Category Archives: Pacific islands

The little island that won: how a tiny Pacific community fought off a giant mining company

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A proposal to mine 60% of Wagina for bauxite was met with outrage by locals and became a landmark case in Solomon Islands

  • Read more of our Pacific Plunder series here

When a mining company arrived on Wagina nearly a decade ago with a proposal to mine 60% of the island for bauxite, resistance was swift and resolute.

“I was in the group that went and physically stopped the machines that landed on the site behind this island,” says Teuaia Sito, the former president of the Lauru Wagina Council of Women.

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From a forest in Papua New Guinea to a floor in Sydney: how China is getting rich off Pacific timber

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China is the major buyer of wood from Pacific nations like PNG and Solomon Islands, which are implicated in illegal or unsustainable logging

  • Read more of our Pacific Plunder series here

An illegally logged tree, felled in the diminishing forests of Papua New Guinea, may well end up becoming floorboards in a Sydney living room, or a bookcase in a home in Seattle.

Illegal logging contributes between 15% and 30% of the global wood trade, according to Interpol. China is a major buyer of the world’s illegal timber, according to environmental groups, especially from Pacific nations like PNG and Solomon Islands, which are implicated in illegal or unsustainable logging.

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Want more international students? Look to the Pacific | Edward Cavanough

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Instead of just bringing in Pacific Islanders to pick fruit, the government should focus on tertiary education

In a budget filled with winners, there were a few notable losers.

There was our university sector. Already languishing, the government dealt our unis the twin blows of a sustained “fortress Australia” – prohibiting a revival of the international student market – and a reduction in funding.

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Fiji seals off major hospital and quarantines hundreds after Covid death

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Hospital closure comes as the Pacific country tries to contain a second wave of the virus with lockdowns

Fiji has closed its second largest hospital amid fears that a patient who died of Covid-19 may have infected multiple staff members. The 53-year-old man was only the Pacific country’s third Covid-related death since the pandemic began.

More than 400 patients, doctors, nurses and other medical staff were being quarantined at Lautoka hospital as of Wednesday, after a doctor who had treated the man also tested positive for the coronavirus.

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My father works for the company that sells weapons used in my partner’s homeland | Izzy Brown

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I had never imagined how horribly the company my father works for was entangled with the story of my West Papuan partner

​They make great trucks. That’s what my father says whenever I ask him: “What do they make? Who do they sell them to?” “Only to the good guys,”​​​​ is his standard answer, and the topic changes quickly. But what he calls “trucks”, most people call “tanks”. And ​I am always led to wonder, “What kind of ‘good guy’ drives a tank?”

My father works for Thales, one of the richest weapons corporations in the world. Before heading up security for Thales he worked for Asio, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

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Sorcery-related violence should be thought of as profoundly modern | Miranda Forsyth

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The attacks in Papua New Guinea may look like a barbaric relic from the past but have to do with poverty, inequality and the normalisation of violence

News broke last week about the horrific attack on two women in Port Moresby after they were accused of sorcery.

Senior leaders and police in Papua New Guinea expressed outrage that such violence was occurring in the nation’s capital. But as a researcher who investigates this type of attack, these stories are frustratingly familiar and predictable.

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‘Chilling’: Vanuatu libel bill prompts fears for free speech

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Bill placing libel under criminal rather than civil law could see journalists jailed for three years for ‘misleading’ content

Journalists and social media moderators in Vanuatu could face up to three years in prison under a new bill that broadly criminalises threatening words, gestures and the “reckless” sharing of false statements.

Changes to the criminal libel and slander provisions of the South Pacific country’s Penal Code Act mean that Ni-Vanuatu could now face imprisonment for “any representation that is untrue or misleading” on public platforms including “television, radio, internet websites, social networking sites and blog sites”.

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If it’s safe, dump it in Tokyo. We in the Pacific don’t want Japan’s nuclear wastewater | Joey Tau and Talei Luscia Mangioni

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Japan’s plans to discharge radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean is a callous act that would do catastrophic harm

Earlier this month, the Japanese government announced plans to discharge 1m tonnes of radioactive wastewater accruing since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 into the Pacific Ocean.

To Pacific peoples, who have carried the disproportionate human cost of nuclearism in our region, this is yet another act of catastrophic and irreversible trans-boundary harm that our region has not consented to.

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The typhoon that hit my island didn’t make the news. This is what the climate crisis looks like

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Palau was hit by Typhoon Surigae last week, but even the typhoons that don’t claim lives or flatten cities are devastating for those who live through them

My adopted home country of Palau, in the northern Pacific, was hit by a typhoon last week. Thankfully no one died here, though it did lead to deaths in the Philippines.

The impact on Palau of Typhoon Surigae didn’t make headlines overseas and this might be the first you will have heard of it. Compared to other natural disasters and other cyclones or typhoons in the Pacific, it was a relatively “good” one. But it left me shaken, exhausted and our community rattled.

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Police warn of ‘all-out war’ as tribal violence in Papua New Guinea kills 19

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High-powered weapons, as well as a hand grenade, were used in fighting near Kainantu Town in Eastern Highlands province

Police are warning a “all-out war” could erupt in Eastern Highlands province in Papua New Guinea, after 19 people were killed in tribal violence late last week.

High-powered weapons, as well as a hand grenade, were used in fighting on Thursday and Friday near Kainantu Town in the east of the country, causing 19 deaths, with many more people unaccounted for, and properties destroyed.

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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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Miss Papua New Guinea stripped of her crown for TikTok twerking video

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Lucy Maino faced intense online harassment over clip in incident that critics say highlights misogyny in PNG

Miss Papua New Guinea has been stripped of her crown after sharing a video of herself twerking on TikTok, with critics saying the incident reveals a deep-seated culture of misogyny in the country.

Lucy Maino, 25, who has also served as co-captain of Papua New Guinea’s women’s football team, faced intense online harassment after she shared a video of herself twerking on the video-sharing app TikTok.

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Palau to welcome first tourists in a year with presidential escort

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Palau is opening up to visitors from Taiwan under strict Covid-safe measures, but locals still have doubts

On Thursday, 110 people from Taiwan will be able to enjoy the thing so many around the world have been dreaming of since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic: an international holiday to a tropical island paradise.

The tiny Pacific country of Palau, in the north-west corner of the Pacific with a population of around 20,000 people, will this week begin welcoming tourists from Taiwan as part of a travel bubble.

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Inside the Covid unit: crisis threatens to overwhelm PNG’s biggest hospital

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Exhausted doctors warn sceptical patients that Covid is real as Port Moresby general reaches capacity

The emergency department of the largest hospital in the capital of Papua New Guinea is hot, stuffy and full. People sit lined up outside the front counter, waiting to be seen.

It has been divided into two sections: the front continues to operate as a traditional emergency room, while the back is now a Covid-19 isolation ward, treating the most serious cases of the virus.

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Cook Islands-flagged tankers scrubbed for alleged sanctions-busting

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Two tankers flying the flag of the remote Pacific archipelago are alleged to have been involved in subterfuge shipping of Iranian oil

Two tankers flying the flag of the Cook Islands have been scrubbed from the islands’ shipping registry after allegations the vessels were sanctions-busting, transporting Iranian crude oil while concealing their movements.

US sanctions on Iran’s oil and gas sector have, somewhat improbably, caught up the tiny Cooks archipelago on the other side of the world.

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Covid cases in Papua New Guinea triple in a month as doctors warn of ‘danger days’ ahead

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Cases of coronavirus reached record highs on the weekend, as more than 120 hospital staff in Port Moresby hospital test positive

Papua New Guinea has reported a record number of Covid-19 cases over the weekend as doctors warn that the hospital system is in the brink of being overwhelmed and more people could die outside emergency rooms.

The news came as a photograph of a woman who died outside the Port Moresby General Hospital went viral on social media causing outrage with fears the woman’s death was due to hospital being overwhelmed due to Covid-19.

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‘This is what we feared’: how a country that avoided the worst of Covid finally got hit

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Papua New Guinea has seen coronavirus cases skyrocket, with fears it could push the health system to breaking point

When Papua New Guinea recorded its first Covid case in March 2020, the country held its breath.

There were acute fears about its on the country’s already overwhelmed and under-resourced health system, which has roughly 500 doctors to serve a population of around nine million, and was already struggling to deal with outbreaks of measles, drug-resistant tuberculosis and polio.

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Papua New Guinea to impose ‘harsh control measures’ as Covid outbreak spirals

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Month-long restrictions to come into force as officials warn virus could rip through PNG’s fragile health system ‘like a tornado’

Papua New Guinea will go into a month-long nationwide isolation in an effort to arrest a spiralling Covid-19 outbreak that threatens to rip through the country’s fragile health system “like a tornado”, health officials say, shutting hospitals and leaving wards without sufficient staff.

Hospitals across the country have already been forced to shut wards and departments, overwhelmed by a combination of staff becoming infected with the coronavirus, surging patient demand, and swingeing budget cuts.

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Pandemic forcing girls in south-east Asia and Pacific out of school and into marriage – study

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Female children are seen as an economic burden, and tough times are setting back progress by a generation, gender equality charity says

Thousands of adolescent girls across south-east Asia and the Pacific are being forced to leave school and get married instead as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, a charity has warned, saying “a generation of girls could be lost”.

A new report by Plan International Australia highlighted the importance of secondary education for girls, and detailed the increased risk and long-term impacts of child, early and forced marriage in the region.

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