Out Of S. Pacific Commission?

[?]ations' Commissioners et in Canberra

Ill They Take The Kinks

iERE is a good deal more behind next month’s meeting of South Pacific Commission in berra than has been permitted ippear in the daily press, audatory articles about the imission have been published; but plain fact is that the Commission been under a good deal of cism during the past year. ppeals for reform were made in ust and September to the tals of the six member nations id especially to London. Some least of the member nations have ordered their repre atives to meet in Canberra ence comes the biggest financial ribution to the Commission), in session planned to consider cism, review the procedures of last five years, and recommend rms. le meeting is not likely to have ceable results. The Com ioners apparently are being d to become their own judge

and jury. Naturally, they cannot see much wrong with the organisa tion and activities which they themselves have created.

But there may be significance in the fact that this meeting takes place soon after the SEATO Conference in Canberra, which is being attended by the Foreign Ministers of USA and France, and by a direct, if inconspicuous, repre sentative of the British Common wealth Relations Office.

The critics who last year appealed to the member nations had hoped that something definite would be done by the end of 1956, so that the Commission in 1957 could be carried on under somewhat different conditions. Nothing was done in 1956, however.

Apart from anything that may come directly from SEATO, the plain fact is that the six member nations are far too deeply occupied with major international develop ments and perils to care much about what is happening in the Sth. Pacific countries. (Continued Overleaf)

Actually, the living standards of the South Pacific natives are of minor importance compared with the problems of keeping Communism, and the Asians, and Asiatic Communism north of the equator, and outside the South Pacific area.

F:OM the devoted work of the Commission’s Research Council, and from the debates at the three-yearly South Pacific Con ferences, a number of really valu able recommendations went up to the Commission in the period 1951-56.

The Commission has no power to implement recommendations —it can only pass them along to the six nations which created the Commission. Although interested observers sought over the years for some assurance that the SPC really was accomplishing something, in return for the £200,000 per annum spent upon it, they never have been able to get evidence that the recommendations were accepted, or evenly seriously regarded, by the six member Governments.

They had the spectacle of six Commissioners, a couple of dozen alternate Commissioners, a number of Research Councillors, a Sec retary-General and a large staff working away, year after year, investigating the lives and living conditions of South Pacific Islanders, and accumulating and

printing and piling up a huge amount of data —and all to no discernible end.

The six nations subscribe the necessary £200,000 per annum (Aus tralia providing the lion’s share) but most of the conception (which was the planning, co-ordination ana implementation of schemes for

developing 15 South Pacific T tories and lifting the nas standard of life) appeared simp end in the bureaucratic pigeonli SOME apologists have arguedE the presence and activitm the South Pacific Commii have kept the South I*

iders tranquil and friendly, ■e otherwise they might have me sharply nationalistic and ■European.

M representatives have been ng among all these Territories 25 years, and can say that, [>t in one place, there never has any nationalist movement h noting, and the SPC has not enced the people, in this regard, way or another, e exception is Western Samoa, ire the Mau organisation ished, and engaged in rebellion, then settled down peaceably 20 ; before the South Pacific Com on was heard of. the end of 1956, the SPC was q a state of suspended anima ion. Most of the scientists and logists who had carried on the of the Research Council for ; with devotion and enthusiasm able among them being Mr. !. Maude and Dr. Ojala—had ne discouraged, and gone to fields. was stated in September, quite lly, that if the Commissioners, heir session in Noumea in 3er, did not revise and re ige the Commission’s purposes nativities, it might as well fold md save a lot of effort and ise. 1 the virtual paralysis of the plan many of us blame the cians, from the ranks of whom the Ministers of the six ries responsible for the SPC. ;y have delegated their risibilities to bureaucrats and olders, who in turn con ;iously performed their task in tea —but without imagination aspiration. It always has id to us, the observers, that Ministers and some Com mers “could not care less.”