Up Front
with the Publisher
WE should know within a few days of publication of this issue just how many South Pacific territories and nations will be taking part in the conference that will review the role of the South Pacific Commission.
The conference will be in Nauru about May next year, and each of the South Pacific countries had until November 30 to decide if it wanted to participate.
This will be one conference where the fur should be made to fly. There ought to be no holds barred. Speak ing ought to be plain and to the point. If there is to be any pussy footing around, the Nauru conference might as well not be held.
Decision to have the review meet ing was made at the 16th South Paci fic Conference in Nauru in October, after it had become obvious there that the SPC needed both a blood transfusion and a heart transplant.
This organisation of Pacific Islands countries is near death because no body now knows what it is supposed to do.
It has been going since 1947, and its role is advisory and consultative.
Its programmes are co-ordinated with those of the Island groups in the three main fields in which it works— health, and social and economic de velopment. The SPC is not involved with politics, nor does it have any authority to control Island develop ment programmes. It gets its money from subscriptions and grants from its various members, who represent 4.5 million people, scattered over 13 million square miles (only three per cent of it land area).
Certainly, it is now widely agreed that the SPC has to help the Pacific Islands develop at the grass roots level—but just what does that mean in practice? More important, what should the structure of the SPC be?
And, can it work alongside the South Pacific Forum, or the South Pacific Bureau for Economic Co-operation?
I believe in the need for an SPC.
There must continue to be some organisation that can give a voice to the Pacific’s English and French speaking peoples. And there must be an organisation that can co-ordinate or carry out technical programmes of common interest to the Islands.
Just what such an organisation should look like, what staff and funding it should have, I confess I don’t know. But I suspect it should have the lean and hungry look, with the minimum of bureaucrats and ad ministrative overheads, and probably only a small list of worthwhile pro jects to carry out at any one time.
Perhaps, we should resolve the question of the SPC’s future by ignor ing the fact that an organisation exists, and getting right back to the drawing board.
ANDREW Peacock, Australia’s caretaker government Minister for Foreign Affairs, is a man with a great regard for Papua New Guinea.
When the Liberals were in govern ment he was, during most of 1972, the last Liberal Minister for Terri tories, and he played a key part in preparing the way for self-govern ment which in turn led to indepen dence. He and Prime Minister Somare and many of Mr Somare’s ministers had, and continue to have, a warm personal relationship, and it’s my view that Andrew Peacock’s continued interest in Papua New Guinea affairs transcends mere party politics. In short, he’s stuck on the place and probably would continue to visit it even if he were not a Federal politician.
Because I believe all this, I regret a paragraph about him I included in my report of Papua New Guinea’s independence celebrations in the October issue. In it, I said that he had visited Port Moresby and had left for Iran two days before inde pendence, “to the chagrin of some of his local supporters who thought he could have organised himself better”.
This was true, but my paragraph is less than fair because it fails to point out that Andrew Peacock was unhappy at having to leave before the festivities, and fails to indicate to the general reader the regard with which he is held in PNG. The sup porters who were “chagrined” did not include Mr Somare, or as far as I know, his key ministers. Andrew Peacock was mightily wounded by my paragraph, and although he has not asked for an apology, I owe him
one.-