We Say 3

"It ain't so," says Greg Urwin, the Australian diplomat and Pacific Islands specialist who in February began work at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat in Suva as its first non-Pacific Islands secretary-general. What ain't so? The perception, stoked up mainly in Australia, is that Oceania is a region filled with failed or failing states, all awash with hopeless corruption, collapsed or collapsing systems of government and awash with terrorists, mafia criminals, money launderers, smugglers of narcotics, guns and people and pseudo-refugees who hope to use the island to leap-frog surreptitiously into Australia. This perception is exaggerated to say the least. Of the region's 14 independent states, perhaps three are in dire straights for one reason or another.

The Solomon Islands, where Australia intervened last year at the request of the country's government, is being put to right although, as Islands Business has already asked, having being put back on its feet, will it then manage to stay on them?

Niue's problem of a population that is dwindling almost to nothing is peculiar to it and one compounded by a recent savage hurricane. But Niue's leaders insist that their now very small national community will remain in business as a nation.

Nauru's difficulties are also somewhat peculiar. Australia's well-meaning foreign minister, Alexander Downer, has floated the idea that Nauruans surrender their identity by becoming Australians. This is a proposition received coolly. Nauruans are intent on floundering on, somehow, but their spectacularly reduced circumstances, reduced all by themselves it should be stressed, inevitably exposes them to the need for friendly helping hands. On the tour around the region, who else is there to be found riding for a fall? Well, in Fiji (three coups since 1987 and some hairy moments due in the next few months), there is light at the end of the tunnel. As Prime Minister, Mr Laisenia Qarase hasn't embarked on a mission impossible. But unless he and the country's chief opposition politician, Mr Mahendra Chaudhry, can arrive at a productive alliance, then Fiji will also flounder, unable to embark on a firm path towards the full exploitation of its immense and varied potential to the benefit of not only itself but the region as a whole.

Papua New Guinea. Ah, Papua New Guinea. Down at street level, even ordinary Papua New Guineans are in despair about the ability of the majority of their politicians and senior bureaucrats to play it straight and level. Again, Australia is poised to lend a helping hand, to the extent of inserting hundreds of its own policemen and public service managers in places where it matters. This naturally offends the pride of the leaders who are leading Papua New Guinea in every direction except forward. A lot of excuses can be made for Papua New Guinea, but not for the personal performance of some of the characters who have entrenched themselves in its leadership.

What are the other potential trouble spots out of the 14? This month's Islands Business turns the spotlight on Tonga, where the government's clumsy and ultimately hopeless efforts to tone down free speech to a level it is comfortable with, is arousing international tut-tutting. But Tonga won't founder as the Solomon Islands did. Its greatest asset is that it possesses a lot of highly educated and intelligent people, at home and abroad, who are capable of making Tonga a reasonably prosperous, progressive and equitable society once a few current in-house difficulties have been attended to. Tonga promotes itself to tourists as the place where time stands still. Actually, it doesn't. For Tonga, it's time to move on. All of Oceania's islands countries, those that are sovereign nations and those that are still French, American or Indonesian colonies, are confronted individually and collectively by considerable economic, social and sometimes political challenges of one kind or another. What is encouraging is that all now acknowledge the challenges and, individually or collectively, are trying to respond to them appropriately, if not always effectively.

Mr Urwin's view of the Pacific Islands condition, reported in this edition of Islands Business, is a pertinent diagnosis. Subsequent to the media conference at which he pronounced it, reports from Wellington were that a review of the Pacific Islands Forum and its secretariat he was to discuss with the Forum's current chairperson, Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister, envisages some form of a European Union arrangement, ultimately, for Oceania's independent states. In February, the European Commissioner for Development, Poul Nielson, was in the region to lecture heavily to it on its need for good governance and transparency. Oh, by the way, two of the EU's most important members, France and Italy, are beset by corruption scandals at the very, very highest of places. Europe and the United States, another insistent harper on the need for what it regards as purity, are being rocked by corporate corruption of epic proportions. The EU administration itself is notoriously corrupt, wasteful, secretive and monstrously bureaucratic. Isn't all that rather ironic?