We Say - 1
We Say
Forty years of thought about and experience of the Pacific Islands condition has brought learned understanding, and at last deep pessimism, to Professor Helen Hughes, of Australia's Centre for Independent Studies and formerly of the Australian National University.
Readers of an analysis published by her in May might initially interpret the drift of her broadside as a call for the abrupt end of Australian financial aid to Pacific Islands governments.
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She conveys the impression that the hundreds of millions of Australian aid dollars spent on the islands has been an utter waste of money.
However, deeper into her argument she suggests that aid should continue, but with a far heavier Australian hand on its use.
She wants "sovereign teams" of Australians and Pacific Islanders to closely control aid spending and monitor the implementation and results of projects funded with it.
This view will surprise those who believe that AusAID, said to be one of the most effective government aid agencies, already does just that.
AusAID presumably thinks so too. But Professor Hughes' judgement is that its style merely exacerbates the Pacific's bad development record by loading the budgets of islands governments with money spent by them incompetently.
The past record of Australia's aid delivery arm is splattered with failures that brought reforms to it. Its latest guise, as AusAID, is the product of bitter experiences. After more than 30 years in the field, is it still the flop that Professor Hughes infers it to be?
Spreading it on thick but too broadly with figures, she comments that for most Pacific Islanders life is no better, and may be worse, than it was 25 years ago, that some statistics, like abysmally low school attendance rates and grim maternal death rates, compared with the worst African cases, and that, of course, like everywhere else a small number of rich are becoming richer as lots of poor become poorer.
Some of her comments are correct. But they can't be applied to all 22 Pacific Islands countries and colonies.
Of the region's 7 million people, more than five million live in Papua New Guinea and nearly 900,000 in Fiji.
The worsening plight of Papua New Guinea, a former Australian colony and the recipient of the biggest chunk of its aid, is depressingly obvious. It surely accounts for the great proportions of the dismal figures quoted by Professor Hughes.
Blight does blot other parts of the region, but most Pacific Islands countries are generally far removed from the abysmal circumstances that tens of millions of Africans exist in, and are unlikely ever to descend to them.
Professor Hughes and other commentators make much of the fact that while receiving more aid than other parts of the world, Pacific Islanders are sunk in economic stagnation; constant zero or negative growth. But the argument that foreign aid so heavily contributes to stagnancy is also suspect.
There have been and will be spectacularly dense, foolish, incompetent and blatantly corrupt Pacific Islands governments leaders. But stagnancy has origins also in the legacy of exploitive colonial rule and the great difficulty that small, isolated, resourceless countries have in making a living in a now "globalised" world economy.
Professor Hughes argues that only Pacific governments can solve Pacific problems. Is that really so? Isn't it really the case that many islands governments haven't a hope of doing so without external assistance?
And, she says, recolonisation in any form is not an option. Oh, but it already is, although not by stiff figures in starched white rig and plumed topees.
Are any of the Pacific's former colonies totally free of economic and political domination by their former rulers and/or new breeds of colonisers disguised as businessmen, investors and international aid agencies flooding in from Asia, America and Europe?
Another form of recolonisation is the new strings now being attached to aid, such as the controls that the United States insists it must have on the delivery of another lump of Compact of "Free" Association aid to its former Micronesian colonies.
Another manifestation of this United States strategy is Professor Hughes' "sovereign team" and "mutual obligation" ideas. These, together with all the "good governance" being thrust now on wayward little islands, amounts to rule by remote control.
Being the beggars that none of them like to admit they are, can Pacific Islanders afford to try to be choosers?
