Correspondent's Notebook

Playing the blame game

21 August 2009

Radio Australia’s Bruce Hill discusses what he says he thinks is becoming a recurring pattern among the leaders of the Pacific.

In my seventeen years of covering the Pacific, I’ve noticed there are some things that keep happening again and again.

Cyclones, coups in Fiji, votes of no-confidence, fishermen getting lost, drifting, and getting found a month later a thousand miles from where they started.

Some days it can feel like the movie “Groundhog Day”, in which a character is forced to relive the same day over and over and over.

And one of the recurring patterns I’ve noticed is something of a favourite among Pacific leaders – blaming Australia and New Zealand if something has gone wrong.

It’s become almost a reflex action nowadays when something isn’t going well for a Pacific government for its politicians to collectively shrug their shoulders and say “Well there’s not much we can do about this, it’s all the fault of Wellington, or Canberra, or sometimes Washington, occasionally London, or in the case of the French colonies of course, their problems are all caused by decisions reached in Paris.

It’s a comforting and very human response to want to blame someone else for our problems, usually someone with more power or influence, someone we might be dependent on but might resent because of that very dependence.

Not making enough money from exports? It’s because of PACER and PICTA and Australian and New Zealand pressure for free trade.

Sea water inundating coastal areas? Climate change caused entirely by western nations.

Remittances starting to slow down? Australia and New Zealand aren’t allowing enough Pacific islanders into their countries, probably because of racism.

Interestingly, I’ve witnessed accusations of racism hurled at Australia and New Zealand from politicians in more than one Pacific nation who are well known to have been involved in attacks on Chinese and Indian owned businesses.

And I well remember one Pacific MP berating a New Zealand diplomat over that country’s assumed racism, only to be coolly informed that the diplomat he was speaking to was Maori, and his wife was white, and frankly he’d be obliged if the speaker would go to Auckland and walk around what is one of the most multi-racial cities on the planet with his eyes open and he’d probably see a few things that might challenge his patronising and stereotypical ideas.

See? That sort of accusation can go in both directions.

It’s easy and tempting, when confronted with things we may not like, to blame someone else.

It means that you don’t have to face it yourself – no responsibility means no action is required.

Someone else caused it, someone else can fix it.

And that can lead to a dangerous kind of intellectual dependency.

Climate change is a case in point.

There’s a debate over global warming and sea level rise, but as far as most Pacific nations are concerned, whatever is happening to their coastline is sea level rise caused by western developed nations, and so countries like Australia and New Zealand can either wave a magic wand and fix it, or give them citizenship and let them flee rising sea levels for the bright lights of Auckland or Sydney.

But what if it isn’t caused by global warming, but more mundane things, like erosion caused by dredging,  coral sand compacting, what if the salinity in the water table is caused by increased populations using up more fresh water than ever before?

What if some of these challenges in fact are solvable, or at least can be adapted to with some local action?

The unfortunate thing is that if this “somebody else’s problem” attitude persists, everything becomes the responsibility of Wellington and Canberra.

That sort of dependency is the very opposite of real independence.

If you’d like to have your say on this issue, you can go to our home page on the internet, radioaustralia.net.au and send us an e-mail.

If you didn’t like what I’ve said, you can blame me.