We must not forget that the same laws will apply in the same national parliament and provincial houses of assembly. In the same national and district courtrooms, case law will grow and precedents will continue to be set in the absence of the hard questions that may never get asked about the blatant breaches in our society and adopted system of government.

From 2017 our leaders will (more than ever before) need the knowledge, political will, grace and patience to restore integrity, democracy and the rule of law as a national emergency in order for all else to be rebuilt without exception. The truth is a new government in 2017 will inherit inter-generational debt, a massive deficit and redundant parliamentary rules/standing orders governing important decision-making processes. Not to mention the crumbling sanctity of the National Executive Council (NEC) or cabinet.

They will realise that legislation set up in principle to provide robust governance mechanisms have been misunderstood or ignored by their predecessors. In 2017 a newly elected parliament will discover an exhausted public service, a manipulated police force, an angry defence force, and many broken Papua New Guineans with drought and income starved families and disrupted livelihoods.

Those elected Members of Parliament will find very drained state-owned enterprises, institutions and agencies incapable of operating with only a steady trickle of public funds to deliver wages, health & education or district support according to policies and promises of the past and present. They will find that the much promised revenues from oil and gas have been committed to paying off the current government’s unilateral decisions and therefore debt for unauthorised loans for generations.

New leaders in 2017 will need to navigate a global economic downturn of epic proportions with PNGs development and economic interests at heart. Our new leaders will discover that our broken service delivery system and our overheated economy will need more than elected candidates with tunnel vision.

Those elected will need to be legislators, not aspiring millionaires or public finance managers. Newly elected leaders will require an understanding of serious fiscal discipline, tax and industrial relations reform and economic modelling that reflect PNG’s economic conditions and our revenue-earning potential in sectors other than petroleum and energy.

PNG will need MPs who are humble yet extraordinary thinkers to guide monetary/fiscal, social, cultural and development policy simultaneously to aid a new-look holistic reconstruction strategy focused on understanding that our vast natural resources should never again be left to a single individual who knows no institutional, spiritual, executive or national boundaries. Those new MPs should be held to the universal promise that candidates seek election (and re-election) to be servants to their people not master manipulators of their resources.

All the hopes in online commentary revert to a single assumption that PNG will inevitably have free and fair elections next year. If all we do is dare to dream it’s no longer enough because we will inevitably get what we vote for yet again.

Photo: Sepik Wewak Urban Local Government facebook group

Thus it is also an honour to be sharing the event with Monsieur Michel Djokovic, the Ambassador of France, given how important French aid has been for this programme.

France and the Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme de Lille (ESJ) played a critically important role in helping establish the journalism degree programme at USP in 1994, with the French government funding the inaugural senior lecturer, François Turmel, and providing a substantial media resources grant to lay the foundations.

I arrived in Fiji four years later in 1998 as Head of Journalism from Papua New Guinea and what a pleasure it was working with the French Embassy on a number of journalism projects at that time, including an annual scholarship to France for journalism excellence.

These USP awards this year take place during challenging times for the media industry with fundamental questions confronting us as journalism educators about what careers we are actually educating journalists for.

When I embarked on a journalism career in the 1960s, the future was clear-cut and one tended to specialise in print, radio or television. I had a fairly heady early career being the editor at the age of 24 of an Australian national weekly newspaper, the Sunday Observer, owned by an idealistic billionaire, and we were campaigning against the Vietnam War.

Our chief foreign correspondent then was a famous journalist, Wilfred Burchett, who at the end of the Second World War 70 years ago reported on the Hiroshima nuclear bombing as a “warning to the world”.

By 1970, I was chief subeditor of the Rand Daily Mail in South Africa, the best newspaper I ever worked on and where I learned much about human rights and social justice, which has shaped my journalism and education values ever since.

I travelled overland for a year across Africa as a freelance journalist, working for agencies such as Gemini, and crossed the Sahara Desert in a Kombi van. It was critically risky even then, but doubly dangerous today.

Eventually I ended up with Agence France-Presse as an editor in Paris and worked there for several years. In fact, it was while working with AFP in Europe that I took a “back door” interest in the Pacific and that’s where my career took another trajectory when I joined the Auckland Star and became foreign news editor.

The point of me giving you some brief moments of my career in a nutshell is to stress how portable journalism was as a career in my time. But now it is a huge challenge for you young graduates going out into the marketplace.

You don’t even know whether you’re going to be called a “journalist”, or a “content provider” or a “curator” of news – or something beyond being a “news aggregator” – such is the pace of change with the digital revolution. And the loss of jobs in the media industry continues at a relentless pace.
Fortunately, in Fiji, the global industry rationalisations and pressures haven’t quite hit home locally yet. However, on the other hand you have very real immediate concerns with the Media Industry Development Decree and the “chilling’ impact that it has on the media regardless of the glossy mirage the government spin doctors like to put on it.

We had a very talented young student journalist here in Fiji a few weeks ago, Niklas Pedersen, from Denmark, on internship with local media, thanks to USP and Republika’s support. He remarked about his experience:

“I have previously tried to do stories in Denmark and New Zealand – two countries that are both in the top 10 on the RSF World Press Freedom Index, so I was a bit nervous before travelling to a country that is number 93 and doing stories there ….

“Fiji proved just as big a challenge as I had expected. The first day I reported for duty … I tried to pitch a lot of my story ideas, but almost all of them got shut down with the explanation that it was impossible to get a comment from the government on the issue.

“And therefore the story was never going to be able to get published.

“At first this stunned me, but I soon understood that it was just another challenge faced daily by Fiji journalists.”

This was a nice piece of storytelling on climate change on an issue that barely got covered in New Zealand legacy media.

Australia and New Zealand shouldn’t get too smug about media freedom in relation to Fiji, especially with Australia sliding down the world rankings over asylum seekers for example.

New Zealand also shouldn’t get carried away over its own media freedom situation. Three court cases this year demonstrate the health of the media and freedom of information in this digital era is in a bad way.

• Investigative journalist Jon Stephenson this month finally won undisclosed damages from the NZ Defence Ministry for defamation after trying to gag him over an article he wrote for Metro magazine which implicated the SAS in the US torture rendition regime in Afghanistan.

• Law professor Jane Kelsey at the University of Auckland filed a lawsuit against Trade Minister Tim Groser over secrecy about the controversial Trans Pacific Partnership (the judgment ruled the minister had disregarded the law);

• Investigative journalist Nicky Hager and author of Dirty Politics sought a judicial review after police raided his home last October, seizing documents, computers and other materials. Hager is known in the Pacific for his revelations about NZ spying on its neighbours.

Also, the New Zealand legacy media has consistently failed to report well on two of the biggest issues of our times in the Pacific – climate change and the fate of West Papua.

One of the ironies of the digital revolution is that there is an illusion of growing freedom of expression and information in the world, when in fact the reverse is true.

These are bleak times with growing numbers of journalists being murdered with impunity, from the Philippines to Somalia and Syria.

The world’s worst mass killing of journalists was the so-called Maguindanao, or Ampatuan massacre (named after the town whose dynastic family ordered the killings), when 32 journalists were brutally murdered in the Philippines in November 2009.

But increasingly savage slayings of media workers in the name of terrorism are becoming the norm, such as the outrageous attack on Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris in January. Two masked gunmen assassinated 12 media workers – including five of France’s most talented cartoonists – at the satirical magazine and a responding policeman.

In early August this year, five masked jihadists armed with machetes entered the Dhaka home of a secularist blogger in Bangladesh and hacked off his head and hands while his wife was forced into a nearby room.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists in figures released this year, 506 journalists were killed in the decade between 2002 and 2012, almost double the 390 slain in the previous decade. (Both Reporters Sans Frontières and Freedom House have also reported escalating death tolls and declines in media freedom.)

(To be continued next week…)

Caption: French Ambassador Michel Djokovic (third from left), Head of USP Journalism Dr Shailendra Singh (fourth from left) and Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie (fifth from right) with the prizewinners at the University of the South Pacific journalism awards. Image: Lowen Sei/USP

The overlay of western-style democracies on centuries old customary practices—that emphasize consensus and harmony, while frowning on openly voiced criticism and complaint—is an ongoing source of tension in many Pacific islands in this modern era. While customary practices of non-confrontation and indirectness may serve the interests of wily political leaders, today’s leaders are confronted with two norms now prevalent in the region: Local populations are, after more than 30 years of political independence, accustomed to democratic practices that include the free exercise of individual rights; and the digital age, in fact the remarkable leaps in connectivity over just the past five years, has generated a level of public information availability and scrutiny of government performance that is unprecedented.

In today’s world, there are global reports on sustainable development, doing business, trafficking in persons, freedom of the press and religion, climate action, money laundering and tax havens, government bankruptcy and debt, and more. They are all now easily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. No longer can governments control the message, much as some may try. Perhaps more to the point, island governments that not only desire but actively seek benefits from engagement in the world community can, of course, cherry pick the advantages while ignoring the requirements of compliance to gain these benefits—but doing so means the country can suffer reputational risks or, in worst case scenarios, sanctions from other governments and aid agencies.

A couple of cases in point:

• The Marshall Islands suffered the largest demotion of any Pacific nation in the recently released World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report for 2015, dropping 25 points to a 139 ranking out of 189 countries evaluated. Likewise, the Marshall Islands was the only Pacific nation to be demoted to “Tier 3” (the worst level) on this year’s U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons report. Whether or not all people reading these reports accept these findings—certainly governments in the spotlight often dispute them vociferously—these reports are in the public domain for anyone to read. And when a country is receiving multiple negative reports, disputing these reports is both futile and lacking in credibility. In the case of the Marshall Islands, when it was listed on the trafficking report’s “Tier 2 Watch List” last year for the second year in a row, the Foreign Minister called the report “BS.” This year, government officials simply did not comment publicly on the trafficking report. On a positive note, efforts to deal with improving capacity to legislate, investigate, prosecute and enforce acceptable standards related to human trafficking have moved into higher gear in recent months, largely as the result of U.S. State Department funding to the International Organization for Migration, which is spearheading collaborative work with Marshall Islands government agencies to address a checklist of problem areas that should move the country off Tier 3. The question that needs to be asked, however, is why did the Marshall Islands government allow it to happen when it has the experience—it successfully removed itself from a global money laundering blacklist over a decade ago and has remained in good standing because of ongoing engagement on the issue—to avoid the demotion?

• The Nauru government’s actions over the past two years have hurt its reputation as a functioning democracy. Among other actions, it recently confiscated the passport of one member of parliament who is in the opposition, and suspended several MPs for speaking to international news media; it cut off access to Facebook for the country (joining such anti-democratic nations as Syria, China and Iran); deported or refused re-entry to two judges, fired its police commissioner, revoked a visa for the expatriate wife of an opposition MP, and made it difficult for opposition MPs to bring in Australian attorneys to represent them in court; and imposed a US$7,000 non-refundable application fee for journalists wishing to visit the island, effectively preventing journalists from covering developments in Nauru. Although these actions recently prompted both Australian and New Zealand leaders to speak with Nauru leaders about democracy issues at home, the Nauru government simply says these are domestic matters and it is following the rule of law. United Nations Special Rapporteur David Kaye, who visited the country earlier this year, had a different view, saying: “It should lift all restrictions to access Internet and social media, and facilitate access to the media in the country. Nauru should revise its course of action and take measures to fulfill its human rights obligations.”

The governance picture is certainly not all bad news in the region. A number of island governments are improving their international reputations by adhering to global governance standards. Papua New Guinea, for example, was the only Pacific nation on “Tier 3” human trafficking status last year, and improved to “Tier 2 Watch List” this year. The Federated States of Micronesia, similarly, was on the “Watch List” last year, and improved its standing to “Tier 2” in 2015.

For the most part, these global rankings evaluate what systems governments have in place to foster what can be described as good governance or best practices. We may not think we have human trafficking or money laundering happening in our countries, but if we have no process for investigating and asking the questions, who can say for sure? No government in the region condones illegal practices, such as human trafficking, but obviously simply being against something is not an adequate response in today’s world where trafficking, terrorist financing and worse are global problems with local ramifications.

The island norm of not asking questions and refraining from open confrontation—generally a necessity for functional democracies—may be most extreme in atoll nations, where getting-along at all costs is simply a requirement of life. Still, even the smallest of our islands need systems in place to promote democracy and accountability, and to reasonably ensure that illegal activities ranging from money laundering to trafficking are not happening. And if they are discovered, there is a mechanism in place for action.

Prior to the Internet age reaching the Pacific and the ramp up in global awareness of best practice systems, most of the Pacific islands were literally on the outer fringes of world consciousness. Not many knew what was happening in our islands, and even fewer cared. Not so anymore. And as countries in our region sign up to international conventions and treaties, take sides at the United Nations on key issues of the day, demand action on climate, fishery and other challenges from developed nations, and seek donor aid for development, there is a price to pay, not so much in dollars and cents, but in government responsibility to meet global good governance standards and in the public obligation to hold our governments accountable for delivering the benefits of this international engagement to people in the community.

Photo: Ebon Atoll in the Marshall Islands, by Megan Coe.

Every week seems to bring a new revelation about un-democratic behavior by its national leadership undermining the rule of law. And despite denials this past week of bribery involving current Nauru government leaders by an Australian company, payoffs to political leaders are hardly a new phenomenon in Nauru, or indeed in the Pacific.

The justification advanced for ordering Digicel, Nauru’s single telecom service, to eliminate access to Facebook is as thin—‘to prevent access to pornography’—as the list of nations that ban Facebook, which includes such notoriously anti-democratic nations as N. Korea, Iran and China.

Should the region shrug this off as something we may not like, but it’s none of our business? After all, Nauru is just 10,000 people on a tiny bit of land in the central Pacific that, save for its now expanding Nauru Airlines, would be one of the most isolated countries in the world. In former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s immortal—if apocryphal—comment about Micronesia, ‘Who gives a damn?’

The Australian and New Zealand governments cared a lot about democracy, or lack thereof, in Fiji by imposing a slew of sanctions after then-Army Chief Frank Bainimarama’s coup in 2006. Many of these remained in effect for eight years until Fiji’s national elections last September. Nauru doesn’t have an army to mount a coup. Still, to date, Nauru’s current government has:

• Arrested and deported Nauru’s Magistrate Peter Law in January 2014 while Law was preparing an inquiry into the death of Justice Minister David Adeang’s wife, who burned to death outside the family home in April 2013. Nauru also cancelled the visa for its Chief Justice Geoffrey Eames to return to work from vacation last year.
• Fired its Australian police commissioner as an investigation into bribery allegations involving Nauru President Baron Waqa and Justice Minister Adeang was in progress.
• Directed Digicel to shut off access to Facebook for the nation and subsequently refused to let the general manager of Digicel back into the country.
• Suspended five opposition senators from the 18-seat parliament chamber over a year ago.
• Revoked the visa of Katy Le Roy, legal counsel to the Nauru parliament and wife of suspended opposition MP Roland Kun, so she cannot enter the country.
• Imposed a non-refundable US$7,000 application fee for any off-island journalist interested to visit Nauru, effectively preventing foreign media from visiting Nauru.

We might well ask, ‘what’s next?’ To date, only the United States government has issued a statement of concern over Nauru’s ban on Facebook.

Why is the Australian government mum on the subject of Nauru? Radio Australia last week quoted Nauru’s former Solicitor General, Australian Steven Bliim, discussing Nauru’s sacking of its previous police commissioner as his investigation into bribery of Nauru leaders by Australian company Getax was advancing. Bliim also briefed Australian government officials after leaving Nauru last year. He was surprised by their lack of interest. “The reaction of the politicians at the time was dismissive, indicating that it was purely an internal Nauruan affair, which seemed at odds with the sort of reaction that was taken, for instance, when the Fiji coups occurred,” Bliim told Radio Australia. “This wasn’t as overt as what happened in Fiji, but the effect of it has been very similar where the country has failed to abide by its own laws and it’s effectively taken steps to make itself not accountable.”

The self-interest of the asylum seekers holding facility on Nauru is clearly the driver of relations between Australia and Nauru now. Nauru is receiving significant funding from Australia for hosting the controversial facility and the Nauru detention center is a key element in Australia’s policy for interdicting refugees aiming for Australia.

The Nauru government has taken to issuing terse statements critical of media reporting as international scrutiny of these issues has expanded. Among these denials includes the assertion this past week that Nauru’s legal system is arguably the most independent, transparent and credible in the Pacific. But this assertion is far from reality. In point of fact, a 2012-2014 governance and transparency assessment of the judiciaries in the 14 independent Pacific nations by the Pacific Judicial Development Programme gives Nauru one of the lowest ratings in the region. The Marshall Islands was at the top in both 2012 and 2014 by meeting all 15 agreed-to indicators for transparency and governance in court operations, and Palau met 14 of these in 2012 and 15 last year. Nauru, however, met only two in 2012 and as of the latest update in April this year, had not filed a report on these indicators for 2014.

A United Nations Special Rapporteur last month raised concerns about recently adopted amendments to Nauru’s Criminal Code, and called on the government to withdraw the legislation restricting freedom of expression. New amendments prohibit use of language that is threatening, abusive or insulting in nature and has the intention to stir up racial, political or religious hatred—which critics say could be used to muzzle political opposition in the lead up to next year’s election.

“Nauru should allow free space for expression without fear of criminal prosecution,” said Special Rapporteur David Kaye. “It should lift all restrictions to access internet and social media, and facilitate access to the media in the country. Nauru should revise its course of action and take measures to fulfill its human rights obligations.”

Unless Nauru’s neighbors, including Australia and New Zealand, get involved in encouraging Nauru to adhere to democratic norms that prevail in this region—including unrestricted debates in parliament, open access to the Internet, and maintaining an independent judiciary—it seems likely the government of Nauru will continue undermining opportunities for its citizens to enjoy freedoms taken for granted in most democracies. This should concern the Pacific Islands Forum, which brings together leaders, governments and island communities over shared goals of democracy, good governance and accountability. Ignoring developments in Nauru undermines the Forum and island leaders’ stated objective of promoting regionalism and raising the quality of life based on the Pacific’s commitment to sustainable development and accountability of governments to their citizens.

Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele recently offered a public reaction to the news that New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, had moved in 2009 from occasional, targeted electronic surveillance tactics to ‘full-take’ collection. Mr Sailele showed his trademark forthrightness in asserting that the proper term for spying was ‘diplomacy’ and that it happened all the time.

This is a mischaracterisation. To conflate the sometimes confidential and always delicate role of the diplomat with someone rooting through literally everything you send over a wire is misguided, and does a significant disservice to diplomats. It’s a little rich, too, when someone who has ‘nothing to hide’ also has no problem with the physical intimidation of the Samoan media.

Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing: There is a world of difference between the intelligence gathering that allies conduct between themselves—often cooperatively—and the kind of thing of which New Zealand stands accused.

Intelligence gathering is a rather broadly-defined activity. It comprises:

• Human intelligence – understanding the people and personalities relevant to your relationship;
• Technical intelligence – understanding the tools and technologies of your counterpart;
• Geospatial intelligence – literally, knowing the lay of the land (and sea) in areas of interest;
• Open source intelligence – using publicly available materials to conduct analysis and better understand your counterpart;
• Signals intelligence – usually, electronic eavesdropping.

As a by-product of the information age, governments are relying increasingly on signals intelligence in their spying and intelligence gathering. Part of the reason is political, and part of the reason is financial. When you calculate the political and financial cost of physically venturing into another country and breaking their laws in order to gather sensitive information, hacking, data interception and other technological tools seem pretty darn attractive.

It’s not a substitute, though, and although the prevailing wisdom is that a single satellite photo renders a walk-though unnecessary, many intelligence experts have expressed concerned for the loss of the detail and nuance that only comes about from being there. Not to put too fine a point on it, the USA might bomb fewer weddings if it quit relying exclusively on satellite images.

Until 2009, the Waihopai signals facility on New Zealand’s south island was used primarily to listen to the traffic bouncing off the satellites that service the southwest Pacific. It was a tightly-focused instrument, capable of listening in on particular phone calls and other communications. Then in 2009, as part of its commitment to the so-called Five Eyes intelligence agreement between the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, Waihopai got a significant upgrade.

This upgrade changed the game completely. It reduced New Zealand’s role to being a more or less passive accessory to the American international agenda, and it integrated American assumptions about the primacy of signals intelligence into the Pacific intelligence community.

Waihopai acquired what is known as ‘full take’ capability. In short, it became possible not only to grab selected bits of information bouncing off the satellite, but to acquire and store pretty much everything. This information was passed on, in bulk and largely unfiltered, directly to the NSA. Ironically, it is more difficult for New Zealanders to access the data they gathered than it is for Americans. In a shameful climb-down in international stature, New Zealand has implicitly granted the NSA the ability to spy wholesale on its own citizens when they travel abroad—a capability they deny their own intelligence officers. Green Party co-leader Russell Norman insists that the GCSB is breaking the law in doing so.

It is most certainly breaking the law of most south Pacific nations. And this is why Mr Sailele’s complacence and comfort with the situation is so surprising: As prime minister of Samoa, he has a duty to uphold the law. And Samoan law contains clear protections for personal information on telecommunications systems. Mr Sailele’s opinion on the matter is of no importance. Nor is that of Michael Field, who not only reported the Samoan story, but wrote his own remarkably similar op-ed on the topic.

But Mr Field is perhaps not the kind of authority we’d want to rely on in this circumstance. His argument for normalising rampant, wholesale spying consists of asking how New Zealand should be expected to invade its neighbours without sufficient intelligence to do so. He uses the UK’s request that New Zealand invade German Samoa during WWI as his primary example. It’s worth mentioning that friends don’t usually invade friendly countries. Because that would be an act of war.

Presumably, if New Zealand’s military assistance were sought by a Pacific islands nation, the intelligence required to protect troops and civilians would be readily supplied by those asking for help.

Mr Field’s tangential play to anti-immigrant paranoia is perhaps indicative of who he thinks his audience is. ‘A large chunk of Fiji’s population live in New Zealand,’ he writes, ‘and more may come if things ever go bad again.’

This blasé—even shameless—attitude toward surveillance and the utter derogation of personal privacy becomes more understandable when we realise that, politically and diplomatically, there is little that New Zealand could have done to mitigate the damage. The smallest partner in the Five Eyes alliance, it brings virtually nothing else to the table other than its proximity to the strategically important southwest Pacific.

Mr Sailele too is no doubt aware—now, if not before—of the fact that the Five Eyes have installed a tap on their fibre-optic link to American Samoa. So his gruffness can best be understood as the reaction of someone who confuses being powerless with being weak, and seeks to hide both.

As with so many geopolitical issues, Pacific island nations are severely circumscribed in how they can react. For example: Objecting to wholesale, fairly blatant interception of mobile phone traffic, as happened in Honiara, might put Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogovare in a difficult position diplomatically, or even politically. From a realpolitik perspective, he’s much better served buddying up with the spies and trying to reappropriate the data for his own purposes. If he doesn’t, maybe the next one will.

The most obvious response to all of this is perhaps the least desirable to the western alliance. Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa and Vanuatu have all accepted significant investment in their national telecommunications infrastructure from Chinese interests. This may not have the effect of cutting off the Five Eyes’ intercept capabilities, but it will at least allow their rivals to see things as clearly as they do.

This is hardly a desirable play for Pacific island countries, though. It’s a bit like trying to decide which creepy boyfriend-wannabe gets to hang out under your windowsill every night.

Pacific islands governments could be doing more to protect themselves. Their national networks are small and have only a few points where they contact the outside world. By virtue of this, they are in the rare position of having what is known in security circles as a minimal attack surface. There are relatively few points where an external entity can usefully insert itself into their networks. By applying some basic technologies and security protocols, they could improve their communications integrity significantly. This might not be enough to safeguard the most tightly held secrets, but it might be sufficient to keep the commonplace ones intact.

More to the point, though, the process of information acquisition among friends should be a two-sided process. Instead of indulging their most prurient instincts, developed countries should engage with their development partners to improve open source information gathering. Surely even the most aggressive military strategist can see that things like improved maps, meteorological and geographic data, better economic data gathering, state of the art taxation systems and better records management for police and the courts are vastly more valuable as intelligence sources than a minister’s private conversations with his children.

In the midst of all of this, the peoples of the southwest Pacific have to be asking themselves where this leaves them. Commoditised more now than ever before, their personal lives are subject to intrusion with complete impunity. Anyone who thinks this comes without cost, who thinks they have nothing to hide, has not been paying attention. Public shaming on the internet can happen to anyone, and it doesn’t take much to do it.

In the short term, private citizens have few alternatives other than to live with the awareness that their governments are creeps—literally, they are allowing a kind of pathological curiosity that, if it happened in the physical world, would be considered little short of depraved. And lest you say that’s an exaggeration, there is evidence of NSA staff listening in to military service members’ most private conversations. The private sector is little better. One former telco technician I spoke with was completely up front about it. ‘Yep,’ he told me, ‘That’s how you’d spend a slow Sunday night shift. Browse all the calls until you found something interesting, then gather all your buddies and listen in.’

Businesses and governments have yet to realise the fullest implications of the utter lack of security in our private communications. But if the Snowden revelations teach us nothing else, it’s that the lack of privacy cuts both ways. Nobody, not even the NSA, is hack-proof. Nor will we be until we start to respect our individual privacy, to accept that the only way to ensure that information cannot be stolen is not to store it.

Then, perhaps, we can begin to build the technological, diplomatic and legislative tools that we need in order properly to protect our secrets, big and small.

In the UNDP’s Human Development Report, only three Pacific nations rank in the “High Human Development” category, with Palau the Pacific leader at number 60 globally. Fiji (88) and Tonga (100) are the others. Samoa, Federated States of Micronesia, Vanuatu and Kiribati make it into the “Medium Human Development” list at numbers 106, 124, 131 and 133, respectively, while Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands tied at 157 join mostly African nations in the “Low Human Development” list. Other island nations were not evaluated.

Three of the seven Pacific nations evaluated by the U.S. State Department for Trafficking in Persons are on Tier 2 Watch List or Tier 3—indicating countries that are not in compliance with minimum standards under the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000. This includes Papua New Guinea (Tier 3) and the Marshall Islands and Solomon Islands on Tier 2 Watch List.

Of the 14 Forum island countries, only five—Cook Islands, Fiji, Niue, Palau, and Tonga—are on track to implement a majority of the seven millennium development goals by next year, according to the Pacific Islands Forum. The other nine are managing to make progress on only one or two MDGs or, as with Papua New Guinea, are off-track on all seven.

Are these reports useful to Pacific island governments? Do they contain information that should be used by individual governments as a basis for improvement?

The short answer is, “yes.” Since performance audits tend to be few and far between, how islands are doing in development, business, trafficking, health and education are key public interest questions. Trying to outrank developed nations that are in the top 10 of various global studies is not a likely scenario for any island nation. But moving from the bottom half of a list to the top half shouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for many islands in our region.

One of the challenges is that while there are now reams of data available on country performance in every category—both from these international rankings and from domestic planning and statistics offices—political leaders in many island nations grew up in an era where there was little data available and decision-making based on performance indicators and information was virtually impossible. So decisions were made based on whatever set of assumptions leaders brought to the table.

Today, United Nations agencies and big donors in the region such as the United States, Australia and Japan are all aiming for performance, poverty reduction, and invigorating moribund economies heavily dependent on donor aid and government employment. Yet many of our decision makers discount the data being provided.

A classic example was the report for the Marshall Islands, “Juumemmej: Republic of the Marshall Islands Social and Economic Report 2005,” which was attacked by the country’s ruling party in parliament for bluntly talking about poverty and other social problems in the country. Despite the presentation of significant data to support its observations and recommendations, the report was largely discounted by political leaders.

Occasionally, however, governments use these performance reports to galvanize action. In the late 1990s, the Marshall Islands was placed on a global money laundering blacklist by the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Because of the significant harm this blacklisting had on banks and business and government operations in the country, an inter-agency group was organized to address the problem. The government brought together such entities as the Banking Commissioner, local banks, National Police, Attorney General’s office, Trust Company of the Marshall Islands (which manages a ship registry and an offshore corporate registry) to deal with the FATF report. It took about two years of concerted legal work, updating laws, putting various anti-money laundering mechanisms in place, training police to investigate financial crimes, engaging with the international community on the issue, and so on. It produced a positive result: the Marshall Islands was removed from the blacklist and has stayed off because of continued engagement.

During November, a newly established government Office of Commerce and Investment in the Marshall Islands called together government ministry and agency representatives and also local government mayors to review the World Bank’s Doing Business report 2015 on the Marshall Islands. There is no reason the Marshall Islands couldn’t have a better ranking in the World Bank’s Doing Business report. But government legislation, policies and actions are what determine the ranking. What businesses need—Pacific wide—is not more rhetoric from government about how it supports the private sector. They need government agencies and departments to work together to streamline and improve their operations to make life easier for businesses, and put the needs of the private sector, not their government offices, as the priority.

The Office of Commerce and Investment’s proactive response to the World Bank’s report card on doing business in the Marshall Islands is one of the only a handful of times over recent years that the government has taken steps to address this type of performance evaluation. Often, task forces have been established by government, research conducted, reports written, recommendations submitted. And then—nothing. The reports are simply ignored and time renders them moot.

No doubt this situation is hardly unique to the Marshall Islands. Whether proactive government agencies or those in the non-government sector can get the support at the political level to make legislative and policy changes needed to improve government services and performance only time will tell as the information and performance era is up against the thinking of many politicians who are not prone to taking action based on words in a report.

I’d love to be able to say that I’m overstating the case. I’d love to find out that the technologies and legal levers that are being proffered by the ITU and various other agencies were never used for anything other than good. I’d also love a pony.

I’ve written before about the fractious relationship between the ITU and the technical organisations that actually do run the internet. I’ve written about how Pacific island governments and societies can come to terms with surveillance and censorship. I’ve even talked about this push by the ITU, extending across the developing world, to drum up support for its vision of the internet as a fenced and orderly place. More to the point, I’ve already written about where it leads.

But just last week, at a conference discussing the protection of critical IT infrastructure, I watched a presenter describing the creation of a computer incident response team (in ITU jargon, a CIRT) based on a model adopted by some of the least free countries in the world. This was presented without apology or explanation.

Meanwhile, just across the grounds of the hotel where this presentation was taking place, another, much more well-attended workshop was taking place. It purported to address what is commonly called child online protection. The core premise of child online protection is that the internet is a scary place, and because the internet is technology-driven, we need more technology to stop the scary stuff from ever reaching our children.

I don’t want to sound completely dismissive of this premise; the internet does have some vile, repugnant content, and predators do use it to identify and pursue vulnerable children. But I cannot help but distrust the tools being proffered and indeed the motivation of the organisations driving it. And I cannot help but feel anger that our children are being used as proxies in this fight.

The tactics used are questionable, to say the least. The chimaera of online predators, porn and cyber-crime (whatever that is) is waved in front of people’s eyes, and then a mostly modest selection of options is presented. The more pious, caring members of our society then lead the charge to the most draconian possible response.

One typically outraged commenter from the PNG ICT community stated:

Looking at the bigger picture, why are we so called IT experts not doing our bit at work to filter, block, report porn sites? Why is it that NICTA [PNG’s telecommunications regulator] is not effective regulating ISP services to enforce such things like this? It isn’t hard nor an expensive exercise. Look at the learning levels, attitude of our kids these days! Read about all the sex related offences happening everyday in this country. BLOCK OFF all forms of filth through the internet would be the quickest and effective start.

In other words: This is not about the law; this is about our children. Ignore the conflation of nudity with sex offences.

A lecturer in computer science at the University of the South Pacific went further:

There can be a level of parental control that is used by the government. I hope that people are not so extreme when it comes to the term “Internet freedom” that they can tolerate websites that promote terrorism, give information of developing weapons at home, sells porn that involves children and so on. Any government would agree to ban these type of sites.

So the arc of internet freedom now bends toward extremism. It’s just plain depressing. And that’s before we even contemplate what he meant by ‘parental control used by the government’.

It beggars imagination to think that this result would have been unforeseen by those who are driving the global initiative.

As one of the greatest champions of freedom from another reactionary time once said, ‘The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.’

To be fair, not everyone is taken in. There are a number of more moderate voices out there, and senior members of some of our institutions understand the danger of making our networks subject to complete and constant surveillance.

But let’s be clear: that’s exactly what we’re discussing here. When we talk about ‘parental control’, we really mean surveillance and censorship. That’s how content filters work: In order to find anything objectionable, we must inspect everything. And by ‘we’, of course, I mean our police, government officials and, equally worrying, our ISPs and telecommunications companies. While I would like to live in a world where all of these players are above reproach, only one of them needs to succumb to temptation in order for this entire proposition to go pear-shaped.

Our instinctual desire to protect our children is being played upon to further global surveillance and censorship.

This may sound alarmist and, yes, extreme. But it is exactly what is being proposed. I challenge anyone to refute the basic premise that the very same tools that allow government officials and others to filter content also allow them to view every byte that crosses those same wires.

The most depressing part is, these forces are going to win. There’s no fighting a parent’s protectiveness. And it’s next to impossible these days to combat the concerted application of unreasoning resentment and opprobrium against the very principles that only a generation ago were worth fighting and dying for.

Just days ago, we witnessed the progress of truly appalling surveillance legislation through the Australian senate. While Glenn Lazarus stood to say that the internet ‘poses one of the greatest threats to our existence,’ his fellow senators passed a law that has been characterised as containing ‘arguably the most significant restraints on press freedom in this country outside of wartime.’

Defending free expression and association on the internet is increasingly becoming a mug’s game. Those of us who still uphold every individual’s sovereign right to be wrong on the internet are increasingly subject to accusations that we’re aiding and abetting terrorists, paedophiles and, heaven help us, spammers.

But before I’m consigned to the flames of digital perdition, allow me to say:

1)    I have found, after 20+ years of working on the internet, that There’s No App For That: parents are the best parental control. Technical substitutes for parental supervision are poor substitutes. I have yet to see a single technological service or application that even comes close to simply sitting in the same room as your child when they’re online.

2)    I prefer not to let other people’s parents control my children, thank you.

But who am I kidding? If the Snowden revelations weren’t enough to get people off their sofas and into the middle of the information carriageway calling for fundamental changes to the way we run our networks, what hope can one hoary old geek living in this digital backwater possibly have?

Still, every time someone says, ‘think of the children,’ I can’t help but reply, ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

Infographic summarising research findings 2011 [PDF 1.3MB]

Research findings report 2009 [PDF 1.8MB]

Research findings report 2008 [PDF 2.0MB]

This research presents findings from a three part series of studies on telecommunications use, benefits, and constraints in Vanuatu.

This series of studies undertaken by the Pacific Institute of Public Policy in 2008, 2009, and 2011 has helped illuminate the economic and social impacts of telecommunications market liberalisation. For those living in Vanuatu, many of these impacts are clear: prior to 2008, people in Vanuatu had limited access to phones, but now mobiles are a common household item. Since 2008, both the incumbent, Telecom Vanuatu Ltd (TVL) and the new provider, Digicel, have expanded services across the country, including to remote islands in the north and south. Modes of communication are changing, new business ventures are emerging, and mobile phones are becoming a part of everyday life. The Pacific Institute of Public Policy has been mapping these changes.

The 2011 study adds to findings from the 2008 and 2009 reports, not only by exploring the ongoing impacts of increasing telephone access, but also by investigating the constraints imposed by complementary infrastructure, and patterns of internet uptake. The study was extensive, including over 1,000 face-to-face household surveys, and nearly 100 in-depth focus groups and semi-structured interviews with community representatives and small businesses. Data was collected in 13 rural and three urban research sites across eight islands of Vanuatu over a three month (March and June 2011) period. The following is a summary of our key findings.

Phones are prevalent throughout Vanuatu…

Perhaps one of the most prominent and persistent themes emerging from the study results is that phones—in particular, mobile phones—have become a primary mode of communication across the country. The overwhelming majority of households had access to a mobile phone; four out of five survey respondents reported personally owning a mobile phone; and at the household level mobile phones appeared to be the most commonly owned electrical appliance. From 2008 to 2011, increasing numbers of households in both rural and urban areas obtained access to multiple (three or more) mobile phones.

…but in rural areas, their use is more limited

Despite these clear countrywide patterns, there were some interesting differences between urban and rural areas. For instance, although mobile phone penetration in rural areas is high, rural respondents reported using their phones less frequently than urban respondents. This may reflect limited service coverage, and perceived cost: more focus groups in rural areas expressed concern about the difficulty of obtaining a reliable service signal, and discussed the expense of using mobile phones. Although a number of respondents reported using both Digicel and TVL services in an attempt to maximise cost savings and coverage reliability, in several areas consumers still only have one choice of provider.

…which may be partly attributable to poor transportation and electricity services

In addition to coverage concerns, the usefulness of phones may also be limited by deficiencies in parallel infrastructure. Results from both the household survey and focus groups indicated that poor wharf services were a major inconvenience and source of inefficiency, limiting the potential gains made through improved communication by phone. In addition, few rural areas had grid-supplied electricity, and thus had to rely on solar cells, batteries, and diesel generators, which can be costly to set up and operate. In such areas, fewer residents were able to charge their mobile phone batteries at home, and ownership of other electrical appliances such as televisions and computers was very limited.

The benefits of phone use are still widely felt…

Nevertheless, as with previous years, respondents in 2011 reported a wide range of perceived benefits of increased access to mobile phones, including multiple commercial and financial benefits, connecting with social networks, and accessing key services and information. The greatest positive impacts from phones appeared to be in enabling more frequent contact with family and friends and increasing the speed of communication. Access to health care services and to increased social support was also seen to have improved somewhat as a result of increased access to phones, and, since 2008, increasing numbers of respondents have noted benefits in gaining access to specialised services. In contrast, more than a quarter of respondents felt that phones had not helped them at all in terms of improving communication with government departments.

…and are likely still to be fully realised in rural areas

Again, though, there were some interesting urban-rural differences in the results. Phones appear to have become more integrated in urban communities: nearly three quarters of urban respondents said they could not continue their current economic activities, or could only continue with difficulty, if they could no longer use mobile phones. In contrast, fewer rural respondents were currently so reliant on their phones, in several cases reporting that the loss of phone contact would make no difference to them. However, focus groups revealed that rural respondents were more likely than urban respondents to focus on improving telephone services as a community priority. This suggests that because mobile phone use is more recent and still constrained in rural areas, its benefits have yet to be fully realised (but people see its potential).

Some other forms of communication are diminishing in importance…

The rise of mobile phones appears to have been accompanied by the decline of other modes of communication. Use of fixed line phones was low across the country, and the availability of public phones in rural areas appears to have been declining, likely due to the costs of maintenance and the inconvenience of travel for rural communities. Looking back across the 2008, 2009 and 2011 studies, the use of letters and communication via local leaders has been steadily decreasing, as has the perceived importance of other such traditional communication forms.

…but direct face-to-face contact is still valued, and some social concerns about phones persist

Nevertheless, phones have not been a direct substitute for face-to-face interaction, which remained a preferred channel for many communication purposes. Furthermore, respondents expressed several concerns about the negative impacts of mobile phone use, particularly related to a breakdown in social relations and divergence from traditional behavioural norms. This suggests that face-to-face communication will remain important within communities, and that the greatest benefits of phones arise when they are used in constructive ways to improve connectivity with distant correspondents, rather than to break down close social connections.
Another concern that some respondents raised is that phones are costly. However, there was no evidence that people were substituting expenditure on essential items for expenditure on phones, and most respondents limited the amount they spent on phones to no more than 1,000vt per month—approximately 2% of the mean monthly income across respondents.

Internet use is still limited

In stark contrast to the data on phones, the majority of survey respondents did not have internet access—reflecting the absence of services in most areas. Those who did tended to use internet cafés or access the internet at their workplaces, and to a lesser extent through mobile phones and on home computers. Respondents perceived the internet to be important, especially for news and information, but did not view it as essential. Perceived cost, limited network access, and lack of experience with the technology appeared to be key barriers to increased usage.

Overall, these results suggest that mobile phone use is widespread throughout Vanuatu. Although people are enjoying greater connectivity, there are still some constraints on achieving further economic and social benefits.

This research was carried out in association with the Government of Vanuatu, Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Utilities with funding from the Australian Agency for International Development through its Vanuatu Governance for Growth Programme.