Pacific Islands

In June this year, officials announced Papua New Guinea’s participation in the delayed Expo 2020 in Dubai. The PNG delegation, headed by the Department of Foreign Affairs (PNGDFA), requested government support, arguing that the event is an investment in promoting PNG. In recent decades, PNG has

As Australian personnel patrolled the streets of Honiara, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare this month successfully fended off an attempt to oust him. The failed vote of no confidence came after violent anti-government protests that followed two years of tensions between Sogavare and

In July 2020, a plane carrying an estimated 500 kilograms of cocaine allegedly destined for Australia crashed on the outskirts of Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby. Because PNG’s Drug Act of 1952, a remnant of country’s colonial history, does not cover substances such as cocaine and

Did you notice anything different about the news coverage of the recent unrest in Honiara? Those fast-breaking stories on Australia’s TV, radio and online networks were not presented by Australian journalists but by Solomon Islanders professionally reporting from the front lines of the riots.

The prophecy was delivered in 2014. “It is likely that over the next ten years,” Wellington’s Defence Assessment foretold, “New Zealand will deploy military and other assets in support of a Pacific Islands Forum member in crisis beyond standard disaster response support.” In 2021 that

An uneasy calm has settled over the Solomon Islands capital Honiara after protests outside the national parliament on Wednesday calling for Prime Minister Sogavare’s resignation descended into civil unrest. A building inside the parliamentary compound and a police station were set alight amid

In 2015, tourism officials from the tiny Micronesian island nation of Palau likely scratched their heads in bewilderment at incoming figures on visitor arrivals. A record number of tourists had touched down that year in the archipelago, but more perplexing was the figure of 91,174 visitors from

Under construction After Build Back Better World (B3W), the Blue Dot Network and the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific (AIFFP), the latest entrant on the acronym-strewn path to a renovated region is disarmingly bland. Infrastructure ++ is the leitmotif from a quietly

Sovereign nation It is 18 months since Prime Minister Scott Morrison sent Australians off to their first locked-down Easter with the somewhat mixed message that the government needed to “look carefully at our domestic economic sovereignty”. From fixing the toilet roll crisis to a world-

The 101-page document appeared quietly on the Fiji Bureau of Statistics website in early September. But almost immediately, the 2019-2020 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) Main Report, with a preface by then Chief Executive of the Bureau Kemueli Naiqama, garnered attention on two counts

The Australian government’s decision to finance Telstra’s takeover of the Pacific’s biggest telecommunications provider, Digicel, via a $1.33 billion loan from Export Finance Australia, is the clearest indication yet that competing with China is changing government-firm relations in Australia

Son Excellence l’Ambassadeur, Your return to Canberra is welcome. Rebuilding ties with Australia after the understandable hurt caused by the “stab in the back” will take time. But, if I may be so bold as to suggest, it is time to move on to the more pressing matter of New Caledonia, its

Who would have thought, three years ago, that buying a fleet of more than 40 luxury vehicles to only be used once, in a developing country with rugged roads, was a bad investment? Literally everyone – except apparently the then government of Papua New Guinea under Prime Minister Peter O’Neil.

Papua New Guinea’s informal economy is a sleeping giant with massive potential. This untapped sector can be an engine for broad based growth right across the country. Informal economic activities cover legal enterprises that are not registered for taxation and not counted in GDP calculations.

Waiting line China is now the top export and import partner for 12 of the other 20 members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group and a top one-way partner for five others. The US score on this measuring stick is two and one. This is one very basic way of seeing how China’s bid

It seems fitting that the progressive political party that helped Papua New Guinea to independence 46 years ago, and has been the ruling party for the past two years, should have the country’s first-ever female president, Erigere Singin. It’s a bold step and one in the right direction for Pangu

As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds, more than 130,000 vaccines donated by the global facility COVAX doses have expired in Papua New Guinea. PNG is Australia’s largest aid recipient and is currently using AstraZeneca vaccines donated by Australia, New Zealand and COVAX for its first phase of a

Book review: Richard Marles, Tides That Bind: Australia In The Pacific (Monash University Publishing, 2021) There’s much to like in Richard Marles’ new essay on Australia’s relations with the Pacific, Tides That Bind. Above all is the author’s passion for his subject. Those who

News that Australia’s Telstra could be a buyer of the Pacific Island region’s prominent mobile network and media player Digicel has put communications technology in the spotlight. The Australian government is set to underwrite the deal which some reports suggest could be worth up to A$2 billion