(o) The Folly of Canberra's Stand Against Fiji

A KEYNOTE SPEECH, A 'MUST' READ

Ni bula vinaka,

Attached is the text of the speech I gave at the Australia-Fiji Business Council in Sydney yesterday. The gathering was well-attended by business and government representatives from Australia and Fiji. My speech was preceded by one from a representative of Canberra's Department of Foreign Affairs who said it was "a myth" that Canberra wasn't involved in dialogue with the government of Fiji. I believe my speech proves the opposite to be the case.

The Australia Network News (ABC) reported on the days events.In reporting my criticism of Australia's "smart" sanctions, they chose to focus on "travel bans on members of the military regime", when in fact the thrust of my criticism of these bans was on the way they stop well-qualified, well-intentioned citizens of Fiji from taking up positions of community service. One need only think of an organisation like the FNPF board, sitting on billions of dollars of prudential Fiji funds. If good people are constrained from serving on this board because to do so would be to bring upon themselves and their families the sanction of Aust/NZ travel bans, how can Canberra and Wellington pretend they're not damaging the governance and well-being of Fiji? Therein lies the actual "myth".

If you are wondering where my motivation is coming from in pursuing this campaign to have Canberra and Wellington change their Fiji policy, the answer is that I believe in dialogue not punishment as effective policy, that I value good will in the neighbourhood rather than the fragmentation that comes with ill will, and that I passionately believe Fiji's best interests and its long-standing relationship with its southern neighbours deserve better policy than that which our capitals have had us locked into for the last three years.

If you find the time to read the attached speech, I thank you for giving these ideas your consideration.
Vinaka vaka levu,
Peter Thomson

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Address to Australia-Fiji Business Council Conference,Intercontinental Hotel, Macquarie St, Sydney14^th September, 2009

The Folly of Canberra’s Stand Against Fiji

Peter Thomson

I’m not sure how many of you here have spent time behind the bars of a prison cell. It’s okay, I’m not asking for a show of hands. I went to prison in Fiji once. Apart from the swarms of mosquitoes in my tiny cell day and night, the uncertainty of it all was the most unpleasant aspect; but then I was only in there for four nights. I tell you that because I’m well aware of the downsides of the arbitrary nature of life under a military government. In my case it was so arbitrary under Rabuka’s military government that I’ve yet to be told why I was imprisoned and I’m left to presume it was something to do with the good progress the Governor-General and I were achieving at the time in returning Fiji to representative democracy.

This awareness of the downside is one of the reasons why, twenty years later, I’m dedicated to constructively assisting Fiji in the way forward to parliamentary democracy. In doing so, I fully recognise there are fundamental changes to be made in Fiji if we’re to see an effective break, once and for all, from the conditions that have fostered Fiji’s ‘coup culture’.

I think it’s also very important for us to recognise there is a major difference between Fiji’s military government of 1987 and that which holds power today. In 1987 the army was taken over by a leadership that was hand-in-glove with the Taukei Movement, an ethno-nationalist grouping of Fijians who employed civil insurrection and terrorism to destabilise the country and get their way. The military government in power today is the avowed enemy of the agenda spawned by the Taukei Movement. Since 1987, that ethno-nationalist agenda has flourished off and on, with such rank high points as the unforgettable 2000 invasion of Fiji’s Parliament, during which government members were held hostage for 56 days, and the subsequent army mutinies in Samabula and Labasa in which the law courts demonstrated some of Fiji’s highest-ranking traditional chiefs were complicit. The last flourish of that agenda was the promotion of the volatile ethno-nationalist legislation that led to the 2006 coup.

I’d be pleased to talk in detail with any of you about the causes of and solutions to Fiji’s current difficulties and will be happy to take questions at the end of my address today on any aspect of them, but the focus of my address today is not on the complexities of Fiji’s domestic politics; it is on Canberra’s policy towards Fiji. I intend to demonstrate that the policy is wrong and is damaging both the business community and Fiji’s economy.

Before I do, I want make it clear where I’m coming from in what I have to say to you this morning. I’m a fifth generation Fiji Islander, who since the events of 1987 has become both a New Zealand and Australian citizen. As a result of the recent decree in Fiji allowing dual citizenship, I’m in the process of applying for the reinstatement of my birthright, that is my citizenship of Fiji. As such, I aspire to being a good citizen of the South Pacific region and speak out today as such. And it is my belief in the integrity of our region that fires much of what I have to say to you today.

Canberra’s Fiji policy is wrong. In the prosecution of this policy we are witness to a transitory generation of politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats rapidly undoing all the good that a century and a half of Australia-Fiji cooperation has previously achieved. I wonder if this generation even knows or cares that it was Australian capital and management that developed Fiji’s industries of sugar, gold, tourism, coconut oil, garments and light manufacturing; that it was Australians who developed much of Fiji’s physical infrastructure, its media, its prevailing church, its banks, and its civil aviation.

Canberra’s Fiji policy is most definitely having a major impact. But before anyone thinks I’m giving Prime Minister Rudd and Canberra’s department of foreign affairs a tick for that, hear me further. It is spiteful policy, conceived in a mood of punishment and sustained by a sense of pique. It is damaging not just to Fiji’s business world, its national economy and the livelihoods of its long-suffering people, it is damaging to the very fabric of the South Pacific region.

One of the most cutting elements of Canberra’s Fiji policy is its ongoing campaign in New York to choke off Fiji’s role as an international peacekeeper. I’m including Wellington in this rebuke, for Canberra has a strong ally in former Prime Minister Helen Clark, now a senior UN official, and in the Wellington inheritors of her Fiji policy.

Last week, The Australian newspaper reported the words of a DFAT spokesman from Canberra proudly letting us know that they’d just made fresh attempts at senior levels of the United Nations to order a progressive replacement of Fijian troops in peace-keeping operations around the world.

What a bitter betrayal that campaign represents for Fijians! When our countries were being invaded from the north less than seventy years ago, Fijians volunteered in their thousands to fight and die in our defence. My father was adjutant of the Fiji battalion doing just that in the jungles of Bougainville in 1942 and was there the day Corporal Sukanaivalu was killed by the Japanese imperial forces in circumstances that earned him the Victoria Cross. After this ongoing betrayal in New York by Canberra and Wellington, you have to ask the question, whose side will the Fijians fight on if we’re attacked from the north again?

Already we see that with defence training denied them in Australia and New Zealand, the next generation of Fiji officers are being trained in Malaysia, India and China. In this Australia is squandering a precious asset – the individual goodwill that exists between military officers who’ve shared intense training experience, and the resulting personal and professional links that exist in the years ahead. By way of example, I’m advised by those involved that such links have served Australia well in its links with Indonesia.

Fiji’s peace-keeping role in the world stands proud. Since President Jimmy Carter’s days when the world needed a multi-national force out in the inhospitable Sinai desert to maintain a peaceful border between Egypt and Israel, a battalion of Fijian peace-keepers has been stationed there. Likewise on Israel’s northern border where a Fijian battalion has served in the UNIFIL force for the last thirty years. Wherever peacekeepers have been required in recent times from Timor to Iraq, from Honiara to Kabul, Fijians have been there putting their lives on the line in the service of international peace.

For their world-wide work as peace-keepers, Fijians should have our undying gratitude. Instead we are witness to this campaign of sanctimonious betrayal by Canberra and Wellington. Why is this important to my address today? Because remittances by Fijians performing these overseas peace-keeping roles are vital to Fiji’s economy; foreign remittances represent the third biggest source of export earnings for Fiji. So this is the first way that Canberra’s policy is damaging the economy of Fiji.

The second way Canberra is grinding the Fiji economy down, is by its so-called ‘smart’ sanctions. In Fiji it is the ‘travel ban” component of these sanctions that is the most widely known element of Australia and New Zealand’s punishment programme. Basically the application of the travel bans is that visas to visit Australia and New Zealand are denied to anyone who accepts a post in the governance of Fiji or is in anyway related to the Fiji military. The bans are applied not just to the individuals concerned, their children and wider members of their family are made to suffer as well.

Everyone in Fiji has a story to tell about the inconsistencies of these travel bans and their application in the most trivial and hurtful ways affecting medical treatment, education, family reunions and business meetings. Yes, they are bad for business and they are without doubt very damaging to Australia’s image as a caring neighbour.

In my preparations for this address, I canvassed opinion from around our South Pacific region by contacting a targeted list of prominent citizens. As a result it was made very clear to me that there are great numbers of good people in Fiji, apolitical people, who would like to be of public service but who cannot because of these travel bans. To say otherwise is a nonsense – there are people in this room who fall into this category and can attest to what I’m saying. To accept roles in public service would be to cut themselves off from friends, family and business ties in Australia and New Zealand. We’re talking here about responsible, well-qualified citizens being constrained from serving on public bodies that work to prevent such things as passenger planes flying into the sides of mountains, or ministries responsible for the health of little children, or developing agriculture and infrastructure, or from keeping convicted criminals in gaol.

I’ve been given evidence of cases where senior management positions of public bodies in Fiji, previously filled by competent locals, have had to be filled by expensive expatriates, for the same set of reasons. Likewise I’ve been presented with figures showing nearly 60% of government ministries have military personnel in senior positions as a result. I’ve been sent many instances of the lowering of the skill base in Fiji as a consequence of these bans. Inevitably, the flow-on effects of these travel bans are withering away public good-will towards Australia and New Zealand in Fiji. And it should be understood, that as with all such sanctions, the real victims are those at the lower end of the economy, where weaker governance inevitably means greater impairment of service delivery.

Since 2006, Canberra seems to have aimed at a short-term coercive outcome from its Fiji policy. It seems to think that by eroding the regime’s ability to govern, it’ll force it to capitulate. But Fiji still has a government and, however imperfectly it may be doing so, it is governing and will do so for the foreseeable future. And when you get down to it, how can Canberra complain about poor governance in Fiji when it’s doing all it can to bring such conditions about.

From a business perspective, we should be very aware that these so-called smart sanctions are schooling Fiji on how to acquire goods and services from alternate sources to Australia and New Zealand. Necessity is the mother of invention and once new habits and new business links are formed, they will become the norm. This is the second way Canberra is damaging Fiji’s economy and is being bad for business. So let us recognise here and now that these sanctions are essentially failed policy and should be dropped before further damage is done to the long-term fundament of Fiji and Australia’s relationship.

The third way is Canberra’s demonising and white-anting of Fiji in the multilateral organisations of the world. Australia and New Zealand orchestrated Fiji’s eviction from the Pacific Forum and The Commonwealth and are working against Fiji’s interests at the UN. Any country that truly cares for its neighbour’s well-being recognises that when hard times have hit your neighbour you do what you can to help them out in the fields of international assistance. But you name it, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, you can be sure there are representatives from Canberra and Wellington doing what they can to block Fiji’s access to resources.

Under the framework recently announced by the government of Fiji setting out the national steps to be taken between now and 2014, the next two years are dedicated to infrastructure development, particularly aimed at bringing productivity to long-under-serviced parts of the country. From a business perspective this could provide excellent opportunities for Australian contractors in Fiji, but that is unlikely under Canberra’s blocking policy. To get these infrastructure projects funded, Fiji is already in the act of going north, and that will involve tied contracts for sure.

The fourth way is the decision made by Canberra and Wellington at Cairns to exclude Fiji from the negotiations for PACER Plus, the regional trade agreement that will supposedly shore up the future of the South Pacific’s regional trading probity. From the Pacific Islands perspective, Fiji is pivotal to these negotiations as the dominant island economy outside of PNG, and as the hub of trade, shipping, civil aviation and regional organisations in the South Pacific. The legal document underlying these negotiations is the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations, and it appears that Australia and the other state parties are in breach of their obligations under the agreement by summarily excluding Fiji.

Legal provisions aside, Fiji’s exclusion is quite obviously undermining the integrity of the negotiations, causing deep-felt resentments within the region and inevitably is going to be bad for regional business. The foreign ministers of the Melanesian countries have recently countermanded the Pacific Forum by calling for Fiji’s inclusion on the PACER Plus negotiations, raising the spectre of regional fragmentation.

In considering regional integrity it is important to note here that though the EU and US have traditionally been guided by Australia and New Zealand in South Pacific policy, that reliance is beginning to show signs of cracks. In the case of Washington, Beijing’s progress and Canberra’s retreat in the Pacific Islands, must be causing deep concern amongst US Pacific policy-makers. In the case of Brussels, while Fiji is excluded from the PACER Plus talks, Fiji is included in the EU/ACP Cotonou Agreement trade talks.

The fifth way is the effect Canberra’s policy is having on Australian private investment in Fiji. As a foreign investor, who would have the gumption to invest in a country that your own government is so intent on choking off and isolating? As someone who has spent the majority of his adult life promoting and facilitating foreign investment in Fiji, I see this aspect of Canberra’s punishment policy as a tragic setback for our bilateral trade and investment ties, and put it to this Council that this failing alone is ample reason for a call to action.

At this juncture in my address I could have added Canberra’s alarmist travel advisories as a further attack on Fiji’s economy, but thankfully Australian tourists know better. They have voted with their feet and have not been advised out of taking their holidays at their favourite Fiji resorts.

In all these ways Canberra’s policy is pushing Fiji away from its traditional South Pacific ties into the orbit of the less judgemental Asian giants. The combination of weakening standards of governance in the Pacific Islands, with the rapacious resource demands of Asian commerce, and the drift towards Chinese dominance of the Pacific theatre, is one that Canberra’s Fiji policy does nothing but foster.

The first obligation of the government of Fiji is to make sure its people have food to eat. The second is to protect the people of Fiji from violence, be it by way of insurrection, rampant crime or foreign intervention. These obligations are fundamental and rate well ahead of political discussion. Fiji is in dire economic straits, and it needs funding to meet these obligations. If Australia and New Zealand are intent on cutting Fiji off from its traditional sources of financial assistance, what choice does the government of Fiji have but to go to less-judgemental sources of finance?

Where is the diplomacy and dialogue needed to create other choices? Initially I was pleased to read Foreign Minister McCully's post-Commonwealth-eviction statement calling for patience on Fiji's position. However he soon undid any good when further in the statement he said that other countries should not attempt to help Fiji in the splendid absence of Australia and New Zealand. Does he not see how incredibly chauvinist and damaging such a statement is, even if it is completely lacking in credibility in terms of realpolitik?

Take a good look at Fiji and you’ll see the contraction of the private sector, declining business conditions, and the steady replacement of Australian and New Zealand interests by Asian initiatives. I am not saying that Wellington and Canberra have brought these bad times on Fiji, far from it. That dubious honour falls to Fiji's domestic politics and of course on the global economic crisis. But I am 100% saying that Canberra and Wellington's Fiji policy is exacerbating the misery, deepening it, and working towards doleful bilateral economic conditions that will be harder and harder to turn around with each month that passes.

If you think the Asian giants are heeding the hands-off warning from Canberra, have a look at where Fiji’s new investments are coming from. See whose ambassadors are in and out of the Fiji prime minister’s office on a regular basis, while the Australian high commissioner sits on his hands in Suva under orders from Canberra since 2006 never once to meet with the Fiji prime minister. Go and see who is taking the place of long-standing Australian, New Zealand and local Fiji businesses in the streets of Suva. Whether they know it or not, by default Canberra and Wellington are shopping Fiji to Asia.

Maybe they think that’s just the way it has to be, maybe they just don’t care that much that they’re losing the neighbourhood, maybe it is indeed floppy fatalism that has allowed their deeply flawed Fiji policy to pass for so long. After all, Australia has bigger fish to fry in Iraq and Afghanistan. Be that as it may, I would say this to you today: don’t let Canberra get away with the sham that this is all no fault of theirs, that they have done no wrong in allowing this neighbourhood fire-sale to take place. I put it to Canberra’s diplomats and politicians: it is on their watch that the neighbourhood is being shopped north.

Under the front-page banner of The Australian newspaper last week was the exhortation “Stand Firm Against Fiji”. I’ll never forget this headline, I’m going to use it in my next book. It sums up so much about the punishment mentality the Australian government and the Australian media have mounted against Fiji. The South Pacific’s David is standing firm against Fiji’s Goliath. Wonderful, I’m sure we can all sleep safer in our beds.

The next day, The Australian ran a story about Amnesty International pressing China on the matter of Fiji. The thrust of the message was about human rights violations in Fiji. In running the story with its focus on repression in Fiji, The Australian quite ignored the intent of the Asian elephant looming over its shoulder. Quoting Amnesty International, the newspaper reported that China has “massively increased its financial assistance to Fiji since the 2006 coup” and that “China has long claimed it doesn’t interfere in another country’s affairs, but in Fiji China has clearly favoured one side of a long political dispute.”

Ever since I was a political prisoner I’ve supported the work of Amnesty International, but I’ve never seen much evidence of Beijing giving human rights precedence over its national interest. I suggest The Australian would do well to turn around and have a look at what that elephant is doing in Fiji and the other South Pacific Islands, for that is the central story of the South Pacific in the twenty-first century, not Canberra’s David and Goliath nonsense.

If you question Canberra and Wellington about the lack of their diplomacy in Fiji and their inability to sustain dialogue with the government of Fiji, they’ll tell you it’s all the fault of Prime Minister Bainimarama. They point to his no-show at the Port Moresby meeting and the way he’s dealt with their emissaries in Fiji. But in making this response they fail to recognise that they too are part of the problem. If you go to Fiji waving a big stick, you can be sure you’ll be met by a Fijian waving an equally big stick. What good is that? If Canberra cries innocence in the face of that accusation, ask them what their punishment policy of sanctions and evicting Fiji is, if it isn’t a big stick?

Talking about diplomacy, or the lack thereof, when I came to Sydney as Fiji consul-general in 1984, it quickly became apparent to me that with all its interest in Asia and America, it was hard to get Australian focus on the Pacific Islands, and in my line of duty, specifically on Fiji.

It was thus that I came up with the idea of forming a focused gathering of Australian business representatives with interests in Fiji who could lift the profile of our bilateral relationship and foster and protect the established ties between us, namely the Australia-Fiji Business Council. I therefore set about forming this council and saw it officially launched in Sydney in 1986 by Prime Minister Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara.

From the outset, the Australia-Fiji Business Council was a body formed to see us through both good times and bad times, and let’s face it, in the long history of our bilateral relationship, these are very bad times. In such circumstances the Council should be fearless in stating to the respective governments and to the media, the concerns and considered collective views of its membership, for the Council and its partner-council in Suva are the voice of the bilateral business, trade and investment relationship between our two countries.

In this role, the Council could well serve as a circuit breaker to persuade Canberra to change the damaging Fiji policy it has had us locked into for the past three years. Why should the Council endeavour to be the circuit-breaker? Well apart from all the other good reasons, Canberra’s policy is very bad for business and I’ve given you today a number of reasons why that is so.

Most of you know there’s a similar organisation to this Council based in Auckland called the New Zealand-Fiji Business Council. In June this year in Auckland, I addressed the joint conference of the New Zealand-Fiji Business Council and its sister organisation from Suva, and at the end of my address put some resolutions to the conference. They were unanimously adopted by the councils’ membership and were then conveyed to Wellington. The resolutions called for the dropping of all New Zealand government sanctions against Fiji and the resumption of constructive dialogue between the two governments. They also called on the leaders of Fiji’s deposed parliament to enter into mediated negotiations with the government of Fiji.

Subsequent to that conference, in light of the diplomatic vacuum existing between Wellington, Canberra and Suva (in my considered view a vacuum largely created by the southern neighbours' big stick policy), I went to Suva in July and spent an hour and a half in one-on-one discussions with Prime Minister Bainimarama. A good part of our meeting was spent in pursuance of the NZFBC resolutions and I was given a fair hearing, I suppose in deference to my having headed up the secretariat in 1987 that lead to the national unity government agreed to by the Deuba Accords.

In the end, I failed in my attempt to persuade him that such negotiations were the best path back to full international cooperation. Prime Minister Bainimarama made it crystal clear his government would do nothing to assist the resurrection of the careers of the politicians who'd misled Fijians with the racist agenda of ethno-nationalism. He also said they would not allow the country to be “bribed” into early elections, by offers of large sums of conditional international aid, before the necessary national changes had been put in place. He did make it very clear that his door was always open to Australia and New Zealand, and he was resolute that some form of national dialogue credible in the eyes of the international community would take place on the road to parliamentary democracy in accordance with the government's announced framework.

I now place before the Australia-Fiji Business Council the same challenge that I put in Auckland. I do so in recognition that this Council is the most important Australian pressure group when it comes to a non-governmental voice on Australia-Fiji relations. My proposal is that the Australia-Fiji Business Council calls upon the Australian government to accept that change is required to its Fiji policy, that it should drop all sanctions against Fiji, desist from working against the Fiji government internationally, and commence immediate dialogue with the Fiji government with the aim of shoring up the Fiji economy and assisting Fiji to true democracy as soon as prudently possible.

Let us agree that the time has come for Canberra to put away the big stick and all the pre-conditions, and just start talking over the back-fence again. We’ve exhausted the stand-off feuding, the time has come for diplomacy and dialogue. I call on the Council to make this approach the core element of its message to the Australian government, and to the Australian media, and to sustain the message until the offending policy is changed.

Some of you sitting here might be thinking to yourselves, this bloke has completely missed the point: the good guys are in Canberra and their policy is only about defending democracy in Fiji. Let me say this very clearly in response. I haven’t met anyone in the three months I’ve been working on changing Canberra’s Fiji policy, who is not a democrat and who does not wish Fiji to be a true and stable democracy in our South Pacific region as soon as prudently possible.

But we must recognise that Fiji has a complex political heritage and that time is needed to carry out a comprehensive national dialogue that will result in a better practice of democracy in Fiji in the years ahead. Well-intentioned as it might be, Canberra’s insistence on an immediate return to democracy is in effect a call for a return to the Fiji of old, where politicians were elected on the basis of racial rolls, ethno-nationalism was rampant, corruption was rife, and “coup culture’ was ingrained.

In the end we’re left wondering what outcomes Canberra’s policy is realistically seeking. Is it to damage the Fiji regime to such an extent that it will coerce change? If this so, how does it envisage change, in other words what will the outcomes be of this punishment policy? Good business outcomes generally equate to good business policy. Currently we are getting bad business outcome and we need to turn that around by getting better policy with longer term perspective on engagement, regional development and security. One of the many outcomes we do not want is for Fiji to become a broken client state along the lines of a few other territories within our region.

The choices are stark. Back the “Democracy or Dust” punishment view of Fiji prevailing in Canberra and Wellington and you’re on the negative side. Take a fresh view of the situation and you will see a way in which doors are opened, sanctions and evictions are put behind us, and rational people of different opinions begin talking with each other to negotiate a true way forward. Take that way and you’ll be on the positive side; you’ll be standing firm with Fiji, rather than against her.

I want to leave you with one lasting thought from my address today. This is that the time has come for Canberra and Wellington to change their “Democracy or Dust” policy on Fiji, to a rightful one of “Diplomacy and Dialogue”. There was a time when we called that the Pacific Way. If they make that change soon enough, maybe then, through the power of our family and friendship bonds, academic links, sporting interaction, church relationships, tourism flows, cross-border investments and business ties, we the people can then do the necessary to revive what’s left of the neighbourhood.