Category Archives: South Pacific

Vanuatu police crack down with arrests over ‘slander’ of MPs accused of breaking Covid lockdown

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At least four people have been arrested and face charges of cyber stalking, cyber slander and cyber libel for Facebook comments

A police crackdown in Vanuatu that has seen people arrested for allegedly posting comments on social media speculating politicians were responsible for the country’s current Covid outbreak has raised serious concerns about freedom of speech in the Pacific country.

At least four people on two separate islands have been arrested as part of a major investigation by Vanuatu’s Serious Crime Unit in the last few weeks, including a factory worker, a printer, a business owner, and a Facebook page moderator. They face charges of cyber stalking, cyber slander, and cyber libel and face up to three years in prison and fines of up to three million Vatu (US$25,838).

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Vanuatu’s push for legal protection from climate change wins crucial support

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1,500 civil society groups from 130 countries back Vanuatu’s move to seek protection from the international court of justice

Vanuatu’s push for the international court of justice to protect vulnerable nations from climate change has received the backing of 1,500 civil society organisations from more than 130 countries, as it heads toward a crucial vote at the UN General Assembly later this year.

In 2021 Vanuatu announced its intention to seek an advisory opinion by the international court of justice on the rights of present and future generations to be protected from climate change.

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New Zealand foreign minister blames ‘relationship failure’ for China-Solomons security deal

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Nanaia Mahuta confirms ‘unwelcome and unnecessary’ deal came as a surprise to New Zealand and Australia, saying the Solomons must provide transparency

The shock over China’s security deal with Solomon Islands is evidence of “a relationship failure” , New Zealand’s foreign affairs minister has said, confirming that the pact took New Zealand, Australia and other Pacific nations completely by surprise.

The deal marks Beijing’s first known bilateral security agreement in the Pacific. The text of the final deal is secret, but a draft leaked on social media in March granted Chinese military and police significant access to the country, allowing China to “make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands”.

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Solomon Islands-China pact is worst policy failure in Pacific since 1945, Labor says

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Penny Wong accuses Coalition of mishandling situation, raising concerns of a potential Chinese military presence in South Pacific

Labor has lashed the Coalition in the wake of the newly signed security agreement between China and Solomon Islands, branding it “the worst Australian foreign policy blunder in the Pacific” in decades.

The Coalition government sounded the alarm over the deal, arguing the pact has been negotiated in secret and could “undermine stability in our region”. The foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, and the minister for the Pacific, Zed Seselja, said they were “deeply disappointed” by the deal, and would “seek further clarity on the terms of the agreement, and its consequences for the Pacific region”.

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Australia live news update: Novak Djokovic federal court decision expected today; ‘difficult three weeks’ ahead for NSW amid Covid surge

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Government argues Serbian tennis star has become ‘icon’ for anti-vax groups as federal court adjourns; Victoria records 13 Covid-19 deaths and 28,128 new cases; Perrottet warns of ‘difficult three weeks’ as NSW records 20 deaths and 34,660 new cases; Queensland records three deaths and 17,445 new cases; ACT records two deaths and 1,316 cases. Follow all the day’s news here

In further Australian Covid news, the Morrison government has announced $24m in new funding to widen the use of telehealth for GPs and other specialists. The funding is a direct reaction to the infection rate from the Omicron outbreak. AAP reports:

The $24m will also cover the continued supply of personal protective equipment, such as masks, respirators, face shields and gowns for face-to-face consultations including patients that have tested positive through a rapid antigen test.

The latter aligns with national cabinet’s January 5 decision that RAT tests no longer need to be confirmed by a PCR test.

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I had death threats and my tires slashed for my reporting. Many journalists in the Pacific face huge dangers | Joyce McClure

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Freedom of the press might be included in some constitutions of Pacific countries, but it often only works in theory

I spent five years as the lone journalist on the remote Pacific island of Yap. During that time I was harassed, spat at, threatened with assassination and warned that I was being followed. The tyres on my car were slashed late one night.

There was also pressure on the political level. The chiefs of the traditional Council of Pilung (COP) asked the state legislature to throw me out of the country as a “persona non grata” claiming that my journalism “may be disruptive to the state environment and/or to the safety and security of the state”.

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How are Australia’s neighbours faring in the Covid pandemic?

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Vaccination rates are rising in much of south-east Asia and the Pacific after recent outbreaks, but some of the largest countries are falling behind

While Australians have focused on the Covid waves in Sydney and Melbourne, many of Australia’s neighbours have recently experienced their largest outbreaks so far. This includes Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu and even Singapore.

Singapore surpassed Australia’s vaccination target weeks ago, but was now seeing more than a thousand cases a day. Fiji recently had one of the highest rates of Covid cases per capita – peaking at 1,850 cases in the middle of July. But the nation of 889,000 was now regularly administering more than 10,000 new vaccinations a day.

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Even as New Zealand battles Covid, trust in government bucks global trend

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With a nationwide lockdown and some of the world’s strictest restrictions, Jacinda Ardern is counting on her people’s goodwill again

In locked-down New Zealand, life orbits around the 1pm briefing. As the home-bound nation digests its lunch, the director general of health, Ashley Bloomfield – frequently alongside prime minister Jacinda Ardern – takes the stage behind a socially distanced podium and updates the country.

In the midst of a Covid outbreak, those briefings occur almost every weekday. They are so clockwork-regular, so predictable in their essential structure, that certain sentences became memes: “Kia ora koutou katoa. There are X cases of Covid-19 in the community,” each begins. After the last outbreak, media outlet The Spinoff spliced together Bloomfield saying it 44 times.

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Citizenship for sale: fugitives, politicians and disgraced businesspeople buying Vanuatu passports

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Revealed: more than 2,000 people, including individuals sought by police, have purchased passports, and with them visa-free access to the EU and UK

A controversial “golden passports” scheme run by the Pacific nation of Vanuatu saw more than 2,000 people, including a slew of disgraced businesspeople and individuals sought by police in countries all over the world, purchase citizenship in 2020 – and with it visa-free access to the EU and UK, the Guardian can reveal.

Among those granted citizenship through the country’s development support program were a Syrian businessman with US sanctions against his businesses, a suspected North Korean politician, an Italian businessman accused of extorting the Vatican, a former member of a notorious Australian motorcycle gang, and South African brothers accused of a $3.6bn cryptocurrency heist.

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Precarious moment: Vanuatu court to rule on prime minister’s fate

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Verdict on Bob Loughman’s parliamentary boycott is uncharted political territory for the Pacific island nation

Next week Vanuatu’s court of appeal will sit to decide the political fate of the prime minister, Bob Loughman, and 18 other MPs. The supreme court ruled in June that they had vacated their seats after a three-day boycott of parliament by the government side.

Even in a country accustomed to political intrigue and surprise, it is a precarious moment. So how did we get here, who are the key players and what might happen next?

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Why the world’s most fertile fishing ground is facing a ‘unique and dire’ threat

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China’s Pacific fishing fleet has grown by 500% since 2012 and is taking huge quantities of tuna

  • Read more of our Pacific Plunder series here

Since long before the steel-hulled fishing boats from foreign countries arrived in the South Pacific its people have had their own systems for sharing the ocean’s catches.

In the New Zealand colony of Tokelau, in the middle of the region, the 1,400 people living on its three atolls practise a system called inati, which ensures every household gets fish.

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Samoa’s democracy in crisis

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For nearly two months, the Polynesian island nation of Samoa has been in the grips of a political crisis after one of the most dramatic elections in the country’s history. After a supreme court intervention, a parliamentary lockout and a swearing-in ceremony unlike any other, two groups continue to claim they are the legitimate government of Samoa. Reporter Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson explains what led to this crisis, and the dire implications of this for the people of Samoa

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Closed borders and Cyclone Harald showed that locals are the best first responders in a disaster | Jill Aru

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When the storm hit Vanuatu last year, the lack of international support gave local aid workers a chance to be heard

If someone had told me this time last year that Vanuatu was about to weather one of the worst cyclones of our recent history with our borders closed, I may not have believed you.

After Cyclone Pam in 2015, hundreds of aid workers rushed in from overseas, eager to deliver lifesaving aid to communities who had lost everything.

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Vanuatu coronavirus vaccine rollout to take until end of 2023

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The majority of the Pacific nation’s population won’t be immunised for another two years, government planning documents show

Despite a tourism-dependent economy devastated by coronavirus shutdowns, Vanuatu’s Covid-19 vaccination programme will not inoculate most of its population until the end of 2023.

According to the ministry of health’s national deployment and vaccination plan, the first shots will be administered in April this year, but only the most vulnerable 20% of the population will get a jab in the first phase.

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Future of Pacific Islands Forum in doubt as north-south rift emerges

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Exclusive: Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and Nauru question whether to remain members amid bullying claims

Leaders of Micronesian countries are contemplating abandoning the Pacific Islands Forum altogether, after a fractious vote for a new secretary general sidelined the north Pacific countries, who say they are bullied by larger nations, and left with “crumbs”.

The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) is the Pacific region’s most important political body and a powerful voice for the Pacific on the global stage, but the election of former Cook Islands prime minister Henry Puna as secretary general has exposed a deep fracture between north and south Pacific nations.

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Chinese vessels detained by Vanuatu, accused of fishing illegally

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Crew on two vessels face further investigation in Pacific nation, a month after similar incident in Palau

Two Chinese fishing vessels have been detained by Vanuatu authorities amid allegations they were fishing illegally in the Pacific nation’s territorial waters.

This is the first time that Chinese vessels have been accused of illegal fishing activities in Vanuatu’s territory, but their confinement comes just a month after Palau detained a Chinese-flagged vessel reportedly illegally harvesting sea cucumber, or beche-de-mer, in the western Pacific state’s territorial waters.

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‘A memory bobbing around the ocean’: message in a bottle found after two years

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Conservationist on a remote Papua New Guinean island finds message from American girl thrown overboard more than 2,500km away

This bottle was different. Glass, with its lid sealed tight, it contained a handful of rice grains and a few seashells. And a note.

In November, on the remote Conflict Islands of Papua New Guinea, conservation ranger Steven Amos was cleaning the beachfront on Panasesa island when he stumbled across something that was not thoughtlessly thrown away, but consciously sent as a message to an unknown recipient, somewhere in the world.

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Now that nuclear weapons are illegal, the Pacific demands truth on decades of testing | Dimity Hawkins

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With a 50th nation ratifying it, the treaty outlawing nuclear weapons for all countries will come into force in 90 days

Nuclear weapons will soon be illegal. Just over 75 years since their devastation was first unleashed on the world, the global community has rallied to bring into force a ban through the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Late on Saturday night in New York, the 50th country – the central American nation of Honduras – ratified the treaty.

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‘This song is the struggle’: Vanuatu’s treehouse troubadour on love, loss and language

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Singer-songwriter Tio Massing writes songs from a sprawling banyan tree, and says ‘I have to do something for this earth, and the next generation’

Vanuatu singer-songwriter Tio Bang Massing writes from a place that few still remember.

He tries to live there too, with an almost Buddha-like simplicity, in a makeshift home tucked among the roots of a sprawling banyan tree.

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Calls for a Covid ‘kava bubble’ as supply from Pacific to Australia dries up

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With little of the homemade Pacific brew available in Australia, prices have skyrocketed, and there’s been a spike in seizures at the border

The questions are asked quietly, but urgently: “Kava, do you have any? Do you know where to get any? Have you heard what they are paying for it in Sydney?”

When Pasifika meet in Australia, it is often kava that dominates: now, it is the absence of it.

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