Pacific Voices

By: Benjamin Sims

There have been several interesting pieces of information in the media recently that have highlighted the importance of international tax revenue in terms of development. We have seen documentaries like the recent Four Corners on East Timor, and also the leak from Papua New Guinea Mine Watch on how mining companies are avoiding tax in PNG.

The Timor documentary and example of PNG tax avoidance demonstrate that for Melanesia the amounts international companies are not paying in tax might eclipse even the aid money they receive. The PNG leak, for example, explains how a South African mining company can get away with paying a tax of just three per cent rather than the official rate of 30 per cent.

This is not a new issue. An ex-government official from PNG recounts the following story:

In the nineties, PNG officials checked the Stock Market declaration of Rimbunan Hijau. At the time, the largest logging company in PNG. This company … never [paid] income tax in 20 years. More shockingly, their stock market record showed that they made USD 120 million profit in the previous year. After issuing Rimbunan Hijau with a tax bill, within 24 hours the Ambassador of Malaysia came to the tax office to declare the information provided to the Malaysia stock exchange was incorrect. The tax owed was never received.

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Marshall Islanders evacuating prior to the first US nuclear tests.
Photo credit: Carl Mydans, University of Hawai’i at Manoa Digital Collection.

On September 13, 2012,  Mrs. Lemeyo Abon, a retired teacher and Marshallese elder, delivered the following statement about the impact of the US nuclear programme on her people to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. This statement was originally published on truth-out.org.

Madame President, Distinguished Delegates:

I want to thank Cultural Survival for sponsoring my participation at this forum. My name is Lemeyo Abon, and I speak today as the President of ERUB. The word erub means “damaged” or “broken,” and it is an apt name for an organization of Marshallese nuclear survivors.
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By: Tess Newton Cain

Conversations held at the recent Australasian Law Reform Associations’ Conference in Canberra prompted a discussion as to whether institutional law reform (i.e. law reform as carried out by a dedicated agency such as a law reform commission) is really practicable within the context of small jurisdictions such as those that make up the greater part of the Pacific island region.

Several of the jurisdictions in the region do have agencies that are tasked with law reform although the names and institutional architecture of these organisations vary (as is the case elsewhere in the world). In Vanuatu, the Law Commission has been recently established and has yet to undertake any law reform inquiries whereas the Samoa Law Reform Commission has been in existence since 2008 and has been tasked with ten references so far, including amending the law in order to change the position of the dateline in relation to Samoa and review and reform of the Crimes Ordinance 1961 as one component of a four-part review of the criminal law more generally. Indeed, the need to modernise, harmonise and otherwise reform the criminal law of Samoa was one of the main drivers for the establishment of the Commission. Elsewhere, The Constitutional and Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea is very active and will be even busier in 2013 undertaking a nine-month programme of review of the Constitution and other pieces of legislation relating to parliamentary procedure, including election of the prime minister.

But are agencies such as these essential pieces of legal architecture or unaffordable luxuries? (more…)

by Erika Morishita

Clockwise from top: Melanesian leaders signing the MSG Constitution; an elderly Kundiawa man from PNG displays a wooden carving he made of PNG’s coat of arms for sale; PNG’s parliament building under siege during the Sandline crisis of 1997. All photos by Ben Bohane, wakaphotos.com.

After 30 years of independence for most of the nation states of Melanesia, nation-building and forging a collective identity is still a work in progress. The great diversity of peoples, languages and cultures spread across the arc of Melanesia was always going to make drawing boundary lines and building a cohesive, national identity difficult. Has it succeeded? Is there ownership of governing systems and a transcendence of tribalism? What lessons are to be learnt from this dynamic region’s experiences of merging introduced systems (Westminster parliamentary democracy) and customary values?

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by Emmanuel Narokobi

(originally published in the Masalai blog)

Just the other day, I received in my inbox a draft copy of the 2012 Review of thePacific Islands Forum Secretariat. It’s a fairly lengthy 79 page, 2.29MB document which I have not thoroughly read just yet. But just skimming through some highlights from it were:

by Dan McGarry

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post under the Graham Crumb byline.]

Every morning I walk the 150 metres from my house to Freswota road beside the cemetery and wait for a bus. I always avoid looking at the nearest corner. For the first few weeks, I didn’t understand why that part of the graveyard unsettled and distressed me so. Then I realised what it was: The plots were half the size of normal ones. This is where they bury the children.

I’m going back there today to stand by two close friends as they lay a little box into the ground.

The parents are part of a young and promising generation of professionals. They each lifted themselves up by their bootstraps, worked hard and, little by little, rose from menial positions to shoulder real responsibilities. They met one another, built a solid foundation of love, respect and stability, and then began their family.

The baby died in childbirth. Her death was entirely preventable. Her life could have been saved a dozen times over in the days before the crisis. (more…)

On the eve of Vanuatu’s 32nd celebration of Independence it is well worth re-visiting the moving words of the inaugural Independence Address to Vanuatu by the nation’s first prime minister, the late Father Walter Lini.

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TODAY we have reached a moment for which many of us have worked hard and prayed continuously for the last 10 years. And it was with very strong personal emotions – some 12 hours ago, just after midnight, that I became Prime Minster. Our road to independence has sometimes been exalting and at others it has been depressing. More recently it has been deeply tragic. But today we have arrived and today we shall start to travel along a different road which will be infinitely longer and very much harder. From today we are responsible ourselves for making the decisions which will influence the pattern of our lives and those of future generations of Ni-Vanuatu.

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Written by Ruth Choulai, Creative Arts Manager, Pacific Islands Trade & Invest

Who we are and what we do

Pacific Islands Trade & Invest is the international trade and investment promotion arm of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat. PT&I is the only Pacific Islands agency tasked by the Pacific Islands leaders to develop, grow and promote industry and the businesses of 14 Pacific Island countries (PICs).  We work together to create greater international opportunities for Pacific Islands businesses to build a better future through more sustainable communities and greater prosperity. Our four (4) key focus areas are Exporter Services, Investment Services, Tourism Promotion and Creative Arts.iat (PIFS) based in Suva, Fiji. PIFS has four trade offices located in Auckland, Beijing, Sydney, and Tokyo; while the Trade offices work independently, they are collectively known as Pacific Islands Trade & Invest (PT&I).

Written by Tony Hughes 

Great efforts are, as usual, reportedly going into making national economic management in the Pacific island countries (PICs) more effective. National governments are resolving or claiming to do better than their predecessors at producing growth, equity and sustainability through a range of far-reaching interventions in the economy, while bilateral donors and multilateral providers of external funding and technical assistance are commissioning expert assessments, supporting reforms of institutions and building national capacity to do better. Pointers to how and why such domestic and external efforts work or don’t work are being published in the region from comparative studies of small developing economies in other parts of the world. These illuminate afresh, for example, the often overlooked role of formal and informal institutions in determining a country’s economic direction and performance.  

Amid all this effort, a prime source of accessible and usable information, insights and know-how based on practical experience of planning and managing economic development in the PICs remains largely untapped, for reasons apparently related to an institutional characteristic shared by PIC and aid donor governments and the regional development banks—a chronic reluctance to frankly examine one’s own past experience and learn from it. An attempt is afoot to remedy this. A proposal is now taking shape with multi-donor backing, aimed at helping both PICs and donors to answer the question ‘What can we learn from our experience of economic management in the PICs?’ (more…)