Up Front
with the Publisher
I wonder what the late Jim Davidson would have said about the surprising turn of political events in Nauru, reported on p 8. Jim, as Professor of Pacific History at the Australian National University, was the man who planned the Nauru constitution in 1967 and saw it through the island’s constitutional convention in 1968 with very few changes.
I knew Jim very well. The position of President of the republic involved him in a great deal of thought, and at one stage he told me he considered proposing that Hammer Deßoburt be appointed President for life, in the same way that Tamasese and Malietoa were appointed joint Heads of State for life under the Western Samoan constitution, of which Jim was also an architect.
If this had been done, President Deßoburt would not have been tipped out with the bath water in December.
This could have created more problems than it resolved of course, because if a President-for-life also had the right to select his own Cabinet, how could the new Nauru Party have won Cabinet changes?
Jim, of course, was too wily to put the republic in that position.
He knew that if there were to be a President for life there would also have to be a separate Premier in charge of the executive, but Jim decided that in view of the small size of Nauru it wasn’t desirable to create two separate offices, and that executive powershould reside in both the President and his Cabinet, both answerable to the parliament.
This emphasis is not mine. It’s to be found in a 16-page document on constitutional proposals for Nauru, drawn up by Jim in 1967 on behalf of the Nauru Local Government Council and formally presented at aconference in Canberra that May between the Nauruans and the governments of Australia, Britain and New Zealand.
This document becamethebasisfor the constitution.
On the question of the President, it says, “The dual position proposed for
the President in the executive government presents some difficulties . . . The principal difficulty relates to the relationship between the Cabinet and the Legislative Assembly. The Cabinet including the President should be collectively responsible to the Assembly, as in a normal parlia mentary system. In the event of Cabinet’s defeat on an issue of confidence, both the President and the other Ministers should resign.”
The document says that this requirement “might be considered to lead to undue number of changes in the tenure of the Presidency,” but adds: “We do not think that this would beso.
Any holder of the Presidency would be likely to take pains to retain the confidence of the Assembly; and, in the circumstances of Nauru, it seems unlikely that there will be violent or
rapid changes of political opinion.”
It says something both for Jim Davidson’s understanding of Nauru, and of the stability of the Nauruans, that it took nine years for any crisis of the kind foreseen to turn up.
And I think it did turn up only because Hammer Deßoburt neglected to retain the confidence of the parliament. He failed to protect his flanks. In my view the most important issue on Nauru is not whether the President has the right to pick his own Cabinet he does but whether the President and his Ministers are collectively responsible to the parlia ment. And they are.
If they were not, Nauru would be a dictatorship, and the President a dictator.
If Hammer Deßoburt should win his battle on his terms, he will be a dictator. A paternal dictator, but a dictator none-the-less, and that’s not good for Nauru. The high regard in which Nauru holds the extraordinary Hammer Deßoburt the same high regard in which he is held by his fellow Pacific leaders is irrelevant to this issue.
The issue is whether the Republic of Nauru is a democracy.