Canberra plans

South Pacific Forum

Canberra plans a tariff trump

Each year, Australia and New Zealand, the 'outsiders' in the South Pacific Forum of Nations (and some near-nations), without saving so, try to outdo each other in their generosity toward Islander members.

Last year there wasn’t much to choose between them. New Zealand around the time of the September Niue Forum made clear its intention to keep the South Pacific Forum Line afloat with Australia not too

enthusiastically agreeing. Aus

tralia’s offering at that session was to offer to send an invest ment team to the Pacific and to

organise a trade promotion centre in Australia to serve the Pacific Islands.

This year for the Honiara Forum on July 9-10 Australia's trump which will be hard to beat if it is as promising as it appears is to offer to down trade barriers to Islands pro ducts something Islanders have been asking it to do for

years. It seems Australia intends to offer on a more gen eral basis terms it has so far re served for its own ‘most favoured’ nation in the Pacific, Papua New Guinea.

Sources in Port Moresby, Suva and Canberra also suggest that, much to Paris’s annoyance. Forum members (or at least some of them) once again will be poking their nose into French affairs in the South Pacific by giving the ‘self deter mination' line an airing.

Economic zones and fish eries are likely to be two other

major talking points at

Honiara (see Tradewinds).

Solomons Prime Minister Peter Kenilorea, who’ll be host at the Honiara Forum, with Australia's Malcolm Fraser...a lowering of the trade barriers? AIS photo