Trade is ‘least’ of Pacific problems, priorities

Jason Brown

October 2009 Issue

 

Economic re-colonisation is one of the risks facing Pacific Islands as they enter PACER Plus trade negotiations.
“Decolonisation is not a dead issue,” says Young Vivian, a fomer Niue Premier.
“If you look at the constitutional arrangements, it’s not a business arrangement,” he says referring to treaties across the Pacific.
Decolonisation would not have happened under trade ‘talks’ like PACER Plus, he says.
Vivian has been on the frontlines of decolonisation from four decades ago, helping set up bodies like the South Pacific Commission (now the Pacific Community) and, later, the Pacific Islands Forum with luminaries like Ratu Kamisese Mara, Sir Michael Somare and Sir Albert Henry.
From that historical perspecitive, is PACER Plus a form of recolonisation, economic rather than political?
“Almost anything could happen.”
On both sides.
Decades of ruthless exploitation at the cost of tens of thousands of lives are now coming up against recent court successes on issues like nuclear compensation.
Another shift: Australia signed the UN convention on indigenous rights, putting further pressure on New Zealand to do the same.
Neither issue directly linked to trade, but reflecting a changing economic environment globally.
Fundamentalist free market ideologies are being attacked as ‘casino’ capitalism' by a host of world lobby groups and local voluntary organisations.
Hailed at the highest levels as the answer to universal problems just a year or two ago, free markets are now under sustained question by world leaders. Almost everywhere, except in the Pacific Islands.
Under PACER Plus, small states are being urged to adopt more of the same.
In response to this kind of background, Vivian says allegations of “bullying” by Australia and New Zealand overshadow the reality that trade offers few answers to the real problems facing Pacific Islands.
“Climate change, cyclones, earthquakes, tsunami,” he lists for starters.
 “There’s too many problems in the Pacific to work together as a team and have one policy for all of us.
"Any kind of arrangement for small islands countries; when you think about the size of our countries, trade is the least of our problems.”
His successor, current premier Toke Talagi, outlines similar objections.
“I think both Australia and New Zealand have a genuine desire to help the Pacific Islands, but I’m not sure the officials have the understanding that they should have.”
Sitting across the cabinet room table at the country’s fale fono legislature, Talagi doubts that small islands realities really register in Wellington and Canberra.
Shipping is an example where free trade can be disastrous for small islands, he says. Advised by New Zealand that subsidised transportation systems never work, Niue signed a series of shipping deals that failed one by one.
“A lot of people do follow the dogma that competition is always good.”
Small islands states lose out.
Asked why Australia and New Zealand are pushing so hard to have PACER Plus ‘forthwith’,  Talagi offers an unlikely answer.
“I’m not sure.”
Could it be that Australia and New Zealand are heavily export driven and want numbers behind  them to help save collapsing world trade talks?
“If you’re being silly enough to do that then you’re being silly.” ,
Talagi says trade talks may start at a regional level, but that it’s the local politicians who have to actually go through local interests to implement trade laws.
“They’re not going to proceed until they consult with their own people. Regardless of what New Zealand and Australia may push for, it’s what’s going to happen at islands level that counts.”
Talagi rejects the decades-old notion of islands communities as small, remote and economically weak.
He questions estimates of as much as $3 billion in unreported fishing on top of official exports of roughly as much.
In the 1950s, as decolonisation revved up, Vivian recalls former New Zealand prime minister Keith Holyoake dismissing the idea of the islands operating profitably, saying they would always need help.
Vivian likewise questions the whole idea of islands surviving, let alone prospering, economically.
“It’s difficult. Today might be alright, but tomorrow might be nothing.”
A cyclone. Drought. Late boats. Almost anything can throw a small economy.
Leaning forward on a short porch bench seat, Vivian gestures outside his Hakupu home, low-key surroundings for someone blooded on the ground floor of regionalism, to the island of Niue, 260 square kilometres of coral, soil so thin it cannot be ploughed.
“What have we got to play around with here?”