Author: Gary Hawke, NZIER

New Zealand marked time in 2009, with the government conserving its political capital but achieved little.

Much of the agenda was international rather than domestic. This was most obvious in the area of climate change. New Zealand shares the international policy issue of identifying a suitable response to a risk assessment and choice of appropriate insurance policy, but there was also much emotional nonsense. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Sandra Tarte, University of the South Pacific

In 2009, the political realities in Fiji became more clearly defined, but increasingly perplexing for its regional neighbors and development partners.

The moment of truth for the country, and for Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s military-backed government, came on 9 April when Fiji’s Court of Appeal ruled that the December 2006 coup and the interim administration it installed were illegal. This ruling removed the already somewhat tenuous constitutional basis upon which the interim government had previously claimed its political mandate. It was also the catalyst for the abrogation, one day later, of the Constitution by the President, and the declaration of a ‘new legal order’ under which the Bainimarama-led administration was reappointed. This development clearly indicated to all that there would be no turning back to the pre-December 2006 order. It also marked the further consolidation and entrenchment of the military-backed regime – a process that is likely to continue throughout 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Jon Fraenkel, ANU

Kevin Rudd has talked of the danger of a ‘coup culture’ spreading from Fiji across the Pacific, but nowhere else in the region has experienced anything similar to Fiji’s three coups. The Solomon Islands witnessed a coup back in June 2000, when Malaitan militants in cahoots with the Police Field Force over threw Bartholomew Ulufa’alu’s government. But there an elected government was back in charge within the month, and the constitution was never abrogated.

Other than that, you need to go back over a century to find another example of a coup in the Pacific. In Hawaii in 1893, American settlers overthrew the government of Queen Lili’uokalani, installing a government that was recognised by Washington several years later. Bill Clinton apologised in 1993. Only Fiji, Tonga and Papua New Guinea (PNG) have standing armies that might, in theory, carry out coups. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Andrew Elek on behalf of the Australian Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (AUSPECC)

On December 4-5, 2009, the Australian Government convened a ‘one-and-a-half track conference’ of prominent government officials, academics and opinion makers. In this week’s digest, Peter Drysdale reports on the meeting which discussed the form an Asia Pacific community might take and the role of existing forums (including APEC) within evolving regional institutional architecture.

Drysdale and Hadi Soesastro have made a useful recommendation for how Prime Minister Rudd’s proposal, could be advanced by a council of the leaders of the G20 members of APEC, together with India. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Virginia Horscroft

Fiji may not have been invited to this week’s Pacific Islands Forum Meeting in Cairns, but its presence will be felt nonetheless.

Regional leaders expelled Fiji from the Forum back in May, because they were not persuaded that Commodore Bainimarama planned to restore democratic rule in the near future. Far from getting Fiji off the agenda, its expulsion has intensified the dilemma facing Forum members – as recent public displays of their differing opinions on the treatment of Fiji demonstrate.

Australia’s political leaders are anxious to ensure that the issue of Fiji does not overshadow this week’s meeting in Cairns. Instead, Australia’s foreign minister, Stephen Smith, is insisting that leaders throughout the region are keen to focus on the ‘real work at hand’.

Rightly so. The Pacific Islands are now facing unprecedented challenges to their economic development, thanks to the global financial crisis and climate change.

For these challenges to be tackled effectively, the Forum must agree on regional responses to them. The important role that Fiji has to play in those responses is inescapable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Stephen Howes

The Pacific Islands Forum meets in Cairns this week. If the leaders of the Pacific’s island economies want to know what needs to be done to lift the traditionally low levels of economic growth seen in the region, they would do well to ponder the recent growth record of one the Forum’s own members, Vanuatu.

Prior to 2004, Vanuatu, like many other Pacific island countries, had a long-term rate of economic growth little different from its population growth, about 2.5%. But economic growth in Vanuatu took off in 2004, and growth for the 2004-2008 period has averaged 6.6%.

Due to the global recession, short-term growth prospects are uncertain. But so far this year, tourism growth has accelerated, not declined.

Vanuatu’s growth acceleration is important for the Pacific. It dispels the myth that the Pacific island economies cannot grow, and it confirms the range of factors which are important for growth in the Pacific – a dynamic private sector, active land markets, deregulation, and macroeconomic and social stability.

Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Author: Virginia Horscroft

While our attention is focused on the political crisis in Fiji, a development that could prove critical to the Pacific is passing almost unremarked.

This week will reveal whether members of the Pacific Islands Forum are able to cut a deal to negotiate a regional trade agreement.

If they manage that, it will be a major achievement for regional engagement – a welcome positive in a year that has so far not been a good one for the Pacific.

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Satish Chand

Fiji was suspended from the Pacific Islands Forum on Saturday, the 2nd of May 2009. This decision was anticipated given that the military regime in Fiji had made clear of its intention not to pay heed to the ultimatum given by the Leaders’ following their meeting in Port Moresby last January.

The decision by the Forum, while understandable, is unfortunate. Fiji was a founding member and the late Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara an instigator of South Pacific Bureau for Economic Cooperation, the predecessor to the Pacific Islands Forum. The Secretariat is located in Suva. Fiji’s suspension is evidence of the fact that the Forum family has fractured.

The political problems in Fiji are hurting. Hurting Fiji foremost, and her neighbours next. Fiji’s GDP contracted by 6.6 per cent in 2007, and was close to stagnant in 2008. Poverty in the two years since the December 2006 coup is likely to have risen by a minimum of 8 percentage points. As of 2002, some 33 per cent of the population were poor. The figures for 2009 would certainly be above 40 per cent.

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Author: Michael Wesley, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

After he takes office next week, Barack Obama will be the first President of the United States to have visited Australia prior to assuming office. Obama, who lived in Indonesia as a young child, occasionally transited through Australia on the way back to see his grandparents in Hawai’i for holidays. These fleeting visits, according to those Australians who have spent time with him, left him with warm and positive feelings about this country.

Beyond these warm feelings, it is unlikely that an Obama Presidency will see a marked upswing in Australia-United States relations. During the Howard and Bush administrations, the political dynamics underlying the Australian-American relationship reached a cyclical high point, which by its nature will not be sustained after the exit of both Howard and Bush. The Howard government had identified Bush as a possible future President and begun building a relationship with him long before the 2000 Presidential elections in the United States, and was delighted when Bush scraped home in that poll. Howard and Bush developed a close friendship, based on shared conservative values and a common contractualist, interest-based approach to international affairs. Most crucial, however, was Australia’s support for the United States after the September 11 attacks and during the war in Iraq. Canberra’s solidarity in the face of opposition, especially as the enunciated pre-war case for invasion unravelled, was a gesture that resonated strongly in Washington.

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Author: Aaron Batten

Just like the 1990’s trust accounts are shaping up to be a defining component of how PNG manages its resource revenues in this decade. Unlike the 1990’s however current revenues are being channeled into numerous smaller trust accounts instead of the single consolidated Mineral Resource Stabilization Fund (MRSF). Has PNG learnt from its mistakes or is it heading towards a repeat of the past? To answer these questions it is necessary to understand why these trust accounts have increased so much in prevalence over the last few years and what implications this has for fiscal management.

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Author: Aaron Batten

One of the biggest questions facing the Australian Government which hasn’t received much discussion in the blog world is how technical assistance is being delivered in PNG and the Solomon Islands and perhaps more importantly who delivers it.

Take the PNG example. The technical assistance program is based around two sorts of staff. Those transplanted from Australian Government agencies in Canberra (originally under the Enhanced Cooperation Program (ECP) but now renamed) and a more general Advisory Support Facility (ASF), which sources contractors from across the country and internationally.

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Author: Aaron Batten

The Blogoshpere has made a number of insightful comments about AusAIDs first Annual Review of Development Effectiveness Report (ARDE) report. On the whole commentators appear to be happy with the frankness of the report providing quite an honest assessment of the constraints facing the aid program. (See Andrew Leigh (ANU) and Jenny Hayward-Jones (Lowy)).

Amongst some of the more interesting findings of the report was that at approximately 50 per cent of its expenditure Australia gives more aid in the form of technical assistance than any other donor – the majority of which goes to the Pacific. This is hardly ground breaking news but it does raise some interesting questions.

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