Hamish McDonald
SYDNEY: A former junior minister for Pacific island affairs has called on Canberra to engage again with Fiji's military regime to avoid an irreversible slide into poverty and authoritarian rule.
Duncan Kerr, who was Kevin Rudd's parliamentary under-secretary for the Pacific before retiring from politics at the recent election, said Canberra's policy of isolating the Fiji regime was unsustainable.
Australia should join the US and other powers in ''strategic re-engagement''. ''…Pursuing the status quo without a strategic engagement is not going to be productive of anything except the slow decline into poverty of the Fijian people, the possibility of our regional influence being diminished, and our effectiveness in the eyes of the international community slowly corroded as people walk away from positions we have articulated,'' Mr Kerr said.
The former Labor MP from Tasmania, now a senior barrister in Hobart, told a symposium at the Lowy Institute in Sydney that time was running out to hold the coup-installed Prime Minister, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, to his promise of elections in 2014, and achieve the ''best democratic and stable government as possible in the circumstances''.
''The longer a military regime continues and becomes entrenched, the harder it will be for a single person to control the outcome,'' Mr Kerr said.
''If that is the case, there is no certainty that those with an interest in restoring democracy would be in the ascendant. There may be some merit in seeing Bainimarama not only as the key to the problem but also, in the short term, as one of the few people who can command the military to return to their barracks.''
Mr Kerr suggested a drive to help Fiji overcome its emerging economic crisis, and, on the political side, a lifting of sanctions to reward progress towards elections. ''We don't have to do everything at once,'' he said. ''For example, within the military I would think there'd be a huge demand for exercises, training, officer schools and the like.''
The situation in Fiji was still ''recoverable'' from the turmoil of the past decade, and Australia's historical and economic links are still robust enough to help. ''But there must be a tipping point at some stage and it's very difficult to know except in retrospect when that tipping point is reached,'' he said.
The regime is on shaky economic foundations. Biman Prasad, an economist at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, told the forum the sugar industry, on which 200,000 of Fiji's 875,000 people depend, faced collapse; the government would confront a massive leap in its foreign debt servicing next year, and the pension fund was being drained.
Professor Prasad said the erosion of governance was damaging the economy. He urged the government to lift its state of emergency and drop media censorship as measures to restore economic confidence. - Sydney Morning Herald/Pacific Media Watch
Article: Strategic re-engagement with regime could be the key to saving Fiji
Pacific Media Watch
