I’ve just returned from a week in Fiji.

Normally that wouldn’t be a particularly controversial sentence. Thousands of people visit Fiji every year; it’s a major tourist hub.

But in this case there was a little something extra to the trip, as Fiji has a coup-installed government which has imposed direct censorship on the media.

Any journalist, regardless of background, is going to feel a bit odd visiting a country where there are military censors stationed in every newsroom.

Here at Radio Australia, we function in a modern western democratic system in which censorship of the media is seem as a very dramatic, last-ditch kind of thing, to be used only in fairly grave emergencies, and subject to plenty of legal oversight.

In peacetime, I can’t remember the last time it was ever imposed.

And so journalists in such a system get very used to it, and start to act as if media freedom is the default state for the world.

Which means they’re often deeply shocked to find that not everyone shares that perception.

I was in Fiji partly to have a bit of a break, but also to give a few guest lectures at the University of the South Pacific’s school of journalism.

Speaking with those idealistic young students, who still want to be reporters despite living in a country where all news must first be checked by an army officer before being allowed to be printed or broadcast, was a humbling experience.

The point I made to them was precisely the same one I made to the interim Attorney-General, and it’s a utilitarian rather than an idealistic one.

It’s that censorship doesn’t work.

I didn’t argue about morality, or the public’s right to know, or anything like that. I just tried to look at the question from the point of view of what works best for as many people as possible.

And censorship, of any kind, never works in the long run – not for the government which imposes it, and not for the society, either.

The media is like your body’s nervous system.

If you kick a stone with your foot, and stub your toe, the nervous systems lets your brain know by passing on the following vital information: “Ow, my big toe hurts!”

Sure, it hurts. Pain isn’t pleasant. It’s not supposed to be. Pain gets your immediate attention, it tells you you have a problem that needs to be urgently addressed.

There are people who do not suffer pain. Far from being idyllic, such people live a life of constant anxiety, having to check their bodies for damage caused by inadvertently sitting on something sharp, burning themselves or otherwise harming their body while remaining pain-free and therefore blissfully unaware that they were damaging themselves.

That’s what the media does. It lets society know when something is wrong. Sure, it’s not comfortable for governments to hear that something’s not right, painful even.

But by censoring the news, by simply removing its ability to inflict some pain, any government that does so is simply choosing to ignore warning signals that things may be going wrong.

I came across a case in point, which a Fiji journalist told me about.

A man’s body was found floating in a river.

He had multiple stab wounds in his back, which the Police officer in charge of the case said looked like coming from a cane knife. He told the reporter at the scene that it looked like murder, and he wanted to appeal to the public for information about the dead man, in the hope that someone might know something which could help police solve the case.

But back in the newsroom, the censor only allowed a few facts to be published, and excluded any reference to the stab wounds, the police assertion that they were treating it as a murder, and the appeal to the public for information.

The reason given was that the government didn’t want it give people the impression that there were lots of murders in Fiji!

So here’s a case in which censorship might temporarily and I think falsely, reassure the government and some people, that everything is fine simply because they don’t read bad things in the newspaper.

But it’s a false reassurance.

Ultimately, censorship doesn’t work because it can’t work, especially in small island states where rumours spread like lightning.

Any government which introduces censorship should realise that.

If they choose not to deal with reality, reality will eventually deal with them.

Last weekend the tsunami warning sirens and church bells rang out again following the huge 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile that sparked a tsunami warning right around the Pacific.

Samoa has fairly well practised evacuation drills in place and nobody these days treats them as a joke or an annoying disturbance to routine.

In the event, the wave that reached Samoa from the Chilean earthquake was only a metre or two high and did no damage. The tsunami in late September was a totally different matter. It killed 143 people in Samoa. The earthquake that set off that tsunami was the second strongest in the world in the past year. It measured 8.1 on the Richter Scale – only surpassed by the one in Chile. It was significantly more powerful than the earthquake that hit Haiti in January.

Five months on, there are still a number of wrecked buildings to be seen down at beach level on the south coast of Upolu but most of the debris has been removed and there’s a good deal of rebuilding going on.

One of the more plucky efforts is the Taufua Beach Fales on a delightful stretch of beach near Lolamanu village. Lolamanu was one of the hardest hit villages – 43 people died there.

Sitting in her rebuilt restaurant, Tai Taufua looked out over the new Beach huts or Fales that have already started to accommodate tourists and told me how she’d attempted to put her father on her back and carry him to safety but never had time. 14 members of her extended family were killed including her baby granddaughter. She said the only thing they could do now was rebuild and gain strength from that.

The family’s home is now a little inland – up on a plateau next to the mass grave where they buried the 14 who did not survive. A lot of other people from Lolamanu have moved inland as well. Esmay Ah Leong Seuala, a doctor, from Lolamanu let me go with her to where her family is rebuilding. It’s high up with a glorious view.

“It wasn’t just our house it was the whole extended family,” she said. “All the houses completely disappeared within seconds really.

“Tsunami’s still there. The thought of it is still there. But I think people have pretty much moved on, rebuilding, starting new lives. Yeah. People have picked up.”

That determination to start again is something I came across again and again in Samoa.

Joe Annendale, a Samoan of chiefly rank, owns the the Sinale Reef Resort and Spa which was badly smashed up by the tsunami. His resort is still closed but he has survived a deep personal tragedy. He tried to escape from the tsunami in his car with his wife, her ailing mother and her mother’s nurse but the waves caught them and tumbled their car over and over.,

“The nurse fell out early and my wife, Tui, she fell out as well,” he said.

“And she didn’t make it because the waves must have picked her up and swept her along and, of course, we had to bring her down from on top of a cluster of trees about 300 metres up, upland, and, yeah, it was tragic because she was trapped up there and, of course, by the time we found her it was all too late.”

But Joe Annendale is rebuilding and hoping to open for business again in April. I asked him about this resolution I’d found amongst so many Samoans to get on with life despite what had happened.

“I think much of that has to do with the amount of support that we’ve had from overseas,” he said.

“The international community, Sean, has been just overwhelming. Family, friends, acquaintances. For us here at the hotel, former guests, we’ve just been inundated with messages. Some have sent money. Ah. Gosh, if that doesn’t spur you on, what will? What else is there?”

Samoa is definitely on the rebound – picking itself up from the tsunami disaster.

In August last year the Princess Ashika sank, taking over 70 lives, most of them women and children. It is the biggest maritime tragedy in Tonga’s history. The ferry went down less than six weeks after it had been bought from Fiji, and the Royal Commission was given the task of finding out what happened and why, also why so many lives were lost, who bears responsibility, and what can be done to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

It’s not the first Royal Commission in Tonga, but it’s first in memory held in public, and as part of that, the proceedings from each day’s hearings have appeared online.

Since late October when those hearings started, just about every day for me has begun by reading up to 190 pages of transcript from the day before. The evidence in those transcripts points to MV Princess Ashika being a disaster waiting to happen. In them you can read the words of maintenance crews who spent hours welding steel plate over the rusted and worn hull of the Princess Ashika after the five successful trips it did make, and descriptions of how on those trips the cargo hold would be submerged in up to a third of a metre of water.

Laid out is the evidence of maritime industry experts who warned against the purchase, and the words of the former Managing Director of the ferry’s operator, the Shipping Corporation of Polynesia, John Jonesse, who inspected it and decided to buy it, despite admitting he had no expertise in this area. He’s since been arrested and charged.

You can read the words from other executives, and board members of the Shipping Corporation, and bureaucrats and minister’s, including the Prime Minister, of the corporation’s owner, the Government of Tonga, trying to explain why the ferry was bought, how it was certified safe, while at the same time explaining why they personally are not responsible.

Most harrowing though is the testimony of those who survived, both crew and passengers, as they describe the scene onboard as the Princess Ashika went down. It is fair to say this Royal Commission has been very “un-Tongan” in its conduct. An aspect of Pacific culture is an acceptance and at times unquestioning obedience of authority.

An example of this is part of the testimony of the captain of the Princess Ashika, Viliami Tuputupu. Captain Tuputupu told the Royal Commission he knew from the first day he went on board the ferry it was unseaworthy. Why then, he was asked, when the law made it clear that such knowledge meant he should have refused to take it to sea, did he continue to do so? His response, he was ordered to. “If they say ’stop’, I stop, and if they say ’sail’, I must sail.” Like John Jonesse, Captain Tuputupu has also been charged over his actions.

Leading the inquiry as Counsel Assisting has been Australian Barrister Manuel Varitimos. More than once during the Royal Commission’s hearings high profile Tongan witnesses made it clear they didn’t want to answer the questions being put to them. But that disdain has not deterred Counsel Assisting Varitimos, who has not deferred to rank or position to the obvious annoyances of the minister, executive, or Law Lord trying to block his attempts.

At one stage during his testimony Tongan Prime Minister Doctor Fred Sevele refused to answer questions. Just how unhappy he was became clear at the end of his time before the commission, when Dr Sevele made a statement in his own defence. He ended with this message for Mr Varitimos. “You may be an excellent counsel in Australia, but when you are in the Kingdom of Tonga, please try to understand our constitution and show some respect for our monarch, for our government, our people and our culture.” A statement which led to the Prime Minister’s censure by the Commission’s Chairman Justice Warwick Andrew.

Two people have already been arrested and charged, in relation to the disaster. And it’s likely over the next few weeks, more arrests will be made. But at the end of March the Royal Commission will table its report, and recommendations, and the government of Tonga will have to decide which recommendations it will adopt. It will do so with the knowledge that Tongans have been following the commission’s proceedings and that not everyone on the government’s payroll or in ministerial office has come out looking good.

This is one report that will be hard to put on the shelf and be ignored.

This is Campbell Cooney, Radio Australia’s Pacific correspondent, and you’ve been listing to Correspondent’s Notebook.

When he was elevated by the Australian people in 2007 to lead the country, there was, among believers, a lot of hope.

Excessive expectations are always a problem. As it has been with Barack Obama, so it has been with Kevin Rudd, adjusted for scale of course.

On green issues, signing the Kyoto protocol was easy. Legislating domestically to re-engineer the entire Australian economy away from carbon-intensive industries was more difficult and it’s now on the legislative backburner. In part, it’s because of conflict in the Parliament that’s prevented the laws from passing. But the Prime Minister has conceded with his new, suddenly clear rhetoric, that he failed to communicate clearly to ordinary Australians, who still want action but whose interest has waned.

On the indigenous agenda, Kevin Rudd’s emotional apology has been overshadowed by stories of failure to deliver housing and complaints that Rudd’s minister and bureaucrats don’t listen.

Kevin Rudd also promised he’d fix the country’s health system, characteristically promising no less than a federal takeover of state responsibilities if the states refused to do what he wanted. But that hasn’t materialised.

The government’s workplace relations changes, a huge winner at the election, face probably predictable implementation issues but also concerns about creeping inflexibility for employers and evidence they’ll keep some industrious school students out of their part time jobs.

On education, the reform agenda has been overshadowed by massive spending on buildings – money shovelled into the economy as part of the stimulus response to stave off the worst effects flowing from the global financial crisis.

And for a time, Kevin Rudd has sailed over the top of the other complexities and embarrassments on the basis that the government’s economic response did save the nation from a fate known as recession.

But even that hasn’t saved him from the headline nightmare of foil ceiling insulation.

One of its economic stimulus programs – and a green one as well – was a plan to insulate two million Australian homes, costing two-and-a-half Billion Australian dollars. But it was rushed, ill thought-through and an invitation to unscrupulous installers. Four deaths have been linked to the program, particularly connected to foil insulation put in older houses, and 87 house fires have followed weeks of mounting criticism of the program. Now the program’s been scrapped altogether and the former pop-star environment minister Peter Garrett teeters on the edge of his second career.

So its not just a public relations problem the Rudd government has. It also stands accused by its opponents of failing to properly administer complex and expensive public policy initiatives.

This is largely of the government’s own doing. Mr Rudd has largely eschewed mature advice in his ranks, he’s employed inexperienced ministers and not changed them when their inexperience showed.

The trend against Kevin Rudd’s government is seen in a slight but continuing fall in its opinion poll rating. They haven’t lost yet. But to be sure, the Opposition’s gamble last year to install Tony Abbott as leader has helped. He’s had clear, targeted messages about Rudd policies. He’s also still in a honeymoon period with voters and is so far getting away with slip-ups and rogue elements in his own ranks. Indeed Mr Abbott can himself tend to the rogue. He went dangerously close to blaming the environment minister for the insulation deaths, before stepping back. On the lighter side, he’s also said he’s confident the only Christian commandment he hasn’t broken is the one against killing.

And that’s all for this week. You can find Correspondents Notebook on the web at www.radioaustralia.net.au and we’ll be back next week.