With not enough workers to pick the upcoming harvest, Australia faces potential food shortages, and its farmers face economic devastation
As Victoria’s Covid-19 outbreak threatens to spiral out of control and beyond its borders, Australia faces another pandemic-related crisis.
We are sailing into a food shortage and few are talking about it. This needs to change.
Continue reading...Covid-19-related developments throughout the Pacific Islands
The total number of Covid-19 cases across the Pacific stands at 314, with new cases reported this week in New Caledonia, Northern Mariana Islands and Guam.
New Zealand is under increasing pressure, both internally and from across the region, to consider Pacific countries as part of its proposed travel ‘bubble’, alongside, or even in place of, Australia. The foreign minister, Winston Peters, initially rejected including Pacific island nations, but later backtracked.
Continue reading...Pentecost Island, devastated by Cyclone Harold in April, has been left a silent shadow of its former self. But its people endure
Touching down on the island of Pentecost in Vanuatu, it takes hours to notice the silence. After a while it hits you: there’s no birdsong, no insects buzzing and chittering. There is no wind in the trees.
You don’t register the silence at first because your eyes are overwhelmed with the magnitude of the destruction. The eye of category 5 Cyclone Harold passed directly over the central and southern half of this remote and mountainous island on April 5.
Continue reading...The northern islands of the Pacific nation were hit by a category-5 cyclone on Monday, flattening buildings, cutting power and stripping trees
The once-lush forest cover of the island of Malo has been completely denuded. Nearly every tree lost major limbs. Many were snapped at the trunk. Even cyclone-adapted coconut trees were strewn about like matchsticks. Schools and homes were destroyed.
On Monday, the tiny Pacific island country of Vanuatu was rocked by Cyclone Harold, the second category-5 storm to hit the nation in five years. The cyclone, which formed off Solomon Islands and led to the deaths of 27 people who were swept off a ferry in rough seas, went on to flatten buildings and cause severe flooding in Fiji and Tonga. But it passed through the north of Vanuatu when it was at its strongest.
Continue reading...Tropical Cyclone Harold lashed the South Pacific island of Vanuatu , ripping off roofs and downing telecommunications, before moving towards Fiji and Tonga. The powerful cyclone made landfall on Monday in Sana province, an island north of Vanuatu's capital Port Vila, with winds as high as 235 kilometres an hour. Aerial videos showed buildings with missing roofs, with some flattened to the ground from the impact of the cyclone. The weather system weaken slightly as it moved towards Fiji but still brought high winds and flooding before moving towards Tonga
The Pacific nation of Vanuatu is one of the few places that is coronavirus-free, but efforts to stop its arrival have been hampered by a category five cyclone
On Sunday morning, 62 guests prepared to check out of an idyllic resort, surrounded by palm trees and overlooking a lagoon, in Vanuatu’s capital of Port Vila.
But instead of taxis waiting to take them to the airport, familiar faces were anxiously waiting to take their loved ones back home.
Continue reading...Pacific nation lashed by heavy rain, flash flooding and ‘phenomenal seas’
A category five cyclone has made landfall on the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, causing damage across large parts of the country, as it tries to prepare for the coronavirus outbreak.
Cyclone Harold made landfall on the north and west of the country on Monday, after spending Sunday sitting off the country’s west coast, gathering strength.
Continue reading...A country with fractured and shifting political alliances, Vanuatu heads to the polls at a crucial moment in its history
In the coffee shops and kava bars of Vanuatu’s capital of Port Vila, there are two subjects that dominate conversation: Covid-19 and this week’s general elections, which will be held on Thursday.
Continue reading...In Vanuatu, where cyclones regularly interrupt trade, we are watching the west’s collective panic with bemusement
I’ve lived in the south Pacific island nation of Vanuatu for 16 years. Tropical weather regularly interrupts trade. Even when they’re hundreds of kilometres away, cyclones wreak havoc on shipping. Isolation and deprivation define our lives. We know better than most how to cope.
So imagine our bemusement when we see ranks of empty shelves in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, denuded by people who pretty clearly have never dealt with a shortage before.
Continue reading...Dan McGarry of the Daily Post told at Brisbane airport the Vanuatu immigration service had barred him from flying back to the island country
The media director of a Vanuatu newspaper whose visa renewal was refused this month has been barred from flying home to Vanuatu from Brisbane with his partner.
Dan McGarry, who has lived in Vanuatu for 16 years, applied to have his work permit renewed earlier this year but it was rejected. McGarry believes his visa was refused due to articles he had published about China’s influence in Vanuatu.
Continue reading...Vanuatu’s Daily Post has always held the government to account and will continue to do so, with or without me as editor
On Thursday, the Vanuatu government issued instructions that after 16 years living here and, despite having a Ni Vanuatu spouse and children, I will have to leave the country.
As the media director and publisher of Vanuatu’s only daily newspaper, a newspaper that has repeatedly held the government uncomfortably to account, I believe the government refused my application to renew my work visa to silence me and warn other journalists in the country not to speak out.
Continue reading...Dan McGarry believes visa was rejected because of his paper’s critical coverage of government
The Vanuatu government has refused to renew the work permit of its largest newspaper’s long-serving director, Dan McGarry, in what he said was a “straight up attack on the media”.
After 16 years in Vanuatu, McGarry’s application to renew his work permit was refused on Thursday, meaning that McGarry, whose spouse and children are from the country, will have to leave Vanuatu.
Continue reading...Seasoned sailors were picked up after their boat sank off the coast of New Caledonia
Three sailors who were rescued by a cruise ship when their yacht went down in the Pacific Ocean say they are relieved to have made it back to dry land.
Seasoned Newcastle sailors Chris Doran, his cousin Kevin Doran and Ben Johnson, from Vanuatu, had spent months in the South Pacific and were headed back to Queensland when their boat, Liberty, struck a discarded mooring line about 5.30am on Thursday and began to sink.
Continue reading...Fish play a big role in the lives of people in Melanesia; coastal fisheries are not just a source of food and income, they are also central to cultural identity. The Wan Smolbag Theatre Company, from Vanuatu, travels to small fishing villages and performs a play called Twist mo Spin, which tells villagers about the challenges fisheries face across the region and about sustainable fishing
Scott Morrison should bring strong climate commitments to next year’s forum to avoid a repeat of this year’s summit
Last week at the close of the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu I described the leaders’ discussions as frank and fierce. It is now well-known that the leaders debated the text of the Kainaki II Declaration for Urgent Climate Change Action Now for many hours. I do not want to comment on the tone of the debate, as many others have done that already.
Instead, as incoming Pacific Islands Forum chair, Vanuatu has a message for Australia: we ask that Australia prepares well ahead of the next forum meeting in 2020 and comes to the table ready to make real, tangible commitments on climate change.
Continue reading...Climate crisis is more than a meeting agenda item in a host country that could be left uninhabitable by rising sea levels
As the leaders of Pacific countries step off their planes at Funafuti airport this week for the Pacific Islands Forum, they are being met by the children of Tuvalu, who sit submerged in water, in a moat built around the model of an island, singing: “Save Tuvalu, save the world.”
The welcome sets the tone for a Pacific Islands Forum meeting that will not only have climate change at the top of the agenda – as it has been for many years – but is being hosted by a country that the UN says is one of the most vulnerable to rising sea levels, which could render it uninhabitable in the coming century.
Continue reading...The cost of keeping China out of the region is too great, we must build forces that could counter its operations instead
Let’s be honest: Australians have never had much time for our South Pacific neighbours.
The island nations that lie to our north and north-east, stretching from Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands to Vanuatu, Fiji and beyond, may be close to us geographically, but we have not found them especially interesting, important or profitable.
Continue reading...Nation suffering disproportionately from climate emergency to phase in ban, believed to be world first, by December
It is but a tiny speck in the Pacific Ocean, but the island state of Vanuatu is leading the global fight against plastic waste. The nation, which has already introduced one of the toughest single-use plastic bans in the world, is believed to be the first to propose a ban on disposable nappies, to be phased in at the end of this year.
At a meeting in London this week, chaired by Patricia Scotland, the secretary general of the Commonwealth, Vanuatu was hailed as a “champion” nation, one of 12 who are forging ahead in tackling ocean and climate emergency challenges.
Continue reading...The violent Manaro Voui volcano forced the people of Vanuatu’s Ambae island to flee their home numerous times over the last year. After living in makeshift camps on surrounding islands, the displaced residents are now anxious to return to their ash-covered homes, even if the danger has not yet passed
Continue reading...First-time actor, who starred in Oscar-nominated Australian-Vanuatu film, remembered as a ‘gentle soul’ and ‘deep family man’
Mungau Dain, who starred in the Oscar-nominated Australian-Vanuatu film Tanna – his first acting role – has died in Port Vila following an untreated infection in his leg.
The film’s co-directors, Bentley Dean and Martin Butler, and script editor Janita Suter, spoke to Guardian Australia after conversations with people on the island about Dain’s death.
Continue reading...