Up Front
pp. 17-18 · Read in the full issue
with the Editor
This is the month for passing judgment on the South Pacific Commission, which celebrates its 25th birthday. If you want to hear mine, the very knowledge that it has attained such mature years underlines the fact that the SPC is a success.
There you are, I’ve said it aloud —what we’ve all avoided saying hese many years. The SPC is a uccess! A quarter of a century is esting time enough, and the com nission is still intact, it’s got more nembers and not fewer, it’s got no ignificant opponents, and it has lone and is doing some worthwhile /ork. That’s success enough in this /ooden world.
It’s had its moments of course, tefore the commission was even out f its teens it was beginning to die rom hardening of the arteries. But t that time, back in 1965, Fiji’s ’atu Sir Kamisese Mara attacked as an “exclusive club” of metro olitan powers, run by a committee f stuffy colonial administrators, and s a result it got a life-saving injec on.
Ratu Mara’s fearless lead—he r as then Chief Minister in a alonial Fiji—woke up the Estab shment and set the commission n a more democratic course. Today le commission is virtually run by le Islanders, mainly through con ol exercised at the annual South acific Conference of Islands dele tes.
Not that the South Pacific Com mission is efficient. It has spent too much money on experts not worth leir salaries in relation to work r oduced (people who have taken me SPC for a ride), but in particular 3t worth their money in relation • the practical benefits their work as brought to the area.
Yet despite this inefficiency, and me fact that the present arrange ents with the various governments e not perfect (hedged round, as icy are, by so many restrictions iposed by the very variety of the ations which compose SPC mem irship), the commission is still a iccess.
It’s a success because 1 believe lat without the commission the acific Islands would not have de
veloped as fast as they have, or have the present sense of unity. The SPC has been an Islands rallying point.
The Islanders have not turned their backs on the SPC even when it has become apparent that there are some jobs it cannot do because of inherent restrictions. Thus we saw established the Pacific Islands Pro ducers Association and more re cently the South Pacific Forum, by the same people who comprise the SPC membership, but who hold the SPC in no less respect.
PIPA was established by some Island governments as an effective arm of regional commercial ambi tion—a pressure group with the job of getting the best deal for Island produce, and with the responsibility of making Island producers more efficient. One can say that this is also an SPC function, yet PIPA can be more effective because it can work faster—hence its establish ment outside the framework of the commission.
Similarly, the South Pacific Forum was created last year, again outside the commission, so that the Islanders could discuss sensitive racial, social, commercial and poli tical problems at the highest level.
The second meeting of the forum will be held in Canberra later this month, and we may expect from it the kind of swift action the leading Pacific nations cannot get from their membership of the commission. Yet they will still retain, and value, their commission membership.
The special needs of the region that PIPA and the SPF were estab lished to meet were only obvious to the territories as a result of the experience that the territories gained over the years from the South Paci fic Commission. Only the SPC has provided the machinery which has enabled the territories to get to gether, and thus identify their problems faster.
Without the SPC there would be
no South Pacific Games—and the Games have done more than any thing else to bring the peoples o: the Islands together.
The need for a co-ordinating bod} such as the SPC was espoused a: long ago as 1931 by PlM’s founder R. W. Robson, who first pleaded ir PIM (January, 1931) for a "Pacific Islands Association” that woulc enable the territories to consult wit! each other and “secure united actior on many matters of vital interest”
He pushed his argument over the years, and in Suva in 1936 in a radic broadcast he suggested that such “inter-territorial consultation anc co-operation” be launched with the British, Australian and New Zealand territories, and that the French anc the United States be invited to joir later.
Similar urgings by others resulted in the commission being established in 1947.
Today, of course, this regional body aids four million Pacific people throughout 12 million square miles of ocean, taking in 19 nations and territories, three of which— Western Samoa, Nauru and Fiji— are full members of the commission Other full members are Britain.
Australia, New Zealand, France and the United States, What of the commission’s next 25 years?
I think the establishment of the South Pacific Forum has taken the pressure off the commission by those who believed that unless the SPC recognised the existence of politics in the South Seas it had no future. The forum can now pursue those matters while the SPC gets on with the task of co-ordinating social and technical aid without un due interference. And this in itself is a big task, with many pitfalls, which could fully occupy all the talents of any organisation. The SPC should attack this role with deter mination.