Urwin's Top Priority As New Forum S-G

Greg Urwin..."people will simply have to judge me on performance."

Greg Urwin agrees. Now that he's taken over as secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, his number one priority, he says, is to counter perceptions that the Pacific Islands region is one big basket case of failing states.

"It is one of the key things I must do is to indicate and press as hard as I can that the situation is a good deal more complex than that ," he told Islands Business after moving into his office at the Forum Secretariat headquarters in Suva in February.

It is not capable of that kind of generalisation which in many respect is a lot more optimistic than that.

"After all, without any complacency you would have to say that the region is still in a somewhat better shape than many other regions in the world." Urwin joined the Australian foreign affairs department 30 years ago. Most of his career was spent in Vanuatu, Samoa, where he was high commissioner, but also for a time on secondment to the Samoan government as head of its foreign affairs office, and Fiji.

He became the Australian foreign service's number one Pacific Islands affairs expert.

He arrived as head of the secretariat of Oceania's dominant political agency, the Pacific Islands Forum , which has as its members 14 islands states and New Zealand and Australia, with ideas formed by his long experience of the region.

Political unrest mainly in the Melanesian countries of the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and less so in Vanuatu, is fodder used by Australians and other commentators to project the region as being highly unstable.

All 14 of the Forum's islands states are being tarred with the same brush; they are small, poverty-stricken, isolated, resourceless and ripe for being used as bases by terrorists, by arms, drug and people smugglers, and by international criminals.

Comparatively, few foreign journalists have ever visited the region, and only then briefly or as junketeering travel writers.

"I really do take the view that what we are seeing in the region is a very particular point of history being reached, which is all about the distance out from political independence, the end of the sort of definitive post-colonial period of history, and the concentration on making good of political independence," is Urwin's response to that picture.

I think we have come to a point where a lot of the colonial inheritance has ceased to have much meaning or usefulness as it once had. We are seeing across the region people grappling with that circumstance, and with perhaps the re-emergence of problems that may have been masked by that immediate colonial period. and in the colonial past itself.

I think what we are seeing is a lot of people doing a lot of thinking about just what are the optimum ways of running their countries in the long-term future. That is by definition almost certainly going to be a complicated and quite long drawn out process. But it should be understood as such rather than just the bottom dropping out of things.

"It is not the case, and it is at the very least more complicated. Even more than that, there is much more promise in the situation than that." Could Melanesia's level of unrest spread to Oceania's two other distinctive regions, Polynesia and Micronesia?

Urwin said: "Forecasts are always very dangerous, but the region is a place very much of parts. Some of the vital characteristics that exist in Polynesia are quite different from those in Melanesia and Micronesia. Again, it harps back to the point of glib generalisations about the region as a whole. It just ain't so, and one should not expect that situations will develop similarly. For example, Samoa does have the advantage of a very cohesive cultural identity and a kind of situation that perhaps some of the Melanesian nations don't enjoy. Everybody speaks the same language. These are powerful national unity factors in some of the countries, and obviously the situation is a bit different in Melanesia."

Melanesian countries use numerous languages, ranging from 30 to 40 in Fiji, more than 100 in Vanuatu, about 200 in the Solomon Islands, and around 800 in Papua New Guinea.

Urwin agrees that of late Pacific Islands governments have been subjected to a blizzard of dire warnings from outside governments anxious to push them into adopting and implementing elaborate anti-crime, terrorism, drug dealing, money laundering and people smuggling that have diverted them from issues more fundamental to Pacific Islands needs.

I think there is a good deal of substance in that. There is a big general issue which is all about how the region finds its place in the whole gobalisation process. That's got a couple of characteristics for a number of small and resource limited islands states, in particular. We all know that. Beyond that, a lot of these global security issues are of as much importance to the Forum states as they are to anybody else. One would be foolish to say otherwise in respect of transnational crime, people movement and things of that kind. On the other hand, there needs to be a balance between that and what people themselves perceive to be the issue that impinges upon their security. Quite often those issues have much more to do with economic security, environmental security, and the wider definitions of security than you referred to.

There is some substance to it and there is an awfully heavy workload and big expectations on islands states to do what they have to do to take part in global efforts in respect to security issue. But it does have to be joined and balanced by their own perceptions.

I think it does harp back to what I have said previously; there are situations in the region, and the Solomon Islands demonstrate this quite graphically, in which for one reason or another the arrangements by which the country has been run ceased to be adequate.

That bore very directly on their security in a traditional way and had to be addressed.

In many states the answers or the questions haven't changed since these countries became independent, and they have a lot to do. I've always liked the phrase by Tony Hughes (a former Solomon Islands central bank governor now in practice as a consultant) who talks about sustainable development with dignity. I think that's what a lot of it boils down to. How can governments ensure tolerable lives for their citizens, which allows their citizens some measure for developing themselves. These are quite basic things. I think that security had to be measured in those terms just as much as it does in the traditional ones.

"I would say that the old issue of development in a sensible way remains at the heart of it. Now, of course, to do that you have to address governance issues for example, and make sure those are appropriate to local circumstances. But I think development issue is still at the fore of things."

Democracy does come in a size to fit all Pacific Islands states, Urwin says. I think the only sensible way to go about this whole issue is to think rather more deeply than we have so far about the way in which you meld, as it were generally held notions of democracy with traditional practice in the region.

If one looks at the situation from the view of making secure and good lives for the citizens of the region, surely the answer lies in some mixture of general standards with local practice. It would seem to me that to just impose a set of standards from a textbook is not taking things very far and not taking them usefully.

"This is not to say in any way that bad governance should be condoned for a moment. But it is saying that there is such a thing as good general government with local characteristics."

Within a couple of days of his arrival at the secretariat, Urwin flew to Wellington to meet prime minister Helen Clark. His purpose was to discuss a report by "eminent persons" including former PNG prime minister Sir Julius Chan and the former Kiribati president, Teburoro Tito, on what reforms to the way the Forum works are needed. At the time he spoke to Islands Business he hadn't seen the report.

It's hoped we will be able to wrap that process up in the next few weeks. The results of the eminent persons group deliberations will have to be put around to leaders for their approval. Once that's done we will be able to set to work on their findings.

I hope it will have some substantial things to say about policy priorities in the region. In a way, structure follows that kind of substance. I hope they will have some suggestions about process; the ideal way of conducting leaders' meetings and various other things that support them; things to say about regional co-operation; about the way various regional organisations in the Pacific co-operate and how they can do that better.

Essentially, what I hope it will come up with, leaving aside policy for the moment, is the means by which it seems to me the leaders are put unequivocally in the driver's seat of the processes that are carried out. I hope they will decide on the means by which leaders can establish priorities on a regular ongoing basis; that we have a system whereby leaders have an opportunity to express those priorities. That becomes the work plan for me and the secretariat, and that we will be required to report on the progress with those priorities.

"I'm guessing at this point, but what might be interesting is what they have to say on the thinking in the air last year about higher levels of regional cooperation. I think those might be areas in which there might be proposals for some departures."

Urwin's appointment as secretary-general during last year's Forum summit held in Auckland, New Zealand, aroused heat. Some islands leaders felt his nomination was another step by Australia to tighten its political grip on the region.

They argued that the job had traditionally been reserved for Pacific Islanders. When they couldn't agree on a choice of candidates from Samoa, Nauru and Tonga, they broke tradition with a vote instead of settling on a choice by consensus.

Urwin arrived at the secretariat burdened by the fact that he's still regarded suspiciously in some regional quarters as being part of a vile Australian plot.

"People will simply have to judge me on performance," he counters. "I wish people would not think in those terms, but I understand why they do; it's because Australia is the largest member of the Forum. I can only say what I said from the start. I will be the servant of the Forum as a whole and for those purposes I will cease to be an Australian and for those purposes have done so already."