal authority.

In the first phase, the priority was the arrest of the militants and the confiscation of their weapons. Before the intended second state-building phase got under way, the Sogavare crisis intervened, triggering a major re-orientation. Solomon Islander politicians did not share the Australian government’s enthusiasm for building their state, but both sides agreed on the immediate objectives of removing guns from communities, the peacekeeping operation, and the need to transform the RSIP. The major longer-term focus of RAMSI was thus on policing, and it is success or failure in this respect that will ultimately settle the debate about RAMSI’s legacy. •

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The announcement allowed one exception: cases in which all the other nuclear-weapon parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, “have also consented to the jurisdiction of the Court and are party to the proceedings in question.” It came just weeks before more than 130 non-nuclear countries began meeting at the United Nations to negotiate a nuclear weapons ban treaty. Those talks resume this week.

This isn’t the first time the British government has taken such a step. Sixty years ago, facing condemnation of its proposed hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, it also withdrew from compulsory ICJ jurisdiction. In the Brexit era, is Britain heading back to the 1950s?

In its July 1996 advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, the ICJ determined that nuclear-weapon states are obliged by Article VI of the NPT “to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective control.” In a unanimous decision, the court has also recognised an equivalent rule under customary law, requiring each nuclear power to engage in disarmament talks.

More than twenty years later, the NPT nuclear-weapon countries are still in breach of those obligations. No multilateral disarmament talks are under way, nor even talks about talks, in UN forums such as the Committee on Disarmament. Nuclear-armed governments outside the NPT, including Israel and India, are also refusing to abide by customary law on disarmament.

Britain’s latest decision is a setback for the push for a treaty banning nuclear weapons, which is being spearheaded by non-nuclear countries. Britain isn’t alone: the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council, together with Israel and North Korea, already refuse to accept compulsory ICJ jurisdiction on disarmament. (By contrast, India and Pakistan have both accepted this jurisdiction, even though they are not NPT signatories.)

According to the non-government British American Security Information Council, or BASIC, Britain’s decision to reject compulsory ICJ jurisdiction is designed to stop “frustrated non-nuclear weapon states from bringing fresh cases against the UK for alleged failure to negotiate on the cessation of the nuclear arms race.” Britain’s declaration means that the court can only rule on nuclear disarmament disputes when the proceedings involve all five of the NPT nuclear-armed states. Announcing the move to the House of Commons, the foreign and Commonwealth affairs minister Alan Duncan said that “the government does not believe the United Kingdom’s actions in respect of such weapons and nuclear disarmament can meaningfully be judged in isolation.”

Another effect of Britain’s decision is to advance the cut-off date for historical cases to 1987. Restricting cases to the past thirty years may affect claims related to British nuclear testing in Australia (1952–57) and Kiribati (1957–58), or disputes arising from the 1985 royal commission into British nuclear testing in Australia.

The decision will also have the effect of banning governments from bringing repeat cases. In April 2014, the Republic of the Marshall Islands filed landmark lawsuits in the ICJ challenging all nine nuclear-armed nations for failing to comply with their NPT obligation to negotiate the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Because they accepted compulsory jurisdiction at the time, the cases against India, Pakistan and Britain proceeded to preliminary submissions.

By eight votes to eight (on the president’s casting vote), the ICJ dismissed the suit against Britain last October, ruling that there was insufficient evidence of a dispute between the Marshall Islands and Britain. (Is it a coincidence that six of the eight judges who found no dispute are nationals of nuclear-weapon states, while all the minority judges are from non-nuclear states?) Several judges stressed that the case was ending at a technical stage rather than after its substance had been examined.

The ICJ also ruled that the Marshall Islands has “special reasons for concern” about nuclear disarmament, because it is living with the health and environmental effects of sixty-seven nuclear tests. As BASIC notes, “The UK government’s 2017 decision would appear to cut off any possibility of the Marshall Islands bringing another case and succeeding, and likely shows that it is not confident that the court’s decision would be favourable if the substance of the case were discussed.”

Britain’s similar decision more than sixty years ago came in the face of protests across the Asia-Pacific region over its proposed nuclear-testing program at Christmas Island. The British government decided in 1956 to test thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bombs on Christmas Island and Malden Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony – today, part of the Republic of Kiribati. Public opposition was especially intense in Japan, where popular anger over Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been strengthened by the March 1954 US hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, codename Bravo, which irradiated the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon.

A nationwide signature campaign against nuclear testing, initiated on Hiroshima Day 1954, gathered more than thirty-two million signatures. The following year, peace activists founded the national peace organisation Gensuikyo (the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs). Britain’s announcement of H-bomb tests in mid-1956 fuelled the concerns.

By early 1957, the British embassy in Tokyo was sending regular reports to London, detailing rising protests against the proposed atmospheric testing program. Fearful that Japan might take a case to the ICJ to stop the Christmas Island tests, the British government temporarily withdrew from compulsory ICJ jurisdiction.

Whenever the interests of the nuclear powers are challenged, whether it’s 1957 or 2017, a similar disdain for law becomes clear. Tony Blair went to war in Iraq in 2003 on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction, exacerbating chaos and terrorism in the Middle East. Today, London calls on states like Iran to adhere to law on nuclear weapons but refuses to act on its own NPT disarmament obligations.

Despite its concerns over the ICJ, the UK Ministry of Defence has been prepared to defend nuclear cases in domestic courts. A 2004 case lodged by British, New Zealand and Fijian veterans of the 1950s Christmas Island tests spent ten years working its way through the British courts, with the authorities resisting every inch of the way. Defence officials appealed every temporary victory by the veterans in lower courts and refused to negotiate an out-of-court settlement. Dozens of the original litigants had died before the case was finally rejected 5–4 by the UK Supreme Court.

As talks recommence this week in New York for a nuclear weapons ban treaty, Britain’s refusal to commit to compulsory ICJ jurisdiction shows that efforts for a nuclear ban are beginning to bite. When it comes to nukes, London is running scared. •

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“It’s true,” he acknowledges with a laugh. “There is no one else in the Marshall Islands that has been exposed twice!”

Charlie had been doing jobs around the house on that morning in March 1954. “Before you have breakfast, all the leaves from the breadfruit trees have to be cleaned, the pigs and chickens fed,” he tells me. “As a young lad, I didn’t want to clean the yard, so I went to hide in the outhouse. But then, I heard noise like thunder. The blast shook the building, the trees…

“When such a disaster happens, the first place to go is to the church. I joined the boys and girls who had run there, until I realised I had no pants on – so I had to run back and put them on.”

Stories like this still dominate Marshallese politics and culture. Even as the Republic of the Marshall Islands joins this month’s negotiations for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, many locals want people to remember the radioactive legacy of the sixty-seven nuclear tests conducted at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls between 1946 and 1958.

Just weeks after the Bravo test, two Marshallese schoolteachers, Dwight Heine and Atlan Anien, prepared a petition for the United Nations Trusteeship Council. The United States was administering the Micronesian islands as a UN Strategic Trusteeship, and the petitioners wanted “all experiments with lethal weapons in this area [to] be immediately ceased.”

Their call highlighted the importance of land as a source of culture and identity – land that was vaporised or contaminated by hazardous levels of radioactive fallout. “Land means a great deal to the Marshallese,” they wrote. “It means more than just a place where you can plant your food crops and build your houses or a place where you can bury your dead. It is the very life of the people. Take away their land and their spirits go also.”

Marshall Islander Lekoj Anjain undergoing thyroid tests at Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York in 1968. He died of myelogenous leukemia in 1972. Brookhaven National Laboratories

The new president of the Marshall Islands, Hilda Heine, has followed that tradition of speaking out about the legacies of nuclear testing. Heine, who took office in January last year, is the first woman to be elected as leader of an independent Pacific island nation. A leading educationalist and the first Marshallese to obtain a PhD, she is outspoken about the failure of successive US governments to address the health and environmental legacies of the US nuclear tests.

“We face the reality that, after the US nuclear weapons testing program first began with the moving of Bikinians from Bikini Atoll, seventy-one years of inconsolable grief, terror and righteous anger followed, none of which have faded with time,” she said in a speech on this year’s Nuclear Remembrance Day, on 1 March, the anniversary of the 1954 Bravo test. “This is exacerbated by the United States not being honest as to the extent of radiation and the lingering effects the US nuclear weapons testing program have on our lives, ocean and land, and by the United States not willing to address the issue of adequate compensation as well as the radiological clean-up of our islands.”

As Marshall Islandsambassador-at-largeTony de Brum points out, “Bravo was the highest yielding of the US tests, exploding with the force of fifteen million tonnes of TNT. It was also the greatest radiological disaster in American history.”

To revitalise awareness and action, President Heine hosted a major conference, “Charting a Journey Toward Justice,” in the capital, Majuro, on 1–3 March. Over three days, hundreds of participants heard from nuclear survivors, research scientists, anthropologists and government leaders. Throughout the conference, the Marshall Islands president and the US ambassador to the Marshall Islands sat quietly in the audience, among ordinary citizens and many students from the College of the Marshall Islands and the University of the South Pacific.

For Heine, it was heartening to see the interest shown by young people in events that took place decades before they were born. “Very few of those who were there in the 1950s are still with us,” she told me. “Many of the living ones are quite old, close to the end of their life. They are very disappointed, because nothing has happened in their lifetime and they know that nothing will happen before they pass on. Therefore it’s up to us to energise the young generation to take on the mantle and go forward, because obviously it’s going to be a long fight.”

Bikini and other atolls are still contaminated with hazardous levels of radioactive isotopes, such as caesium-137, that can enter the food chain. In a 2016 paper published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a Columbia University team led by Professor Emlyn Hughes found relatively high gamma radiation at Bikini nearly sixty years after the end of nuclear testing. Low levels of gamma radiation persist on the settled island of Enewetak and the island of Rongelap.

“Bikini has radiation levels higher than the US and Marshalls governments have agreed on for resettlement,” says Hughes. “This is simply from background radiation. This is only one path and does not include the measurement of radiation in food such as coconut, breadfruit or fish.” This May, Hughes will lead another team to the northern atolls to look at exposure through food and from the ocean environment.

For decades, the US government hid the full extent of contamination in the Marshall Islands. During that period, it negotiated the Compact of Free Association, an agreement that led to self-government and independence for the Micronesian nation in 1986. As part of the Compact, the Marshall Islands government and people gave away the right to sue in US courts over damage to person and property from the tests. In return, a fund of US$150 million was established to deal with the legacies of the testing program.

Successive US governments have acknowledged the damage to the four northern atolls ­– Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utirik – from nuclear testing. But in May 1994, the US Department of Energy released to the Marshall Islands government more than seventy boxes of newly declassified documents, revealing that the fallout from Bravo and other tests had spread much more widely than Washington had previously acknowledged. For fifty years, US governments had hidden the fact that fallout from the Bravo test had reached other atolls, including Ailuk, Likiep, Wotho, Mejit and Kwajalein.

As archivists collate the documentary history of the testing era, Ambassador de Brum believes the US government still has a responsibility to provide full, unredacted documentation from the 1950s. “There cannot be closure without full disclosure,” he says.

In 2000, following the further revelations, the Marshall Islands government submitted a “changed circumstances” petition to the US Congress, seeking increased funding to pay compensation for damage to health and property. Under the provisions of the Compact, a Nuclear Claims Tribunal issued rulings for compensation amounting to more than US$2.3 billion, a sum far in excess of funds available through the trust fund. To this day, the US Congress has failed to grant the extra funding needed to cover the Tribunal’s decisions.

Hilda Heine stresses that the United States’ responsibility for health and environmental impacts across the whole country is still a concern for her government. The 1950s documents, she says, “have now shown that eighteen other inhabited atolls or single islands were contaminated by three of the six nuclear bombs tested in Operation Castle, as well as by the Bravo shot in 1954. The myth of only four ‘exposed’ atolls of Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utirik has shaped US nuclear policy on the Marshallese people since 1954, which limited medical and scientific follow-up and compensation programs.”

To coordinate further action on the nuclear program, the Marshall Islands Nitijela (parliament) recently passed legislation to establish a three-person National Nuclear Commission. The commission will develop a nuclear justice strategy and document all aspects of the US nuclear testing program.

“We only have six years left of the current Compact,” says Heine, “and so we will soon be talking to the United States on the economic provisions that are expiring in 2023. Right now, there are programs in existence that deal with the effects of the nuclear program, but the importance of the commission is that they will coordinate all of these separate programs as well as look at the strategy for going forward.”

Despite the US government’s health and remediation programs in the northern atolls, Heine believes it is time for the US Congress to respond to the changed circumstances petition. “You can see they are able to help the people of the four atolls but in very small ways, reacting to what is happening but not taking account of the root causes,” she says. “They realise that it’s a big job and it would take quite a bit of their resources. So they’d rather take care of the surface issues rather than the root causes. That’s the problem we’re facing in discussing our issues with the US government.”

Looking beyond Washington, successive Marshall Islands governments have sought to break the stalemate over the reduction of nuclear arsenals. In April 2014, the government filed landmark lawsuits in the International Court of Justice challenging the nine nuclear-armed nations for failing to comply with their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to negotiate the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Cases against India, Pakistan and Britain proceeded to preliminary submissions. But the court dismissed the lawsuits last October, ruling that there was insufficient evidence of a dispute between the Marshall Islands and these nuclear-armed nations.

Heine doesn’t regret the previous government’s decision to launch the cases. “I think it served its purpose to the extent that it continues to place the issue to the forefront of the minds of people, ly as well as in the United States,” she says. “Unfortunately, the conclusion was not what we hoped it would be, but I think it was important for us to put it out there, because otherwise, who will?”

She believes that there is a need to revive momentum on disarmament. “When you look at discussion on nuclear disarmament, it has pretty much come to a stop,” she says. “There seems to be no pathway moving forward. So I think it was important for the Marshall Islands to put some pressure on, by going to the International Court of Justice, and to keep the momentum and the discussion alive.”

This nuclear diplomacy comes alongside efforts to increase action on climate change, another environmental challenge to the low-lying atoll nation. Ambassador Tony de Brum played a key role in establishing the Higher Ambition Coalition, which linked developed and developing nations in the final stages of the negotiations leading to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

In December last year, the Marshall Islands joined 113 nations to support a landmark UN General Assembly resolution to begin negotiations on a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons. All Pacific island states, with the exception of the Federated States of Micronesia, voted in favour of the resolution, reflecting the importance of the cold war history that saw more than 315 atmospheric and underground nuclear tests at ten sites.

Now, beginning on 27 March 2017, negotiations for the nuclear weapons ban treaty are under way in New York, with a second round of talks scheduled for June and July. Across the Asia-Pacific region, governments as diverse as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Fiji are discussing a binding agreement similar to treaties that have abolished other classes of weapons (landmines, cluster munitions, chemical and biological weapons).

It’s no surprise that the nine nuclear-armed states will be reluctant to accede to the treaty. But the refusal of the Australian government to participate in the negotiations is a sad commentary on how Canberra’s security posture has been integrated into US nuclear war doctrines. With the nuclear ban treaty likely to be completed later this year, non-nuclear states will have the opportunity to sign on to an agreement delegitimising nuclear weapons and setting in train a process for nuclear abolition.

With its ongoing support for Extended Nuclear Deterrence, the Turnbull government is further aligning itself with the United States, even as president Donald Trump announces another US$52 billion in defence spending. When Malcolm Turnbull joins island leaders next September at the Pacific Islands Forum in Apia, Australia’s nuclear isolation will be fully on display. But the Marshall Islands, along with other neighbours, are likely to remind Australia of the folly of nuclear weapons. •

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Six of the independent Pacific Island countries went to the polls in 2016, and in three cases incumbent governments lost and were peacefully replaced by opposition constellations. In Samoa, Palau and Nauru, the incumbents were successful; in Kiribati, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and Vanuatu, opposition groups took office. Kiribati president Anote Tong reached his three-term limit, and although his Boutokaan te Koaua party obtained twenty-six of the forty-six seats at the January election, it was the opposition candidate Taaneti Mamau who won the subsequent presidential contest in a nationwide vote. That outcome realised a potential tension in the Kiribati constitutional arrangements: the risk of gridlocked government owing to the fact that the president lacks a parliamentary majority. Assisted by the fact that twenty-two MPs were newcomers, parliament regrouped around a newly formed post-election party, the Tobwan Kiribati.

Unlike Kiribati, the Marshall Islands’ president is selected by parliament. In November 2015 polls, fourteen of the thirty-three seats in the Nitijela(parliament) changed hands and around half the cabinet of president Christopher Loeak lost their seats. By a one-vote margin, the Nitijela opted for Casten Nemra, a president backed by the Kwajalein chiefs, but rapidly shifting coalition fortunes meant he lost a vote of confidence only three weeks later. In his place, senators realigned behind Hilda Heine, who became the country’s first female president in late January. Such an outcome so soon after a general election would have been unlikely in Kiribati because its constitution requires the dissolution of parliament after a successful vote of no confidence.

In Vanuatu, meanwhile, the prime minister heads the government but among the president’s few powers is the authority to dissolve parliament. In December 2015, president Baldwin Lonsdale triggered a dissolution after half of the incumbent government’s ministers were sent to prison for corruption. The snap election, held in January, brought the opposition into office. With twenty-two changes of government since 1991, Vanuatu has more experience of switches from government to opposition than any other country in the Pacific Islands.

Elsewhere, elections brought greater continuity. In Palau, president Tommy Remengesau was re-elected with a narrow majority in November, but incumbents won by a landslide in Nauru and Samoa. In Samoa, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi’s Human Rights Protection Party obtained thirty-five of the fifty parliamentary seats in March; twelve independents also joined the government, leaving the opposition Tautua Samoa Party with only three seats, less than the eight required for recognition as a political party, and encouraging objections that Samoa is becoming a one-party state. Tuilaepa’s party has now been in office since 1982, with one short break when it was forced into a coalition government.

Samoa’s 2016 election was the first under a new “best loser” system, designed to ensure women acquire at least 10 per cent of the seats in parliament. Since four women were elected through normal channels in 2016, the new law only applied to, and only secured, the election of a single additional female MP. Women remain poorly represented across the Pacific Islands, except in New Caledonia and French Polynesia, where a “law on parity” has ensured close to 50 per cent of legislators are female.

Unusually, at least since 2004, the incumbent government was also re-elected in Nauru, despite a record of poor relations with the judiciary and suspension of opposition MPs. All but one of Baron Waqa’s ministers were returned and several of the opposition MPs lost their seats. That government has become highly dependent on funds for hosting the Australian-run detention centre, which potentially became even more critical for Canberra’s Pacific Solution after the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea in April ordered the closure of a similar detention centre on Manus Island.

Across the Pacific Islands, elections and government formation are hotly contested events. Allegations of bribery or fraud are commonplace in Solomon Islands, Samoa and Papua New Guinea, although courts rarely overturn results. Money politics has become pervasive in PNG and Solomon Islands, with a large share of government expenditure legally disbursed to MPs as District Service Improvement Programme grants or Rural Constituency Development Funds. In the parliaments of these western Melanesian countries, too, cash handouts are frequently used to sustain government majorities or solicit support for no-confidence challenges, with the courts mostly powerless to convict those responsible of wrongdoing owing to lack of solid evidence.

But there are exceptions to the impunity. In November 2015, deputy prime minister Moana Carcasses and half the Vanuatu cabinet were imprisoned for having openly offered and received bribes ahead of a no-confidence vote. The president, and the new government elected in January 2016, resisted pressure to pardon those jailed. There was no unrest. Another Pacific country also witnessed a landmark political corruption case in 2016: in June, Tuvalu’s courts convicted former prime minister Apisai Ielemia of corruption, and sentenced him to prison for a year.

In PNG, the law courts have become highly influential, and are prepared to confront key parts of the government’s legislative program. In September 2015, PNG’s Supreme Court declared prime minister Peter O’Neill’s attempts to amend parliamentary rules to be unconstitutional; he had sought to extend the “grace period” during which there cannot be a no-confidence motion and to reduce the annual number of sitting days. In June 2016, PNG police opened fire on student protesters who were demanding that O’Neill step down to face charges of corruption. O’Neill responded by delaying the sitting of parliament, hoping to avoid a no-confidence challenge, but the Supreme Court ordered a recall of parliament. O’Neill won the resulting parliamentary vote, and is therefore likely to survive until the next election, scheduled for mid 2017.

Because PNG’s courts have extensive powers to review government legislation, there is a risk of what Ran Hirschl calls “juristocracy,” with courts usurping key functions of law-makers. In most of the recent cases, court intervention in western Melanesia has been well-intentioned and the outcome relatively benign, but the preparedness of the courts to engage in a showdown with the legislature was demonstrated in PNG in 2011–12, when that country experienced its worst constitutional crisis since independence.

No other Pacific country has witnessed the recurrent breakdowns of democracy, and abrogation of successive constitutions, that we’ve seen in Fiji. Coups in 1987, 2000 and 2006 have gravely undermined both respect for electoral outcomes and the rule of law. After eight years of rule by decree, Fiji went to the polls in September 2014, but the aftermath has not been a smooth reversion to democratic rule. Although coup leader Frank Bainimarama’s FijiFirst party won a thumping 59 per cent majority in 2014, the government remains ever-focused on threats to its security and highly intolerant of the opposition. Three MPs from the main opposition party were suspended during 2015–16, and the opposition chair of the public accounts committee, Biman Prasad, was replaced by a FijiFirst MP. In September 2016, a group of opposition leaders was arrested for convening a forum to discuss the 2013 constitution.

Fiji is not yet a consolidated semi-authoritarian state. Much of its present orientation depends on the prime minister and his attorney-general, without whom Fiji would probably change direction, but the country’s military has acquired a taste for power and will not easily settle under civilian rule.

Aside from Fiji, all of the Pacific Islands have sustained unbroken constitutional rule since obtaining independence at varying points between 1962 and 1980 (or 1994 in the case of Palau). The courts have mostly remained independent and the media reasonably free from interference, again with Fiji as the glaring exception. The region’s only monarchy, Tonga, successfully established a majority popularly elected parliament in 2010, and ended royal selection of the prime minister. Secession, where it has occurred, has mostly been peaceful, as was the case with the break-up of the former US-administered Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands in Micronesia and the 1976 split between Tuvalu and Kiribati.

One major exception was the Santo rebellion in Vanuatu in 1980, which left a lasting, and at times bitter, anglophone/francophone cleavage; but with a francophone prime minister, Charlot Salwai, now heading a largely anglophone coalition government in Vanuatu, that rift has narrowed. Chuuk’s perennial threat to break away from the Federated States of Micronesia persists, but it has never descended into the kind of violence witnessed on Bougainville between 1988 and 1997 or, still today, in Indonesian West Papua. Even Bougainville ultimately reached a peace settlement, establishing an autonomous government in 2004. Both Bougainville (2001–04) and New Caledonia (1988, 1998) settled protracted conflicts through peace agreements that entailed devolution, constitutional reform and promises of future referenda on independence (expected in Bougainville in 2019 and New Caledonia in 2018).

That range of Pacific outcomes has largely defied the predictions of doomsayers, who around the turn of the century anticipated political crises on the African pattern of Zimbabwe, Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of Congo. One reason is the Pacific Islands’ isolation from external pressures of the type witnessed in postcolonial Africa, Asia and the Middle East, which has allowed its nations time to reshape inherited institutional arrangements relatively free of external interference. Another is a demographic pattern of either exceptional heterogeneity or exceptional homogeneity, in contrast to the more troubled experiences of the bi-communal states of Fiji and 1980s New Caledonia. And yet another reason is an egalitarian ethos, at least in some parts of the region, and a distaste for the pretensions of would-be strongmen who seek to usurp the power and authority of oversight institutions. •

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Just a few words signalled a momentous change. Since its founding in 1971, the Forum has been an organisation made up exclusively of sovereign nations, linking Australia, New Zealand and independent island nations. But during their forty-seventh annual meeting at Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Forum’s leaders had decided to welcome two French-controlled territories as full members.

The lack of any explanation or declaration in the communiqué reflects ongoing concerns about France’s objectives among some member states, and awareness that other territories might also seek membership. The consensus decision was forged despite calls by leading Kanak and Maohi independence activists to defer a decision, in New Caledonia’s case until after a scheduled referendum on independence in 2018.

The pro-French leaders of the two territories welcomed the news. “It’s really a great thing for New Caledonia,” Philippe Germain, president of the Government of New Caledonia, told me after the announcement was made. “It will certainly allow us to participate in discussions about the management of our region in all sectors: not only the environmental questions that are worrying the whole world, but also issues of economy, health, education and governance.”

French Polynesian president Edouard Fritch, who had lobbied independent nations to give his territory a greater role in the Forum, was similarly upbeat. “This decision comes after discussions we’ve been holding with our friends from the Pacific, where we strongly expressed our desire to become full members of the family,” he told me in Pohnpei. “Despite obstacles on the path, the main reality – for us and for most Pacific countries – is that we are Pacific islanders like any other. It’s not because we are French that we’re in this meeting, but because we’re islanders.”

Any reasons for excluding French Polynesia no longer applied, said Fritch. “In contrast, many countries see New Caledonia and French Polynesia as a pathway to France and to Europe, for Europe is present here in the Pacific.”

The decision has extra historical significance because of the Forum’s origins. In the 1970s, a group of independent island states created a new gathering as a response to a ban by France and other colonial powers on political debate within the existing regional organisation, the South Pacific Commission. Leaders like Fiji’s Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara and Nauru’s Hammer DeRoburt were angry that they couldn’t discuss nuclear testing and self-determination for the colonies of the region.

After forty-five years as an organisation of independent nations, though, times are changing. Over the past decade, Forum leaders have been working to expand their engagement with the remaining US, French and New Zealand territories of the Pacific. The decision to upgrade the status of French Polynesia and New Caledonia, bringing the Forum’s membership to eighteen, fulfils the vision expressed by leaders in 2004 to better integrate the non-self-governing territories.

Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, a supporter of the change, acknowledged that it was “a political decision.” According to the incoming Forum chair, Federated States of Micronesia president Peter Christian, “There were concerns about how we are doing it, but at the end of the day, doing it the Pacific way, we agreed that French Polynesia and New Caledonia have been knocking on our doors for many, many years. One of the things that really helped us make a decision is that most of the issues we’re talking about are cross-border issues; they have no respect for political borders.”

Not all leaders favoured the change. Nauru’s president Baron Waqa and Tuvalu’s prime minister Enele Sopoaga are understood to have raised concerns during the leaders’ retreat. It was their two nations, together with Solomon Islands, that lodged a resolution to relist French Polynesia as a non-self-governing territory with the UN General Assembly in 2013, ending a sixty-five-year period during which it was absent from the list of countries recognised as colonial possessions. The success of that move was greeted with fury by French authorities because it opened the way for the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation to monitor governance in French Polynesia and the legacies of thirty years of French nuclear testing.

The rapprochement with France has worrying implications for the Kanak independence coalition, the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, which has long relied on Forum support in its quest for decolonisation. After the signing of the 1998 Noumea Accord, New Caledonia’s elected government engaged increasingly with the Forum, obtaining observer status in 1999. It was joined as an observer by French Polynesia in 2004, and both countries were upgraded to associate member status at the 2006 Forum meeting in Apia. The territory of Wallis and Futuna, another French “overseas collectivity,” also joined as observer at that meeting. (After last month’s decision, Wallis and Futuna remains a Forum observer, with no clear pathway to full membership.) US territories like Guam and American Samoa gained observer status in 2011.

Since the Noumea Accord and the end of French nuclear testing, the government in Noumea, and its counterpart in the French Polynesian capital, Papeete, have been granted significant new powers and gained the right to negotiate regional agreements in some sectors. Under the French Constitution, however, Paris still controls the military, courts, police, currency and other sovereign matters, and the constitutional power to sign many treaties still remains with the French Republic. Successive governments in New Caledonia – all led by presidents opposed to independence from France – have lobbied to upgrade from associate to full membership of the Forum, even though New Caledonia is not a fully independent and sovereign nation.

The FLNKS Congress in February this year began discussing a revised position on Forum membership. Some leaders from two of FLNKS’s member parties, Palika and UPM, support the change as part of the broader regional integration of New Caledonia with its Melanesian neighbours. But leaders from the UC-FLNKS and Nationalists parliamentary group, led by long-time independence leader Roch Wamytan, opposed full membership until after the territory’s 2018 independence referendum. Wamytan unsuccessfully lobbied Forum Secretary General Dame Meg Taylor to delay the decision.

Since New Caledonia gained Forum associate membership in 2006, all delegations have included both supporters and opponents of independence. One noticeable feature of the Pohnpei Forum was the absence of any Kanak leaders among New Caledonia’s delegates.

Last month’s decision followed a special Forum ministerial mission to French Polynesia in July 2015, led by PNG foreign minister Rimbink Pato, which assessed Papeete’s application for full membership. At the 2015 summit in Papua New Guinea, leaders deferred a decision on the mission’s report. A key concern was whether the existing governance arrangements of French Polynesia would enable its government “to participate independently and effectively as a full member, in the full complement of political deliberation, decision-making and commitments of the Forum.”

Since then, the Forum secretariat had developed new criteria for membership for consideration at this year’s meeting. Despite this, Forum leaders in Pohnpei failed to set out any clear rationale for the decision. Many observers expressed surprise at its timing, but there had been plenty of evidence that pressure from France was mounting.

The issue was raised by France’s overseas minister, George Pau-Langevin, at the 2015 Post-Forum Dialogue in Port Moresby. Then, at the November 2015 France-Oceania summit in Paris (held just before the global talks that led to the Paris agreement on climate change), French president François Hollande expressed a hope that the Pacific Islands Forum “could welcome to its breast both New Caledonia and French Polynesia as full members and Wallis and Futuna as an associate member. These three territories will be our representatives.” France and its local representatives have lobbied sub-regional bodies like the Polynesian Leaders Group and Melanesian Spearhead Group.

Regional relations with France have certainly improved since the days of nuclear testing and the 1985 terrorist attack on the Rainbow Warrior by French intelligence operatives. Today, France is an active partner on climate change, development programs and EU relations. As a major contributor to the Green Climate Fund, Paris has increased its climate finance for small island states, and President Hollande joined island leaders at a High Level Dialogue on Climate Change in Noumea during his 2014 visit to the region.

Supporters of change: Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull and the NZ prime minister John Key. Nic Maclellan

Through the governments of New Caledonia and French Polynesia and via its own bilateral programs, France has offered to bankroll a range of regional initiatives. President Fritch offered funding for a Polynesian Leaders Group secretariat, while President Germain has offered – and Paris has approved – visa-free travel to New Caledonia for citizens of Vanuatu. Other Pacific island countries have been offered improved air services and support for civil aviation, a crucial concern for smaller island states lacking good transport networks.

Through the Melanesian Spearhead Group, Papua New Guinea has been a long-time supporter of the FLNKS. But the PNG government has also been improving its diplomatic and economic ties to France, and this no doubt weighed on Port Moresby’s decision to support the two territories’ full membership this year. Prime minister Peter O’Neill’s state visit to France in June had been a first for a PNG leader. “With our strengthening relationship direct with France,” he said at the time, “I hope we will see an increase in business and tourism. France is increasingly our trade gateway to Europe and we would like to see Papua New Guinea become a significant hub for France in the Pacific.”

Alongside these political developments, the French energy corporation Total has been expanding its investment in PNG’s LNG industry. The company’s chief executive, Patrick Pouyanné, travelled to PNG last April, and later announced that his company would strengthen its partnership with Oil Search and InterOil for gas exploration. During his Paris visit, O’Neill and his ministers met with Total directors to discuss a potential US$10 billion investment by the company and its partners in PNG’s Gulf province.

Since the 2010 signing of the Joint Statement of Strategic Partnership Between Australia and France, successive governments in Canberra have supported the push for New Caledonia and French Polynesia to become full members, even before a decision on self-determination. Reluctant to be seen as advancing France’s agenda, though, Australian officials have left it for others to take the running. During his press conference on arrival in the Federated States of Micronesia, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to respond to questions on the topic.

Under the 1992 FRANZ agreement, Australia, New Zealand and France have long collaborated on maritime surveillance and humanitarian responses in the Pacific. This year, Canberra also announced that the French shipbuilding corporation DCNS had won an A$50 billion contract to build the next generation of submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. The ANZUS allies will now be happy for France to upgrade its involvement in the South Pacific Defence Ministers Meeting, where Paris currently has observer status. (Paris rather than Noumea or Papeete controls all French military deployments in the region.)

In contrast to Turnbull, NZ prime minister John Key was a very vocal supporter of the change. The Key government shifted policy after a visit by French prime minister Manuel Valls last May, the first visit to New Zealand by a French PM since 1991. Key conceded that it was possible to make a case that the two territories don’t fit the Forum’s criteria for membership, but, he added, “the scale of their activities, the contribution they could potentially make, I think argues the case that they should be allowed full membership.” Pacific academics have argued that New Zealand was partly motivated by the hope that this gesture of goodwill might discourage a French veto for Helen Clarke’s bid for the post of UN secretary-general.

With other Pacific territories – including Tokelau, American Samoa and Guam – seeking greater engagement with the Forum, Samoa’s prime minister Tuilaepa referred to the particular circumstances of France’s lengthy campaign for its territories. “There are many others, but these two have a long association,” he said. “They’ve been knocking and knocking and knocking on the door.” And if others like West Papua or Bougainville come knocking? “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Meanwhile, France seems to be in the Pacific to stay. During a flying visit to Tahiti last February, François Hollande reaffirmed his country’s intention to remain a power in the region. “That’s another reason for my visit here,” he told the Assembly of French Polynesia, “to show that there are no far-off territories of the French Republic – there is only the Republic… You are not far from France, because you are France, because I am here in France.”

Some commentators have suggested that France can play a greater role in limiting Chinese power in the Pacific. But French patrol boats in Noumea and Papeete have limited military capacity and are based thousands of kilometres away from current tensions in the South China Sea. Moreover, the governments of French Polynesia and New Caledonia have both welcomed extensive Chinese investment in tourism and other sectors. This year, Noumea has expanded nickel exports to China, as traditional markets like Australia have reduced their imports of nickel ore.

Of greater importance is France’s strategic interest in maritime resources like tuna fisheries and deep-sea mining. Seeking to uphold his country’s self-image as a mid-sized global power, Hollande has reaffirmed the strategic importance of France’s seven-million-square-kilometre Exclusive Economic Zone in the Pacific.

As Pacific governments seek to expand their control of ocean resources, France and other European powers are increasingly interested in the wealth of this liquid continent. “We have to protect the EEZ,” Hollande said in Tahiti. “We have to ensure our presence so that no one can come to exploit the EEZ without our consent or authorisation. It’s our common heritage – it’s yours, it’s ours and we share it. So we must ensure that other people can’t interfere with part of our territory.”

With French presidential and legislative elections to be held in mid 2017 and New Caledonia’s referendum on self-determination scheduled for late 2018, there are uncertain times ahead. Meanwhile, start rewriting all the textbooks about governance in the Pacific. •

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Having had fair warning of Turnbull’s intentions, other committees rushed out their findings at the last minute. In the week before parliament was dissolved, the various Senate, House and joint committees published around seventy interim or final reports between them. Among the releases was a report from the joint standing committee on migration on its inquiry into Australia’s Seasonal Worker Programme.

It is no surprise that this document garnered little attention except among observers with a specialist interest. The nuts-and-bolts work of parliamentary committees – less spectacular than question time jousting and more taxing than poll-watching or leadership speculation – often goes unrecognised even in the middle of the electoral cycle. The pressure of the twenty-four-hour news cycle gives journalists little incentive to wade through bulky and often verbose publications, especially once they switch to campaign mode.

Yet committee work can be important and influential, as the history of the Seasonal Worker Programme, or SWP, shows. The Senate standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade put the scheme on the political agenda during its 2003 inquiry into Australia’s relations with Papua New Guinea and the island states of the southwest Pacific. One of the thirty-three recommendations of its report, A Pacific Engaged, was “a pilot program to allow for labour to be sourced from the region for seasonal work in Australia.” The Howard government’s response, two years later, was belated and muted. It noted the recommendation with the terse comment that “Australia has traditionally not supported programs to bring low-skilled seasonal workers to Australia.”

Yet the idea gained traction, not least because Pacific Island leaders began lobbying for such a scheme at regional meetings. The World Bank took an interest, too, commissioning research on labour mobility in the Pacific that fed back into the parliamentary process. In 2006, the Senate education and employment committee explored the idea in far greater detail. Its report, Perspectives on the Future of the Harvest Labour Force, recommended against piloting a seasonal worker scheme, arguing that the proposal was “likely to be vulnerable to populist sentiment at this time.” Yet the committee’s inquiry served to advance the cause by engaging interested parties and putting a wealth of evidence, argument and research on the public record.

In 2007, in a report on Australia’s aid program in the Pacific, the joint foreign affairs, defence and trade committee renewed its push for “an active and serious evaluation” of a scheme, and in the same year New Zealand launched its seasonal labour program, now known as the Recognised Seasonal Employer Work Policy. Eventually Australia followed suit, announcing the Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme in 2008. In 2012, the pilot became the SWP, an ongoing program for migrants from Pacific Island nations and East Timor.

Since then, New Zealand’s scheme has taken off – it is widely seen as a success – while Australia’s SWP remains limited in size and impact. Despite its much smaller economy, New Zealand hosts around 8000 seasonal workers each year; Australia’s numbers are fewer than 3000.

In an effort to reinvigorate the SWP, the federal government introduced changes designed partly to make it more accessible to employers, and partly to complement the white paper on developing northern Australia. The annual cap on worker numbers has been removed, and participation will now be “determined by employers’ unmet demand for labour.” The scheme has also been broadened from horticulture to take in aquaculture, and cane and cotton farming, with proposals to extend it to other agricultural sectors under active consideration.

A trial of seasonal workers in the “accommodation industry” has been converted into a permanent program, opening up jobs for waiters, kitchen hands, gardeners and cleaners. This is initially limited to Western Australia, the Northern Territory, tropical north Queensland and South Australia’s Kangaroo Island, but other locations are likely to be added over time and a trial of other seasonal jobs in tourism is under way in northern Australia.

Other rules designed to protect the interests of seasonal workers have also been relaxed. Sponsoring employers no longer have to guarantee workers a minimum of fourteen weeks’ employment, for example; that requirement has been replaced by a vague onus on employers “to demonstrate to the Australian government that seasonal workers will benefit financially from their participation.”

Even with these changes, though, it’s unlikely that the scheme will be attractive to large numbers of employers, particularly in the horticultural sector, which it was originally intended to assist. And despite remaining small, the scheme is also likely to be prone to periodic scandals. Why? Because other key problems haven’t been dealt with, as is clear from the migration committee report released just before the election campaign began.

The report pointed to the fact that the SWP is “in direct competition” with the much larger and largely unregulated Working Holiday Maker scheme. Of the 226,812 backpackers given working holiday visas in 2014–15, a large proportion would have sought seasonal employment. The reason is no mystery: if they work in a regional area for at least eighty-eight days (in plant and animal cultivation, tree farming and felling, fishing and pearling, or mining and construction), they qualify for a second twelve-month visa. More than 41,000 of these second visas were granted last financial year.

Farmers who want to engage working holiday-makers don’t have to prove their credentials in any way, whereas “approved employers” under the SWP must demonstrate not only “good immigration practices and a history of compliance with immigration legislation” but also “a history of compliance with Australian workplace relations, work health and safety legislation, and other relevant laws.” While only fifty-eight employers were approved under the SWP in 2014–15, a majority of horticultural producers report employing working holiday-makers. An employer who wants to recruit backpackers doesn’t have to test the local labour market at all, whereas approved SWP employers must advertise for a two-week period within the three months before they bring a seasonal worker to Australia.

Extensive evidence shows that working holiday-makers are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse from employers who can determine whether they qualify for a second twelve-month visa. The SWP is not without problems either – as recent cases involving the ill-treatment of workers from Fiji and Vanuatu show – but it is easier to monitor the employment conditions of teams of workers deployed under a centrally organised program than it is to keep track of what happens to tens of thousands of backpackers independently entering the rural labour market. As the migration committee noted, the Fair Work Ombudsman receives a “relatively low” number of complaints about employers in the SWP compared to other sectors. So it’s disappointing that the committee called for yet another review of the two programs rather than making the bolder recommendation that the second working holiday visa be phased out and the labour market gaps filled instead by an expansion of the SWP.

Abuse could be further reduced if state and federal governments regulated the labour hire industry effectively. On this point the migration committee did call for action, endorsing an earlier Senate education and employment committee recommendation that labour hire contractors be subject to a licensing regime. That committee’s report on temporary work visas, A National Disgrace, concluded that “certain parts of the labour hire industry… have been a breeding ground for the widespread and egregious exploitation of temporary visa workers.” A re-elected Turnbull government committed to cutting red tape (or even a minority Coalition government) is unlikely to act decisively on this issue.

The migration committee’s report on the SWP also recommended that the program be expanded into new sectors suffering from labour shortages, notably aged care, childcare and disability care. This would certainly help achieve the committee’s laudable aim of opening up the program to more women, but it is problematic in other ways. Unlike significant parts of the agriculture and tourism industries, there is nothing remotely seasonal about care work.

Bringing in low-skilled migrant workers on temporary visas to fill ongoing gaps in the labour market is a very different proposition from a seasonal scheme in which migrants come to Australia for a defined period each year, and it would open the door to a different range of problems. Assuming that these migrants would be working and paying tax in Australia for years at a time, what rights would they accrue to access welfare benefits? Would there be a pathway to permanent residency and citizenship, or would they, like many New Zealanders, be trapped in permanent temporariness? If Australia needs low-skilled workers from the Pacific and East Timor to fill permanent jobs, then we must offer them permanent visas and allow them to settle with their families and become full members of the political community.

The SWP was designed to be cyclical, with migrants spending less than six months at a time in Australia but returning year after year in subsequent seasons. (For workers from Kiribati, Nauru or Tuvalu, the time limit has been extended to nine months because of the significant expense and difficulty of travelling to Australia from those micro-states.) It was hoped that migrant workers would be able to maintain close links with their families and home communities rather than be separated from them for years at a time. And it was hoped that the workers would use the skills and savings acquired in Australia to improve their own lives at home and the lives of those around them.

The program focuses on island states in the Pacific (and East Timor) in recognition of the reality that these small, often isolated nations can struggle to generate internal economies of scale or export markets large enough to create sufficient employment for young and growing populations. (Thankfully, the migration committee resisted calls for the SWP to be expanded to countries in Southeast Asia. Some employers and industry lobby groups had sought this expansion so that they could argue for greater market access for Australian agricultural products.)

The SWP was also designed to benefit Australian employers, especially in horticulture. Over recent years it has become increasingly difficult to recruit sufficient staff for the “dramatic but predictable seasonal peaks in demand for labour” in the industry – work like fruit picking and pruning. Jobs like these don’t offer an attractive career path, and with populations declining in rural areas and competition from other more lucrative sectors like mining, no pool of local workers exists to take up positions when needed. Students might once have filled this niche during vacations, but they can now find better-paid work without leaving the city. Since the introduction of the second working holiday visa, backpackers have become the default workforce for horticulture and are also increasingly important in tourism. But relying on such an itinerant workforce has its disadvantages.

The Victorian apple-growing firm Vernview, for example, told the committee that the high turnover makes working holiday-makers unreliable because “backpackers tend to only want to be around for short periods before heading off to the next region as many have a pre-planned itinerary of exploring Australia.” This has often left the business “short of labour and caused issues on critical days of harvest and getting the crop picked in optimum condition.”

Mossmont Nursery in Griffith echoed this concern, noting that backpackers are unskilled:

They generally care little for the work and are very unreliable. On average, they work for us for about a month – maybe two months if we are lucky – and then move on. Every time they leave, we have to retrain and reskill staff, which costs us money and time. Further, a lot of our trees get damaged…

By encouraging migrants to return year after year, the SWP aims to provide employers with a secure source of increasingly skilled and experienced labour. Queensland firm Golden Mile No. 1 confirmed this experience, telling the committee that employees under the SWP were “at least twice as productive as backpackers.”

In 2014–15 more than half the workers in the SWP were return migrants. The increased productivity that repeat workers bring to an enterprise should offset the extra costs associated with a more highly regulated scheme (including the requirement for employers to share the costs of workers’ travel). It is not only individual growers who stand to benefit, but also the industry as a whole and the wider economy. According to evidence presented to the committee, New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme has delivered a 32 per cent increase in output.

As long as the second working holiday visa is on offer, though, many rural enterprises and labour hire firms will continue to recruit cheaper, unregulated backpackers rather than go to the trouble of seeking accreditation under the SWP. And unless labour contractors are subjected to a rigorous system of licensing and regulation, we should expect more scandalous examples of abuse of temporary workers of all kinds. •

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Both prime ministers have traded insults in the past. Last year, Key accused Bainimarama of “mouthing off” after the Fijian PM called for a reconfiguration of the Pacific Islands Forum to diminish Australian and New Zealand influence. Key said that no one should take the Fijian leader seriously. Bainimarama’s defence of his 2006 coup might have been crude, poorly timed and largely inaccurate, but he is not alone among national leaders in using diplomatic occasions to celebrate the real or perceived founding moments of his country.

For its part, Australia has not sent a prime minister to Fiji since the 2006 coup, though foreign minister Julie Bishop travelled to Suva for a carefully choreographed meeting with Bainimarama in February 2014 and visited again in the wake of Cyclone Winston early this year. Before assuming her cabinet post, she too was publicly vilified by a Fijian leader: in her case, at a 2013 Brisbane gathering of the Australia Fiji Business Forum by foreign minister Ratu Inoke Kubuabola, who lambasted the Australian government about the regional impact of Australian detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru.

Conveying much the same message as Bainimarama delivered to John Key, Kubuabola also opined that “Australia chose to punish Fiji for finally addressing the deep divisions in our society, the lack of equality and genuine democracy and the corruption that was destroying our country from within.” After she became foreign minister, Bishop’s invitation to Fiji to discuss a possible restructuring of the Pacific Islands Forum was snubbed.

The critical issue is not whether Bainimarama’s comments this month were diplomatic or not, but whether his interpretation is accurate. Has his government initiated “genuine democracy,” increased social equity, countered corruption and soothed ethnic divisions? And why have ministers on both sides of the Tasman felt unable to put forward an alternative assessment?

Any verdict on the Fiji “revolution” needs to be carefully weighed. In many ways, it is still too early to make a definitive judgement. True, the Bainimarama government has been in office since 2006, but its sympathisers would argue – with some justification – that Fiji was in crisis-management mode in the early post-coup years. Only after 2010, as the economy recovered and the security situation stabilised, could Bainimarama’s administration begin implementing its agenda. Still, the subsequent six years – or two terms of an Australian government – is a long enough period for some verdict to be reached, to the degree that a lack of accurate information allows. The tenth anniversary of the coup this coming December will inevitably encourage competing judgements of progress in Fiji since 2006.

Many of Bainimarama’s claims owe their domestic resonance to the government’s control over the flow of information. With the opposition in Fiji’s parliament struggling to counter government propaganda, strong media censorship legislation and a compliant public service, those in power are often able to shape interpretations of how the country has fared since 2006. But how strongly do their claims stack up?

• Genuine democracy? Parliamentary sitting days have been cut back, key opposition MPs suspended, and the chair of the parliamentary public accounts committee sacked. It’s true, though, that the 2013 constitution abolished communal electoral rolls, which long segregated Fiji’s citizens by race, and dispensed with a preferential voting system that worked badly at elections in 1999, 2001 and 2006. The 2014 polls, held under a new proportional system, were probably not rigged in any direct way, but the wider electoral environment was heavily constrained in favour of the incumbents. The Australian-led observer team found that election “credible” but cautiously steered clear of addressing the wider issues.

Despite the return to elective democracy at the national level, municipal authorities remain unelected. The 2013 constitution was introduced by decree and can’t be amended except with the support of 75 per cent of registered voters – an exceptionally high threshold. That alone is likely to store up major problems for the future.

• Reduced inequality? Much is made of Fiji’s household income and expenditure surveys, which found a fall in poverty between 2008–09 and 2013–14. But even if these statistics are accurate, they are part of a longer-run trend that pre-dates the 2006 coup. A 2002–03 survey found a 35 per cent rate of poverty, which had fallen to 31 per cent by 2008–09 and 28.9 per cent by 2013–14 (though comparisons through time can be hazardous). It’s important to remember that the Fiji Bureau of Statistics, which collects the basic data, experiences political interference, and some of its key reports, such as the 2007 census analysis and the 2010­–11 employment and unemployment survey, have not been released. Even if the poverty rate has indeed fallen, it is not clear that government policies are responsible.

• Less corruption? The Bainimarama government established a Fiji Independent Commission against Corruption, but much of its work has been highly politicised and embroiled in vendettas against those associated with the deposed government. The public accounts committee that functioned until the 2014 election was allowed only to investigate pre-coup malpractice. After the election, auditor-general’s reports were released for the post-coup years (2007–13) and an opposition-chaired public accounts committee was established. But the subsequent sacking of the committee’s chair and the substitution of a pro-government MP have stymied its investigations. Serious allegations against the post-coup government – including confirmed reports that ministerial salaries were diverted during 2010–11 through a firm owned by the attorney-general’s aunt – have not been fully investigated.

• Improved ethnic relations? Here, assessments diverge wildly, with alternative verdicts shaped by broader interpretations of Fiji’s history and of the resilience of its communal tensions. Reactions to the 2006 coup were themselves highly ethnically polarised, particularly during 2006–10 when opposition was widespread within the indigenous Fijian community, among lawyers and professionals, and in the media. Since around 2009–10, the indigenous response has been much more divided, with many prepared to wait and see what the Bainimarama government delivers.

The new millennium may well mark the transition away from the ethnically based politics of the post-independence years, but it is less certain whether this is a result of the coup or of a longer-term demographic reconfiguration. And it is impossible to know what might have happened if the short-lived multi-party cabinet of May–December 2006 ­– which featured prominent political leaders from both of the major communities – had survived.

Many of Fiji’s post-independence elections featured two big, antagonistic ethnically based parties, one largely indigenous-supported and the other mainly Fiji Indian–backed. The shift away from the bicommunal polity of the 1980s, when indigenous Fijians and Fiji Indians each accounted for around 50 per cent of the population, potentially takes much of the heat out of the electoral battle. Ethnic Fijians now constitute around 63 per cent of the country’s citizens and Fiji Indians are down to around 33 per cent, with the gap widening. The likelihood is that the standing of the Bainimarama government, rather than a showdown between communally identified parties, will dominate elections for some time to come.

Since 2010, an Australian and New Zealand policy of mild sanctions on Fiji has been displaced by a policy of re-engagement, but this new policy has been no more successful than its predecessor. Of course, Bainimarama is now an elected prime minister, Fiji is an important regional player, and nothing will be gained by isolating the island nation. The re-engagement policy has been fuelled by a sensible conviction that working alongside an ally is likely to be more effective than remonstrating with an adversary. But, as John Key’s visit indicated, combined work on the rehabilitation after Cyclone Winston earlier this year offered little payoff in terms of a public warming of diplomatic relations. Disengagement or full re-engagement are not the only policy options.

The re-engagement policy has meant that ministers in Australia and New Zealand have been reluctant to make critical statements about Bainimarama’s democratic backsliding or chequered human rights record. Fiji regime insiders, who after the 2006 coup chose to work within government in the hope of achieving reform, complain that they nowadays get little support from Canberra or Wellington.

Dwelling on conflicting interpretations of the 2006 coup may seem fruitless, but berating Australia and New Zealand for allegedly victimising Fiji during 2006–10 remains a central theme in the Fiji government’s narrative about its own origins. Associated claims that 2006 was a legitimate “revolution” are still being used to punish the opposition, clamp down on dissent, control the media and justify limited accountability. Despite facing no serious domestic threat, and reflecting its military origins, the Bainimarama government appears unable to normalise the security situation. It operates perpetually in emergency mode and justifies doing so in terms of its heroic transformation project.

One possibility is that the rhetoric will ease with time, or that the services of the more inflammatory speechwriters will be dispensed with, but so far there is little sign of this. Until that occurs, the best approach might be to keep Suva off the itinerary of Australia’s next prime minister. •

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Nearly 800 of the smelter’s employees have lost their jobs this year, and are relying on the federal government’s Fair Entitlements Guarantee for unpaid entitlements. Legal battles are looming over who controls Queensland Nickel and how much the company’s debts to staff and creditors will end up costing taxpayers.

But Palmer’s woes extend to New Caledonia, just 2000 kilometres from Townsville, which has long been a major supplier of laterite ores to the Yabulu smelter. The mining and export of ores bearing nickel and cobalt provides a range of economic benefits to the French Pacific territory, which holds an estimated 25 per cent of global reserves. The minerals and metallurgy sector is the largest private employer in the island nation of 265,000 people.

In March, as Queensland Nickel went into liquidation, New Caledonia’s president, Philippe Germain, announced a new plan to tackle the current downturn. “Our mining framework has always prioritised traditional partners like Australia and Japan,” Germain said. “But if Australia can no longer buy the same levels from us, we need an alternative in the current circumstances, because we have mines, miners and sub-contractors who are dependent on this activity.”

Although New Caledonia has long looked to Japan and Australia for exports, it has mostly avoided selling high-grade ore directly to other countries, including China, in the hope of protecting the local smelting industry’s metal exports. As part of what he called a “temporary” plan, Germain announced that his government will allow increased exports of ore to China for twelve to eighteen months.

The recent fall in the price of nickel on the London Metals Exchange has come at a bad time for the French Pacific dependency. Globally, over 400,000 tonnes of nickel were stockpiled as production boomed with China’s economy still brisk. Now, the slowdown in Chinese steel production has contributed to falling prices. Beyond this, the island nation’s Asian competitors, Indonesia and the Philippines, have also been transforming their nickel policies. Jakarta banned the export of unprocessed ore in early 2014, and Manila has announced a floor price for the export of ore.

Many of New Caledonia’s east coast mines, along with the ageing Doniambo smelter in the capital, Noumea, are run by the dependency’s largest producer, Société Le Nickel, or SLN. Through its Strategic Investment Fund, the French government holds a minority stake in SLN’s parent company, ERAMET; the balance is owned by private investors.

Local New Caledonian leaders have criticised SLN for issuing more than €900 million (A$1.4 billion) in dividends in 2012 and 2013, but then seeking government support now that times are tough. SLN lost nearly €250 million last year and Doniambo continues to lose hundreds of thousands of euros each week.

“Metal markets, and nickel markets especially, are going through a very deep crisis; one that we have not known for at least fifteen years,” ERAMET chief executive Patrick Buffet said during a recent visit to Noumea. “For the most part, the crisis is due to a very unfavourable change in demand in China, as well as excess capacity over the last few years. Moreover, for a variety of reasons, and especially local ones, SLN is faced with higher production costs than those of its main competitors.”

Earlier this month ERAMET’s board of directors agreed to provide additional financing of €40 million to ensure that SLN operates until the end of June. (ERAMET has already provided temporary financing to SLN amounting to €150 million.) This will allow time for a decision on a €200 million loan foreshadowed by French prime minister Manuel Valls, who visited New Caledonia in late April.

The new financing to SLN will be issued through the Société Territoriale Calédonienne de Participations Industrielles, or STCPI, a holding company for New Caledonia’s three provinces in the mining and smelting sector; in return, STCPI wants to increase its shareholding in ERAMET from 34 to 51 per cent.

In Noumea, government policy since 2009 has tried to add value to the country’s vast nickel stocks by expanding nickel smelting rather than exporting raw laterite ore. Despite this, ore exports grew by 24 per cent between 2013 and 2015, with the growth focused on Japan and Korea. Exports to Japan alone grew from 26 per cent of the market in 2013 to 32 per cent last year; over the same period, exports to Australia halved from 27 to 13.6 per cent.

SLN’s exports of nickel metal have faced competition from two new smelting operations in New Caledonia, though both are experiencing problems with debt, technology and markets. The Goro smelter in the Southern Province, managed by Brazil’s Vale Corporation, has also made significant losses, amounting to US$400 million in 2015. Following major technical problems, which led to releases of acidic pollutants into nearby rivers and bays in April 2009 and May 2014, Vale is reviewing its strategy in New Caledonia.

Production delays and falling international prices have hit the Koniambo nickel smelter, in New Caledonia’s Northern Province, too. This project is managed by Koniambo Nickel SAS (KNS), a joint venture between New Caledonia’s SMSP nickel company (51 per cent) and the Anglo-Swiss corporation Glencore (49 per cent). Glencore inherited its stake in KNS in a May 2013 merger with Xstrata, and CEO Ivan Glasenberg has previously said “we are not married” to the Koniambo project.

Last August, protesting truckers blockaded Noumea for weeks, calling on the government to expand exports to China and other countries. And in February this year the government formally declared a crisis in the industry, opening the way for the allocation of grants from New Caledonia’s Nickel Fund, a subsidy scheme to assist miners and related sectors like transport and energy.

Even if new management can help Palmer’s Yabulu smelter revive production, President Germain said that “no one has a crystal ball to see if this is a sustainable solution. Today there is no calendar of boats scheduled to come from Australia to New Caledonia, so there is a danger for miners to transport the ore from the mountains to the coast.” For the next eighteen months, Germain said, “the mining companies are invited to prioritise exports to Chinese steelmakers, and not pig-iron manufacturers, in order not to undercut New Caledonian metal producers.”

Maintaining stability in the nickel sector has crucial political, as well as economic, importance for New Caledonia. In the 1980s, the French dependency was riven by violent conflict between the French state, the independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, and opponents of independence among the territory’s large European population.

The signing of the Noumea Accord in May 1998 set out a twenty-year transition to a referendum on self-determination. Today, New Caledonia’s politics are marked by a level of intercommunal engagement that is quite different from the era of violent clashes that divided the country between 1984 and 1988. But in spite of fifteen years of multiparty government, economic restructuring and extensive funding from the French government, a significant gulf still exists between parties supporting political independence from France and those opposing it.

Before the Noumea Accord was signed, the Bercy Accord of February 1998 had opened the way for the transfer of nickel reserves and the construction of the Koniambo smelter in the Northern Province, where the population is mainly indigenous Kanaks and pro-independence parties dominate. The deal on Koniambo was a crucial precondition for the political settlement that came a few months later between supporters and opponents of independence.

The future for nickel once again weighs on Noumea’s political class, as New Caledonia moves towards its late-2018 referendum to decide whether to remain within the French Republic or achieve full independence and sovereignty. As Philippe Gomes – leader of the conservative Calédonie Ensemble party – says, “There can be no exit from the Noumea Accord without a consensus amongst us on nickel.”

Daniel Goa, president of the pro-independence Union Calédonienne, has stressed the importance of support for SLN and other nickel operators at a time New Caledonia is moving to a decision on its future political status. “We need SLN to maintain the peace,” he says. “The French state must act on its responsibility to ensure the future of employees and of the subcontractors who rely on SLN.”

For New Caledonia, the economic and political stakes could not be higher. •

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Once I started reading China’s Second Continent I realised that the miners who mentioned Africa weren’t too wide of the mark. PNG isn’t in Africa, of course, and homesick mineworkers don’t need to stay up late to talk to relatives back home by phone or, these days, on WeChat. Yet the four-bed dormitories in which they eke out an existence, bored near-senseless by the isolation and the monotony of their work, would be familiar to Chinese mineworkers in the Zambian copperbelt.

The heroes (and anti-heroes) of Howard French’s book are Chinese migrants like my friends in PNG. Not all of them are charming, but French brings them, and their new African home, to life in prose that brims with affection for the continent and its controversialnew arrivals. Using the craft he has refined during forty years as a journalist, including periods reporting from Africa and, more recently, as the head of the New York Times bureau in Beijing, French fashions a compelling narrative from in-depth interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs in nine countries, from Namibia to Sierra Leone.

Among the memorable Chinese is Hao Shengli, who arrived in Mozambique straight from Henan province. In Hao, French believes he has found the successor of the Ugly American, although for me he seems more reminiscent of a budding Colonel Kurtz. In his late fifties, a member of the Cultural Revolution’s “lost generation,” all Hao brought with him was his young sons and a single-minded determination to establish a dynasty. Although he lacked any language skills, by the time we meet him he has managed to acquirea 5000-acre plantation and is embarking on a project to get his sons coupled up with local women. “We’ll have people who can serve in each and every occupation that we need, you know?” he explains. “Successors… Drivers, salespeople, foreign trade agents. No matter what we need, we’ll have it. There will be nothing we can’t do.”

Hao might be an extreme case, but similar characters can be found in frontier towns like Daru and Vanimo in PNG, or on remote islands in Tonga, where one in every twenty-five people are new arrivals from China.

Aside from the casual racism and staggering ignorance that permeates the comments of many of the Chinese entrepreneurs he interviews, French draws out insights into the structural reasons behind China’s expansion into Africa. He asks a manager in Ghana why Chinese construction companies often lowball their bids to price out local firms and win contracts, and is told:

If you have your equipment and your people in place and there is no business, that is very bad. If you bid low, though, even if you have a tiny margin, you are better off… The number of companies working in this sector in China is very large. We need more and more markets to keep people employed. Most of the companies like mine are state-owned, and if you start laying off workers, it will create huge problems for the country.

Construction companies in the Pacific, who are squeezing out their Australian and local competitors, face similar pressures to keep their bulldozers busy and their workers on the books. The handful of Australian construction companies who take an interest in the Pacific struggle to compete with their Chinese counterparts, finding themselves beaten on price, speed and willingness to lobby local politicians and landowners.

Shining through French’s account is the resilience and wry humour of Africans, most of whom are painfully aware that many problems stem not from the new arrivals, but from their own leaders. In Namibia, where a corruption scandal involving the son of former Chinese president Hu Jintao briefly made the country a banned search term in China, 500 local construction workers with a big Chinese contractor walked off the job complaining that they were receiving half the pay they were entitled to. They marched through the streets of the capital wearing t-shirts bearing their president’s likeness, along with his response to Namibians’ concerns about the Chinese presence: “too busy complaining.” The dispute was soon settled.

If the book has a shortcoming, it is that a few of French’s most intriguing assertions aren’t borne out by existing research, much of it coming out of Stellenbosch University’s excellent Centre for Chinese Studies. French speculates, for instance, that “the biggest single source of Chinese migration to Africa” is made up of labourers staying on after their contracts finish with big public works companies. “Workers would arrive from a given locality in China and discover there was good money to be made in some corner of Africa they had never before imagined viable,” he writes. “Soon, they were sending word back home about the fortunes to be made there, or the hospitality of the locals, or the wonders of the environment, or the joys of a free and relatively pressureless life.” What comes out of the data, though, is the striking fact that most Chinese migration to Africa, and indeed to the Pacific, has occurred in parallel with state-run construction projects, and has involved almost entirely different groups of migrants drawn by opportunities in the retail and resource sectors.

Another quibble is French’s description of China’s presence as a “new empire.” While his publishers may have pushed the word on him (at least he escaped “dragon” or “panda”; why is it never “phoenix”?), he attempts to justify the use of the term in the epilogue, getting drawn into awkward comparisons with Japanese migration into Manchuria in the 1930s, which will surely guarantee that his book is never published in China.

Yet the enduring impression from French’s work is how distant the Chinese state is from the lives of these Chinese migrants and the extent to which their activities frequently fail to align with Chinese foreign policy, such as it is. Can you have an empire without intent or direction? Similarly, in the Pacific, China’s diplomatic presence is striking for its thinness, ineffectuality and disconnect from Chinese business migrants, who are regarded by consular officials as a nuisance at best, and a threat to China’s global image at worst. The chief concern of Chinese diplomats is pleasing their bosses in Beijing, where no news is good news.

French’s thoughtful narrative is strong when he holds up Western donors’ reservations about China’s presence for gentle mockery. Here is his meeting with the head of America’s aid mission to Mali:

A sprinkling of foreigners were seated at the Café de Fleuve when I arrived, but it wasn’t hard to recognise Jon Anderson. Wearing a sport coat, he was dressed more formally than anyone else. He was seated toward the rear, amid large potted plants, with his back to the wall… While the Americans fought bureaucratic battles to advance their agenda of granting deeds to peasants on about five thousand hectares of land, China’s Sinohydro was busy building a $230 million waterworks that would connect the farmland to the region’s huge irrigation grid. It was the same company that was building the big airport expansion in the capital, and here again it was the Americans that were paying. Anderson said that American builders routinely showed no interest in work like this in Africa… Africa occupied a relatively blank space in the minds of most Americans, and when they stopped to think about it, aided by old and deeply ingrained habits of press coverage, all they could imagine was violence, corruption, disease and horror.

Sadly, similar views about the Pacific exist in Australia, where cabinet ministers feel comfortable joking about the imminent immersion of our nearest neighbours. I met Jon Anderson’s Pacific equivalent in a sleepy Pacific capital. Bedecked in a fading Hawaiian shirt, he was unimpressed by the host government’s reluctance to seek an audience. “I think it would serve their purposes to reach out to me. It’s classic donor/host behaviour. I don’t mean it as a criticism.” He went on to compare the country, oddly, with Zimbabwe.

Security protocols were so tight it was possible the locals had tried and failed to reach this diplomat’s oversized desk, but the cold reality was that for all the flags and fanfare, the host government saw America’s re-engagement with the Pacific as small beer. While the United States talked about refurbishing a hospital wing, China built a new national hospital. The US attaché went on to declare that direct budgetary support from donors – which was regaining currency in better-governed Pacific states – is “illegal under US law.” Unable to pin down exactly which law, he averred, “We don’t write cheques to government. It’s ineffective. We prefer to work with NGOs.” Later in our conversation, he was appalled to learn that funding for NGOs also went through a government body.

The final word, which encapsulates the affectionately observed nature of the book, is this anecdote recounted to French by a Ghanaian businessman:

One day it was raining heavily [in Accra] and people began crowding into a bus stop for shelter. A Chinese couple approached and began to nudge their way into the crowd seeking cover. The Ghanaians began to grumble among themselves. “Who are these people? Why are they bothering us?” they said. At that point, the Chinese man spoke up in Twi [Ghana’s near universal lingua franca]. “Ade?” [Why?] “Aren’t we people too?”

China’s Second Continent provides the answer in spades. •

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Today, however, it’s getting harder and harder to reconcile widely divergent policies over climate change. This year’s Forum meeting, in Port Moresby on 7–10 September, comes just a few months before negotiations in Paris to finalise a global agreement on climate change. Many fear the Australian delegation will block key elements of the climate agenda advanced by island nations, leading to a policy consensus with little substance.

When Fiji’s prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama announced in May that he wouldn’t be attending the Port Moresby meeting, he highlighted the climate-policy gap. “As we see it, Australia and New Zealand have been put to the test on climate change and been found wanting,” he said. “It should be no surprise that we have formed the view that at the very least, their position as full members of our island nation Forum needs to be questioned, re-examined and redefined. They simply do not represent our interests as we face this critical matter of survival.”

In every major speech this year, Bainimarama has beaten the climate drum. At the June summit of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, he told the assembled leaders, “We have less than six months to get this crisis on the global agenda. I urge you all to put it at the top of your own agendas and make your voices heard. Loudly.”

The Australian government’s engagement with the Forum in recent years has been patchy. Prime minister Tony Abbott didn’t attend last year’s leaders’ meeting in Palau, leaving his deputy Warren Truss to wave the Australian flag. Not surprisingly, Abbott’s frequent pronouncements on climate change have managed to annoy many of his island counterparts.

Australia and Canada’s decision in 2013 not to contribute to the Green Climate Fund angered Pacific countries that rely on finance to fund adaptation and technology transfer. The fact the announcement was made at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting – a gathering that includes many of the least-developed countries, small island states and sub-Saharan African nations on the climate frontline – only made matters worse.

At a meeting with Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper in June 2014, Abbott proposed an alliance to resist emissions trading schemes. Marshall Islands president Christopher Loeak said such an alliance would isolate Australia from its Pacific neighbours. “I’m very concerned that the prime minister is setting the wrong tone in what needs to be a very determined effort to tackle climate change,” he said, and went on to describe Abbott’s efforts as “a further indication that Australia is isolating itself on this issue.”

The same concern was raised a year ago when Samoa hosted the third global conference on small island development states. Integrating environment and development has been a central part of the island agenda since this summit was first held in Barbados in 1994. In the lead-up to the September 2014 summit, host prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi was forthright about Australia’s lack of initiative on climate policy.

“We do hope Australia’s current leadership could look at the Pacific islands as a special case in terms of climate change,” he said. “In saying that, I am aware of the extreme preoccupation of the present leadership with budget savings. Australia and New Zealand are members of the Pacific Islands Forum and the membership there was especially important, because being the biggest member countries in the only consolidated grouping of islands in the Pacific, they should do more.”

The communiqué of the conference, known as the SAMOA Pathway, recognised that “sea-level rise and other adverse impacts of climate change continue to pose a significant risk to small island developing states and their efforts to achieve sustainable development and, for many, represent the gravest of threats to their survival and viability, including, for some, through the loss of territory.”

The following month, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon hosted the UN Climate Summit to advance the climate negotiations. More than 120 world leaders attended, but the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand were not among them (even though Tony Abbott had been in New York the day before).

Once again, island leaders expressed their concern over Australia’s priorities. “Probably one of the most frustrating events of the past year for Pacific islanders is Australia’s strange behaviour when it comes to climate change,” Marshall Islands foreign minister Tony de Brum said at the time. “It just does not make sense, it goes against the grain of the world.” He added, “Not only is Australia our big brother down south, Australia is a member of the Pacific Islands Forum and Australia is a Pacific island, a big island, but a Pacific island. It must recognise that it has a responsibility. The problems that have befallen the smaller countries are also Australia’s problems.”

With climate financing a central pillar of the global negotiations, the November 2014 G20 meeting in Brisbane highlighted Canada and Australia’s isolation. With the United States contributing US$3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, and Britain, Germany and France each adding another billion, Julie Bishop finally buckled at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, talks in Lima. The foreign minister announced a contribution to the fund of US$165 million over four years. Overall, Canberra is offering a sum well below the $2 billion of public and private climate funding required each year to meet Australia’s fair share of global pledges.

For years, Marshall Islander Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner has used poetry to translate the jargon of climate policy into a call to action.

From her poem “Tell Them” to “Dear Matafele Peinem” – her presentation to the opening of the 2014 UN Climate Summit – her lyrics highlight islander concerns over government inaction. Her latest poem is “2 degrees”:

At a climate change conference
a colleague tells me 2 degrees
is an estimate
I tell him for my islands 2 degrees
is a gamble
at 2 degrees my islands, the Marshall Islands
will already be under water
this is why our leaders push
for 1.5

Two degrees is the compromise forged between the OECD and rapidly industrialising countries at the 2010 UNFCCC summit in Cancun. Governments agreed on the long-term goal of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2°C above preindustrial levels.

But this consensus on 2°C is a political, not a scientific, measure of safe climate boundaries. As climate analyst David Spratt has noted, “In reality, 2°C is the boundary between dangerous and very dangerous climate change and 1°C warmer than human civilisation has ever experienced.”

During the UNFCCC negotiations, which have been under way since 1992, Pacific governments have worked through the Alliance of Small Island States, a grouping of 44 island and coastal states that are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Reflecting the findings of a range of scientific studies, they have called for tougher targets than 2°C, requiring more urgent and extensive emissions reductions. At climate talks in Bonn in June, the alliance called for a long-term temperature goal of “below 1.5°C,” to be included in any agreement signed in Paris this year.

When they meet without Australia and New Zealand in the room, Pacific leaders constantly reiterate their support for the alliance’s policies on emissions reductions, climate financing and technology transfer. They also endorse the Warsaw Mechanism on Loss and Damage, a scheme to address the existing damage to water supply, agriculture and infrastructure caused by past greenhouse gas emissions and the failure to fund the necessary adaptation.

In July this year, the Polynesian Leaders Group issued the Taputapuatea Declaration on Climate Change. Island leaders from Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Cook Islands, Niue and French Polynesia repeated positions long advanced by other small island developing states, to “deal with the adverse effects of climate change by limiting global warming below 1.5°C and having access to tools and means to adapt to the adverse impacts caused by climate change.” The declaration highlights “that loss and damage is a critical element for building resilience against climate change” and that this should be “reflected in the legally binding agreement.”

Canberra doesn’t agree. Throughout this year, Australian officials have worked with other industrialised nations to systematically challenge positions on loss and damage advanced by the small states alliance during climate negotiations.

Tony Abbott has argued that Australia’s “budget repair” will provide the revenue for ongoing engagement with the region to address climate change. But regional concern over climate policy goes beyond the current conservative backlash, which saw the abolition of Australia’s emissions trading scheme. Australia’s role as a major exporter of fossil fuel energy has led to the “carbon capture” of successive governments, affecting its relationship with other members of the Pacific Islands Forum.

Over the last two months, Australia, New Zealand and other countries have announced targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after 2020. These targets, known as the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs, are the basis for negotiation of an agreement at the next UNFCCC summit in Paris.

The Key government in New Zealand announced plans to reduce emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Australia’s INDC submission to the United Nations includes an even less ambitious target of greenhouse gas emissions: 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Island leaders joined an chorus of disapproval. Marshall Islands Foreign Minister de Brum said, “Australia’s weak target is another serious blow to its reputation. As with Prime Minister Abbott’s attempt to ignore climate change when hosting the G20 last year, this will send a serious shudder through the Pacific and raise concern amongst its closest allies, including the United States and Europe.”

De Brum went on: “This seems to be another example of Australian exceptionalism when it comes to tackling the biggest economic, environmental and security challenge of the twenty-first century. If the rest of the world followed Australia’s lead, the Great Barrier Reef would disappear. So would my country and the other vulnerable atoll nations on Australia’s doorstep.”

Based on current INDC pledges, global emissions are on a path to 3 or 4 degrees of warming, a catastrophic failure of ambition that will devastate small island developing states – and the rest of us.

In March, foreign minister Julie Bishop proudly highlighted Australia’s aid response to Cyclone Pam, which devastated Vanuatu and Tuvalu. But beyond the post-disaster hype, successive Australian governments have damaged the institutions that contribute to our engagement with the islands region on climate and disasters. Cutbacks to funding and staffing have reduced the capacity of the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology – which have partnered with Pacific meteorologists on cyclone research – as well as Radio Australia, a vital service that provides cyclone warnings to outlying islands.

The abandonment of a bipartisan target for Official Development Assistance has led to proposed cuts of $11.7 billion from Australia’s aid budget over four years, restricting the ability to pledge substantial climate funding. While aid cuts in this year’s budget focused on Africa and Asia, the Pacific islands will not be spared in next year’s budget, with another billion dollars to be slashed.

Under its current secretary-general, Dame Meg Taylor of Papua New Guinea, the Pacific Islands Forum is trying to address the global challenge of sustainable development, promoting a new Framework on Pacific Regionalism and improvements to the operations of the Forum Secretariat in Suva. But differences over climate policy threaten that momentum, and will reinforce the growing debate over whether the region might be better served by an “islands-only” Forum. •

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Commentators were quick to denounce this branding exercise. But any attempt to purify the Gallipoli centenary can also distort the way we remember the events of 1915 by downplaying the multinational history of the conflict.

Among the forces serving in the Gallipoli campaign were thousands of British and French colonial troops – soldiers who fought and died on the peninsula but have largely been written out of the centenary history. Alongside Anglo-Celtic Anzac soldiers were Indigenous Australians, Maoris, Senegalese, Zouaves, Sikhs, Gurkhas and Newfoundlanders, as well as a contingent of Zionists from Palestine who formed the Zion Mule Corps.

Bruce Scates, who chaired the Military and Cultural History Group of the Anzac Centenary Program, has argued that the Gallipoli commemorations often ignore the role of other nations. “We are in danger of returning to a narrow, nationalistic and self-congratulatory account of that costly and ill-conceived campaign,” he writes. “In our rush to remember, we run the danger of forgetting.”

After the conflict on the Western Front became bogged down in trench warfare in early 1915, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, began planning a second front. But his early vision of a naval campaign to capture the Dardanelles Straits was abandoned when the French battleship Bouvet sank on 18 March, with the loss of 600 men. Instead, the fateful land invasion was launched on 25 April.

Although the campaign was led by British commanders, an estimated 80,000 French nationals served in Gallipoli, and nearly 15,000 of them died there. As Britain’s Imperial War Museum points out, “vivid testament” to their presence can still be found on the peninsula, “where, in the French Cemetery above S Beach, there are over 2000 individual grave markers as well as five huge white ossuaries each containing the remains of up to 3000 men.”

The French Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient, initially a single infantry division, grew to two divisions for the Gallipoli campaign. The 1st division had originally been recruited in North Africa from French settlers, and Arab and African soldiers. By 1915, the Corps included an African Regiment of Zouave and Foreign Legion troops. (The Zouaves, originally recruited from the Berber population of Algeria, were augmented by troops from across North Africa and even prisoners of war and deserters from Alsace and Lorraine.) There were also two colonial regiments, each comprising a European battalion and two battalions of West African Senegalese Tirailleurs. From March to December 1915, Senegalese made up more than half the French expeditionary force.

On 25 April, to provide a diversion for the Gallipoli landings, the French 6th Colonial Regiment led an assault near Kum Kale on the Asian side of the Straits. The seizure of Kum Kale was the only success that day, but the French troops were soon withdrawn, with 300 killed and nearly 500 wounded. “Till the first rays of dawn the next day, we are leaning over wounded in an atmosphere of blood, of groans, and of indescribable horrors,” reported medical officer Joseph Vassal of the 6th Colonial Regiment. “There is a Senegalese with his head torn, a foot missing, and three fingers on the hand gone. Another Black, waiting his turn on a chair, is asked, ‘Beaucoup malade?’ [Are you very ill?] The doctor looks. Both legs have been torn off by a shell.”

The next day, the French troops joined British forces on Cape Helles, in the south of the Gallipoli Peninsula. They held the eastern part of the Allied line on Cape Helles and took part in the First Battle of Krithia on 28 April. The French troops were hammered by the Turkish forces, who halted their advance and caused massive casualties among the Senegalese and Zouave units. With many of them dressed in red trousers and white cork hats, the soldiers were an easy target for the Turkish machine gunners.

In early May, successive French attacks at Krithia were beaten off by the Turks. Snipers killed the French officers and Senegalese troops retreated in confusion. General Sir Ian Hamilton, British commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, dismissed the colonial troops as “niggy wigs” and “golly wogs.” Over the next few weeks, the French advance on the right of the peninsula was blocked by Turkish deployments on Kereves Dere, a deep gully running inland from the Dardanelles coast.

By June, the stalemate had led to a collapse in morale among French troops. With limited medical evacuation, only a litre of water a day and trenches filled with rats and lice, they suffered alongside other nationalities. In September, much of the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient was redeployed to Salonika under French command – troops from Senegal, Martinique and other French colonies formed the bulk of the remaining troops. By year’s end, when the remaining 21,000 French troops were withdrawn, only one man in three from the corps was unscathed by injury or disease.

Overall, the French had sustained 14,340 dead or missing and an estimated 40,000 wounded, including 20,000 medical evacuations. (Among the Australians, 8709 were killed in action or died of wounds or disease, and another 19,441 were wounded.)

The overwhelming silence in Australian commentary about the role of colonial troops at Gallipoli is mirrored in France, where the major focus of commemoration is the slaughter on the Western front. As British historian Matthew Hughes writes, “in France there is only one monument to the men who died at Gallipoli, on the Corniche in Marseilles, the harbour from which most of the troops left.”

More than 1.3 million South Asians served in the British Imperial Army during the first world war, and more than 140,000 of them died. Some 15,000 Indian troops were deployed at Gallipoli, with Indian mountain gun batteries operating in the Anzac area from the landing on 25 April until the August 1915 offensive. The Punjabi Muslim gunners among the 7th Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade were the only allied Muslim troops in action against the Turks on the peninsula.

“The Indian story, and it was a substantial one, must therefore be unravelled from amongst the larger official accounts of the war,” writes Indian historian Rana Tej Pratap Singh Chhina. “There are almost no records that preserve the subaltern voice of the Indian rank and file, apart from the fortuitous collection of letters passed down by the Indian censors in France.”

During the August offensive, the 6th Gurkhas participated in the climactic battle of Sari Bair alongside a Maori contingent from New Zealand. Around one-in-five of the 500 New Zealanders were killed or wounded. The surviving Nepalese soldiers seized the heights of Hill Q on Sari Bair ridge, the furthest Allied advance during the August offensive of the Gallipoli campaign, but were forced to retreat when they were mistakenly shelled by the Royal Navy.

The francophone West Africans serving at Gallipoli were not the only French colonial troops deployed during the war. After the massacre of French soldiers in Europe during the summer of 1914–15, the French high command agreed to expand recruitment to France’s overseas colonies.

In France’s Pacific dependencies – New Caledonia and the Etablissements Français d’Océanie – young men from both settler and Islander communities joined colonial regiments. A quarter of the male population of New Caledonia enlisted or were conscripted, including 1087 French settlers and 1010 Kanaks. Across the Pacific as a whole, 1817 volunteers and 2213 conscripts signed up for the French Pacific battalion. After two warships from the German Far East Flotilla attacked Tahiti in September 1914, 1115 men were recruited to fight in Europe between 1915 and June 1917.

In June 1916, the Bataillon de Tirailleurs du Pacifique, comprising companies of Kanak and Tahitian soldiers, deployed for France. New Caledonians serving with the 5th Regiment of colonial infantry fought on the Somme, at Verdun and in other slaughterhouses. Some 575 New Caledonians, including 382 Kanaks, died for “the motherland.”

Maori and islanders from New Zealand’s Pacific colonies also joined the war effort. On the tiny island of Niue, 150 men joined the 1st Niue Regiment, sailing to Egypt and France in February 1916 as part of New Zealand’s 3rd Maori contingent. Margaret Pointer’s poignant history of the Niuean contingent, Tagi Tote e Loto Haaku: Niue Island Involvement in the Great War, documents how most of the islanders were struck down by influenza, pneumonia or dysentery and were repatriated without firing a shot.

Not everyone rushed to support the Empire. In New Zealand’s Taranaki and Waikato districts, where hundreds of thousands of acres of land had been confiscated after the Maori wars, the indigenous tangata whenua refused to join the colours. In New Caledonia, the 1917 revolt led by Chief Noel highlighted Kanak opposition to French colonial rule, with French soldiers declaring a new military front to crush the rebellion.

On their return to New Caledonia, Kanak soldiers who had survived the slaughter on the Western front were once again placed under the Indigénat, a native affairs administration that denied them the right to vote and restricted them to tribal reserves. Along with indentured labourers and French women, Kanaks only obtained the vote following the second world war, after communist activists had started agitating in the tribal reserves and indigenous soldiers returning from European battlefields had begun petitioning for civil rights.

In Australia, the fate of the “Black diggers” and other returning soldiers – including Alexander McKinnon, an Aboriginal station hand from the Northern Territory who fought and died at Passchendaele in 1917 – has been captured by the moving memorial “One Hundred Stories.”

From Australia to New Zealand, from Niue to New Caledonia, the war is commemorated by memorials to the fallen. But, as Elizabeth Rechniewski writes, these statues can create new conflicts: “The landscapes of Australia and New Caledonia are crowded with monuments that we unproblematically refer to as ‘war memorials’ and yet nothing is less evident than what constitutes a ‘war,’ or what distinguishes a soldier from a fighter. Nothing is more controversial than whose wars we should commemorate and why.”

Following the signing of New Caledonia’s Noumea Accord in 1998, Kanak independence activists began agitating for a proper accounting of the islanders who died for France. On the main Monument aux Morts in Noumea, each European soldier from New Caledonia who died during the first world war is listed by name. On the reverse side, however, the Kanak dead were nameless – the memorial simply listed each village or island, with the number of casualties inscribed in the stone.

In the northern town of Koné, a memorial with a statue of a first world war French soldier was damaged in 2010. The local Kanak mayor replaced it temporarily with a wooden statue of a Kanak warrior who had died defending his own land. Within days, the new statue had been daubed with red, white and blue paint. Then independence activists covered the colours of the French tricolour with the multicoloured flag of Kanaky. To end this outbreak of the history wars, the statue was removed, and the plinth remains empty today.

This year, the Anzac centenary once again highlights the contested nature of military history and the silence of colonial narratives in Australia and across the region. As Bruce Scates suggests, “It is time to look beyond that narrow beachhead at Anzac Cove, acknowledge the futility of war and mourn the suffering of nations other than our own.” •

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I had joined NGO workers on a trip to Futuna, a small volcanic island in the southeast of Vanuatu. Shipa, chair of the Community Disaster Committee on an island of just 600 people, was showing us how local villagers had managed to build community resilience to prepare for climate change and natural disasters.

Since last weekend’s Cyclone Pam devastated much of the country, I haven’t been able to get through to people on Futuna. There’s only one mobile phone tower near the island’s grass airstrip, and I suspect it’s been hammered by gale-force winds, like much of the infrastructure across the country.

As we walked around the island’s rocky tracks last year, visiting each of six villages clustered on the coastline, villagers proudly displayed their work: pilot gardens, water supply systems, trials for food drying and preservation, information noticeboards. These initiatives showed a level of commitment and preparedness that belies the image of starving, helpless islanders presented in much of the media in the aftermath of Cyclone Pam.

Across the island, experiments were under way to find the best way to preserve “cyclone foods” and maintain food supplies after natural disasters. Villagers traditionally gather bananas, wrap them in banana leaves and bury them to eat when village gardens are being re-established after a cyclone. On Futuna, people were seeing whether concrete pits could be used to better preserve cyclone foods, reducing the labour involved in constantly replacing rotting leaves in an earth pit.

The villagers were also testing other ways of maintaining food and water supplies. These techniques are valuable not only after natural disasters but also in the lean periods that will come with changing rainfall linked to long-term climate change. One of the innovative features of this process is the mobilisation of both older and younger members of the community, combining experience and enthusiasm, and drawing on traditional knowledge as well as new technologies.

Despite this preparedness, the sheer scale of category-5 Cyclone Pam requires an urgent response from the community. The Australian government has immediately deployed aid workers, technical specialists and Hercules aircraft to ferry supplies. But this response comes at a time when the government has announced massive cuts to Australia’s aid program in coming years, and has slashed the budgets of key Australian institutions – from Radio Australia to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology – that play a crucial role in disaster preparedness.

It also comes at a time when science is telling us that the devastation of Cyclone Pam is a sign of things to come.

Cyclone Pam’s most extensive damage was in Vanuatu, but other small island nations were also hit severely. Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga said that 45 per cent of his country’s population has been affected by Cyclone Pam, which has also reached Fiji, Kiribati, Solomon Islands and New Caledonia. In the outer islands of Tuvalu, the entire population of 400 people were evacuated from Nanumaga due to flooding caused by Cyclone Pam, together with another eighty-five families from Nukulaelae. On the island of Nui, fresh water supplies were contaminated after the island was covered by a large storm surge, while Vaitupu and Nukufetau were both badly affected by flooding.

The Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre in Fiji has already chosen the names for the next cyclones that will develop in the region. Pam will be followed in coming months and years by Reuben, Solo, Tuni, Ula, Victor and Winston – then, not too far in the future, we’ll start the alphabet again.

Because of its location, Vanuatu faces particular hazards from cyclones, volcanoes and earthquakes. In the latest World Risk Report, Vanuatu was listed as the globe’s most at-risk country in terms of exposure and vulnerability to hazards. Data from recent scientific studies by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology show that Vanuatu is experiencing significant changes in weather. Longer-term projections show a range of potentially adverse impacts, including rising sea levels, increasing sea surface temperature, changes to wind-driven waves, and less frequent but more severe tropical cyclones.

As more people and community infrastructure are exposed to climate shocks and disasters, decades of hard‐won development could be reversed. Whether they’re called hurricanes, cyclones or typhoons, these natural disasters have set back economic and social development in countries across the Asia-Pacific region, from Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines to Cyclone Ian in Tonga. Over 7000 people were killed in the Philippines in late 2013, and last year Cyclone Ian displaced 70 per cent of the population of Tonga’s northern Ha’apai islands. (Ha’apai was already under drought conditions, and the Kingdom had to ship in food and water supplies.)

Climate change has so stacked the deck that this kind of disaster is likely to occur with greater intensity. Storm surges move further inland on sea levels that have risen over the last century, amplifying damage to infrastructure and coastal communities. (Satellite data indicate the sea level near Vanuatu has risen by about 6 mm per year since 1993, more than the global average of 2.8–3.6 mm per year.)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a range of scientific agencies have developed projections of cyclone activity that suggest a decrease in the frequency of cyclones by the late twenty-first century but an increase in the severity of these events. A 2010 collaborative study published in Nature Geoscience notes that “future projections based on theory and high-resolution dynamical models consistently indicate that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2–11 per cent by 2100.”

The warming of the oceans can also contribute to the severity of storms. “Once [cyclones] do form, they get most of their energy from the surface waters of the ocean,” observes professor Will Steffen from the Australian National University. “We know sea surface temperatures are warming pretty much around the planet, so that’s a pretty direct influence of climate change on the nature of the storm.”

As Kevin Trenberth, an expert in climate change and extreme weather at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, notes, “In the large area around Vanuatu the sea surface temperatures were one to two degrees Celsius above normal… So the atmosphere all around there has some 10 to 20 per cent more moisture in it, than a comparable storm in the 1970s would have had.”

Ironically, the devastation of Cyclone Pam coincided with the third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, in the Japanese city of Sendai. There, standing before the conference, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said that 70 per cent of natural disasters are now linked to climate change, twice as many as twenty years ago. With France due to host crucial climate negotiations in Paris next December, he stressed that disaster risk reduction and action on climate change went hand in hand.

This integration of climate change and disaster response is well under way across the Pacific islands. Since 2012, island governments have been developing a regional Strategy for Disaster and Climate Resilient Development in the Pacific. The strategy will merge two existing regional frameworks on climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction into one coordinated program.

Vanuatu is at the forefront of this process. In April 2013, the national government integrated a number of departments to create the Ministry for Climate Change Adaptation, Meteorology, Geo-Hazards, Environment, Energy and Disaster Management. This ministry now hosts the Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department and the National Disaster Management Office in a newly constructed complex in Port Vila.

Local and NGOs, the Red Cross movement and UN agencies are also coordinating their operations to work more effectively with the government on disaster preparedness and response. Established in 2011, the Vanuatu Humanitarian Team has promoted an innovative team-work approach to improve collaboration among NGOs.

Coordinated by Oxfam and initially funded by the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office, the team includes the Vanuatu Association of Non-Government Organisations and the Vanuatu Rural Development and Training Centre Association, alongside NGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision and CARE. Also participating are the Vanuatu Red Cross, French Red Cross and key UN agencies (UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). With NGO staff sitting inside the National Disaster Management Office, coordination has improved since two cyclones hit Vanuatu in 2011, and an NDMO Cyclone Support Plan is released each year.

As people overseas dip into their wallets in response to disasters like Cyclone Pam, some are worried that their donations will go on administration rather than directly helping affected communities. The Vanuatu Humanitarian Team is an important example of a cost-effective program designed to encourage coordination between different development players. For a relatively small investment, government and NGOs work together to build resilience in local communities in the lead-up to disasters. This work doesn’t hit the headlines like the immediate post-disaster flurry of activity, but is essential for communities that cannot receive assistance in the days immediately after a catastrophe.

The work of NGOs on the ground is also vital for engaging the most vulnerable members of the community. After two tropical cyclones hit Tafea Province in Vanuatu in 2011, for example, the Tanna Women’s Counselling Centre reported a 300 per cent increase in new domestic violence cases. Programs targeted at women and children are a crucial element of disaster response, as families struggle with the stress and trauma of re-establishing their homes, gardens and workplaces, at the same time as jobs disappear. (Many ni-Vanuatu work in the tourism sector, but will earn no income until hotels, bungalows and other tourist infrastructure are refurbished.)

Beyond the Vanuatu Humanitarian Team, similar work on coordination is under way to promote adaptation to climate change. In 2012, an NGO consortium in Vanuatu secured Australian government funding for climate adaptation and resilience activities. Over two and a half years, the Yumi stap redi long klimaet jenis program focused on building community resilience through livelihood initiatives in agriculture, water supply and health, and through engaging women in decision-making. Consortium members collaborated on innovative community education programs such as Klaod Nasara, which produced simple animations to explain the science of El Niño, La Niña and climate variability.

The initial core funding of $2 million for the Yumi stap redi program came from Australia’s International Climate Change Adaptation Initiative, or ICCAI, and the first phase ran until December 2014 in nine local communities across four provinces. After the Coalition took government in Canberra, the ICCAI was dropped from the Australian aid program and the consortium, focused on building community resilience and climate adaptation, was unable to draw on Australian aid to develop a new phase of activities in 2015.

The Australian government has responded immediately to Cyclone Pam, deploying Australian Defence Force aircraft with humanitarian supplies, sending technical and medical teams and announcing a $5 million package for the Red Cross, NGOs and other humanitarian organisations. The massive task of reconstruction in Vanuatu and other Pacific countries will rely on support as well as local resilience in coming months and years.

But this response to yet another natural disaster in the Pacific comes after successive Australian governments have abandoned support for an increase in Official Development Assistance.

Before the September 2013 elections, both the Labor Party and the Coalition pledged support for an increase in Australian aid to 0.5 per cent of Gross National Income, or GNI, by 2015. That objective started slipping under the Gillard government, with the target date set back to 2016–17. As well as reopening detention centres for asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru, the Labor government reallocated $375 million from the overseas aid budget towards the domestic costs of processing refugees in Australia.

Since coming to power, the Coalition government has abandoned the objective of increasing the aid budget to 0.5 per cent of GNI. On 18 January 2014, halfway through the 2013–14 financial year, the Abbott government announced cuts of $650 million to the aid budget. Specific reductions were made to regional programs in the Pacific, bilateral programs with Pacific island countries, and support for multilateral organisations. Small island states saw their allocation cut by almost 30 per cent relative to the original 2013–14 budget (Vanuatu’s allocation fell by nearly $6 million, while over $20 million was cut from Pacific regional programs, reduced from $196 million to $172.6 million).

In the May 2014 budget, Australia’s aid program suffered a further hit, with $7.6 billion cut from planned aid increases over four years. In the December 2014 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, treasurer Joe Hockey announced another cut of $3.7 billion, on top of the reduction in the May budget. The Pacific region has fared better than other programs in Africa and Latin America, but the loss of more than $11 billion over the next few years will inevitably constrain bilateral and regional initiatives.

Beyond this, other government cutbacks will affect the capacity of Pacific countries to develop long-term resilience to respond to disasters.

Last year, when I visited the village of Matangi – one of Futuna’s more isolated communities – people highlighted the importance of Radio Australia.

“We rely a lot on Radio Australia when there’s a cyclone coming,” said Miranda Natuifi, a young mother who is a member of Futuna’s Community Disaster Committee. “We have no telephone on this side of the island and we often can’t hear Radio Vanuatu.”

Isolated rural communities across Melanesia rely on shortwave radio transmissions, yet ABC management is debating the shutdown of these services, following the recommendations of the Lewis review into the ABC and SBS. Deep cuts to Radio Australia in 2014 saw the sacking of dozens of staff (including the Pacific correspondents for Radio Australia and Australia Network TV), and reductions in English and foreign language broadcasting to the Pacific. The Tok Pisin service to Papua New Guinea, which ni-Vanuatu Bislama speakers rely on, has been reduced to two people, while just one person broadcasts in French.

Beyond this, funding cuts to key research and scientific bodies in Australia will also affect collaboration between Australian researchers and their counterparts in the Pacific on meteorology and cyclone research.

A $111.4 million reduction over four years for the CSIRO, $10 million from the Bureau of Meteorology and a further $21.7 million from environmental science programs will have an impact on regional initiatives. These agencies have collaborated with island meteorology departments through the Pacific Climate Change Science program and on initiatives to make weather predictions more usable by farmers and fishermen across the islands.

In coming weeks, the people of Vanuatu will begin to rebuild their homes and communities. The resilience of ni-Vanuatu should not be underestimated and the government of Vanuatu will have clear priorities for the future, which will set the agenda for government and NGO assistance.

Immediate humanitarian support from Vanuatu’s neighbours is crucial, but it’s also important to look forward. How many times will our Pacific island neighbours have to rebuild shattered infrastructure before governments seriously integrate the responses to climate change and disasters? Will the Coalition slash aid once again in the May budget, as it tries to balance the books? What role will Australia play as governments try to negotiate a global climate treaty in Paris this December? Surely we can do better this this. •

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I can’t see it myself. In the past year, I’ve travelled both to Scotland and to New Caledonia. For the life of me, I couldn’t detect much resemblance between the Scottish glens and the mountain valleys of Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia that so bewitched Cook.

In spite of this, there’s one contemporary connection between old Caledonia and New Caledonia. In Edinburgh and Noumea, people are debating independence.

Over four million residents of Scotland, aged 16 and over, will go to the polls on 18 September to decide whether to stay with the United Kingdom or become an independent country. New Caledonia, one of Australia’s closest neighbours, is also scheduled to hold an independence referendum – in its case, sometime before 2018. Today, the French tricolour and the flag of Kanaky fly outside town halls, schools and other public buildings; within a few years, just one of them may be flying.

Many commentators regard debates about flags, sovereignty and statehood as a nineteenth-century anachronism. In the 1990s, as the Soviet Union imploded and Yugoslavia exploded, the “national question” was resolved in conflict and corruption, with an atavistic return to blood-and-soil nationalism. Decades later, there are new debates about borders and imagined communities, about cultural identity in a globalised world. The creative tension between nationalism and globalisation is being played out today in Scotland, Belgium, Spain, France and across the islands of Melanesia.

In his wonderful polemic, Arguing for Independence, the late Stephen Maxwell described globalisation as “the growth of multi-level interdependence between societies around the world, which limits the freedom of all states, while bearing down with particular weight on small states.” Maxwell, the leading intellectual of modern Scottish nationalism, welcomed interdependence. He believed that Scotland’s independence would improve relations with Europe and the rest of the United Kingdom, rather than create a permanent breach between neighbours.

His arguments echo the vision of the Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, who campaigned for New Caledonia’s independence until his assassination in 1989. Tjibaou argued that independence from France would allow better relations both with Paris and with countries in our region: “It is sovereignty that gives us both the right and the power to negotiate our interdependences. For a small country like our own, independence allows us to determine our interdependences.”

As a modern capitalist economy, Scotland is fundamentally different from New Caledonia, a developing country struggling with the legacies of French colonialism. But the quest for independence unites the two nations.

With just over a week to the vote in Scotland, pollsters report a late surge in support for the Yes campaign led by the Scottish National Party, or SNP.

There’s a panicked tone to the interventions of Better Together, the unionist campaign led by former Labour chancellor Alistair Dowling. Their “Let’s stay together” initiative has wheeled out a range of politicians, celebrities, musicians and business leaders to highlight the damage that would be caused by a vote for independence.

The No campaign is mobilising supporters from across the spectrum. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Stones fan or a Beatlemaniac – both Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney have declared their opposition to independence. The Pope and atheist superstar Richard Dawkins agree that the break-up of the United Kingdom is a danger to global stability. Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton and the boss of BHP Billiton have all called for a No vote. J.K. Rowling is one of the many English-born residents of Scotland who will vote against independence.

Facing this parade of millionaires, the SNP has been joined in the Yes campaign by a range of left-of-centre groups that have traditionally been hostile to Scottish nationalism and the SNP’s pragmatic conservatism.

Polling shows that working-class voters are more likely to vote Yes than the rich, in the hope of protecting the social democratic advances that Scotland maintains over the rest of the United Kingdom (no tuition fees at university, free medical prescriptions for the elderly, booming investment in wind and hydro power, and policies to promote investment in the National Health Service).

During a visit to Scotland last year, I was struck by the diversity of grassroots organising, as the members of a broad coalition try to mobilise their neighbours and workmates in a debate about creating a different sort of society. One night, we travelled halfway across Edinburgh in the pouring rain to attend a community debate in Leith, but were turned away at the door. So many people had turned out that the organisers decided to give priority to the undecided, and were refusing entry to those who’d made up their mind or outsiders who couldn’t vote.

Another day, on a bus to Balmaclellan, we spotted a woman with a bag emblazoned with the simple slogan “Yes.” Later, over a cuppa in her home, she explained that she was an SNP member and responsible for doorknocking in Balmaclellan and nearby farms. “There’s another young lass from the next village who is involved in Radical Independence,” she explained. “She has green hair, but we get along pretty well – we’re both working for the same thing.”

From staid SNP supporters to the youthful troops of Radical Independence, from the artists of the National Collective to the activists of the Scottish Socialist Party, the act of voting Yes is part of a broader debate about the future. Should the Queen stay as head of state, or do we want a modern democratic republic? Should we stay in NATO and the European Union? The pound or the euro? How can we overcome Britain’s democratic deficit (no constitution, first-past-the-post voting and a House of Lords packed with Church of England bishops and the enemies of social democracy)?

The Yes campaign has remobilised a generation of Scots who have fought against a range of Westminster policies, from Maggie Thatcher’s poll tax to David Cameron’s bedroom tax, from Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq to Britain’s bipartisan support for the £80 billion renewal of Trident nuclear submarines. In spite of the integration of Scottish elites in the British Empire, there hasn’t been a Tory majority in Scotland since 1955.

Our own English-born, Rhodes Scholar–educated Tory prime minister weighed in on the other side of the debate during a recent visit to London. “As a friend of Britain, as an observer from afar, it’s hard to see how the world would be helped by an independent Scotland,” Tony Abbott said in August. “I think that the people who would like to see the break-up of the United Kingdom are not the friends of justice, the friends of freedom, and the countries that would cheer at the prospect… are not the countries whose company one would like to keep.”

Abbott’s intervention in the independence debate was widely reported as a gaffe: in the past, his ideological enthusiasms have led to the occasional awkward statement, such as telling the US Heritage Foundation that “few Australians would regard America as a foreign country.”

Rather than a blunder, though, I’d suggest that it was a more calculated intervention. Abbott recognises that independence for Scotland would open a wider debate about neoliberalism and nuclear policy, the role of the secret state and the “Five Eyes” UKUSA alliance, the United Kingdom’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council, how Scotland and England will coexist in NATO and the European Union, the role of the banking sector – a complex debate that would upset the relaxed and comfortable.

His intervention also comes at a time when debates about self-determination and independence, about borders and sovereignty, are occurring around the world, from old Caledonia to New Caledonia, from Corsica and Catalonia to Bougainville.

You wouldn’t know it from the Australian media, but the Coalition government will soon be facing strategically significant debates about self-determination in our own region. Over the next five years, there may be major changes in two of Australia’s closest neighbours, as New Caledonia and Bougainville move towards a new political status.

Both islands suffered traumatic periods of armed conflict, in New Caledonia in the 1980s and in Bougainville in the 1990s. In spite of the widespread calls for independence, there were significant divisions within the population and both conflicts ended with innovative political agreements to delay a vote on a final political status.

Since 1998, both have been undertaking lengthy transitions towards a self-determination referendum and the possible creation of two new sovereign and independent nations. Indigenous peoples and migrant communities are debating cultural identity, the future role of mining, and how to develop a viable post-independence economy.

These transitional periods are now coming to a head. Under the 1998 Noumea Accord, New Caledonia is scheduled to hold a referendum before 2018. In a similar period, Bougainville will come to the end of the ten-to-fifteen-year transition initiated by the 2005 election of the Autonomous Bougainville Government. Will these referendums be held as scheduled, or will there be pressure to maintain the status quo in the interest of “stability”?

Tony Abbott has often spoken of the Anglosphere – his vision of a set of civic institutions marked by pluralism, democracy and fairness. But the term has taken on a broader strategic meaning in Canberra’s policy community, best shown in Keep Calm and Carry On: Reflections on the Anglosphere, a 2013 report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Institute director Peter Jennings argues that the Anglosphere has taken on a new meaning in the age of Edward Snowden. “A more modern term is the Five Eyes community,” he writes, “which refers to the post Second World War intelligence collecting and sharing relationship developed between the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.” His view is that “the Anglosphere demonstrates itself time and time again to be the engine of global order and the essential enforcer of international stability, even at a time of sweeping strategic change.”

Reflecting concern over China’s emerging strategic power, many Australian policy wonks argue that the old Anglo alliance must be strengthened in the Asia-Pacific region through closer cooperation with India (uranium sales), Japan (increased interoperability with ANZUS forces) and France (military cooperation in the South Pacific).

In recent years, both major parties in Canberra have welcomed France’s ongoing presence in the Pacific, arguing that the French state is a “positive influence in the region.” Australian think tanks like Jennings’s organisation and the Lowy Institute are holding strategic dialogues with French officials (but not Kanak or Tahitian leaders), promoting closer engagement with the French armed forces in the Pacific. This creates some tension with our closest island neighbours in Melanesia, which are actively supporting independence movements in New Caledonia and French Polynesia.

To the disquiet of leaders in Canberra, Jakarta and Port Moresby, Bougainvilleans and West Papuans are asserting their right to self-determination within postcolonial nations like Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. The issues of self-determination, autonomy and independence are on the agenda of organisations like the Melanesian Spearhead Group – a dilemma indeed, when many of your nearest neighbours are countries that cheer at the prospect of independence.

As Stephen Maxwell has argued, this issue is a very contemporary one. “It is not an accident that the right of the self-determination of peoples is so widely acknowledged,” he wrote. “It reflects a judgement that those best qualified to decide how a community should manage its collective interests are the members of that community. They are in the best position to know their own needs and the best options available to them for meeting those needs. They are more likely than anyone else to be guided by an enlightened self-interest in balancing the claims of individuals and minorities within the community against the claims of the majority and of present generations against those of future generations.” •

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We’re sitting on the grass in Matangi, a small group of houses on a small island at the southeastern extreme of the archipelago that makes up Vanuatu. “We rely a lot on Radio Australia when there’s a cyclone coming,” says Miranda, a member of the island’s Community Disaster Committee. “We have no telephone on this side of the island and we often can’t hear Radio Vanuatu.”

As Australia debates budgets, debt and deficits, we rarely hear the views of communities affected by planned cuts. Whether it’s the size of the aid budget or the resourcing of the services of the ABC our neighbours have little input into decisions that affect their lives.

The latest blow is the planned redundancy of eighty staff from ABC International following the Abbott government’s decision to take Australia Network television away from the ABC. Revoking the $250 million TV contract – with just ninety days’ notice – has had an impact well beyond television. Given the integration of TV, radio and online services within ABC International, the decision affects not only Australia Network but also the other services providing crucial information to the islands region.

ABC International has merged key functions of Radio Australia and Australia Network in recent years in expectation that its contract with the government would be honoured. With only $15 million of ABC funding to work with after the loss of $22.3 million this year from the contract, disentangling these services and activities will cause major problems. According to the ABC, it must find a way to operate “an converged media service with 60 per cent of the previous budget.” ABC management is still discussing the new service and its impact on staffing with affected employees, but it has revealed that “an approximate eighty staff will be made redundant.”

Last week, employees were given a fortnight to respond to forced redundancies and major cutbacks to services. “The new model has been designed to reach as much of our desired audience in the region as possible,” says an ABC spokesperson, “through a converged service based on radio, a limited television offering and digital means.” The broadcaster acknowledges that services will be cut, but says that it is “working very hard” to make sure that the impact on “audiences, partnerships and syndication is minimised as much as possible.”

Forced redundancies will have a disproportionate impact on Radio Australia services to the Pacific islands, however. “I can understand why my job has been eliminated,” observes veteran Pacific correspondent Sean Dorney, one of the casualties of the cuts. “I worked mostly for the Australia Network TV news service, which was funded under the Foreign Affairs contract. But I’m really feeling sorry for my colleagues at Radio Australia, who have become huge casualties of the reorganisation following this budget decision. Too few people in Australia understand how important Radio Australia has been in the Pacific.”

The government’s revocation of the Australia Network contract may be the original sin, but the gutting of Radio Australia suggests ABC management underestimates the importance of outreach into the Pacific. Whether it’s news, English language lessons, cyclone warnings or the latest cultural programs, there’s a significant audience for Radio Australia – especially in outlying islands and rural communities with limited access to the internet.

While there are alternative broadcast and internet services in the crowded Asian media market, the range of options in the small island states is much more limited (That’s not to say that the cuts to staffing in ABC International won’t seriously affect Asian programming. Three bureaus will close and the long running Asia-Pacific, Mornings and Asia Review are being axed.)

Many Pacific media organisations relay news and features from Radio Australia and Radio New Zealand International, providing a crucial window to the world that local media can’t hope to match. There are many excellent Pacific journalists working for private and government broadcasters across the region, but budgets are tight and resources for regional and global coverage hard to come by. Journalists in the region are often faced with government or military censorship, limited advertising, tough defamation laws and a complex cultural environment for investigative journalism; having stories broadcast by Australian or New Zealand media allows them to follow up issues that may otherwise be too hot to handle.

My concerns about the proposed changes to Radio Australia are based on thirty years of listening to Australian and New Zealand broadcasting in the islands. A decade ago, I also worked as a casual employee of Radio Australia, reporting for Pacific Beat – an experience that reaffirmed my belief in the importance of Australia’s capacity to broadcast radio, TV and internet into the region, and to carry voices from the Pacific into Australian debates.

The latest cuts fundamentally undermine this two-way process. Australia creates strategic problems for itself when key institutions – media, universities, non-government organisations and government departments – fail to allocate the resources needed to engage with a dynamic and complex region. The loss of experienced staff from ABC International will mean that the woeful coverage of the Pacific islands in the Australian media is further weakened. If the story doesn’t fit the paradigm of paradise (swaying palm trees, blue water, sandy beaches) or paradise lost (coups, corruption, climate change), voices from the islands rarely get a run.

According to current plans, the ABC will maintain one correspondent in Papua New Guinea and one in New Zealand, but lose its dedicated radio and TV correspondents for the Pacific islands. Pacific Beat will be retained, together with six hours of television broadcast into the islands region. “Radio Australia remains central to our broadcasting model and will continue to broadcast a 24/7 schedule,” says the ABC spokesperson. “The network will be delivered through deeper collaboration with ABC News and ABC Radio and through collaboration with SBS.”

But who will provide knowledgeable, accurate and timely content? The ABC’s domestic service has long relied on the expertise of reporters like Radio Australia’s Pacific correspondent Campbell Cooney, business reporter Jemima Garrett and Australia Network’s Sean Dorney. Dorney, who worked for many years in (and was deported from) Papua New Guinea, is one of Australia’s most experienced Pacific affairs reporters; in recent years, he has covered the region from Brisbane for Australia Network and ABC TV. Dorney believes that there’s a need for specialist reporting of a region that has vital importance for Australia: “I have often said that in the world outlook of most of the Australian media, Australia might as well be anchored somewhere between Ireland and North America rather than in the South Pacific.”

According to the proposed restructuring, Radio Australia’s English-language service is “not required,” and “English content will be sourced from ABC Radio and News in future.” The abolition of the English-language unit will be a major setback. In the past, Clement Paligaru, Heather Jarvis, Isabelle Genoux and other talented reporters have crafted radio series including Carving Out and Time to Talk (a twelve-part radio series and website on governance in the Pacific). Innovative content of this kind can only be produced by journalists with cultural understanding, personal relationships and a contact book developed through years of hard grind and travel across the region.

I doubt that the skills required for detailed coverage of the twenty-two countries in the islands region can easily be found in press gallery reporters who accompany Australian politicians on whirlwind visits to the islands. Add to this the fact that not one daily newspaper in Australia has a dedicated Pacific islands correspondent.

The cuts partly reflect a broader, but mistaken, view of technological change. A leaked summary of the federal government’s efficiency review of the ABC and SBS, which was headed by the former chief financial officer of Seven West Media, Peter Lewis, recommended shutting down Radio Australia’s shortwave broadcasting. “Noting shortwave is a largely superseded technology,” said the review, “discontinuing this service would release resources for other purposes.”

In reality, these broadcasts are a vital service for rural communities in neighbouring Melanesian nations like Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. Streaming internet into the islands region is not sufficient for the ABC to meet its charter responsibilities: in spite of broadband advances in urban centres and the spread of digital phones, the vast majority of Pacific islanders still rely on radio for their information, and any loss of shortwave and satellite rebroadcasting will be sorely felt.

There will be “reduced original content requirements” and fewer positions in RA’s foreign language section, with the Chinese-language service reduced to three staff, Indonesian to three and just one broadcaster each for Vietnam, Burma and Cambodia. Staff at the Tok Pisin service, which provides a vital service for our closest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, will be reduced to just two. “Language services in Tok Pisin will be delivered through a mix of reduced original content coupled with translated ABC content,” says the current restructuring proposal.

The loss of “original content” for our northern neighbour comes at a time when foreign minister Julie Bishop has spoken of her “long love affair with Papua New Guinea” dating back to when she wrote to penpals there as a fourteen-year-old. Radio Australia’s PNG service has been broadcasting since Bishop was a lovelorn teenager; in past decades, Pearson Vetuna, Carolyn Tiriman, Kenya Kala and other Australian-based Radio Australia broadcasters were treated like rock stars when they visited their homeland. Proposals simply to translate ABC News into Tok Pisin hardly meet the ABC’s charter obligation for innovative broadcasting.

The future of Radio Australia’s French-language service “remains under consideration” even as the French dependencies of New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna are building closer economic and political ties with Australia and the Pacific Islands Forum. New Caledonia is moving towards a referendum on self-determination in the next few years. Yet Australian audiences would be hard-pressed to find any coverage of last May’s elections, even though the incoming Congress will determine whether New Caledonia reaches a new political relationship with France before 2018. I was the only Australian journalist to travel to report on the elections from New Caledonia, and no newspapers in Australia published a report on the vote. (Ironically, Radio Australia was created during the second world war to complement Australia’s first diplomatic presence in the Asia-Pacific region: a consulate in New Caledonia established to support Gaullist efforts to overthrow the pro-Vichy governor.)

As I travelled around New Caledonia in May, a number of indigenous Kanaks mentioned items from Radio Australia’s French-language service that they’d heard or seen online. Australian broadcasting provides a crucial alternative in a media landscape dominated by French government media and a daily newspaper that campaigns against independence.

The ABC’s reporting of the region is not perfect, of course, and it’s not unknown for Pacific journalists to criticise the errors and cultural bias that are part and parcel of an under resourced organisation. But the loss of the Australia Network contract is part of a broader pattern that fatally damages Australian broadcasting to the islands region.

Even for a government that declares little love for the ABC, this short-sighted budget bushfire is yet another blow to Australia’s declining influence in the Pacific region. With cuts to the ABC, CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology and other institutions working with Pacific partners, the Australian government is weakening regional initiatives to respond to poverty, development and the climate emergency. The merger of the Australian Agency for International Development into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and multibillion dollar cuts to the overseas aid budget over the next four years have already unbalanced the institutions that implement policy in the region.

And what about the villagers in Futuna? There will be an increased diet of ABC reporting of the floods in Queensland, but less timely information about the next cyclone bearing down on them. Surely we can do better than this. •

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Recent tension on China’s maritime borders has caused a sharp intake of breath in capitals across the region and around the world. Picking fights with Vietnam in its own backyard is something that few come away from in good shape; like the misadventures of the United States in the 1960s and early 70s, China’s clashes with Vietnam have been traumatising ones. The 1979 conflict was the last significant occasion on which the People’s Liberation Army had combat experience, and it was also the moment when the Chinese saw that their army, so vast in terms of personnel, was simply unable to deal with so determined a foe.

Which raises the question: why risk inflaming a formidable neighbour once again? There are two broad ways to begin to understand the latest escalations in the South and East China Seas: the first is to see them as part of a quest by China not just for physical space, but also for status and symbolic space; the second is to link them to a government seeking new forms of legitimacy as its economic challenges become more complicated and domestic problems continue to mount. Getting tough on the outside world forges unity in ways that local issues seldom do.

On the first of those factors, a 16 May editorial in the Global Times was illuminating. The Global Times might be one of China’s more unashamedly populist papers, but behind the editorial’s shrill tone lay an important point. Berating the Vietnamese for their latest response to Chinese infringements of contested territory, the paper complained that Vietnam still regards China as a weak, developing economy, rather than the proud, mighty nation it now is. No political leader in China would say this sort of thing quite so blatantly, but plenty of observers have detected a leadership tired of posing as humble, cooperative partners in the order – a leadership that believes the world’s second-largest economy needs more recognition and more elbow room.

In this sense, the matter of physical space can be translated into a question of symbolic space. Chinese intellectuals of the left – Beijing University’s Wang Hui among them – have complained of an America which, in Wang’s words, extends right up to the borders of China via its influence over treaty partners and its cultural reach. China feels crowded in by a regional order in which it must reluctantly subjugate its economic importance in order to placate a United States that constantly seeks affirmation and feels it can project its influence in ways that, if reciprocated by China, would bring accusations of over-assertiveness.

Liu Yunshan, the Politburo member in charge of ideology, captured some of this frustration in 2008 and 2009 when he complained of a world that failed to acknowledge China’s contribution and true status. He was referring to negative responses to the Beijing Olympics, but the mismatch continues between a Chinese ruling elite that feels it has achieved great things and a world that seems bent on denying it full recognition.

Frustration is therefore a very strong theme in Beijing now, with military and political establishments seeking to push the boundaries all the time, while also aware of how much opposition is heaped against them. This search for symbolic space was clear when Xi Jinping met Barack Obama at Sunnylands last year: “The Pacific is big enough for both of us,” the Chinese president told the American president.

One place where China can move a little more freely is in economic space. In recent years it has projected into Africa (witness prime minister Li Keqiang’s visit to a number of sub-Saharan countries in early May, dispensing aid and largesse), Latin America and a number of developed economies through investment and strategic partnerships. But even here there is a fly in the ointment. Beijing sees the Trans-Pacific Partnership, dominated by the United States, as another attempt by Washington to contain China’s markets. Yet again, China’s space is being curtailed.

This might explain recent events, but it doesn’t excuse China’s poor diplomacy, which has left it largely without regional alliances at a time when its economic reach and ambitions are increasing. The simple fact is that the United States remains at the centre of a remarkable series of treaty alliances, and this, above all, gives it the strategic strength to project its interests so deeply into the region. What might lie behind China’s clumsy diplomacy of late, however, are domestic issues – the fact that growth is falling, that economic indicators are looking less dazzling than they did a couple of years ago, that so much growth is now dependent on an internal housing market that looks more fragile as each month passes.

Li Keqiang has referred to the macroeconomic challenge of finding “new spaces of growth,” but in this case he means space within China for new development opportunities that reduce reliance on the outside markets that proved so capricious during the 2008–09 global crisis. Li’s metaphor might apply just as well politically: as the crucial card of economic performance becomes less reliable, the Party is seeking new spaces for growth in terms of its legitimacy.

That is the link to foreign policy. A Chinese government no longer able to forge consensus in Beijing through strong, dynamic growth knows that loyalty must now come from another source – and a vision of national strength and mission is the best and easiest card to reach for. Like Vladimir Putin, who has enjoyed huge public approval since playing tough over Ukraine, Chinese leaders must be tempted by the public support they will receive for being tough on their neighbours, and particularly Japan, where historical animosities are so deep.

On almost constant “war alert” over border disputes, the Chinese government can also play tougher back at home by dealing more harshly with separatists and other elements that look like they are jeopardising cohesion during a moment of external threat. This is not to deny that some of these security threats are real. But building national consensus on the basis of permanent crisis is an old trick with two big problems: it cedes a great deal of control to volatile and nationalist public sentiment, and it risks the possibility that rhetorical threats might just lead to real conflict.

If it toughens up further and faster in the region in order to keep domestic tensions under control, the Chinese government could at some point lose control, and fights over symbolism could become physical combat. This is a worrying time in the region, and the current trajectory of events, like the condition of the Chinese economy itself, is looking more negative than a year ago. But China’s quest for those two kinds of space was probably inevitable as it grew richer, so we need to think harder about how it can come to occupy spaces that recognise its status while being acceptable to the rest of the world and reducing the threat of combat. We are entering a period of deep readjustment and compromise, and there is no road map in Beijing, Washington or anywhere else for that matter that is going to make this easy. •

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SIXTY years ago, on 1 March 1954, Rinok Riklon was a young girl living on Rongelap, one of the northern atolls of the Marshall Islands. Then the Bomb went off.

“People were playing with the fallout as it fell from the sky,” she told me through an interpreter. “We put it in our hair as if it was soap or shampoo. But later I lost all of my hair.”

The American government had exploded a thermonuclear device on Bikini Atoll, 120 kilometres to the west. Codenamed Bravo and weighing in at fifteen megatons, this was the largest nuclear device the military had tested. It sent a cloud of radioactive fallout across the northern atolls of the Marshall Islands, which were part of the United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, a strategic UN trusteeship administered by the United States.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands is now an independent country, but the people of this Micronesian nation still live with the health and environmental consequences of the nuclear weapons program. Bravo was just one of sixty-seven atmospheric nuclear tests on Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958.

On the eve of the test, the American military had received weather reports indicating that atmospheric conditions “were getting less favourable” and winds at 20,000 feet “were headed for Rongelap to the east.” In spite of these warnings, the test went ahead. Islanders on Rongelap, Ailinginae and Utrik atolls were only evacuated for emergency medical care a few days later. The evacuation began a decades-long odyssey that has left many people still living in exile from their contaminated atolls.

Lemyo Abon was just fourteen years old when Bravo spread fallout across parts of Rongelap atoll. After living on the contaminated atoll for thirty years, she was evacuated to Mejatto Island in 1985 aboard the Rainbow Warrior. (Just weeks later, this Greenpeace vessel was sunk in Auckland Harbour by French intelligence agents who had been sent halfway around the world to sabotage protests over French nuclear testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.) In 2007, she moved to the Marshall Islands capital, Majuro – still far away from her home island.

“We are still living in this place in exile from our homeland, like a coconut floating in the sea,” she told me through an interpreter. “The United States has to live up to their responsibility and make sure our children and grandchildren will be cared for.”

Returning home is difficult. Food plants like breadfruit and coconut take up radioactive Cesium-137 from the soil, and this hazard has persisted on Rongelap and other contaminated islands to this day. Although the US Congress has allocated $45 million for a trust fund to finance the partial clean-up of the main island, less than 10 per cent of Rongelap, Rongerik and Ailinginae atolls have been remediated and exiled residents are calling for more comprehensive efforts before they return home.

AFTER four decades as a US-administered strategic trust territory after the second world war, the Marshall Islands and neighbouring Micronesian states moved to self-government in the mid 1980s. The governments of the Marshall Islands and the United States adopted a Compact of Free Association – a program of American aid in return for defence cooperation – in 1986.

As part of the negotiations, both governments agreed to establish a Nuclear Claims Tribunal to receive and adjudicate claims for personal injury and property damage resulting from the nuclear tests. In exchange for the cessation of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of civil claims lodged in US courts, a US$150 million trust fund was established to fund payouts determined by the tribunal’s judges. The Marshall Islands had to give up all claims “past, present and future” that were “based upon, arise out of or are in any way related to the Nuclear Testing Program, and which are against the United States.”

The Nuclear Claims Tribunal can award costs for restitution and clean-up of contaminated lands, and has allocated property damage awards, including compensation for loss of land use and for hardship and suffering. But the trust fund is nearly exhausted and cannot meet the court’s rulings and damages awards. As a result, more than US$2.3 billion of compensation remains unpaid.

In 2000, the Republic of the Marshall Islands lodged a Changed Circumstances Petition with the US Congress, seeking extra funding for the tribunal. But the United States refused to pay the remaining compensation for damage caused by the nuclear tests at Bikini and Enewetak atolls. Fourteen years on, the Obama administration has followed previous US governments in arguing that all avenues to respond to the Changed Circumstances Petition have been exhausted.

For people who staffed the Nuclear Claims Tribunal after 1988, Washington’s refusal to meet its responsibilities still grates. Bill Graham, who served as the Public Advocate at the tribunal for twenty-one years and now works as an adviser to the Marshall Islands foreign ministry, says there are still billions of dollars owed to affected communities from Bikini, Enewetak, Utrik and Rongelap after rulings by the Tribunal.

“For the property damage awards, if you add up the clean-up and restoration, the loss and damage, and the hardship and suffering, you wind up with just under US$2.3 billion remaining owed on those awards,” he says. “The tribunal did make two very small payments, one in 2002 and one in 2003, to the people of Bikini and Enewetak. But this is totalling less than $4 million of that $2.3 billion.”

Graham said that there were smaller but still significant amounts owing for health impacts. “The tribunal awarded personal injury compensation to nearly 2000 people of nearly US$96 million. But again, due to insufficient funding in the settlement agreement, we were only able to spend $73 million of that $96 million. So more than $23 million is still owed to those people.”

The tribunal also awarded US$531 million for clean-up of residual contamination in those atolls, beyond existing amounts allocated by the US government. It made its last compensation award and some partial payments in late 2008. Since then it has suspended awards and payment for lack of funds, with evidence being preserved by two part-time clerical staff. More than six years after the tribunal issued its ruling on property claims for Rongelap, there is no funding to pay out the compensation.

The US government’s obstinate refusal to address the issue has sparked increasing scrutiny. Marshall Islanders have welcomed a 2012 report to the UN Human Rights Council by UN special rapporteur Calin Georgescu, who visited the Marshall Islands and the United States in early 2012. “The nuclear testing resulted in both immediate and continuing effects on the human rights of the Marshallese,” he wrote. “According to information received by the special rapporteur, radiation from the testing resulted in fatalities and in acute and long-term health complications… exacerbated by near-irreversible environmental contamination, leading to the loss of livelihoods and lands. Moreover, many people continue to experience indefinite displacement.”

PEOPLE are gathering from Majuro to Arkansas to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Bravo test this week. Around the region, the anniversary of the test is commemorated as Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day on 1 March each year. The day highlights longstanding and ongoing opposition to nuclear weapons in a region that experienced 315 American, British and French nuclear tests between 1946 and 1996.

Beginning in the 1950s, churches, trade unions, women’s organisations and customary leaders in the islands campaigned for an end to nuclear testing and the abolition of nuclear weapons. On 6 May 1954, Marshall Islanders lodged a petition with the United Nations Trusteeship Council requesting that “all experiments with lethal weapons in this area be immediately ceased.” The petition stated that people were “not only fearful of the danger to their persons from these deadly weapons” but “also concerned for the increasing number of people removed from their land.”

These concerns were echoed by islanders facing British and French nuclear testing. Even before gaining independence from New Zealand, the Cook Islands and Samoa protested against Britain’s testing program at Christmas Island and Malden Island in 1957–58. “Nations engaged in testing these bombs in the Pacific should realise the value of the lives of the people settled in this part of the world,” commented the Indo-Fijian newspaper Jagriti in 1957. “They too are human beings, not ‘guinea pigs.’”

In 1975, the Pacific Conference of Churches joined with the Student Christian Movement, the Fiji YWCA and the antinuclear group Against Testing on Moruroa to host the first Nuclear Free Pacific conference in Suva, Fiji. The conference spawned the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement, linking the cause of disarmament to the right to self-determination. As the New Hebrides delegation told the meeting in Suva: “The main objective of this conference is to end nuclear tests in the Pacific, but the more we discuss it, [the more] it becomes obvious that the main cause is colonialism.”

As they have gained independence from colonial powers, Pacific governments have expressed their support for nuclear disarmament. At the height of the US–Soviet arms race, on Hiroshima Day 1985, members of the Pacific Islands Forum signed and ratified the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. This important contribution to global disarmament inspired similar initiatives in Southeast Asia, Africa and Central Asia, and all land areas in the southern hemisphere – except Timor-Leste – are now covered by these zones, which ban the development and deployment of nuclear weapons by treaty signatories. Individual states, from Vanuatu and New Zealand to South Africa, Austria and Mongolia, have declared their territory nuclear-free.

After massive protests during the 1980s, the nuclear disarmament movement was largely demobilised, with peace activists campaigning instead on landmines, cluster bombs, the Arms Trade Treaty, and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other developing nations. But with the passage of treaties to ban or constrain the use of landmines, cluster bombs, chemical weapons and small arms, there is new momentum to ban the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction.

With the official Conference on Disarmament stymied by the veto of nuclear powers and unable to agree on any action, non-nuclear nations are not standing idle. A number of new initiatives aim to sidestep the nuclear weapons states and advance efforts for nuclear abolition.

Launched in 2007, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has expanded to sixty countries and is campaigning for a global treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Its cause has been aided by the 2011 decision of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement to throw its worldwide network of affiliates into campaigning on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons.

In February this year, 146 governments – but none of the nuclear powers – gathered in Nayarit, Mexico, for the Second Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. Following a ground-breaking meeting in Oslo in March 2013, this gathering brought together non-nuclear governments to pledge action towards nuclear disarmament and an treaty. The government of Austria has agreed to host a third conference, continuing the momentum. These conferences discuss the impact of nuclear weapons on global public health and the environment, economic growth and sustainable development, but also the risk that nuclear weapons, if not banned and eliminated, will one day be used again.

Maintaining its support of the US policy of “extended nuclear deterrence,” Australia stands aside from these efforts. Responding to discussion of a nuclear ban treaty in Mexico, foreign minister Julie Bishop said, “Their argument ‘to ban the bomb’ may be emotionally appealing, but the reality is that disarmament cannot be imposed this way. Just pushing for a ban would divert attention from the sustained, practical steps needed for effective disarmament.”

Even after the end of nuclear testing in the Pacific region in 1996, many island governments have continued to support efforts for nuclear disarmament. In the UN General Assembly and summits, Pacific nations have voted in favour of resolutions calling for a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

On 1 March, the voices of Rinok Riklon, Lemyo Abon and thousands of nuclear survivors around the Pacific islands will be a reminder that many people have been adversely affected by the development and deployment of nuclear weapons. Sixty years after the Bravo test, it’s time for action to abolish these weapons. •

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STANDING on the podium in Warsaw this week, president Baron Waqa of Nauru wasn’t mincing his words. “Many of the countries most responsible for climate change are retreating from their moral responsibility and obligation to act,” he said. “Consequently, we are lacking the urgent ambition required to lower emissions in the short time we have to avert catastrophe.”

This year’s global climate negotiations haven’t gone well. The Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS, is angry that many developed nations are abandoning pledges to provide financial support for the most vulnerable islands affected by global warming. Speaking on behalf of this forty-three-member bloc, Waqa stressed the vital role of climate finance in responding to the climate emergency. “We are missing the all-embracing idea of human solidarity that underpins the concept of ‘loss and damage,’” he said, referring to the devastation to land, water supply, agriculture and infrastructure caused by delays in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the failure to fund the necessary adaptation.

Leading the retreat at Warsaw is the Australian government. In December last year, the Coalition’s shadow climate minister, Greg Hunt, said that an Abbott government would not give a “blank cheque” to cover loss and damage. Now, as federal environment minister (“climate” having been removed from the title), Hunt has refused to attend the Warsaw negotiations and is making good on his pledge to stop the cheques.

At this month’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka, the Abbott government ditched Australia’s pledge to contribute to the Green Climate Fund, an innovative new funding mechanism for dealing with the effects of climate change. In their final communique, the CHOGM leaders “recognised the importance attached to both the operationalisation and the capitalisation of the Green Climate Fund.” But a footnote recorded that “Australia and Canada had reservations about the language of paragraphs 18, 19, 20 and 21 and indicated that they could not support a Green Capital [sic] Fund at this time.”

Hunt made clear in December last year that the Coalition wouldn’t support this multilateral body. “This is not a fund which we support. We have no control over where the money goes, no control over how it’s used, no control over how much we pay and this is something which we clearly, simply, categorically reject.” At the time, observers were astounded by the chutzpah of this statement. Australia had played a central role in the creation of the fund, with AusAID’s deputy director-general, Ewen McDonald, appointed co-chair of the Fund’s board for its first year of operation. Australian officials have played a crucial role in determining the Fund’s mandate, operations and policies.

In Warsaw, Australian negotiators also disrupted talks on the “loss and damage” agenda, leading to a walkout by the “G77 plus China” delegates, the 132-member bloc currently chaired by Fiji. As noted climate researcher Saleemul Huq told the Guardian, “Discussions were going well in a spirit of cooperation, but at the end of the session on loss and damage Australia put everything agreed into brackets, so the whole debate went to waste.”

At a time of diplomatic turmoil with Indonesia, these attacks on climate finance, coupled with recent cuts in the aid program, will have long-term strategic implications for Australia’s relationship with Pacific island neighbours. Although Australia remains the major provider of aid, trade and military cooperation in the Pacific islands region, the days when it could use aid to call the shots are long gone. The old relationship is no longer the only game in town: in the same month that Canberra overturned Australia’s policy on climate finance, China announced US$1 billion in concessional loans for the Pacific islands.

Alongside China’s increasing diplomatic influence in the Pacific, a range of other players – from Cuba, Russia and Indonesia to unexpected actors like the United Arab Emirates – are complicating policy in the islands for the ANZUS allies. With larger countries like Papua New Guinea and Fiji taking more assertive regional and roles, many Australians underestimate the rapidity of change in our region. The latest cuts in aid and climate finance can only accelerate that process.

SINCE Copenhagen in 2009, OECD nations have pledged funds for adaptation and mitigation initiatives in the developing world. Thirty billion dollars was committed for fast-start financing in 2010–13, and the agreed target for 2020 is an annual US$100 billion of public and private funds.

But many obstacles already stand between these funds and the most vulnerable communities, including the inadequacy of funding pledges, the balance between money allocated for adaptation or mitigation, a lack of donor coordination, the complexity of funding mechanisms and the special vulnerability of small island developing states and least-developed countries – countries that barely contribute to global greenhouse emissions.

“Approved [climate] finance for projects in the region’s most vulnerable countries, particularly the small Pacific island states, has been modest,” reports the Overseas Development Institute. “Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu cumulatively receive only 4 per cent (USD $83 million) of the total amount approved in the Asia-Pacific region, mostly for adaptation activities.” Funding cuts will just make the shortfall more serious for countries like these.

The cuts can’t be justified by arguing that small island states have a limited capacity to manage aid flows. Australian officials and non-government organisations have been working with the Pacific Islands Forum to establish systems to manage resources effectively and avoid corruption and mismanagement. The Forum secretariat has completed a major study on climate funds in Nauru and published reports on better practice in the region, and last year Oxfam published a report (on which I was the lead researcher) examining regional efforts to strengthen governance of climate adaptation finance.

Beyond this, many of the problems in accessing climate finance lie with the practices of key donors and multilateral organisations. Acknowledging this problem, a June 2012 World Bank report pointed out that “the institutional rigidity of donor organisations makes cooperation and partnership more difficult… Joint programming of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction activities by donors and implementing agencies is not widespread.”

Since 2010, Australia’s fast-start funding for climate adaptation and mitigation has been drawn from the aid budget. With the aid program expanding in those years, and a bipartisan commitment to increase official development assistance to 0.5 per cent of gross national income by 2015, Pacific governments have been reluctant to criticise Australian policy. (Island officials believe, for example, that climate financing was supposed to be “new and additional” to resources allocated for addressing poverty, health, education and women’s empowerment, but they haven’t chosen to make an issue of the fact.)

The decision to abandon the 2015 aid target began under the Gillard government. Labor foreign minister Bob Carr diverted $375 million of aid funds in 2012–13 – funds for humanitarian and emergency responses, women’s programs, agriculture and rural development – to pay for asylum seeker processing. But the Abbott government is going further and faster. Since coming to office, the Coalition has made three key changes to the aid program: cutting $4.5 billion over four years by reversing planned increases in the aid budget; abolishing the aid agency AusAID as a statutory agency and merging its functions into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; and proposing cuts in the number of experienced staff charged with making sure taxpayer funds are well spent.

Under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Labor met its target of A$599 million of fast-start climate finance in 2010–13. But our fair share of the global target of US$100 billion by 2020 is estimated at $2.4 billion a year, an amount that would require a dramatic shift of attitude within the Coalition.

RECENT announcements about aid and climate finance come at a time when Pacific regionalism is being transformed. Australia’s long-held influence in the Pacific Islands Forum is being eroded by new trends in aid, trade and investment. Pacific governments are diversifying their political and economic links beyond the regional groupings that dominated islands politics throughout the cold war years.

Today, Forum countries are showing growing interest in South–South cooperation and engagement with new partners. Fiji’s coup leader Voreqe Bainimarama has been a key player in this regional realignment. Bainimarama has argued that Pacific nations need an independent grouping outside the Pacific Islands Forum. “We must insist that our voice be heard and heeded,” he has said. “We will dine at the table; we will not be content to pick at the crumbs that remain on the table cloth after the decisions are made and dinner is over.”

With Fiji suspended from Forum and Commonwealth activities since 2009, Bainimarama initiated the “Engaging with the Pacific” meetings in 2010 as a counterpoint to the Forum. In August 2013, these meetings morphed into the Pacific Islands Development Forum, a new regional summit which provides both a mechanism for debate about sustainable development and an alternative meeting place for governments, business and civil society. Over time, the new grouping may evolve into a venue for inter-island dialogue without Forum members Australia and New Zealand in the room.

These trends are also evident globally, reflecting the growing links between the Forum’s island countries and Asian powers. As relations with Canberra and Wellington have soured since the 2006 coup, Fiji has joined the Non-Aligned Movement, established diplomatic relations with a range of key developing nations, and opened new embassies in Brazil, South Africa, Korea and Abu Dhabi.

In 2011, the Asia Group within the United Nations formally changed its name to the Group of Asia and the Pacific Small Islands Developing States. (With Tony Abbott stressing Australia’s links with Anglosphere partners in Washington, Wellington and Ottawa, it’s worth remembering that Australia is part of the UN Western European and Others Group, rather than the Asia-Pacific group.)

The Bainimarama regime’s repression of trade unions, limits on political parties and delays in constitutional and electoral reform have not hampered Fiji’s regional and influence. This year, Fiji has served as chair of the G77 plus China grouping in the United Nations, an unprecedented role for an islands nation. As Fiji’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Peter Thomson, said in May, “The G77 is the most appropriate grouping for countries such as Fiji, Kiribati and other PSIDS” – Pacific Small Island Developing States – “to advance the development of their economic agendas in the global context.”

Papua New Guinea is also playing a more independent role in regional politics, reflecting its size as a dynamic, populous nation near the borders of Asia. It is the only Pacific island nation in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation grouping, or APEC, and is seeking full membership of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. With major reserves of timber, fisheries and minerals and new projects to export oil and liquefied natural gas, Papua New Guinea has the potential to influence neighbouring atoll nations.

Attending the Pacific Islands Forum in Majuro last September, PNG prime minister Peter O’Neill said his country will embark on a program of regional assistance with various countries in the Pacific. From next year, the PNG government will introduce a special budget allocation to fund a regional development assistance program. In Majuro, O’Neill increased climate funds to the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Kiribati, and pledged funds for Fiji’s 2014 elections.

Seizing the moment, China is using loans and investment to expand its diplomatic influence in the region, erode longstanding island ties to Taiwan and blunt US regional influence. According to China’s foreign ministry, “developing friendly cooperation with the Pacific island countries is part of the long-term strategy guideline of China's diplomacy” and “a role model for South–South cooperation.”

Meeting Pacific leaders in Guangzhou on 8 November, the Chinese government announced a range of loans, grants and scholarships for island nations. Vice-premier Wang Yang announced that China will provide US$1 billion in concessional loans for Pacific island nations to support construction projects. (A loans facility will especially benefit Papua New Guinea and Fiji, where major oil, gas and seabed mining projects are proposed.) A further $1 billion in non-concessional financing would be made available by the China Development Bank.

At a time when Australia is abandoning increases in overseas development aid, the Chinese government is stressing its diplomatic commitment to the region: “China is a reliable and sincere friend and a dependable cooperative partner of the Pacific island countries.” It will build medical facilities and send medical teams to island nations, as well as investing in green energy projects. Beijing will also provide 2000 scholarships over four years to add to the 3600 Pacific officials and technicians who have already received training in China in recent years.

Canberra’s fixation on the carbon tax and domestic climate policies, meanwhile, is overshadowing these regional and developments. Although Australia remains the largest aid donor in the islands region, the Coalition government is fundamentally transforming our capacity to deliver development assistance in ways that address core regional concerns over poverty, infrastructure, water and food security. And as we move towards a global climate treaty and a summit to replace the Millennium Development Goals in 2015, there are plenty of other players who are stepping up to engage with our island neighbours. •

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AT THE height of the nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union, a treaty to create a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, or SPNFZ, was opened for signature on Hiroshima Day, 6 August 1985, at the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Rarotonga.

Twenty-eight years after it was signed on that day by Australia, New Zealand and island nations, the United States still hasn’t ratified its protocols, in spite of a request from president Barack Obama to the US Senate more than two years ago.

Next week, as Forum leaders gather in the Marshall Islands – site of sixty-seven US nuclear tests at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls – the US government will be eager to keep nuclear issues off the agenda, as it has been since the Treaty was first mooted. Declassified documents from the National Archives of Australia, and US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, highlight longstanding opposition in Canberra and Washington to a comprehensive nuclear-free zone that might hamper US nuclear deployments in the Pacific.

The Forum meeting, and the US Senate’s continued stalling, coincide with on-going concerns that Australia’s decision to sell uranium to India threatens to breach Australian treaty obligations.

AS CONSERVATIVE Australian governments in the 1960s debated the acquisition of nuclear weapons and purchased aircraft capable of delivering nuclear strikes in Southeast Asia, the labour movement across the region proposed a nuclear free zone designed to ban the bomb in this part of the world. The SPNFZ Treaty was finally negotiated in the 1980s after decades of campaigning by unions, Pacific churches and the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement.

Under the treaty, countries in the zone commit never to develop nuclear weapons. Under three protocols, nuclear states with territories in the zone (France, Britain and the United States) agree to apply the treaty to their territories. In accepting the protocols, all nuclear powers also undertake not to use or threaten to use any nuclear device against countries in the zone, and not to test nuclear devices in the zone.

Russia and China were first to sign the protocols, in 1986 and 1987 respectively, pledging not to store or test nuclear weapons in the region or use them against Australia, New Zealand or island nations. France, Britain and the United States refused to sign the treaty protocols for a decade, only signing on 25 March 1996 after the end of French nuclear testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.

Until now, however, the US government has refused to ratify its signature by passing legislation through the US Senate. President Obama formally called on the US Senate to ratify the SPNFZ protocols the day after a US Special Forces unit shot and killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. “Ratification of Protocols 1, 2, and 3 to the Treaty would fully support US non-proliferation policy and goals,” he told the Senate, “and I am convinced that it is in the best interest of the United States to ratify these Protocols.”

But the Senate has failed to act on President Obama’s request. On 2 May 2011, the Senate referred the treaty to its Committee on Foreign Relations “pursuant to the removal of the injunction of secrecy.” The committee hasn’t yet discussed the legislation, even though Obama’s Democratic Party has held a majority of its membership since 2007.

The US Embassy in Canberra has confirmed that no hearings are scheduled to discuss the ratification. “There is no time period for ratification,” said an embassy official. “For example, it took the Senate thirty years to ratify the Genocide Convention. The Committee has many other treaties under consideration, so there is no way to tell how long it will be before this treaty is approved by the Committee and referred to the full Senate for its advice and consent.”

THE delay reflects longstanding American opposition to limits on its nuclear deployments in the region. US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show Washington’s opposition to SPNFZ dating back to the 1970s, when the New Zealand government considered taking up the issue.

After the unexpected death in 1974 of NZ prime minister Norman Kirk, a firm supporter of a Nuclear Free Zone, incoming prime minister Bill Rowling took up the issue. Rowling initiated discussions with Australia’s prime minister, Gough Whitlam, in early 1975, a decade before SPNFZ was finally signed by most Forum member countries.

In March 1975, the classified New Zealand SPNFZ proposal was leaked to the US Embassy in Wellington. A US diplomatic cable that month notes: “Source indicated he thought GoA [Government of Australia] Foreign Affairs and Defence officials remained opposed to SPNFZ, but allowed the possibility that proposal might find some acceptability at Cabinet level.” The cable goes on to note: “Without indicating US knowledge of latest GNZ [Government of New Zealand] proposal, Embassy believes Deputy Secretary Defence Clements should firmly impress upon GoA our opposition to SPNFZ.”

The March 1975 US Embassy cable highlights support in Australia’s Foreign Affairs bureaucracy for delaying any action. “Likely outcome of Rowling–Whitlam talks would be to refer agreement to officials for further study… If this is the case then GNZ expects little of it and would be quite willing to see it discussed by officials more or less ad infinitum.”

Further US cables from September 1975 show Whitlam supported the proposal in public but privately told the US Embassy that he only did so because he “feels obliged to give token support” to a “beleaguered” NZ government.

The replacement of the Whitlam Labor government by Malcolm Fraser’s conservative Coalition after the November 1975 constitutional crisis saw the end of any discussion of SPNFZ until Labor was re-elected in 1983 under Bob Hawke. Hawke’s government revived the concept of a nuclear free zone at the 1983 South Pacific Forum leaders meeting in Canberra. The following year, meeting in Tuvalu, the Forum endorsed a set of principles proposed by Australia as the basis for establishing a zone. Forum leaders also appointed a working group to draft the treaty text, which met five times in Suva, Canberra and Wellington between November 1984 and June 1985.

Declassified documents from the National Archives of Australia, including the 1985 Cabinet minute about the SPNFZ Treaty, show clearly that Australia designed the treaty to protect US interests in the Pacific, including the deployment of nuclear-armed warships and the testing of nuclear missiles. As an April 1985 submission by Foreign Minister Bill Hayden to Cabinet notes, “The proposal is designed to maintain the security advantages afforded to the South West Pacific through the ANZUS Treaty and the United States security presence in the region.”

At the time, the Hawke government was embroiled in debate over a US proposal to test-fire two MX inter-continental ballistic missiles into Pacific waters east of Tasmania. Hayden’s cabinet submission includes details of Australian negotiating positions in the final months before the treaty was signed:

(iii) Australia oppose the inclusion in the draft SPNFZ Treaty of a ban on missile tests.

(iv) Australia oppose the inclusion in the draft SPNFZ Treaty of a ban on the facilitation of the stationing of nuclear weapons, and limit the proposed non-facilitation provisions on the testing and acquisition of nuclear weapons to practical measures consistent with established Australian government positions.

The archives include a draft version of the treaty dated 10 April 1985, just before a May 1985 working group meeting in Suva finalised the text for leaders to sign in August that year.

The draft text notes in article three that: “Each Party undertakes:… (b) not to [provide], seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture or acquisition of any nuclear explosive device.” The word “provide” was removed from the final text after Australia sought successfully to retain the right to provide support for the manufacture of nuclear weapons (such as the export of uranium to nuclear weapons states).

The Australian cabinet submission highlights divisions within the Forum, with Melanesian countries eager to create a more comprehensive nuclear free zone than many smaller Polynesian nations.

“In general,” says Hayden’s cabinet submission, “the Melanesians (PNG, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands) have supported a treaty which is broad in scope. They have expressed interest, for instance, in the possibility of including in the treaty bans on missile testing and ‘nuclear related’ facilities such as the Joint Facilities. Nauru has supported them. The Polynesians (Fiji, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, Niue and Western Samoa) on the other hand support a treaty that is essentially limited to the principles endorsed by the Heads of Government in the communiqué of the [1984] Tuvalu Forum.”

AT THE time the treaty was negotiated in the mid 1980s, three Micronesian countries were still under US administration through the UN strategic Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau.

Because SPNFZ was finalised a year before the Micronesian states achieved self-government under a Compact of Free Association with the United States, they were not included within the zone. As well as protecting the crucial US missile testing base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the US government was trying to overcome popular anti-nuclear sentiment in Palau, which had included a “nuclear free” clause in their Constitution (the clause was eventually removed, allowing Palau’s Compact with the United States to come into force in 1994).

Ratification of SPNFZ by the US Senate could open the way to review and extend the treaty north of the Equator. This would clearly match the aspirations of South Pacific countries at the time the treaty was drafted.

In June 1985, a report from the drafting team for the SPNFZ treaty was submitted to Forum leaders. Countries like Papua New Guinea argued that the treaty should be called the Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, to include territories north of the Equator. Instead, the report noted:

Inclusion of the United States Trust Territory in the zone could complicate current negotiations on the constitutional future of these territories, especially since nuclear issues were a major element in these negotiations… Papua New Guinea, while acknowledging the reasons that had led the Working Group to settle for the northern boundary as described in the draft Treaty, asked that its continuing preference for the South Pacific Commission boundary be recorded. It was recognised by all delegations that the SPNFZ Treaty should allow for the inclusion in the zone of future members of the South Pacific Forum who wished to and were in a position to become parties to the Treaty.

At the 2010 review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Marshall Islands foreign minister Phillip Muller told the United Nations that the Republic of the Marshall Islands has “eventual aspirations to join with our Pacific neighbours in supporting a Pacific free of nuclear weapons in a manner consistent with security.”

Since the SPNFZ treaty was signed in 1985, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and Palau have all joined the Pacific Islands Forum and the United Nations. Today, the Rarotonga Treaty could be amended to include them in its boundaries – if the United States allowed it.

THOSE decisions during the 1980s have important implications today, at a time when Australia is proposing to sell uranium to India, a country that has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Bill Hayden’s 1985 cabinet submission notes that the Department of Defence “considers that Australia should seek to have a withdrawal clause included in the treaty and that the right of withdrawal should not be limited to the situation where the Treaty has been breached by another party.” This advice was rejected in the final version of the treaty. Countries cannot withdraw from the SPNFZ unless there is a clear breach of treaty provisions by another party.

International legal experts, including Don Rothwell, professor of law at the Australian National University, have raised concerns that uranium sales to India would breach Australia’s obligations under the treaty. Rothwell has prepared a legal opinion stating that the SPNFZ Treaty prohibits members from selling uranium to countries that do not accept full-scope nuclear safeguards under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

This is consistent with past Australian government policy. In 1996, Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer observed that “Article 4(a) of the SPNFZ Treaty imposes a legal obligation not to provide nuclear material unless subject to the safeguards required by Article III.1 of the NPT; that is full scope safeguards.”

In spite of this, the Gillard government commenced discussions on uranium sales to India in 2012, even though Delhi still refuses to open its nuclear facilities – civilian as well as military – to inspectors, as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Rothwell’s legal advice concludes:

If India does not agree to Article III.1 Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards and Australia were to export uranium to India, Australia would be in violation of its Treaty of Rarotonga obligations. If Australia’s action were in breach of the Treaty, Australia could be exposed to the complaints procedure of Annex 4 of the Treaty initiated by other state parties to the Treaty of Rarotonga.

Since the SPNFZ was created in 1986, there has not been a formal review of the Rarotonga Treaty by Forum member countries, even though it includes provisions for a consultative committee to discuss “any matter arising in relation to this Treaty or for reviewing its operation.” This committee must convene “at the request of any Party,” so any Forum member country could call for a SPNFZ review conference.

Today, island governments are focused on climate change as the greatest threat to their national security. But with 17,000 nuclear weapons still held in arsenals around the world, maybe it’s time to revive longstanding regional opposition to the threat of nuclear war. •

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