Up Front
with the Publisher
ON Nauru in October I met Walter McQuade, who was collecting information for an article in the US business magazine Fortune.
Walter is a quietly-spoken, even tempered Fortune writer with the American reporter’s propensity for extensive note-taking, and I suppose he must have spent what would be PlM’s entire travel budget for 12 months in covering the Nauru story with his Paris-based photographer.
They spent a couple of weeks there.
It was quite obvious to me that Walter liked Nauru and the Nauru ans. He didn’t hide the fact in his article in the December issue of Fortune.
“Neither financial prosperity nor political independence seems to have changed the inhabitants of Nauru”, he wrote. “The usual Nau ruan is genial and uncompetitive . . .
Those who draw the big money from royalties are expected to donate to their clansmen, and do so.
Generosity remains supreme”.
And, unlike some other reporters in the past (which is one reason, I suspect, why journalists haven’t found it easy to get visitor’s visas for the republic in recent years), Walter doesn’t write Nauru off as going to the dogs, filled with unreal people and a government all dissipat ing their common wealth, putting nothing aside for a rainy day. He thinks there will still be plenty for a rainy day; that the Nauruans are quite competent at managing, and he submits these figures (all in US dollars): In 1974/75, Nauru shipped out 1.9 million tons of phosphate at prices averaging about $74 per ton.
Production cost was under $lO per ton, so total profit was more than $123 million, or nearly $31,000 for every Nauruan citizen, man, woman and child.
The Fortune man compares this per capita figure with the Persian Gulf oil sheikhdoms, and says that in the same year oil exports brought in $51,000 per person in Abu Dhabi and $9,000 in Kuwait.
He says Nauru’s money was, as usual, distributed to a formula: $3.50 per ton (or nearly $7 million) to the specific Nauruans whose land was mined during the year; $23.60 per ton ($45 million) to the Nauru
Phosphate Royalties Trust, and S3B a ton (572 million) to the Nauru Local Government Council and the Government of the Republic of Nauru.
It was the Phosphate Royalties Trust which fascinated Walter. This fund is to provide for the Nauruans when the phosphate runs out, esti mated in about 18 years.
Walter estimates the present value of the fund at $165 million.
Nauru has a Melbourne financial adviser, Douglas Rogers, investing this money with the aim of getting 10 per cent, and Walter McQuade estimates that if this earning rate can be sustained, with the fund reinvest ing its earnings, then 18 years from now the fund will have reached a staggering $3.4 billion, or a half million US dollars for each Nauruan living, assuming a 50 per cent in crease in the meantime.
There are some “ifs” there, of course. Including “if” Walter’s figure for the Trust Fund’s present resources is correct, and “if” 10 per cent can be sustained.
THESE paragraphs are being writ ten in Sydney in some difficulty.
We’re in the centre of the dustiest clean-up campaign PIM has experi enced in almost 50 years.
We’re moving house. We’re shift ing from our notorious premises at Alberta Street (it’s true that they were, before our time, used as a brothel), to carpets and air conditioning at 76 Clarence Street, Sydney—the classier end of town.
It’s near the Harbour Bridge.
Yes, “classy” doesn’t sound like us! So our move is thus noteworthy enough to have rated a story in the Australian Financial Review (which didn’t forget to mention the bro thels). Said the review, “PIM is moving to slick, downtown premises . . . PIM magazine—it regards it self as a monthly newspaper—and the people who bring it out, are a little-known tradition of Sydney. The old offices were a port of call for every Island personality who breezed through Sydney”. And so on . . .
Well, Islands visitors are still wel come. We apologise for our premises being slick but we promise to work hard to rectify that.