'For most Pacific Islanders, there's still no place like home, and home is where dependents and customary obligations exert a powerful draw..."


Some members of the present Australian government are swinging cautiously to the view that “guest workers” from the Pacific Islands should be allowed into their country temporarily to toil at jobs few Australians are prepared to do. Others, notably the finance minister, Peter Costello, and foreign minister, Alexander Downer, are hostile.

Mr Costello says admitting temporary workers from the Pacific Islands would be contrary to the Australian ethos. This view is rather rich, emanating from a country built partly upon the backs of Melanesians shipped to Queensland in blackbirding days, upon the backs of tens of thousands of Chinese allowed in during the 19th century to labour in less than salubrious circumstances, and the tens of thousands of escapees from Europe who after the Second World War were imported for grinding toil in agriculture or on such monumental engineering feats as the Snowy River projects.

Mr Downer, who overall is a good friend of the Pacific Islands, allowing for Australia's obvious interest in having dominance in the region, is sniffy about what he thinks would be a reversion to blackbirding days. However, he said in a Radio Australia interview he's “happy” about the admission of 1500 to 1600 Fiji islanders annually as migrants. He believes the “challenge” is for Fiji to train unskilled people in vocational skills. Yeah, and after being trained, where do skilled Fiji Islanders head for? They head for Australia, allowed in under the migration policy that gives preference to mechanics, plumbers, electricians, carpenters and a host of other occupations for which there are thousands of vacancies in Australia because Australians won't train for them. The brain drain from Fiji to Australia is immense, one that started way before the coups of 1987 and 2000. The cost to Fiji is also immense; millions of dollars worth of skills sucked away to Australia, New Zealand, or other richer pastures.

What drives Pacific Islanders to migrate is a lack of opportunity in their own countries and political circumstances, such as in Fiji, Tonga, and in the Cook Islands, where frustration and disgust aroused by the incestuous and corrupt style of the domestic politics drive disillusioned people abroad.

The future prospects of many Pacific Islands states are dark. Think about population growth rates, practically zero resources, inept governance, geographic isolation and wonder about the fate awaiting the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tonga, and some elements of Melanesia.

How on Earth will some of these microstates flourish when the odds stacked against them are of the magnitudes that they are? Will the Compact states ever be independent of the United States? Where would Samoa and Tonga be without remittances?

The Pacific Plan, which may or may not have been approved by the Pacific Islands Forum by the time this edition of ISLANDS BUSINESS is published, is not a secure liferaft for them. And as for the hints of salvation in the form of free trade markets being presented to them, these are surely a cruel illusion for economies that have nothing or virtually nothing to offer in trade.

Free trade will be but a one-way trade with Australia and New Zealand in the first place being positioned to unload their wares on the Pacific Islands to the tune of more billion dollars in addition to the several billions worth they supply now.

Pacific Islands leaders are becoming aware that the vision of free trade is quite likely a façade. If, as of now, Pacific Islands banana plantations could overnight be restored and improved to supply quality fruit that Australia could invent no excuse for not accepting, what would happen? The banana growers of Queensland and New South Wales would raise objections any Australian government would ignore at its peril.

The labour issue was one waiting to surface at the Port Moresby Forum. Some elements of the Australian trade union movement have signalled that they are prepared to accept “guest workers” on their conditions-basically not at the cost of the job of any recumbent Aussie layabout and equal pay for equal work.

Australia has genuine cause for reservations about “guest workers”-a euphemism for temporary sweatshop labour treated somewhat more kindly than the good old blackbirding days. Basically it has a nightmare about hordes of overstayers becoming illegal presences too large, vocal and troublesome to boot back home. But we wonder if that scenario should be taken to be a convincing one.

For most Pacific Islanders, there's still no place like home, and home is where dependents and customary obligations exert a powerful draw. Most 'guests' will have a desire to preserve a clean slate with Australia so as to be able to return again and again for jobs an increasing number of Australians have neither the desire nor the competency to perform.