Politics
Coalition Won't Bring Reform, Says Former PM
There are too many views
Like a long lost lucky charm, a copy of the purple cover 1998 Political Review Commissioner report sits on the conference table at the office of the opposition in Rarotonga.
Opposition leader, Dr Terepai Maoate is sitting on one side of the table, catching his breath between meetings, and is not keen to do an interview about politics.
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"Give us a break," he sighs, half smiling.
It's been a rough few months for the man who led the Cook Islands into the third millennium just two and a half years ago. In February he was dumped as prime minister over his refusal to allow multi-million dollar trials of a pig cell treatment for diabetes.
Just a month or so ago, one of his staunchest supporters in the Democratic Party crossed the floor to stand for the Cook Islands Party in a by-election.
Former Demo adviser, Wilkie Rassmussen won the country's northern most seat, the big pearl farming atoll of Tongareva, for the current coalition, giving government a 17th seat and a two-thirds majority in parliament — including power to change the constitution.
Rassmussen abandoned the Demos saying the party had not moved fast enough on reform, and that fresh blood in the Cook Islands Party promised better politics.
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Maoate was left with just eight seats including his own in a 25-seat parliament. And to ruefully reflect might have been if he had been able to get more support for the purple report.
"The only way this thing will work," he told Islands Business, "is for there to be a party that wins an outright majority.
"It will never work when there is a coalition government. There are too many views," Maoate says.
Since the release of the 1998 report, political reform has, at best, been at a standstill in the Cook Islands. In 1999, a few months before a general election that year, former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Henry passed just two of the report's 45 recommendations:
- that political parties be required to reveal funding sources, and
- that a member of cabinet be appointed from outside parliament.
Both changes were dropped in parliament by Maoate's government in 2000. Maoate now claims that other recommendations in the report could not get the support of a majority of MPs in his own coalition government.
Most MPs have been doing their best to completely ignore the report.
However, there has been a constant drumbeat of reminders from NGOs and community leaders and letters to the editor. Somehow, the reform report has stuck in the mind of the same public that keeps electing the same leaders who ignore those reforms to power.
One of those leaders is Sir Geoffrey Henry, now deputy prime minister. When he was replaced in 1999, one of the few consultative bodies he introduced, the National Development Council, was dropped by Maoate's government. Two years later, Maoate finally came up with a replacement idea — a budget select committee in parliament, which was to include a representative from the public.
Too late. Maoate lost power, and Henry promised to bring back the National Development Council.
So far that hasn't happened. Instead, Henry has pulled together a budget committee of his own. It does have public representatives, but it is in-house and not open to questioning by the media.
At least Henry himself is talking to the media. Since taking power in February, his new leader, Dr Robert Woonton, has held just one media conference. Political reform — and any hopes of economic stability — appears a long way off yet.
