All of us, at one time or other, have looked at some new horror emerging on the news ticker from other parts of the world and quietly counted our blessings, whispering, ‘That could never happen here in Vanuatu.’

A story came across the wire yesterday from Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. We’ve re-run it in today’s paper. Mathieu Batick, a twenty-five year-old ni-Vanuatu seasonal worker, was convicted of assaulting a woman and remanded for sentencing.

It’s another story that could never happen here, but that’s no reason to celebrate.

The New Zealand Herald recounts how an astute police officer, realising that a group of revellers had disappeared into an alleyway, reversed his patrol vehicle and checked to make sure everything was all right.

Turning into the service lane, “the headlights shone on a man with pants down standing over a drunken woman who lay on the ground yelling: ‘Leave me alone.’”

Consequently, Mathieu Batick had two charges laid against him: assault with intent to commit sexual violation and indecent assault.

Not only did Mr Batick deny any wrongdoing, he told a probation officer that if he’d done the same thing back in Vanuatu, it wouldn’t have been taken seriously.

The Herald tells us that the woman was drunk and alone and, having just left a bar, was trying to find her way home to Napier at 3am.

Mr Batick admitted that he put his arm around her and touched her inappropriately before he and a friend pulled her into the laneway.

The story is remarkable particularly because it might have been so much worse. The judge is quoted as saying the arresting officer performed “outstanding police work” in spotting and stopping the act before any rape actually occurred.

In Vanuatu, that kind of police work is unheard-of.

The Family Protection Act of 2008 states unequivocally that police must investigate any acts of violence against women or children. It further states that police must enter a domicile if they have a reasonable suspicion that domestic violence is being committed.

Not ‘should’, not ‘may’, but ‘must’.

Our police have a legal duty to protect the public, and are required to take extra care in protecting those most vulnerable to violence and sexual coercion.

We can equivocate and evade, we can hem and haw and hedge all we like; nothing changes the fact that, here in Vanuatu, a woman walking alone at night is in danger. And the police almost certainly won’t help her. It’s not even certain whether her friends would keep her safe, especially in light of Mr Batick’s blithe assertion that pulling a drunken woman into an alley and having his way with her is no big thing.

In many respects, everyone in Vanuatu can rightly be proud of our largely peaceful and harmonious society. But in this respect we should hang our collective head in shame. We need to ask ourselves, ‘how can we make what happened in New Zealand happen here?’

While Tony Abbott was boasting about his story-telling capabilities as he entered the Leaders’ retreat at the Pacific Islands Forum, his cabinet were busy drumming up derision with jokes about climate change. Classy.

The ABC and several other news agencies have reported Mr Dutton’s soon-to-be-infamous quip that “time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.”

The Liberal government’s blasé, even callous indifference to the plight of their nearest neighbours is enough to make even Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama’s sulk look mature and considered.

To add injury to insult, Fairfax Media obtained leaked drafts of the Leaders’ statement, traditionally circulated once the conclave is complete, showing that a proposed goal of limiting average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees was struck from the document.

Kiribati President Anote Tong has said that anything less than this constitutes a betrayal of small island states.

Earlier on, Mr Tong raised the possibility that smaller states might leave the Forum if it no longer served their interests. Couple this with Mr Bainimarama’s insistence that Australia and New Zealand take their leave, and it becomes clear that, once again, Australia’s apparent dearth of insight into its own neighbourhood leaves it rudderless, clumsily knocking the china off the shelves.

Maybe it is in fact time for a re-think on how Pacific island states align themselves.

Arguably, New Zealand may be forgiven for its occasional lapses into introspection. But aside from economic aid, it is perfectly reasonable to ask what Australia has done to earn its place as a citizen of the Pacific neighbourhood.

Now, let’s be fair. We can’t for a moment pretend that Australia’s largesse isn’t critical to the region’s development. But what with Nauru’s imploding democracy, Manus on the edge of anarchy and shambolic relations with PNG generally—to say nothing about the utter vacuum where its climate policy should be—there are more than a few Pacific islanders rolling their eyes today and wondering just how much more of this so-called help they really need.

Statements by ex-Westpac CEO Gail Kelly at a CARE fundraising event in Melbourne have caused a minor firestorm here in Vanuatu. On July 28^th, Ms Kelly provided a litany of examples of sexual abuse, violence and subjugation of women in Vanuatu, which she characterised as “staggering,” according to the Guardian Australia.

The response in Vanuatu was outrage.

Men and (to a much lesser degree) women alike castigated Ms Kelly, claiming that she was uninformed, that she had no insight into traditional values and was grossly misrepresenting the situation.

It is true that when such issues are put under the microscope, they look appalling, especially when crime, prejudice and systematic bias are piled up side by side with one another.

That’s because they are appalling. Continue reading →

The space where kastom and the law overlap has seldom been a peaceful one. From the earliest colonial days, land, law and kastom were gunpowder.

Historian Howard Van Trease writes of the plight of Ni Vanuatu in the years immediately following the 1906 Condominium. He recounts how Edward Jacomb, a British civil servant, ultimately advised Ni Vanuatu to resist attempts to alienate their land with force, as the Joint Court was powerless to help them.

When a plantation operator was murdered on Epi in 1911, the event “evoked an outcry for the administration to instigate much harsher measures to reduce the threat against Europeans….”

Fast forward 100 years, and the problems of today bear a striking resemblance. The rule of law still doesn’t reach all the way out to the islands. The concept of land ownership and entitlement is still cloudy, and misunderstandings still lead to disagreements.

Disagreements still sometimes lead to violence.

The most striking example of this, of course, has been playing out on Tanna near Bethel village. There is much yet to be understood about the issue, and because some aspects of the dispute are already before the courts, we need to tread carefully.

Likewise, the widely held sense of outrage and search for kastom resolution needs to be treated with sensitivity.

But some things are already clear. Continue reading →

I first began to worry about the future of journalism in Vanuatu back in 2011, when Marc Neil-Jones was attacked in his office at the Daily Post by a minister of state and others.

At the time, I quoted him: “’I’ve been deported, jailed and beaten up before. This isn’t the worst I’ve seen.’

“‘I am getting a bit old for this, though,’ he added wryly.”

Marc will be retiring at the end of this year, and I will be taking his place.

The largest part of my job will be preserving and protecting the legacy of the institution that Marc has built in the face of significant adversity.

Inside the newsroom at the Daily Post are reporters who have worked their beat since before independence. They are storied, wise and, surprisingly, not a bit jaded by their decades of service.

When I was being interviewed for the position of media director, I said that I felt that we had moved on from 2011. I felt that using the threat of violence to intimidate the media was no longer in the cards.

It was gratifying, therefore, to meet with the prime minister and several senior ministers of state to discuss the state of the media on Monday. Continue reading →

Written for the Vanuatu Daily Post

There are days when it looks like this country is committing slow, deliberate suicide.

As an ex-smoker, I have a vivid sense of how that feels. You know it’s going to end in tears. At best, you’ll be struck down years before your time, clutching your chest and knowing it wasn’t worth it. But more likely, it ends in indignity as you cough your lungs out, slowly losing the battle to breathe, while others look on at you with a mixture of pity and loathing.

Yet still, you light up and smoke. The incremental pain of staying hooked is nothing to the agony of quitting. Until that fateful day when you realise that if you want to live, you have to set some limits.

This country has a habit, and painful as it might be, it needs to quit. We cannot—not must not, not should not—we cannot continue using bureaucratic and political appointments as rewards.

I’m not saying we need to stop because it’s wrong. It is, but this is not a bully pulpit. In fact, morality be damned. The problem is that this path is guaranteed to end in tears for everyone. Continue reading →

Written for the Vanuatu Daily Post

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s true in politics as well as physics

“Toktok no tumas. Aksen nomo.” These words, originally attributed to the famous—or infamous, depending on who you talk to—politician Harry Iauko, capture in simple and direct terms the nation’s growing impatience. People are rightly asking when are we ever going to see the benefits we’ve been promised for so long?

It should come as no surprise then, that in word and deed, the current government is intent on moving forward, and moving fast.

The more cynically minded among us could remark that the 2016 general election is just around the corner. But, after all, that’s what politics are all about. This is quite literally a popularity contest, and voters are right to ask, “What have you done for me lately?”

So nobody should be surprised when the minister of Public Works redirects earth-moving equipment from their current sites in Ambae and Maewo and has them sent to his home island in Pentecost.

Nobody who’s travelled the roads in Pentecost can deny that they are in desperate shape. Traffic comes to a complete halt after a heavy rainfall because of the lack of infrastructure.

But that’s not to say the roads in Ambae or Maewo are any better. And here’s where action and reaction become difficult to manage. Continue reading →