Comments

The detailed paper is all very well, but why doesn't this summary cover the Greens as a viable choice for people concerned about foreign aid? The detailed paper mentions Greens policies such as the "safer pathways" proposal and criticism of fake aid such as mining industry support. At least a paragraph or two on Greens policies would be appropriate in this article. This is unfair and hobbled election commentary as it stands.

I think a healthy degree of scepticism is more than warranted. Other questions that arise in this regard are: which employment laws govern those ni-Vanuatu people who are employed by Carnival - are they covered by the Vanuatu labour laws or something else? Also, Carnival predominantly employs ni-Vanuatu people in 'hospitality' areas creating a demand for graduates from the APTC campus here in Port Vila which is funded through AusAID - whilst there is a certain synchronicity here it is not clear what Carnival is contributing and again there is no dollar amount attached. I have written previously that in small Pacific island economies the private sector with which AusAID needs to engage (whether by way of challenge funding or otherwise) is the private sector that is there already not the bit of it that operates on a SISO (sail in sail out) basis. An agreement of this type satisfies a need to work 'to scale' and reduces the number of reporting lines I guess but not much more. I look forward to having my scepticism disproved!

Stephen, thanks for the post and for drawing attention to this odd paper by ASPI. I read the paper and I'm afraid it just gets more mystifying. See this perplexing passage from Peter Jennings's chapter: "A government that wants to promote a mature and broad foreign policy would divert about $100 million a year from AusAID to DFAT (less than the cost of a wing on a new Super Hornet, 12 of which were bought on a whim for around $2.9 billion in the 2013 Budget)." So a poor decision by Defence is a reason for cutting AusAID? How can that be? Should AusAID be cut every time some other part of government makes a mistake? Is this what passes for 'strategic' commentary in Australia?

Thanks Jonathan. It’s a relief to respond to a less belligerent post. And good also to have issues raised that are not based on wild conjecture, but are susceptible to clear evidence or analysis: you can get answers to both of your key questions just by looking at the antics of the government itself. There’s no question that the Bainimarama government lacks legitimacy, …. and knows it. After all, it has always claimed to be following a roadmap towards elections, and thus itself sees elections as the route to ‘legitimacy’. That’s always been the odd thing about Fiji since 2006: these are the anti-coup coup-makers, the insurrectionists who describe their own coup as a ‘coup to end all coups’. If by ‘legitimacy’ you mean popular support, no one is really sure about the extent of backing for the Bainimarama-led government, though there are many extravagant claimants of certainty on both sides. The Bainimarama government hasn’t itself bothered to test the water, for e.g. through municipal council elections. No one is sure which ordinary person-on-the-street statements can be accepted at face value, particularly since the 2009 clampdown. The Fijian expression ‘liu muri’ (dishonest/deceptive/ backstabber) has become widely used. What was once an open and frank society (no pun intended), at least compared to the rest of Melanesia, has become much less easy to read. As to the Lowy poll carried out by market research company Tebbutt Research, I’ve published what I think of that here [copied below]. For my own part, I reckon Bainimarama has accumulated considerable personal support, and a great deal of pragmatic acquiescence, but – whatever the truth - that Lowy poll was scandalously shoddily conducted and conceived, and the Lowy Institute has never bothered to respond to those widely aired criticisms. Second, you question my claim that Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed Khaiyum has no electoral base, but this is a statement of fact not conjecture. He did – I believe - have some loose links with Ratu Epeli Ganilau’s National Alliance Party of Fiji, a party which obtained only 2.9% of the national vote in 2006. Ratu Epeli did join Bainimarama’s cabinet after the coup, but – like many of the military commander’s allies – has since fallen by the wayside. And why do you think that the government’s draft constitution made more explicit (than did the 1997 constitution) the scope for appointing a non-elected person as Attorney-General? [(s.95(3)-(4)]. That was hardly an expression of confidence in Mr Sayed-Khaiyum’s ability to secure election. Not only does the A-G have no popular base, he also faces considerable hostility within the upper echelons of the regime itself. They key point I was trying to make in that blog post was to get us away from the ridiculous hard/soft policy debate which dominates discussion about Australian/New Zealand foreign policy towards Fiji – and to think rather in terms of a longer- rather than shorter-term outlook. The fixation with Fiji’s overseas relations, which seems to unite both supporters and many critics of the Fiji interim government, is often an alternative to saying anything at all – let alone anything sensible – about the domestic situation. Excerpt from Review of Fiji 2011 on <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_pacific/v024/24.2.fraenkel.html" rel="nofollow">The Lowy Fiji Poll</a>: <blockquote> At the Auckland PIF meeting, the Lowy Institute released an opinion poll conducted within Fiji by market research firm Tebbutt Research and funded by Fiji-born businessman Mark Johnson (Hayward-Jones 2011). This was based on interviews with 1,032 adults in urban areas of Fiji's largest island, Viti Levu, in August 2011. It found that Bainimarama had a 66 percent approval rating and was used to reinforce pressure both from the Lowy Institute and the ANZ Bank for a policy switch toward Fiji. The poll was much criticized by civil society activists within Fiji, who pointed to the prevailing climate of fear and intimidation and asked how Tebbutt had gained permission to carry out its poll (ABC Pacific Beat, 7 Sept 2011). Former Fiji Times editor Russell Hunter had been responsible for commissioning occasional opinion polls from Tebbutt Research until he was deported by Bainimarama in 2008. He said that, "When the Tebbutt-Times poll was still operating, Caz [Tebbutt] several times declined to conduct a poll on contentious issues, fearing that the powers that be would shoot the messenger" (Lal and Hunter 2011). Standard practice for polling organizations is to initially conduct pilot surveys, so Tebbutt would have known the likely findings before carrying out the poll. Others criticized the poll on the grounds that the sample was too small and pointed to the urban bias, claiming that opposition to Bainimarama would have been stronger in rural Fiji (Narsey 2011). Yet, internationally, approval ratings surveys are regularly conducted with similarly small samples, and there was no good reason to think that the opposition would be weaker in urban Fiji. There were stronger reasons for questioning the Tebbutt methodology. A Fiji Times-Tebbutt survey conducted in February 2009 had asked respondents the open-ended question as to whom they preferred as prime minister: 31 percent had favored deposed Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase, and 27 percent Bainimarama (see Fraenkel 2010). The 2011 poll asked instead a highly loaded question: "How good a job do you personally think Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama is doing as Prime Minister?" Not only was the full military title used, but the more normal polling formulation would have been to ask "how good or bad" a job Bainimarama was doing. That the survey designers were possibly aware of this unbalanced phrasing was suggested by another question, which did use the positive and negative options: "Do you think Fiji is moving in the right or wrong direction?" To this question, 65 percent of respondents responded "the right direction," but the exact meaning of "right" or "wrong" in this context was highly uncertain. Even coup critics might reasonably hope that Fiji was moving in the right direction. The Tebbutt poll was used brazenly by the Fiji government to blow its trumpet throughout the rest of 2011, with the Ministry of Information's Sharon Smith-Johns crowing that Bainimarama was "almost three times more popular with the people of Fiji than the Prime Minister Gillard is with the people of Australia" (Fiji Government 2011). More broadly, approval ratings may be reasonably indicative of shifts in popular sentiment in the mass industrial democracies, but they are of questionable value in a country like Fiji, particularly in a climate of severe censorship and intimidation.</blockquote>

Thanks Stephen, great post. The DLP ads are quite baffling. As you said, the DLP support aid. But they've created an ad that clearly taps into the kind of sentiments that you hear from those advocating for aid cuts. Is the ad a work of political strategy (i.e. are they trying to have their cake and eat it too by having a pro-aid policy while trying to pick up anti-aid votes through the ad)? Or is it just a really confusing piece of communications (i.e. they don't realise it has strong potential to fuel the crusade of those calling for aid cuts, including to countries they support such as Timor-Leste)? It's bizarre. To make it even stranger, there is also <a href="http://mumbrella.com.au/rudd-impersonator-fronts-eye-wear-retailers-tv-campaign-172767" rel="nofollow">another cut of the same ad</a> that promotes an eyewear store. The ads were bankrolled by Ian Melrose, who has been a long-time Timor-Leste and West Papua independence supporter. The ads seem counterproductive to the DLP's goals in many ways. Not least that cutting aid to Indonesia would affect Indonesian people living in poverty--including those in Papua and Papua Barat provinces--a lot more than it would impact on the Indonesian government.

Thanks for the valuable piece, I think it demonstrates that VfM will continue to be a big part of the aid policy discussion. Donors need to get clearer on how they define VfM and what they expect of their partners. Groups such as NGOs will increasingly have to grapple with how they demonstrate value for money to donors. But another tricky - and perhaps even more important - question is what value for money means to the people or governments that actually receive aid dollars or programs. What represents value for them? I think there's a need to also explore that question as well, and if we did, we might be in for a few surprises.

It is telling that DFID's definition is “maximising the impact of each pound spent to improve poor people’s lives”. How does this relate to their role as a bilateral partner in developing capacity, leadership and ensuring country ownership? Instead it sounds more like the mandate of a short-term humanitarian NGO. It seems that this focus has gone hand-in-hand with their retreat from alignment and the <a href="http://www.bond.org.uk/data/files/publications/Country_Ownership.pdf " rel="nofollow">good-donorship principles</a>[pdf] of Paris and Busan. DFID has clearly vacated the position of "best donor" - wouldn't it be great if AusAID filled it?!

We invite you to explore our <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/page/value-money-agenda-global-health-funding-agencies " rel="nofollow">report</a> "More health for the money: A practical agenda for the Global Fund and its partners", a report of the Center for Global Development working group on value for money in global health. We are also <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/event/more-health-money-progress-and-potential-global-fund" rel="nofollow">hosting an event</a> on the Global Fund on September 25.

Frank's strutting about on the world stage is precisely an attempt to create legitimacy at home. Its a PR slight of hand, keep up the diatribe and there will not be space to consider that he was not mandated to speak on behalf of the people of Fiji. The regime has its fingers around the throat of the media, controls the judiciary and rewards state brutality. Silence does not mean consent and I guarantee you that it is on the minds of most Fijian's and on the minds of the regime as well. If his strategy is to say look at all I have done for you people, I have stood up to the Aussies and the Kiwi's, fixed all the water pipes in your village and listened to your concerns, now vote for me even though I wont tell you how much I or Aiyaz earns, or how much of your pension fund is gone, or how the economy is really doing...doesn't that qualify as a hail Mary pass from the your own 10 yard line Tom Brady? Fiji is much more than Bainimarama and Aiyaz. Their entire international and domestic policy stance is reactive. In Hindsight, Qarase had the chance to put an end to end this cycle of coups by prosecuting all the perpetrators behind the 2001 coup and more importantly, the shadowy figures behind the attempt to assassinate Frank Bainimarama during the assault on the military camp by the rouge CRW soldiers. Sadly he did not, instead he created the most bloated government Fiji has ever seen, ministers on salary without any portfolio, reduced sentences of Fijian aristocrats guilty of coup related charges and then employing them as ministers in his government all the while trying to gain control of Bainimarama and the Fiji military which was then and still is a deeply fractured and traumatized institution. The die was cast a long time ago.

If I may weigh in somewhat less belligerently, I’d also like to question your assertion that the military government is starved of legitimacy at home. If you mean that he has not found, or founded, a party to contest a putative election, then I suspect you are correct, although alternative explanations might be over-confidence or just bad planning. I question your assertion that Attorney-General Sayed-Khaiyum has no electoral base and ask how sure you are that he would not win a seat in an election. Also, what does it matter for their legitimacy if the governments other officials are military officers or were part of the events of 1987? Secondly, how do you account for the conclusion from the Lowy Institute’s 2011 research report ‘Fiji at Home and in the World: Public opinion and foreign policy’ that there is a strong measure of domestic support for the government in Fiji? For all that the people may be receiving a distorted view from the censored media and the never-ending supply of good-news stories in the Sun, or afraid to voice their true opinion, it seems a little simplistic to ignore this inconvenient evidence. It also concords with my (albeit highly unscientific) conclusion after three weeks just spent in Suva, Ovalau and Taveuni where I found a fairly consistent opinion that went along the lines of ‘We don’t much care for how Bainimarama is going about it but we like what he is doing and we definitely prefer him to the previous government.’ All that aside, I concur with your opinion about what Australia should do now, though perhaps for slightly different reasons. One way that the Fiji government has been so successful on the international stage has been by appealing to anti-imperialist sentiment, with Australia cast in the role of empire. Australia, and by now New Zealand, have run down their reserves of good will among both the people and the elite in Fiji and across Melanesia. By pretending to oversee Fiji’s return to democracy, Australia has in fact bolstered rather than undermined the interim government. It is time to adopt a position clearly defined by human rights principles, rather than by some claim to regional leadership. Travel bans should be applied only to those who are implicated in human rights abuses, and condemnation be strictly guided by universal principles rather than represent the actions of a self-appointed judge and jury. While Julie Bishop is presently in thrall to the Australia-Fiji business community, who strongly advocate normalisation of relations, it will be interesting to see what line she takes if she becomes foreign minister and is confronted by the full complexity of dealing with Australia’s relationships with Fiji and the wider Pacific island region.

Jon has written an excellent and well thought out article. Tom's sweeping statement that there has been no Arab Spring in Fiji highlights his superficial understanding of the issue. First of all silence does not mean concurrence in fact quite the opposite. Secondly, it took the Arabs decades to mobilise the people for the Arab Spring, far longer than Fiji has had its crisis. He would do well to put down the tv remote after turning off CNN, and picking a few books on history instead. The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants alike...

A simple statement of two facts will shed light on this and other Government Departments. Senior levels of the Government are populated by incompetents amenable to bribes from interested parties and it will take a great man to clean out these entrenched parasites. Our politicians are attracted to gaudily wrapped proposals that could be attractive or sold to an under-educated mass of voters and will overrule the few competent leaders that we do have. I could say this about parts of the UK economy from my reading of the Private Eye. I have to accept, that if the PE was lying, they would be bankrupted by the courts by now.