Pacific Magazine > Magazine > September 1, 2002

Cover Story

It Might Not Be Warm After All For Greg Urwin

There's opposition to his Forum secretary-general candidacy

Greg Urwin, since the end of 2001 retired as a senior Pacific Islands specialist in Australia's foreign affairs office, is accustomed to a warm reception at the Suva headquarters of the Pacific Islands Forum. Years of experience in the region brought him a reputation of being a genuine sympathiser for the Pacific Islands.

From the mid 1970s, Urwin was influential in shaping Australia's relations with the Pacific's now 14 independent islands nations. He was sometimes handicapped by periods when the reigning political bosses in Canberra gave little serious attention to a collection of microstates they couldn't take seriously.

As Australian High Commissioner in Fiji during 1995-1999, he was a regular visitor to the Forum Secretariat, a gracious complex of buildings shrouded by trees in Muanikau, Suva's top residential suburb.

Greg Urwin... Australia's candidate.

After retirement, Urwin with his Samoan wife settled in Apia, Samoa's capital, another of his past diplomatic postings. Now, the Australian government's desire to see him succeed Noel Levi, a Papua New Guinea bureaucrat, as the Pacific Islands Forum's Secretary-General has dropped Urwin into a cauldron being heated by a bout of the resentment that sporadically unsettled Australia's relations with its microstate neighbours. Australia's hand in influencing the repair and redirection of their ramshackle affairs is felt by islands leaders as being frequently a condescending and insensitive one. Unlike some of his predecessors, Howard, who has avoided some Forum meetings, hasn't been a great hit with Pacific Islands leaders.

Howard's hope of securing Urwin's candidacy as the Forum Secretariat's executive head is presented by some regional bureaucrats, politicians, academics and activists as a ploy to tighten Australia's hand on the Forum. Why would it wish to do that? So it can have more success in manipulating Pacific Islands governments, so conspiracy theorists claim, particularly for muffling or thwarting attacks on the United States and Australia's climate change and sea level stance.

"Australia is trying to turn the Forum into its own little institution," Hilda Lini, sister of a former Vanuatu prime minister, and now director of the Suva headquartered Pacific Concerns Resource Centre, said in assailing the idea of Urwin's advent there.

On the Monday before the summit in Suva, the present resident Australian High Commissioner, Susan Boyd, sallied from her diplomatic compound at Tamavua to the Forum Secretariat to protest to Levi about "out of place" remarks he had made against Urwin's candidacy a few days earlier.

Levi, Secretary-General since late 1997, declared that to end the convention since the Forum's initiation in 1971 that its executive head should be a Pacific Islander, would split the Forum fatally.

Since its beginning the Forum's executive heads have been first a Tongan, Mahe Tupouniua; a Papua New Guinean, Gabriel Gris; Tupouniua again; a former deputy prime minister of Tuvalu, Henry Naisali; and, before Levi, a former president of Kiribati, Ieremia Tabai.

Levi, in conversation, hasn't been reticient in presenting Urwin's candidacy as proof of Australia's low opinion of the competency of Pacific Islands administrators.

He's inferred that he is supported by the majority of islands heads of government in opposing his succession by an Australian, or for that matter a New Zealander, at the end of next year.

So far, only critically cash-strapped Nauru has indicated that it wants to provide Levi's successor. Its man is a former finance minister, Vince Clodumur.

As Forum spokesman, Qarase after the Forum's retreat session outside Suva, told reporters that a revised appointment procedure had been accepted by leaders. The job would be advertised six months before Levi's January 2004 departure. Applications would be sent to the chairman (Qarase) and the 2003 Forum would approve an appointment "dependent on circumstances and the merit of each case".

Levi's anti-Australian stance is most likely influenced by awareness that his performance as Secretary-General is one that the Australians, who contribute just over one-third of its $3.4 million annual administrative budget, are not prepared to highly rate.

Prior to the Forum summit, three of the Forum's Micronesian member countries ‹ Palau, Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia ‹ had a sub-regional meeting which produced a statement in which they called for a new regional political grouping minus Australians and New Zealanders.

That attitude, and hints during the Forum meeting that all Melanesian and some Polynesian countries back Levi's view, suggest that Urwin's prospects for a takeover from Levi aren't good.

In 1995 Australia succeeded in having a former head of its aid agency, Dr Bob Dun, appointed as secretary-general of another important regional agency, the New Caledonia headquartered Pacific Community, formerly called the South Pacific Commission, which has a social, health and economic development role.

It had made no secret of its impatience with what had been the deterioration of the agency's management under the hand of a succession of Pacific Islands chief executives, some of them inept and one removed for dishonesty, selected by the region's old political boys network.