Up Front

with the Editor

As I warned last month, this issue is spilling over with sporting news. While I won’t apologise for that, the pressure on space has squeezed out some items that might otherwise have expected a run on the inside pages, and in the circumstances I am herewith mount ing a rescue operation.

You won’t need me to apologise for that, either, when you see what I’m offering.

First, did Prime Minister Fiame Mataafa of Western Samoa in August take a poke at a local bus driver and a visiting German tourist, or did he not? I don’t know. But just about all of Western Samoa seems to think it knows just what did happen on a recent Sunday in the Prime Min ister’s home village, although there has been no local publicity.

We’ve got two versions, both guaranteed from the horse’s mouth, and both contradictory. We sent one of them to the Prime Minister for his comment, but none was forthcoming at the time we went to the printers.

Not that it matters. If most Samoans were, as it has been claimed, “shocked at this uncharacteristic dis play of Samoan hospitality”, then they have lost their sense of the ridiculous.

Prime Ministers, I think, are as en titled as the rest of us to take active umbrage at having their Sabbath dis turbed by busloads of tourists with cameras. And if they choose to go about it by inviting the offenders to put up their dukes, then surely it adds to the local colour!

Oil in West Samoa?

THERE might well be some real news come out of West Samoa soon. What appears to be oil has been discovered seeping out of swamp banks at Fugalei, about a half-mile out of Apia. The treacly-like sub stance with an oily smell started seep ing from the banks three months ago, according to Afoa Wilson, who owns 29 acres of the swampland.

Wilson told my friend Bob Rankin at the end of August that the sub stance was tested by a visiting Ger man engineer, who said it was oil and to keep it quiet until he returned from Germany.

Oil seepages don’t necessarily mean commercial oil. But Samoa is a neighbour of Tonga’s, where enough seepages have been found recently to interest a whole covy of hard headed international oilmen, who are now negotiating for survey rights.

Maybe coconut palms will yet give way to oil derricks in central Poly nesia.

Cheaper airfares?

AN interview I had the other day with the president of American Airlines, George Spater, gave me a more hopeful, perhaps even cheerful, insight into South Pacific aviation prospects. By which I mean the prospects of us passengers getting cheaper Pacific airfares.

I’m weary of the poor-mouth approach we’ve all been getting from the trans-Pacifio operators in recent years. Passenger-loadings are down, costs are up, there’s no money in the airline business, etc., etc. They promise to relieve us with Jumbos and then warn us that fares will go up, not down. And they dissolve into tears at the very mention of another operator being allowed to cross the Pacific.

George Spater’s American Airlines aren’t operating on the Pacific yet, but it looks as if they will be by January. And Spater says they will need a minimum daily frequency, and probably go to Australia via America Samoa and Fiji.

But. he adds, God bless him; “We

spend s2om. a year on advertising, our strength is in the eastern and mid western areas of the US, and we will sell the South Pacific to that area.

We see no point in sharing existing Pacific traffic; we’ll generate our own.”

Mr. Spater is confident that in a few years Americans will be island hopping in the South Pacific as they do in the Caribbean. He says they will buy real estate and commute.

He says the South Pacific is one of the few areas in the world where fewer Americans are travelling than other nationalities, and American Air lines plans to double the existing US flow in three or four years. They will also extend their hotel interests in the area and are seriously examin ing pospects in Fiji.

He thinks there are more than enough passengers for everyone. I’m all for American Airlines and their breath of fresh air.

P NG flights

WHICH reminds me, recent changes in the registration of Ansett’s in New Guinea, plus Sir Reginald Ansett’s announcement that Ansett Airlines of Papua and New Guinea (registered in Port Moresby), would apply for rights to fly between New Guinea and Guam, have started some in-fighting in the territory.

Ansett of P-NG is to have some local participation, and apparently hopes it might become the national territory airline when the time comes.

But this is a role that the pioneering, locally-backed Papuan Airlines sees itself in, and Patair is currently grind ing its teeth over the intrusion. —Stuart Inder