Recent history also shows that the level of representation has decreased alarmingly, with the total vote of winning candidates dropping to a low of 36 per cent in 2012. This figure rebounded slightly this year (41%) partly because fewer candidates ran. However, it still means more people voted for candidates who did not get elected than those who did.

Vanuatu election timeline 1979-2016

With the number of parties contesting the 2016 election (35) at an all time high, it is interesting to note that since independence a total of 33 political groupings (plus independents) have been represented in the national legislature. Of those, 19 have been represented in two or more parliaments. Previous analysis has shown remarkable similarities in the policy platforms of parties, especially those that formed as break away factions of the established independence-era parties.

Share of parliamentary seats

Democracy in Vanuatu is seemingly delivering a kind of micro federalisation. While this is reflective of the reality on the ground, it does not bode well for nation building and presents a significant challenge for parties to consolidate or grow their share of the popular vote. In the most recent election, only four parties secured over five per cent of the popular vote (i.e. total vote for all of their candidates) and most saw their vote share decline from the previous election. Some countries set a minimum threshold of five percent for a party to take a seat in parliament.

Share of popular vote

There seems to be widespread acceptance that the electoral roll is inaccurate and needs updating. The state of the roll means the turn out figures are unreliable. However, when we look at the number of votes cast compared to the last election, it is evident that voter numbers were down across the board.

Votes by constituency

Throughout the campaign we heard many candidates and voters alike discuss the need for political reform. There is a clear need to re-set the system to address the representation and stability issues, and to give the government of the day a mandate to get on with the task of governing the country. The challenge for the political actors is to connect with what the people want, while building a national debate about the development needs of the country – and then for the parties to respond to these needs.

In the meantime, the country awaits the parliamentary vote next week to find out who will be the next prime minister.

Vanuatu Prime Ministers 1980-2016

We want to hear what people across the Pacific think about these new goals. This short survey explains the new goals and gives people across the Pacific the chance to rate their relevance and help track progress. The more we know about the goals, the more we can hold our leaders to account to implement them.

Your response will remain anonymous and will help assess where Pacific countries and territories currently stand in relation to the goals, and provide feedback to our leaders and policy makers as progress is made – or not as the case may be.

We aim to keep the survey running (online and offline) over the next couple of years and will periodically report on results. These reports will be made public and shared with national governments and regional organisations.

This survey is an initiative of the Pacific Institute of Public Policy in association with RMIT University, and has been approved by the RMIT Human Research Ethics Committee. More information about the survey is available in the Participant Information Sheet.

If you are 16 years or older, from a Pacific country or territory, and happy to participate you can have your say by starting the survey here.

Just drag and drop the parties and MPs you think can work best together, and see how the numbers work out. Can you build a coalition that will endure? It’s not as easy as it looks….

Enjoy!

Danny Tetiano and Dr John Otto Ondawame were both influential, important people. One was a gifted musician, mentor to a generation of aspiring artists in Vanuatu. The other, of course, was one of the leaders of the West Papuan independence movement. In addition to the loss to society and to the world, both left grieving widows and young children behind.

To put it plainly, Danny and John died of poverty, not disease.

The cost to society is immense. One of the very reasons West Papuans have struggled to organise themselves and become a well-defined locus of international attention is the lack of well-educated, dynamic people, skilled in persuasion and diplomacy. They lack entrepreneurs to improve prosperity, education to create the entrepreneurs, and health services to preserve and protect them.

The lack of basic services is characterised as systemic abuse when Indonesian government policy is concerned. But how should we characterise such neglect in Vanuatu?

Health services in Vanuatu – there is no health system, per se – are rudimentary at best. Post-operative infection rates make even the most run-of-the-mill surgery a cause for concern. One long-time acquaintance died following the amputation of his big toe. A well-intentioned (but unforgivably vague) blog post by the UNDP raises the point that life expectancy in Vanuatu and other Pacific island countries is ten years less than in Australia and New Zealand.

Ten years, and three hours flight away.

The difference is quantum. It’s at once tantalisingly close and achingly distant. But the bitter lesson that I’ve learned this week, and repeatedly in the past, is that the cost of inactivity is not an abstract one. Death impacts directly on a nation’s ability to grow, to gain experience, and ultimately to survive.

With the debate continuing, it’s time to be part of the conversation.

Here is what they’ve set out so far….

The calamitous recent history of Timor Leste is one I’ve always felt close to. In part, it’s because it’s played itself out entirely in my lifetime. I’ve been old enough to comprehend the events, the causes and the effects of an international tragedy brought about almost entirely by politics and greed. In part, it’s because I’ve got friends who have witnessed first-hand key parts of the country’s history. But it’s mostly for even more subjective reasons than that. I’ve had the privilege of meeting a few of the people at the core of Timor’s resistance – and later its government.

But every time I’ve visited Timor, I’ve done so on my own terms. For years now, I’ve been wandering through neighbourhoods across the globe, taking photos and trying to see the world from the ground up. It’s a great way to see the world, rewarding in ways that can’t be explained to those who never step out of the tour bus.

It’s a uniquely limiting perspective, too. It tends to make it easier to miss the forest for the trees. It’s dangerous too, if you allow yourself to generalise too much. The plural of ‘anecdote’, as they saying goes, is not ‘statistics’.

But past a certain point, sufficient quantities of anecdote become statistically useful.

So when I saw a Foreign Affairs article recently claiming Timor Leste was the world’s youngest failed state, I had to wonder which Timor Leste the author was referring to – it certainly was not the one I’d just visited. A follow-up in The Economist came to the opposite conclusion, but only after a couple of assertions that, again, didn’t match with what I’ve seen.

ABRAÇO is a photo essay created in response to these critiques. It takes images from different points in the country’s history, puts them side by side, and allows you to draw your own conclusions.

Timor Leste is many things, but the poverty I saw, although significant, was hardly ‘abject’. Yes, ‘scars’ of arson and destruction from Indonesia’s spiteful scorched-earth campaign are still evident, but not nearly to the extent they were even a few years ago. And even that was a faint echo of the devastation of 1999.

The infrastructure is still weak and limited, but again, the change over the last five years alone is nothing short of astonishing. You can hardly travel 10 kilometres in this country now without encountering road work.

But the change that has been wrought upon this nation cannot adequately be measured in statistics. Infant mortality has indeed dropped to nearly half of what it was under the UN mandate. More than half the population have mobile phones; 3G coverage is widely available and increasingly affordable. Youth literacy for males and females is pushing over 80%.

But standing where I was in Ainaro market (or Liquica, or Suai), none of that particularly meant much. What continually caught my attention was that the feeling of the place had changed. I can perhaps be accused of seeing what I wanted to see, but nearly a year later, as I peruse the hundreds of photos I took in my visits over a five-year period, I see a marked change in people’s response to the camera.

I might be reading too much into these images. So rather than draw conclusions, I will let you be the judge. Once you’ve seen what I’ve seen, though, I suspect that ‘failure’ is the last term you would choose to apply.

(And even if Timor were failing, surely South Sudan would be the youngest candidate for the title…?)

One by one, orders and rules of engagement are read out by the mission commanders. Today there is a special guest – the Commander of Guam Battalion Colonel Michael Tougher has flown down from his hq in Kabul and will be travelling with us to see the drones in action for himself. Col. Tougher also highlights some security issues for the drive ahead, telling the vehicle gunners:

“Watch out for kids with plastic guns along the road. We’ve had reports that the Taliban sometimes deliberately uses children to provoke us into shooting them, for the propaganda value, so make sure you follow the rules of engagement and watch very carefully”.

We leave Kandahar in a convoy of MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles towards the Pakistan border. It is only a couple of hours drive and you soon realize how close Kandahar is to Pakistan, with a constant flow of vehicles and people on this road. Moving on roads in the south east of Afghanistan you are always aware of the dangers: the risk of IEDs and ambush is on everyone’s minds and our convoy moves at speed for the whole trip without stopping.

We arrive at FOB Spin Boldak and after the MRAPs are parked we move into a large open base with runways and lookout towers. Small, lightweight “Raven” drones are being assembled and readied by a contractor and some army personnel.

I ask the contractor, “Jeremy” from Enrgies Inc, what the main value of using drones is.

“The main thing is soldier safety. You have your guys moving on the ground and by having one of these Ravens up in the air to scout around where you are going you can get an idea of any danger ahead. It gives your soldiers a “heads up” on what is out there in front of them.”

“We have the Raven, the Puma, a smaller one called the Wasp which can be deployed easily and then a larger one called a Tigershark. These models are all for surveillance, they’re not weaponised until you get to larger UAVs like Predators and Raptors.”

He says the Ravens require a 10 day course, about 80 hours, to become competent in using them. There’s a couple of days of classroom work initially and then it gets hands-on.

“The technology is always moving quickly – when we started with the Raven a couple of years ago we only had a fixed camera, now we have a fully moving 360 degree pivoting camera mount and the batteries have been much improved upon too.”

Is the use of drones a significant turning point in warfare?

“I think so. With the war downsizing and moving to the end (for the US) it may be less significant now, but during the heavy fighting of ‘08 and ‘09, these aircraft were saving a lot of lives and used alot. In my unit (2^nd, 101^st Airborne) we accumulated 10,000 flying hours in the course of that year. It set up the battlespace for our guys to have success and we were using drones daily, 8-10 hours a day. They would land, we’d put new batteries in and send ‘em up again.”

Drones started out being used by elite units but their use is now being filtered down the line.

“They are now going army-wide. The Pumas were upgraded and first used by all the Special Forces guys – SEALs, Green Berets etc, but now all the army units are being trained in them. This is the future of warfare.”

What makes the Ravens so flexible to use is that they don’t require a runway to takeoff or land – they are launched by hand and come back to crash-land whatever the terrain. The drones are designed to break into 3 pieces on impact. What holds them together is a 10 cent piece of plastic that absorbs the impact of landing by snapping, and then are easily replaced.

“You can feel the engines pulling your arm back” says Sgt Napoleon as he throws a Raven with propellers going at full blast. It is his first time to fly and all the Guam troops take their turn to get a feel for the little machines. Cheers go up and he says “time to go look at what the bad guys are doing”.

The use of drones has become a highly controversial method of warfare, particularly in neighbouring Pakistan. Hundreds of militants – and civilians – have been killed in drone strikes and there are concerns that the use of drones is driving support towards the Taliban and away from ISAF forces.

Pacific nations are themselves starting to experiment with drones and finding areas for use. There is an argument to be made that Pacific nations with limited resources could use drones to monitor illegal fishing in their EEZs. They can be deployed during times of natural disaster, people lost at sea and a range of other scenarios. Many Pacific nations cannot afford patrol boats and aircraft to monitor their waters, often relying on Australian, New Zealand and US aerial surveillance to keep an eye on their territorial waters. Drones could well be a cost-effective means to combat illegal fishing, and some countries including Palau have already trialled their use.

Effective they may be – but there remain questions in a wider policy sense about the “militarization” that comes with drone use and an uneasy feeling among many citizens about how drones are already enhancing state surveillance of its citizenry.

These Pacific soldiers are probably the first to see the potential for drone use, but there is little doubt that drone use in the vast Pacific ocean, deployed by island governments or superpower rivals, is going to escalate with implications for everyone in the Pacific.

While only a handful of Fijians serve in the Australian and New Zealand defence forces, there are currently more than 2000 Fijians enlisted with the British army worldwide, a very substantial number. Fijian troops have a well-earned reputation as professional soldiers, particularly as UN peacekeepers in the Middle East. Although many would be aware of the famous Gurkhas from Nepal serving with the British army, less well known are the large numbers of ‘Pacific Gurkhas’ serving with the Brits and the active recruitment that still goes on in Fiji. Many cite the benefits of career and pay that comes with a stint in the British army, but there is a price to pay – so far 9 Fijians have been killed in Afghanistan with many more wounded. They are included among the 446 British soldiers killed there so far, and their names and place of origin are on this online list of casualties.

‘Bula! (hello!)’ It took a moment for me to understand the mix of thick Scottish brogue and Fijian language coming from Staff Sgt Ilimo Dovibua. I guess that’s what happens when a Fijian spends 13 years with the ‘the Highlanders’, 4^th Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland. They are the ‘desert rats’ who found fame in north Africa during World War Two, but are now deployed in various other desert conflicts.

Sgt Dovibua joined the British Army in 2000, with no previous background in the Fijian army. ‘After the Fiji coup in 2000, I was looking for work and worried about the local situation. There were British army recruiters in Suva so I decided to join up.’

‘We do 6 month tours here and then go back to our base in Germany. This is my third tour and I was also in Iraq. It is basically the same conditions and same hostilities, but in Iraq we were mostly in armoured vehicles whereas here we do a lot of foot patrols.’

Sgt Dovibua has risen in the ranks and is now a Company Quartermaster, handling a lot of the supplies to keep British troops on the go. Like many of his Fijian comrades, he loves his rugby and says proudly ‘Half the British army rugby team are Fijian and almost all the rugby 7s team is Fijian. It’s a good way for us to integrate and be appreciated’.

He notes that there are also some Fijian officers in the British army who have gone through Sandhurst for their training; there are at least 5 Majors, a bunch of lieutenants and some in the SAS, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force too.

‘We even have a couple of Fijian chaplains in the army, so we are bringing God back to British!’ he laughs.

Apart from a group of Fijians serving with the Royal Regiment of Scotland, I also found Fijians serving with the Royal Engineers who have come to help pack up parts of the base as the UK contingent in Bastion also starts to wind down.

Many of them cited the same reason for joining up: the coups of 2000 and 2006 prompted them to think there was no point staying at home where the politics – and job opportunities – were too unstable. The chance to earn good money and work overseas was a significant draw. Yet unlike so many who join the US army (mainly from Mexico and South America) so they can get a ‘green card’ after 5 years’ service, the Fijians say they want to return home at some point. None claimed that getting a British passport or residency was a reason for them joining.

For some, like Sgt Lisa Rokoyadre from the Lau islands who handles ammunition supplies, joining the British army ‘was all about adventure – and escaping from my parents who wanted me to do something else’.

There are Fijian contractors everywhere in Afghanistan, and I found a couple in Helmand who had even created their own little Fiji club in the compound of National Air Cargo, Camp Bastion, where some of them work. I had brought a packet of prized Vanuatu kava with me all the way to Afghanistan with the hope of sitting around the kava bowl one evening with Fijian troops and having a few shells in this most unlikely setting. But our British Army minders forbade our kava session so I ended up leaving my kava packet with Luke Tokaduadua and his fellow Fijian contractors to add to their regular kava sessions. Somehow they are able to source kava and manage to have a couple of sessions per month here in the Afghan desert.

They take me one evening into their club, where Fijian graffiti, flags and memorials line the wall in a room next to the National Air Cargo office. There are some moving tributes to fallen Fijians here and this club is where Fijians from all over Afghanistan come on their National Day to celebrate – a little corner of Afghanistan that is forever Fijian, you could say.

I had also hoped to visit the Tongan troops based here at Camp Bastion, especially since they have a significant number of troops here (around 300) by Pacific standards and are the only Pacific nation to have deployed under their own flag, as a sovereign nation. But I was informed by my British minder – who said he had been given no explanation – that I would not be able to meet or interview any of the Tongans deployed. This was one of the few disappointments of my trip – the only Pacific soldiers not open to share their experience and be documented. Whether this was for any tactical reason or a hangover of Tonga’s rather autocratic, royalist history is unsure. It certainly doesn’t reflect Tonga’s attempts to move towards an era of democracy and transparency and it’s unfortunate not to have them represented in this Pacific soldier project, and without an explanation.

So after spending a few days with the Brits and Fijians, it was time to return to Kandahar and our next mission – a convoy patrol down to the Pakistan border to watch Guam Battalion soldiers being trained how to fly drones.