Report Says Aussies Ignorant of Islands

The big two...New Zealand's Helen Clark and Australia¹s John Howard.

There would be a common currency, the Australian dollar, common law and order and defence policies and, for the Pacific Islands most interesting of all, free-for-all admission to Australia for workless islander job-hunters. But neither the Australian prime minister, John Howard, nor his foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer, mentioned such a concept. What happened was that some Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Islands journalists got confused between Howard's advocacy of a stronger Australian grip on the islands and a report on Australian relations with the Pacific Islands, issued a few days before the Forum by the Australian Senate.

This did advance such ideas but purely as suggestions that have not been adopted by the Howard Government and, apart from a few less sensitive ones, certainly won't be.

The gist of the Senate report is that most Australians, including Australian journalists, are magnificently ignorant of the islands to their east. While Australia has a reasonable aid presence in the region, it needs to do far better to avoid serious and costly trouble for itself, as it has in the Solomon Islands now, in the years ahead.

The report suggests the appointment of an Eminent Persons Group tasked with discovering island countries, and New Zealand would be prepared to enter into an European Union (common market) arrangement that would cover currency, law and order arrangements, budgets, fiscal policy, defence and a variety of other areas of presently 16 separate national sovereignties. This is the response to the worsening social and economic problems of a region Australia has a responsibility for keeping stable and economically viable, the report argues.

It says Papua New Guinea, Nauru and the Solomons are worse off in 2003 than they were at independence.

There will be serious implications for Australia if the islands economies collapse and the cost of other Solomon Islands-style salvage jobs will be far higher than an economic union, it says.

Several businesses in Australia, supported by the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the report says suggested that Pacific Islanders should be admitted as temporary workers with the aim of learning new skills and remitting to the home country.

Australian enterprises had "described a sense of frustration over the difficulty in seeking sufficient numbers of workers at harvest time." The report recommends a pilot programme to allow islands labour in for seasonal work. It did not think overstayers would become a bad problem if workers knew they could return annually.

Noting that Howard had not attended all Forum meetings since being elected in 1996, the committee said his non-appearance at some Forums amounted to a "direct insult in cultures where status, recognition and the conventions of identity are of paramount importance." Australian prime ministers should make a point of attending all Forum meetings.

The committee referred to "a vicious circle in the way the (Australian) media deals with the Pacific. Apart from about five journalists, mainly those of Radio Australia who did do a good job, most journalists are spectacularly ill-informed about the region, and reports that they might make on a fleeting visit‹usually at a time of a crisis‹are bound to be prejudicial and reinforce the very prejudices with which they arrive."