Comments

Greg, Thank you for your excellent contribution. This is shaping up to be the most important Forum Leader’s meetings in years – as you say, the future relevance of the Forum is at stake. In my view, the way in which Australia handles this issue will be a good indication of the extent to which its political leadership considers relations with the region important. Is the Australian leadership willing to suffer moderate embarrassment by allowing a strong statement on climate change at the Forum, with a view to supporting the regional order previous Australian governments helped establish? Or does it consider the Pacific so unimportant that it is unwilling to compromise? I’m cautiously optimistic that sense will prevail. It would be incredibly self-destructive if Australia were to oppose and undermine a strongly-worded statement signed by forum island countries. It would both severely damage Australia’s credibility in the region, and demonstrate the validity of comments coming out of Fiji. The third course of action that you suggest, in my view, is quite clearly the best option available for all parties. I guess we’ll know next week just what Australia’s political leadership thinks of the region.

Jenny You posted an interesting query about the projected fall in total population of Fiji between 2050 and 2100. I contacted senior officials at the United Nations Population Division in New York and authors of the original report. They responded that the outcome is mainly the effect of the projected fertility decline over a long period of time. They also note that there are, of course, a range of possibilities in those projections. Further details of that range is available <a href="http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/" rel="nofollow">here</a>. Ian

I concur. As someone who was part of the team assessing the introduction of photo ballot papers many years ago and who has observed early PNG elections, I believe it was a tragedy that the 'first past the post' system was introduced. It accelerated other divisions in society, and PNGians have shown themselves to be most adept at using systems for their own benefit. However, I would like to know if the authors did some quality control on the estimates of how much money was paid by candidates, and considered where the money came from!

Thanks, Garth. You're absolutely right that there is not a direct correlation between levels of public support and political support for aid (or, at least, budget allocations to aid). It's a topic that was beyond the scope of this discussion paper, but certainly something we are interested in exploring further. Ben Day also touches on it in <a href="https://devpolicy.org/aid-cuts-wildly-popular-says-poll-or-does-it-20140612/" rel="nofollow">this blog post</a>. I would suggest there's also something of a 'chicken-or-egg' argument here -- if budget allocations are ultimately dependent on who is elected to office, might raising public awareness and support for aid contribute to the election of more representatives who support that message too? We certainly can't expect that raising public support will automatically translate into increased aid budgets, but I think it is reasonable to consider whether doing so could be an effective means of shifting the political discourse to one that is more amenable to aid. Thanks again for your comment, Camilla

It's great to see continuing attention to this area of public opinion Camilla and Terence. It is clear from all the surveys carried out to date that there is a high proportion (70-80%) of Australians who support the Government providing aid but that this support is not strong when it is presented as against competing domestic expenditures. This should not come as a surprise given humans' strong focus on our own needs and those of our family and neighbourhood and the many close-to-home struggles that every family must deal with. Surveys such as Eurobarometer show that the difference between those countries with high levels of aid and those without is not in the level of public support for aid but in the actions of a small number of political leaders who make decisions about budget allocations. Given that the 0.5% of GNI aid target would only require 2% of the federal budget, and therefore cannot greatly impact budget balances, it is clear that whether we have a generous or a miserly aid program is the outcome of decisions made by a few in executive government. What the public thinks about these decisions is shaped by whether they are told "We can't afford more aid, we have a budget crisis, it doesn't work anyway and its often lost to corruption" or "We are a wealthy nation, we can afford to give more aid, we know that aid has saved and improved millions of lives despite the risk of corruption and we could help millions more people if we increased our level of aid". One day, hopefully, we will elect political leaders in Australia who have more generous hearts and consistently send the second, more factual, message to the Australian public.

Thanks for the referral to your other very good blog Grant. It may be true then, what I was told some years ago - "when you sup with the devil, use a long spoon." - when we were trying to fashion an approach to an invitation from a politician that had a public reputation for "corruption", (whatever that means). To me, your example from your <a href="https://devpolicy.org/the-international-anti-corruption-conference-and-the-case-of-the-disappearing-prime-minister-20150831/" rel="nofollow">other blog</a> of the Malaysian PM highlights the complexity of the issues around corruption, and that progress is made primarily in the political arena of local vested interests and competing identities. No area of public policy advocacy rewards purists, and compromise between powerful interest groups is an essential aspect of policy forward movement. I think it's necessary for the anticorruption movement to engage with pollies, because it's an essentially political fight. But who they engage with, and when, is a matter of judgement that is best made by those who will bear the consequences of getting it wrong. Whether TI has made the wrong call in engaging with the Malaysian PM, and then disengaging, is impossible to tell right now, but I think that anticorruption advocates will need to keep "supping with the devil", if they are to make progress. I can recall another quote from Gough Whitlam that I think is relevant to this point - "only the impotent are pure". To your other point in your blog about target audiences and the costs of attending conferences, I definitely agree that events such as the IACC, like most international shindigs, are beyond your average grassroots advocate, as well as academics, and are worse off for it. And when one considers that many attendees are public servants employed by governments (with their attendance funded by the same), then one can legitimately question the personal fervour of many of those who end up there, which is galling when one knows there are countless grassroots anticorruption advocates around the world who would give their right arm for the chance to go to an IACC conference. However, at the end of the day anticorruption progress is mostly about coalitions, and TI would seem to me to have their broader approach about right at least in that regard, even when the IACC doesn't quite hit-the-mark. Thanks again for your excellent blogs.

The focus on domestic resource mobilization is a big step forward.

please am very pleased that the current government is taking the initiatives to address the current issues that are experience in the highlands of PNG and am very concerned about my very dry place IALIBU ..thank you very much.

Thank you Bryant for this important post. It is also positive to see Vini is drawing on the considerable material that fortunately was documented from the 1997 experience. When going through the historic material, it is not clear what level of public resources were applied to help mitigate the impacts of the drought and frosts. The 1998 budget papers suggest an allocation of K25m for drought relief, K38m for additional education subsidies (aimed to lessen the impacts of the drought on local cash flows) and K8m for medical supplies. Donor expenditure is unclear - one figure is AUD30m in relief from Australia. Other donors were involved, as were NGOs, church and community groups. Given inflation from 1997 to 2014 of 240% (using CPI indexes from the IMF), a population increase is some areas of 50%, and an AUD to Kina exchange rate of around 2 to 1, the total budget requirement may need to total K668m ((K25m+K38m+K8m+K60m (donors)) x 3.4 (inflation) x 1.5 (population)). This is a rough calculation, but it clearly suggests the current allocation of K30m is inadequate - less than one-twentieth of an indicative value of the 1997 response. However, given the fiscal pressures the government is now under due to spending LNG revenues before they were received, and then the collapse of international commodity prices, there appears little fiscal space to move. However, the funds were found in 1997 despite fiscal stringency in place under an economic reform instigated in 1995 due to poor economic management. Hopefully, public funds can be better spent this time through using private sector supply chains, traditional coping mechanisms can be drawn upon, and more emphasis can be given to actual need rather than politics. Agriculture prices also moved upwards during the 1997 crisis which more than offset falls in quantities driven by the drought - this helped support local incomes (especially coffee but also copra and cocoa - although oil prices fell to US14 per barrel). It is unclear whether this beneficial offset through agriculture price rises will occur in the current drought/frost disaster. One way to accomplish a similar effect is to allow the Kina to depreciate more quickly (which will increase agricultural incomes as exports become more valuable in Kina terms). Given the potential immediate humanitarian impacts, the medium-term impacts on the agriculture sector, and the possible long-term impacts on children's health if inadequate nutrition is supplied during their growing years, there is a need to urgently assess the required level of public resources needed and the macroeconomic levers which may be able to assist. In addition to domestic action, this may include having to go to the international community to request assistance.

It was full Optional Preferential Voting in the Elections from 1964 to 1977 which delivered Members who were largely representative of their whole electorate. Vote buying was established by the First Past the Post system. Limited Preferential Voting for only 3 candidates never had any chance of remedying the problem. This is why the Members, who had been elected by buying votes agreed to its introduction. Having to buy 3 preferences was never going to be a problem to them. They knew they had to appear to being doing something, so they agreed to the limitation of 3 preferences, knowing that they could still buy themselves back in. Full Preferences would not only have been too expensive, but also to complex and difficult to manage. Do not underestimate the political nous of PNG politicians!

Thanks Jo. Agree entirely. Table S9 (pages 38-42) of the original UN report also provides estimates of Total Fertility Rates for all countries, starting in 1975-1980 and going through to 2095-2100. For the countries you mention, the report estimates that total fertility (average number of children per woman) in Kiribati goes from 5.1 in 1975-80 down to 2.05 in 2095-2100.The corresponding figures for Solomon Islands is 7.04 down to 1.94 and from 5.75 down to 1.90 for Vanuatu. Table S10 on page 43 of the report also ranks the ten countries in the world with the highest total fertility for various time periods. The table is dominated in all time periods by African countries, but with two interesting exceptions. First, Timor Leste, with an average of 5.91 children per woman is ranked as having the ninth highest fertility in the world in the current period 2010-2015. (Niger, with an average 7.63 children is ranked as having the highest fertility in the world in this period). The second interesting exception to the dominance of Africa is that the State of Palestine, with an average 7.5 children per woman had the tenth highest rate of fertility in the world during the period 1975 -1980. In every other case, in every other time period, countries in Africa are in the top ten countries in the world for the highest levels of total fertility. Ian

Thanks Jenny.You raise a good point. Page 19 of the UN Report does actually project a decline in the population of Fiji from 924,000 in 2050 to 696,000 in 2100 as cited in the blog (ie it is not a typo). But there is no explanation given in the report for that fall. I have gone back to the original authors of the report asking for a clarification / explanation and will post this as soon as I hear back from them. Thanks again for raising this issue. Ian