Correspondent's Notebook

Serious agendas

10 August 2009

Climate change, Fiji and free trade dominated last week’s Pacific Islands Forum meeting in the Australian city of Cairns.

Radio Australia’s correspondent Linda Mottram reflects on a summit that was unusually serious.

Last week in the tropical northeast of Australia, in Cairns, where Kevin Rudd, Australia’s Prime Minister, assumed the chair of the Pacific Islands Forum. And to deal with the frivolous first, he’s chosen perhaps the least silly of the traditional silly shirts for the annual meeting of forum leaders. For the record, the shirts are baby blue chambray: plain, no risky tropical patterns for Mr Rudd and made by Mr Rudd’s favourite manufacturer of Australian rural wear. Perhaps unfairly, for they are durable shirts I can attest, they’ve drawn some unflattering reflections on Mr Rudd’s character.

That aside, the leaders minus military-run Fiji which remains suspended until it reinstates democracy have discussed perhaps the weightiest agenda of their 40 meetings to date.

Climate change has dominated. It threatens the very existence of some low lying Pacific states right now, experts say states that are the least to blame but which have the smallest of voices in the clamour to influence the world’s response. Pacific leaders have repeatedly demanded big greenhouse gas emissions cuts in response – 45 per cent by the year 2020 has been their consistent position.

As it turns out, the Forum communique calls for something less, 50 per cent by 2050. One Pacific journalist asked Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Edward Natapei if he was happy being forced to side with Australia and New Zealand on the issue, rather than carrying the Pacific’s own view to the world. What’s agreed is agreed, Mr Natapei says.

Then there’s the global economic crisis, once again not of the Pacific’s making but likely to deliver a savage battering to these most vulnerable states. Pacific states say there’s money there, but they just can’t get to it. The Foreign secretary of Kiribati, Tessa Lambourne says, countries like hers just don’t have enough people to even begin the complex processes of applying for the financial help that’s been put on the table by well-meaning and well-funded institutions, distant in places like Washington. The Forum’s pledges to find ways of untangling what Kevin Rudd calls the spaghetti bowl of assistance of all types.

Tessa Lambourne was in fact a source of inspiration at this Forum. Standing in for her Prime Minister, she was the only woman on the podium, surrounded by fourteen men. I hasten to add she is no mere symbol. She is a competent and articulate. But in the Pacific, gender issues so often remain at the level of the symbolic, if that. So perhaps the fact that for the first time a forum communique has included a statement about gender-based violence should be seen as some kind of progress.

There was also the debate about a free trade agreement for the Pacific, the contentious PACER-Plus. Kevin Rudd says the Pacific leaders are “on the bus” with that one, though he concedes it’s not quite clear where that bus is going.

What may remain in some minds for longest about this forum though is it’s decidedly un-Pacific flavour, bogged down as it has been in surly, inflexible security, and rigidly compartmentalised arrangements for the accredited participants.

Pacific Islands Forum meetings are typically casual. This was most certainly not, with many journalists, including Radio Australia, despite being accredited, finding themselves prevented from completing interviews if they weren’t officially approved and properly chaperoned. Kevin Rudd claims the Pacific Way prevailed. Edward Natapei says when Vanuatu hosts the next forum leaders meeting, it will endeavour to return to the more informal approach, raising a question about Mr Rudd’s interpretation of the Pacific way.

And it’s not just Mr Rudd. One Australian aid official marvelled as I regaled her with tales of the informality of forums past, a style where all participants understand they need each other and fairly freely intermingle, where possible, messy but arguably very democratic. But the aid official looked puzzled, and asked, how would we facilitate that.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that under that admittedly idealised scenario, she wouldn’t be needed.