- Student protests across Papua New Guinea continue as Prime Minister O’Neill has refused demands to step aside. Four weeks of protest has forced UPNG to suspend the teaching semester, with the Vice-Chancellor demanding students vacate the premises in 48 hours. Unitech remains hopeful that the Semester can still be salvaged. Meanwhile, students argue that they cannot back down.
- Protests are also beginning to spread through the country, with a rally of over 6,000 people in Kundiawa, the capital city of the Simbu province in the PNG highlands, making similar demands to the students.
- PNG’s opposition leader Don Polye has been reinstated to Parliament by the Supreme Court, which has ruled that several ballot boxes from the 2012 election must now be recounted to ensure he is the elected representative for the Kandep Open Electorate.
- Elsewhere in PNG the InterOil board has approved a $US2.2 billion takeover by rival Oil Search. Hailed as yet another coup by Oil Search CEO Peter Botton, the deal has been slammed by a former InterOil CEO and is being questioned by the head of the ICCC, PNG’s corporate watchdog.
- The date for the Bougainville referendum has also been set for June 15, 2019.
- The Vanuatu government says it will pass a constitutional amendment to reserve seats in Parliament for women, months after a national election in which none of the nine female candidates were successful.
- New reporting shows the Solomon Islands government set a record deficit of SBD$172 million (US $21.5 million), or 2% of GDP, largely driven by paying down domestic debt.
- A new World Bank report argues that the business as usual approach to tourism in the Pacific will not result in substantial growth of the sector. With careful planning, however, the report argues that tourism in the region can generate 'as much as US$1.8 billion per year in additional revenues and create up to 128,000 additional jobs by 2040'.
- And in case you missed our panel last week looking at new approaches to tackling gender based violence in PNG, the podcast is available here.
Pacific Island links: PNG protests, InterOil takeover, Vanuatu's female MP quota and more
Published 25 May 2016
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