Opening Oz’s Doors?

At least this is the view of some academics who want governments to make it easier for Pacific Islanders to move around the region and the globe.

Much public money in Australia has been devoted to the study of conflict in Melanesia. Australian policymakers' interest in a stable and peaceful Pacific has been sharpened since the 2003 commitment of an intervention force to restore law-and-order in the Solomon Islands and last year's decision, now suspended, to post police and civil servants in the failing state bureaucracies of Papua New Guinea.

But migration may become a more popular, long-term strategy.

"It's a humane and cheap way of keeping the region secure," says Helen Ware, a peace studies specialist at the University of New England in Australia. She believes the right to travel could meet a number of needs better than other forms of assistance.

"Allowing them (Pacific islanders) immigration is better than aid or trade," she adds. "They're not asking for special assistance. They want to come and work."

Dr John Ngongorr of the University of Papua New Guinea. Photo: Samantha Magick

Of course, many Pacific Islands nations have long developed networks overseas, providing valuable remittances in foreign currency. The migration solution, if it is a solution, has been tested in the history of Polynesian movement to the point where 6.5 percent of New Zealand's permanent population is now of Polynesian ancestry.

"Exporting people is a deliberate and valid strategy for the Cooks, Tonga, Samoa," Ware wrote last year in a paper on Pacific demography.

The depth of integration with mainstream New Zealand achieved by Polynesians could, others argued, be copied by Melanesian countries to stabilize urban unrest and reduce dependence on direct Australian aid.

John Henderson, a political science lecturer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand supports the current policy of armed intervention in the Solomon Islands as "necessary and successful in its primary role of restoring law and order" but in the long term, he believes islander immigration will allow Australia to embrace the Pacific more fully.

"It's a better way of achieving an environment less threatening to Australia than sending bureaucrats, police and military for the foreseeable future," Henderson says.

Ware, however, believes the problem lies with Polynesia's emigration safety valve not being available to less well-educated Melanesians. This lack of opportunity has been worsened by high population growth rates (6 percent in the Solomons) and equally high growth in numbers drifting to the cities.

She cautions against Melanesian countries falling back on subsistence agriculture and holding out for a high-income industry like tourism to absorb the urban unemployed. An over-supply of skilled professionals (for example, teachers in Fiji) is not a bad thing if they have the chance to work overseas.

The problems of "brain drain" are overstated, she says, and emigration can free up the job market for those who stay at home. Traditionally, where Tongans, Samoans, Cook Islanders, Nuieans and Tokelauans have found a haven in New Zealand, Micronesians have become seamen or sent members of their family to the U.S.

Fiji's Indians have always kept the migration lines open and indigenous Fijian men have had the British Army, peacekeeping duty and increasingly, dangerous assignments in the Middle East as private security contractors. However, in Fiji as in other parts of Melanesia, without broader migration choices, idle young men will continue to fill the cities and make trouble.

"It's (migration) giving people an option. What are they supposed to do if they're not manning the barricades? Go back to the village?" questions Ware.

Papua New Guinea commentator, John Ngongorr of the University of Papua New Guinea says young people from his country would benefit from working in plantations or picking fruit in Australia, and seeing how law and order is kept there.

"Here (in Australia) law and order is everyone's business….the public itself keeps law and order" says Ngongorr. He compares this to citizens' complex allegiances to clans and tribes in Papua New Guinea, rather than to a broader community.

Almost two years ago, a foreign affairs, defense and trade committee released a report into "Australia's relations with Papua New Guinea and the islands of the south-west Pacific," which argued in favor of special migration schemes to fill labor shortages in Australia, especially in seasonal work such as fruit picking.

The Australian Immigration Department in the same report opposed "low-skill guest worker schemes," which it said did not benefit the sender or receiver countries. However, the report concluded labor migration from the Pacific could have mutual economic benefits. It recommended the risk of overstaying could be lessened if migrants knew they could return each year on a seasonal basis and if the schemes were managed from the home country.

While Australia has a "non-discriminatory" immigration policy, there are precedents for treating some groups differently. Ware says: "Australia has reciprocal agreements, working holiday visas with countries such as Canada and the UK, even Estonia-so why not with the Pacific?"

Both Ware and Henderson believe travel opportunities should first go to Australia's neighbors.

"We are all for free trade in goods but scream when the question of the free movement of people arises. Clearly Australia cannot take everyone but we can be far more open," Ware adds.