Woonton Dumped But Not Worried

After five years of political instability under six different coalitions, Cook Islanders are waking up to an awful sense of déjà vu.
General elections are to be held within 90 days and, so far, 2004 is shaping up like it's party time 1999.

That year saw the beginning of voodoo politics in the Cook Islands, parliamentary alliances being killed by curses of corruption but brought back to life only slightly altered, with frightening frequency.

No less than four different prime ministers have ruled through six‹or is it seven? ‹different coalitions. In between changes of leaders and governments, there have also been many line-up changes. There have been so many that local journalists have long lost count.
"Do I look worried?" asks Prime Minister Robert Woonton, the day after the latest leadership challenge. "It's business as usual."
It sure is. Last month, Woonton was dumped as party leader of the ruling Democratic Party. Rather than step down, Woonton insisted he would have won the vote if the party's parliamentary wing had been allowed to vote at the party convention.

His successor, former prime minister Terepai Maoate, didn't argue. He too had been there before, replacing Dr Joe Williams in November 1999 before being dumped by his former deputy, Woonton, in February 2002.

Robert Woonton at Aitutaki...will he still be popular come the next general election?.

Also freshly dumped was coup master Norman George, the man at the centre of all but one of the leadership challenges inside parliament. And outside of it, like at last month's party conference.

Party President Iaveta Short attacked "corrupt" elements within the party, and, George narrowly lost a motion to protect sitting MPs from internal challenges by fresh candidates.

George is a survivor. "Never underestimate me," he warned after one coup. Many wonder what he will do now.

He has a history of party bed swapping going back ten years. After running as a third party alternative in 1999, George knifed his campaign allies in the back to take up coalition with then Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Henry, a man George had spent months electioneering against.

He then back-stabbed Henry to continue as deputy prime minister under Williams, then Maoate, later leaving leadership of his own New Alliance Party (itself a second version of the original Alliance party he founded in 1993) to rejoin the Democratic Party.
Now, four years later, George is once again without a party. And, once again, he is under attack from the Pitt Media Group.

Starting out as a state approved television monopoly, the Pitt family media are survivors too. They sold public relations to Henry's 1999 administration in the disguise of a current affairs show, Frontline, for NZ$500 a week.

So if George was the man at the centre of years of political instability, George Pitt was the man immediately behind him. Many suspected Pitt of pulling the strings.

Under Henry's CIP (Cook Islands Party) administration, Pitt was appointed George's chief adviser, as well as chairman of the boards of Telecom and the environment Council, roles he kept after Williams replaced Henry, and Maoate replaced Williams.

Strangely, even after Pitt declared "journalistic ethics don't make me any money" to a regional media conference, he was given $75,000 under New Zealand's former Pacific Islands Investment Development Scheme. Pitt quickly dumped his New Zealand business partner and PIIDS itself was later dumped after an investigation by embarrassed foreign affairs officials.

Flushed with aid bucks and government subsidies, Pitt carried on defending different coalitions, savaging critics and independent journalists alike with years of personal attacks.

Opposition leader Henry declared him to be the "puppet master" of Cook Islands politics. That was last year.

This year, Henry is seen as prime-minister-in-waiting before elections he is widely predicted to win.

Once more, like 1999 all over again, Henry gets soft interviews and favourable headlines in the Pitt media.

In return, he is back defending the Pitts against outrage over falsified content, this time a supposedly secret letter from the PM advertised as real on Pitt TV but faked for the cameras.

Sounds familiar? Sickeningly so, for many Cook Islanders. Many wondered whether Pitt's master plan was to drag the Democratic Party down into a morass of his own design on behalf of his old friends in the Cook Islands Party.

Perhaps. The real target may be elsewhere. Before the Pitt Media Group got started, the only institution to hold majority confidence among voters as "an effective control on the political process" was the "news media," according to public surveys conducted by the 1998 Commission of Inquiry into Political Review.

That confidence now seems highly unlikely. The media industry is in tatters, with no daily reporters with more than five years experience to track corruption. Pitt's real master plan?

Whatever it is, the results have been continuous political instability similar to the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, countries famous for coups, guns and corruption; profits for the few and chaos for many.

All the while, population continues its free fall‹20,000 at the end of 1995 to 13,200 residents at the end of 2003‹more than 7000 lost to migration.

Has nothing changed?

Ten years ago, Cook Islanders were waking up to impending collapse in the public sector brought on by massive debts and a bloated public service.

Government now avoids deficit budgets like a plague, and tourism, pearls, fishing and offshore banking continue to bring in good money.
But disease from over-farming struck pearl farmers in 2001, fishing rose and fell this year under similar mismanagement, offshore banking remains stubbornly blacklisted by unimpressed regulators from the Financial Action Taskforce, and, worst of all, the number one industry of tourism is seeing record arrivals translate into fears of serious pollution.

Last month saw dozens of residents, many of them students, complained about irritation from the lagoon. Authorities closed one college.
For a country yet to fully absorb the lessons of economic collapse, the Cook Islands looks dangerously close to repeating the whole exercise all over again.

What has changed is that, this time, the collapse may come from the private sector, if warning signs continue to be overshadowed by political instability.