Island affairs

Opinion

A new role for the ministry of Pacific Island affairs

If Pacific Island youngsters living in New Zealand need role models - and there is no doubt they do they couldn’t do much better than Fuimaono Les McCarthy.

Bom and educated in Auckland until the age of 13, he then went to his ethnic homeland, Western Samoa, with his parents, Fuimaono Mosope McCarthy, of Falealili, and Riverlina Fitisemanu, where he attended Samoa College. After returning to New Zealand, he joined the police force in 1973. In a 25-year career, he rose from constable on the beat to detective and finally to Superintendent - the highest rank attained by a Pacific Island person in the history of the force. During his career, he studied part-time to complete two law degrees (with honours) and a Masters of Business Administration.

He headed the police legal division in Auckland from 1989 to 1993 before being promoted to take charge of the internal affairs division at national headquarters in Wellington. Resigning from the police last October, he began working on his own account as a barrister in Auckland.

On March 2 this year he became chief executive of the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. He left the police after a quar ter of a century in search of a new challenge. At 47 years of age, this father of five has certainly found one in what he describes as a “very rare opportunity to serve the Pacific people in New Zealand”. He took over a ministry that has been the Cinderella of government departments since it was founded eight years ago. It had done little to improve the lot of New Zealand’s 170,000- odd Pacific Island community, and for the past year has been in tran sitional turmoil. With Pacific people featuring poorly and all too prominently in national statistics on unemployment, health, hous ing, income levels, life expectancy and educational achievements, McCarthy has no illusions about the task ahead.

The Pacific Island population is growing rapidly and is fore cast to reach 600,000 by the middle of the next century. “That gives our job increasing urgency,” he says. “It’s going to get worse if we don’t act now. If our disadvantaged position in society is

carried forward in these population projections, the situation is quite dire.”

McCarthy’s first job is to restore credibility to the ministry, a quality it lost because of internal wran gling, lack of accountabili ty in the past and the inevitable pain and confu sion of a year’s restructur ing.

It will not be easy, especial

ly with his constituency - the Pacific Island community. For as a result of restructuring, the operations division in Auckland, which was the most visible example of the ministry’s work, has been downgraded and its satellite offices in Tokoroa, Nelson and Hastings closed.

After a major strategic review completed before he joined, the government has reaffirmed the ministry’s prime role as policy advice. This may sound like bureaucratic chair shuffling, but in fact is a major change of emphasis for a ministry with an all too modest budget of just under SNZ4 million this financial year.

The budget has been realigned to provide for more policy advisers and the operations division, which used to take the lion’s share and had semi-autonomous status (even having its own logo) will now work only on pilot projects stemming from approved policy. McCarthy admits he will have some difficulty explaining this to island community leaders who used to be able to go to the operations division Tagata Pasifika with pet projects and get funding for them.

Now, he says, there is no money for them and the ministry’s work will be largely invisible - or at least the results will be much longer term.

This change is in line with the government’s policy of main streaming services to the Pacific Island community. It marks firm rejection of a proposal to create a new Crown agency or “super ministry” to provide a one-stop shop for Pacific people to access government services - a proposal rightly rejected as apartheid by ACT leader Richard Prebble, who was the first minister of Pacific Island affairs. With the ministry now unified, McCarthy says; “Our role is to influence the decision makers in the mainstream government departments in policy areas affecting Pacific Island people.

“We have to play by the rules that apply to all other govern ment departments,” he says. “We are not here to play one depart ment off against another, but to supply up-to-date information on Pacific people’s views so that policy decisions in the long term may be made more effective.” He knows the island population’s problems cannot be solved by just providing more money - even if the government was prepared to be generous.

“The pit has a bottom,” he says. “The money will always run out. Hopefully, well thought out policies will stand the test of time and be a much more effective way of changing Pacific Island peo ple’s circumstances for the better.” Coming in with the advantage of a newcomer, he says the divisions that have racked the ministry in the past should be left in the past. “We have a very difficult role to play and we can’t succeed if we spend time in conflict amongst ourselves.” g

David Barber