Hidden voices . . . Professor David Robie says the New Zealand media could do more to understand Asia-Pacific political and environmental issues. Image: Stuff
By Karina Abadia
Veteran journalist Dr David Robie doesn’t shy away from a challenge when covering a story.
Over his career he’s always tried to bring grassroots voices to public attention.
The implications of climate change and Australian foreign policy towards asylum seekers are just two issues which don’t get enough coverage, he says.
Another is the need for genuine self-determination in West Papua. Indonesian human rights atrocities there are a threat to the security of the Pacific region, he says.
Dr Robie has been arrested a few times while doing his job, including twice in New Caledonia. His “crimes” included taking pictures of a military camp in a Kanak village where soldiers were terrorising villagers and photographing white voters alleged to be using dead people’s credentials for proxy votes against independence.
The Grey Lynn resident has also been at the forefront of some significant events in New Zealand.
As a journalist he was there when protesters stormed Rugby Park in Hamilton during the 1981 Springbok Tour. In 1985 he spent almost three months on the Rainbow Warrior and disembarked just three days before the bombing – his 1986 book Eyes Of Fire tells the story.
Dr Robie didn’t always have aspirations to be a journalist. After graduating from high school he started working for the former New Zealand Forest Service whole embarking on a science degree.
A couple of years later he decided he wanted to write and quickly moved up the ranks, working for The Dominion, The New Zealand Herald, Melbourne Herald and Sunday Observer (where he was the editor).
He moved to Johannesburg in 1970 and was chief sub-editor at the former Rand Daily Mail.
“The newspaper was totally opposed to apartheid and there were about 3000 banned people who you couldn’t quote. Our tactic was to often run blank spaces so people knew stuff was being censored.”
His next job was in Paris at the Agence France-Presse global news agency. That’s where his interest in French policy in the Pacific really took hold.
Back in Auckland he worked at the Auckland Star as foreign editor and in 1981 he set up a Pacific media agency, which he ran for the next decade from his Grey Lynn home.
In 1993 he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea and later shifted to the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.
“We don’t do enough to try to understand what’s going on in the Pacific,” he says.
“Fiji is a case in point. We don’t really understand why it had coups and why many Fijians want something different from the colonial system that was set up when they country became independent.”
Karina Abadia is a journalist for Stuff. This article was published at Stuff on 25 June 2014.
Don't Spoil My Beautiful Face . . . the new book on Pacific freedom and human rights. Image: David Robie/Café Pacific
By David Robie
One of Fiji’s best investigative journalists and media trainers ended up as a spin doctor and henchman for wannabe dictator George Speight. Like his mentor, he is now languishing in jail for life for treason.
Some newshounds in Papua New Guinea have pursued political careers thanks to their media training, but most have failed to make the cut in national politics.
A leading publisher in Tonga was forced to put his newspaper on the line in a dramatic attempt to overturn a constitutional gag on the media. He won—probably hastening the pro-democracy trend in the royal fiefdom’s 2010 general election.
The editor of the government-owned newspaper in Samoa runs a relentless and bitter “holier than thou” democracy campaign against the “gutless” media in Fiji that he regards as too soft on the military-backed regime. Yet the editor-in-chief of the rival independent newspaper accuses him of being a state propagandist in a nation that has been ruled by one party for three decades.
In West Papua, Indonesia still imposes a ban on foreign journalists in two Melanesian provinces where human rights violations are carried out with virtual impunity. Journalists in the Philippines are also assassinated with impunity.
Media intersects with the raw edge of politics in the Pacific, as countries are plunged into turbulent times and face the spectre of terrorism.
A decade-long civil war on Bougainville, four coups in Fiji (if the ill-fated George Speight putsch is counted), ethnic conflict in the Solomon Islands, factional feuding in Vanuatu and political assassinations in New Caledonia and Samoa have all been part of the volatile mix in recent years.
Fiji struggle
And journalists are still struggling to regain a genuinely free press in post-coup Fiji even with a general election approaching in September.
While teaching journalism in Australia, New Zealand and other Western countries involves briefing students how to report on regional and local business, development, health, politics and law courts free of the perils of defamation and contempt, in Pacific media schools one also needs to focus on a range of other challenging issues—such as reporting blasphemy, sedition, treason and how to deal with physical threats and bribery.
At times, it takes raw courage to be a neophyte journalist in the Pacific. At the University of Papua New Guinea, at a time when it still had the region’s best journalism school, two senior reporters were ambushed and beaten by a war party from a Highlands province after the local award-winning training newspaper, Uni Tavur, featured the campus warriors’ home affiliation in an unflattering front-page report on politics.
On another occasion, a student journalist slipped into hiding when ominous “wanted” posters with his name and picture were plastered around campus because of his report exposing corruption over an annual Miss UPNG beauty pageant.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face cover
Also, at the University of Papua New Guinea in the mid-1990s, trainee reporters covered five campus-related murders over two years as part of their weekly assignments, including the slaying of a lecturer by off-duty police officers.
In July 2001, four students were shot dead in protests against the Papua New Guinean government over unpopular World Bank structural adjustment policies. Two young women, Uni Tavur reporters Wanita Wakus ad Estella Cheung, wrote inspiring accounts of the shootings and gave evidence at a subsequent commission of inquiry.
At the University of the South Pacific—a unique regional institution owned by a dozen Pacific nations—a team of students covered the Speight rebellion in 2000, when Fiji’s elected government was held at gunpoint for 56 days, for their newspaper, Wansolwara, and website, Pacific Journalism Online.
Journalists lack training
Although three long-established journalism schools at university level exist in the Pacific—UPNG in Port Moresby and Divine Word University at Madang in Papua New Guinea, and USP in Fiji—along with a second tier of trade school-level programmes supported by Australian Aid, most journalists in the region still have little solid training.
During my decade teaching journalism in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, I found many bright young graduates will work for a year or so as journalists then leave for other, more highly paid, media-related jobs using the double major degrees they gained to get into journalism.
This continual loss of staff makes it very difficult to achieve stable and consistent editorial standards and policies.
Poorly paid journalists are potentially more readily tempted by “envelope” journalism—the bribery and other inducements used by unscrupulous politicians and other powerful figures.
Financial hardship and lack of training are an unhealthy mix for media in a democracy.
Media organisations themselves are too dependent on donors in the region for the limited training that does go on, and this makes them captive to the donors’ agendas.
Many view ventures as band-aid projects out of step with journalism training and education in Australia and New Zealand.
Australian Aid has contributed little to the main university-based journalism schools—the best hope for sustainable media training and education in the region.
Universities under threat
But even the universities are under threat.
In Timor-Leste, on the cusp of Asia and the Pacific, there is severe criticism of media education and training strategies. Award-winning José Belo, arguably his country’s finest investigative journalist and president of the Timor-Leste Press Union, is highly critical of “wasted” journalism aid projects totalling more than US$5 million.
A “journalism in transition” conference in Dili in October 2013 attempted to strengthen the self-regulatory status of the news industry “in response to the so-called international aid, particularly from the United States and Australia, which has been misused in the name of journalism in this country”.
The good news was that there was a united stand on a new code of ethics.
The most disturbing trend in the digital age is electronic martial law—a new law in the Philippines that criminalises e-libel in an extreme action to protect privacy. The Supreme Court in Manila ruled in December 2012 to temporarily suspend this law and then extended this until further notice in February 2013.
However, in February this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the law was indeed constitutional, “effectively expanding the country’s 80-year-old libel law into the digital domain”.
This Cybercrime Prevention Act is like something out of the Tom Cruise futuristic movie Minority Report. An offender can be imprisoned for up to 12 years without parole and the law is clearly a violation of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Truth no defence
And truth is not recognised as a defence.
In March 2014, the indictment of two journalists, Alan Morison and Chutima Sidasathian, for alleged criminal libel under a similar Computer Crime Act in Thailand “may spell doom” for the online news website Phuketwan.
It would be disastrous if any South Pacific country, such as Fiji, wanted to impose a copycat decree and gag cyberspace.
In the Philippines, at least 206 journalists have been murdered since 1986—34 of them in the Ampatuan massacre in Mindanao in 2009. Four years later nobody has been convicted for these atrocities.
The Philippines is a far more dangerous place for the media under democracy than it was under the Marcos dictatorship. There is a culture of impunity.
West Papua is the most critical front line for defending media freedom in the South Pacific at present. The West Papua Freedom Flotilla last September focused unprecedented global attention on human rights and freedom of expression in the Indonesian-rule region.
Vanuatu Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil challenged the United Nation Human Rights Council in March 2014 to act decisively to end the “international neglect” of the West Papuan people.
Shameful rights violations
Australia’s shameful human rights violations and suppression of information about asylum seekers is another media freedom issue.
Journalism must fundamentally change in the Pacific to cope with the political and industry chaos. Just as much as it needs to reach across an increasingly globalised world, it needs to strike a renewed bond with its communities—trust, participation, engagement and empowerment are essential.
Fiji is a critical testing ground for efforts to “renew trust” in the lead up to the post-2006 military coup general election due in September.
Deliberative and critical development journalism have an essential role to play in the future of the South Pacific region. So do peace journalism, or conflict-sensitive journalism—another form of investigative and deliberative journalism—and human rights journalism.
And a new generation of educated journalists has a responsibility to provide this for the people. The environment, climate change and peace are key challenges facing island states.
Pacific political leaders finally picked up the challenge over climate change at last year’s Pacific Islands Forum in the Marshall Islands. Now Pacific journalists need to emulate this lead and target climate change as a top priority for the media and education.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific is being published today [24 April 2014] while Fiji is voicing the mantra of the “free press” at the same time as it continues to ban experienced Pacific reporters such as Barbara Dreaver and Michael Field from New Zealand and Sean Dorney of the ABC.
Ashwin Raj, chairman of the new Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA) is haranguing journalists at public media meetings using expressions such as “…the complicity of select Fijian journalists and media either wittingly or those that remain oblivious to the laws of Fiji…”
The same MIDA that is so upset with Sean Dorney’s mild comment that “there was a feeling in the room anyway that the situation in Fiji wasn’t as free and open for the media as it should be” is also asking for “an ethos of robust debate”.
The Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific cover. Image: Little Island Press
MIDA might strengthen its interpretation of robustness by reading David Robie’s arguments for improving journalism education rather than putting media training on hold.
Dr Robie has been concerned with the quality of Pacific journalism training for many years. He looks beyond conflict reporting and quotes Kunda Dixit, editor–in-chief of the Nepali Times, who has little love for counterpoint in journalism stories that foster the tension and drama of controversy making most reportage “sound like a quarrel” in a way that obscures rather than increases clarity about global problems.
Dr Robie writes on “deliberative journalism” which he says includes peace journalism, development journalism and human rights journalism. He tries to nail down his own interpretation, which is “critical development journalism”, by saying it goes beyond the standard reportage model to get into the gutsy questions of “how, why” and “what now”.
His views are parallel with an Asian-Australian academic, Asia-Pacific Media Educator editor Dr Eric Loo, who recently tried to “rescue” the journalism school at the University of Papua New Guinea, and who criticises a “biased” view by Western journalists of a journalism model that stresses successful social and economic development, instead of the conventional focus on conflict, such as failed government projects and their policies.
Important issues
While Dr Robie struggles, perhaps inconclusively, to get precision into the terminology of the many forms of journalism, he is clear on the need for journalists to continue to strengthen their skills in order to scrutinise the institutions of governance affecting many peoples of the Pacific.
He notes the diaspora of Pacific people migrating and settling in Australia, New Zealand and North America. These migrants, some of whom are now second and third generations, look to journalists to inform them on important Pacific issues other than disasters.
Writing quality journalism while dealing with cultural and tribal pressure is a problem identified by Dr Robie. He notes that former Fiji Daily Post editor Jale Moala says about the Speight Coup of 2000 that customary obligations are a burden, that it:
“…was not so much one of reporters taking sides, as it may have seemed at the time, but the inability of many reporters to function objectively under the pressures of the crisis. A lack of leadership in newsrooms was one reason. One media organisation that came under early criticism was the state-owned Radio Fiji, which seemed to suffer from a combination of confusion over who was in power or who was going to end up in power, and lack of newsroom discipline and leadership…”
Dr Robie worked in Papua New Guinea for a number of years and frequently wrote about Bougainville. He went to Kieta to report on the new war and stayed in a hotel where soldiers sat eating their dinners with their guns on their laps. This is a colourful chapter, full of detail with Robie at the heart of the conflict and reporting it.
New Zealand consultants had come up with a report saying the mining company was causing huge environmental damage. Dr Robie published a series of articles on Bougainville and then as head of the journalism programme at the University of Papua New Guinea he got his students to cover the conflict.
This rich chapter probes a nasty part of Pacific history.
A lesser-known conflict for Pacific readers was the 1989 struggle by Canadian Indians of the Lubicon Lake Nation with their call for sovereign rights on traditional hunting and trapping. Dr Robie draws parallels between the struggle of the Indian tribes and the New Zealand Ngati Whatua’s occupation of ancestral land at Bastion Point in Auckland, which was ended by a police and army raid after a peaceful occupation of 507 days.
Dr Robie neatly updates the Canadian story with one of the leading protagonists who says the original conflict continues and it is now in the hands of the courts.
Painful stories
The book has photographs that reflect faces of families embroiled in the numerous conflicts, the plump faces of their leaders and lean soldiers toting guns. Painful stories from Tahiti, Tonga, Timor-Leste, Fiji, the Philippines and other parts of the disturbed Pacific help to make this book an important part of our Pacific history.
Dr Robie says this book may be seen as a sequel to two earlier volumes, Blood on the Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific and Tu Galala: Social Change in the Pacific. Investigative journalist John Pilger describes it as an “extraordinary secret history”.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face, with its overview of various conflicts, needs to be added to the shelves of Pacific newsrooms and journalism schools. It would make a valuable addition to the shelves of numerous politicians who provided the author with considerable content for this book and who are now feeding him material for his next one.
Professor David Robie is director of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology. For more than two decades he has reported on the Asia-Pacific region. Formerly he was head of journalism at both the Universities of Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific. The book is being launched today [24 April 2014].
David Robie talks to Te Waha Nui’s Monique McKenzie about the new book
By Patrick Craddock in Suva
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific is being published today while Fiji is voicing the mantra of the “free press” at the same time as it
continues to ban experienced Pacific reporters such as Barbara Dreaver and Michael Field from New Zealand and Sean Dorney of the ABC.
Ashwin Raj, chairman of the new Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA) is haranguing journalists at public media meetings using expressions such as “…the complicity
of select Fijian journalists and media either wittingly or those that remain oblivious to the laws of Fiji…”
The same MIDA that is so upset with Sean Dorney’s mild comment that “there was a feeling in the room anyway that the situation in Fiji wasn’t as free and open for the media as it should be” is also asking for “an ethos of robust debate”.
MIDA might strengthen its interpretation of robustness by reading David Robie’s arguments for improving journalism education rather than putting media training on hold.
Dr Robie has been concerned with the quality of Pacific journalism training for many years. He looks beyond conflict reporting and quotes Kunda Dixit, editor–in-chief of the Nepali Times, who has little love for counterpoint in journalism stories that foster the tension and drama of controversy making most reportage “sound like a quarrel” in a way that obscures rather than increases clarity about global problems.
Dr Robie writes on “deliberative journalism” which he says includes peace journalism, development journalism and human rights journalism. He tries to nail down his own interpretation, which is “critical development journalism”, by saying it goes beyond the standard reportage model to get into the gutsy questions of “how, why” and “what now”.
His views are parallel with an Asian-Australian academic, Asia-Pacific Media Educator editor Dr Eric Loo, who recently tried to “rescue” the journalism school at the University of Papua New Guinea, and who criticises a “biased” view by Western journalists of a journalism model that stresses successful social and economic development, instead of the conventional focus on conflict, such as failed government projects and their policies.
Important issues
While Dr Robie struggles, perhaps inconclusively, to get precision into the terminology of the many forms of journalism, he is clear on the need for journalists to continue to strengthen their skills in order to scrutinise the institutions of governance affecting many peoples of the Pacific. He notes the diaspora of Pacific people migrating and settling in Australia, New Zealand and North America. These migrants, some of whom are now second and third generations, look to journalists to inform them on important Pacific issues other than disasters.
Writing quality journalism while dealing with cultural and tribal pressure is a problem identified by Dr Robie. He notes that former Fiji Daily Post editor Jale Moala says about the Speight Coup of 2000 that customary obligations are a burden, that it:
“…was not so much one of reporters taking sides, as it may have seemed at the time, but the inability of many reporters to function objectively under the pressures of the crisis. A lack of leadership in newsrooms was one reason. One media organisation that came under early criticism was the state-owned Radio Fiji, which seemed to suffer from a combination of confusion over who was in power or who was going to end up in power, and lack of newsroom discipline and leadership…”
Dr Robie worked in Papua New Guinea for a number of years and frequently wrote about Bougainville. He went to Kieta to report on the new war and stayed in a hotel where soldiers sat eating their dinners with their guns on their laps. This is a colourful chapter, full of detail with Robie at the heart of the conflict and reporting it.
New Zealand consultants had come up with a report saying the mining company was causing huge environmental damage. Dr Robie published a series of articles on Bougainville and then as head of the journalism programme at the University of Papua New Guinea he got his students to cover the conflict. This rich chapter probes a nasty part of Pacific history.
A lesser-known conflict for Pacific readers was the 1989 struggle by Canadian Indians of the Lubicon Lake Nation with their call for sovereign rights on traditional hunting and trapping. Dr Robie draws parallels between the struggle of the Indian tribes and the New Zealand Ngati Whatua’s occupation of ancestral land in Auckland, which was ended by a police and army raid after a peaceful occupation of 507 days.
Dr Robie neatly updates the Canadian story with one of the leading protagonists who says the original conflict continues and it is now in the hands of the courts.
Painful stories
The book has photographs that reflect faces of families embroiled in the numerous conflicts, the plump faces of their leaders and lean soldiers toting guns. Painful stories from Tahiti, Tonga, Timor-Leste, Fiji, the Philippines and other parts of the disturbed Pacific help to make this book an important part of our Pacific history.
Dr Robie says this book may be seen as a sequel to two earlier volumes, Blood on the Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific and Tu Galala: Social Change in the Pacific. Investigative journalist John Pilger describes it as an “extraordinary secret history”.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face, with its overview of various conflicts, needs to be added to the shelves of Pacific newsrooms and journalism schools. It would make a valuable addition to the shelves of numerous politicians who provided the author with considerable content for this book and who are now feeding him material for his next one.
Professor David Robie is director of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology. For more than two decades he has reported on the Asia-Pacific region. Formerly he was head of journalism at both the Universities of Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific. The book is being launched today.
Don't Spoil my beautiful face: Media, mayhem and human rights in the Pacific cover
By David Robie
A comprehensive “hidden stories of the Pacific” media and communication book about many of the region’s major issues of the past two decades such as the Fiji coups, Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville war and resource development crises, nuclear testing and health challenges, environmental degradation and climate change and West Papua.
The author writes with insight and personal experience of all the events covered. It is the first book by the author since his Mekim Nius: South Pacific Media, Politics and Education(published at the University of the South Pacific, 2004).
Australian investigative journalist John Pilger: “This is an extraordinary ‘secret history’ of a vast region of the world of which David Robie has been a rare expert witness. What makes this epic work so timely is that it allows us to understand the Asia-Pacific at a time of renewed Cold War ambitions and dangers.”
Greenpeace activists hold up a banner highlighting the fragile state of Pacific fisheries. Image: Greenpeace
Café Pacific
How ironic. For two days this week, veteran Pacific affairs correspondent Sean Dorney from Australia Network was contributing hugely to an inaugural regional business media summit organised by the Asian Development Bank.
His final contribution to the seminar was a rundown on “tunanomics” and how illegal fishing was, for him, the biggest economic story confronting the Pacific.
He punctuated this presentation with an ABC video report from 28 October 2013 which exposed how lack of cooperation by at least six Pacific countries was undermining the Forum Fisheries Agency’s surveillance efforts.
Anthony Bergin, the Deputy Director of the Australian Security Policy Institute, estimates that about US$1.7 billion is lost through illegal and unregulated fishing activity in the Pacific. He’s proposing that the Australian patrol boat programme should not only be a Defence Department commitment but that Australian aid should also contribute to the programme now being developed to replace those 22 patrol boats that Australia has donated to Pacific countries but which are coming to the end of their work life.
No sooner than his fine contribution and the ADB seminar was over, Dorney found himself in the gun again with Fiji media “control freaks” — Dorney’s description — who seem determined to use the controversial 2010 Media Industry Development Decree to gag anything deemed to be “un-Fijian”.
And this seems to include every shred of criticism from the foreign media.
Although this issue never really made it to the floor in this media seminar, there was a lot of muttering behind the scenes over a complaint of alleged bias by Dorney in his reporting from recent Pacific Media Summit in Noumea, New Caledonia, sent from the decree bureaucracy octopus MIDA (Midas would be more apt after the Greek mythological king who turned things to gold but ended up dying of starvation).
MIDA, or the Media Industry Development Authority, was supposed to be the new media accountability agency that was going to oversee media freedom and freedom of expression and usher in a new era of political discourse and discussion leading to the 17 September 2014 general election.
Chief MIDA moguls . . . former USP academic Ashwin Raj (left) and ex-PINA general manager Matai Akauola. Image: Fiji Television
Instead, the chief MIDA moguls, USP academic Ashwin Raj and former Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) general manager Matai Akauola, have set themselves the task of finding ways to zip-up foreign journalists (and more than a few locals).
Both men are pleased with the existing blacklist topped by Dorney (ABC – Australia), Barbara Dreaver (TVNZ – NZ) and Mike Field (Fairfax Media – NZ). But they don’t want it to end there.
More names are wanted for the banned list, and the ABC’s Campbell Cooney has also been mentioned for a “dishonourable” recommendation.
Sean Dorney and Ashwin Raj recently in Noumea . . . happier times? Image: Unnamed paparazzi
What did Dorney say in his Noumea report that was so “offensive”? Well, for a start he merely said that “there was a general feeling that there is not much media freedom in Fiji”.
And MIDA wants a retraction from the ABC? Hardly.
At the MIDA media conference announcing the establishment of a “bias” monitoring unit, Raj was reported to have told Pacific Freedom Forum (PFF) coordinator Ricardo Morris he would have to choose between being a journalist and an advocate (he is also editor of the monthly news magazine Republika).
Morris defended the right of journalists to speak out for themselves on media issues.
Café Pacific publisher David Robie branded the MIDA media tightening up development as “mind-boggling” at a time when MIDA should be pulling out all stops to restore a vibrant and fearless political debate in Fiji during the return-to-democracy election campaign.
Back at the ADB media summit in Sydney: This was an excellent occasion for all 20 senior media people from eight countries who took part and was a reminder of how constructive things can be when the divisive political baggage is left at the door.
As well as Dorney, a relentless critic of PINA, there was PINA head himself, president Moses Stevens, from Vanuatu, who appealed to the ADB to assist Pacific media to face “the challenges of infrastructure, manpower and the business aspects of our industry”, and the deputy chair of rival Pacific group Pasifika Media Association, Kalafi Moala of Tonga.
Taimi Media Network’s Kalafi Moala, freelancer Russell Hunter, ABC’s Sean Dorney and Talamua’s Lance Polu at the ADB media summit in Sydney. ADB’s Michael Hutak is on the right with the ABC’s Jemima Garrett crouched in front with a microphone. Image: David Robie/PMC
Moala again had a message of “collaboration” for the Pacific media.
Aaron Levine explaining issues around alternative bank security to land title. Image: David Robie/PMC
The opening day was focused on the ADB in Pacific development; the Pacific economic outlook; the private Sector Development Pacific Initiative aimed at building up the business environment in the region; and the A$1.3 billion Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility.
The final day was instead directed at media issues, such as the Pacific media business outlook; “coconut wifi” with internet, mobile and digital technology changes; gender and business; and a lively final session discussing the region’s “biggest stories”.
Café Pacific found business law reform specialist Aaron Levine’s session on the online Company Register initiative in the Solomon Islands and in other Pacific countries especially innovative in a region where only one island country — Cook Islands — has a Freedom of Information law.
Branchless banking in Papua New Guinea. Image: David Robie/PMC
A presentation on village banking and mobile banking in Papua New Guinea, a country that has a low density of bank branches and ATM machines but high uptake of mobile phones was also intriguing.
The “human tsunami” of lifestyle diseases will overshadow climate change and other big Pacific economic stories for some countries, a regional conference has been told.
“The climate change story – while it is real and huge – will be overshadowed in Samoa by non-communicable diseases,” Talamua publisher Lance Polu said.
He described the crisis as an economic and health “human tsunami” at the two-day inaugural ADB … summit in Sydney. Other speakers said the crisis also affected several
Pacific countries, such as Tonga.
Diseases caused by a huge shift in lifestyle and diet has caused obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney failure and heart conditions, according to Polu who cited research reports.
“The heart of the problem is the shift in diet to a domination of imported processed foods like chemically grown chicken, fat-infested turkey tails, low-grade tinned fish, sugary fizzy drinks and much more,” he said.
“And we keep on importing them and returning only empty containers so they can fill up quickly and be sent back again to make our people even more sick and kill our productive populations at a very young age.”
Polu gave an example of the death from lifestyle disease in the past three months of two young Samoan chief executives of government ministries – one aged 45 and the other 50.
Bankruptcy risk “The problem for us is so serious, some medical experts predict it will ultimately bankrupt our country in the near future,” Polu said.
We’re struggling to keep two dialysis units going to treat the number of kidney patients and the cost to the economy is enormous.”
Polu said the key was “information, public awareness and continuing education”. “The media plays a hugely important and a vital role in this process to change attitudes and lifestyle. And it takes time and money.”
He called on the Pacific Islands media and ADB to consider a collaboration project on the issue because health had a major impact on sustainable growth in the region ….
Climate change topped the anecdotal list along with corruption; social justice and human rights; resource extraction industries such as logging, mining and fishing; asylum seeker economic packages; and changing political climates, such as with Fiji preparing for a “return to democracy” election later this year.
Rights violations Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie said the worsening human rights violations in West Papua were likely to also have a serious economic impact on ventures such as the giant Freeport McMoran copper mine after the presidential elections in Indonesia next month.
Indications are that elections could result in a leadership change that may be even worse for the people of West Papua,” he said.
Dr Robie praised Vanuatu Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil for the “only principled stand” over West Papua by a Pacific leader in recent months with his outspoken speech at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Representatives from Fiji Television, Fiji Sun, Fiji Times, Matangi Tonga, Solomon Star, Taimi Media Network, Talamua Media Samoa, PNG’s National Broadcasting Corporation, Pacific Islands News Association, Asia Pacific Journalism Centre, Pacific Media Centre, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation took part.
"Sit down everybody. This is a takeover" - Sitiveni Rabuka's first coup in Fiji, 14 May, 1987. Image: New Outlook (June/July edition)
By David Robie
Alongside normative definitions of the Fourth Estate as an independent watchdog on political power, in the South Pacific there is also a notion of a “fifth estate”, an Indigenous traditional cultural pillar, which is a counterbalance to all other forms of power, including the news media.
This is especially so of Fiji in the wake of four coups, or five if the 2009 Easter constitutional putsch is counted as a separate coup.
This paper explores traditional chiefly political power, the Taukei ethno-nationalist movement and the dilemmas of cross-cultural reporting with a particular reference to the expected return to democracy in Fiji with a general election due in September 2014 after a quarter-century of coup cycles.
It also argues for a tanoa model incorporating culture as part of a philosophy of talanoa, or a more nuanced, reflexive approach to journalism in the Pacific based on a flexible and open form of communication, dialogue and negotiation.
The paper draws on the author’s experience as both a journalist and media educator for almost three decades in the region.
Robie, David (2013). The talanoa and the tribal paradigm: Reflections on cross-cultural reporting in the Pacific. Australian Journalism Review, 35(1), 43-58.
On board the Rainbow Warrior at Rongelap Atoll, May 1985. Image: David Robie
Pacific Media Watch
While in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, for the Asian Media Information and Communication (AMIC) media conference, David Robie was contacted by Newstalk ZB’s Total Recall co-host Sam Bloore for a phone interview.
Sam talked to David about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior scandal on 10 July 1985 and his recollections as a journalist on board the environmental ship.
Dr David Robie, author of Eyes of Fire: The last voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, talks about the humanitarian voyage to the Marshall Islands and how the sabotage of the ship by French secret agents was part of a pattern of state terrorism against indigenous groups, especially Kanak pro-independence activists during the 1980s.
Rainbow Warrior photograph: (c) David Robie 1985
This is the recorded interview broadcast on Sunday, 7 July 2013, and posted with permission thanks to Newstalk ZB.
At the heart of a global crisis over news media credibility and trust is Britain’s so-called Hackgate scandal involving the widespread allegations of phone-hacking and corruption against the now defunct Rupert Murdoch tabloid newspaper News Of The World.
Major inquiries on media ethics, professionalism and accountability have been examining the state of the press in New Zealand, Britain and Australia. The Murdoch media empire has stretched into the South Pacific with the sale of one major title being forced by political pressure.
Professor David Robie’s media professorial speech monograph cover, 2012.
The role of news media in global South nations and the declining credibility of some sectors of the developed world’s Fourth Estate also pose challenges for the future of democracy.
Truth, censorship, ethics and corporate integrity are increasingly critical media issues in the digital age for a region faced with coups, conflicts and human rights violations, such as in Fiji and West Papua.
In this monograph, Professor David Robie reflects on the challenges in the context of the political economy of the media and journalism education in the Asia-Pacific region. He also engages with emerging disciplines such as deliberative journalism, peace journalism, human rights journalism, and revisits notions of critical development journalism and citizen journalism.
This monograph was extracted from Professor David Robie’s Inaugural Professorial Address on 16 October 2012. Pacific Journalism Monographs No 2.
Despite bans on foreign journalists in West Papua, there is “no excuse” for journalists to turn their backs on the Melanesian people, says the first professor in journalism studies in New Zealand and the Pacific.
Restoring public trust, engaging in critical journalism, and opening the media’s eyes to common blind spots were all on the agenda for the inaugural address of Professor David Robie.
Speaking on Coups, conflicts and human rights, Professor Robie spoke to a crowded conference room of almost 200 people at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) tonight after receiving his professorship last year.
Beginning with the current so-called Hackgate media crisis and visiting plenty of other “hot spots” throughout the presentation, Professor Robie charted the course of his life’s journey through New Zealand, Africa, Europe and back to Oceania.
Professor David Robie presents his inaugural professorial address at AUT University tonight. Image: Alex Perrottet/PMW
He warned that the current media crisis seemed to be facing a growing “soft” reporting of the Leveson Inquiry in Britain — with a report due next month — and in the wake of the Finkelstein and Convergence Reviews in Australia.
“Already there are concerns by critics that the media has started soft-peddling the issue,” he said.
He said the latest edition of Pacific Journalism Review examined the issue of rebuilding public trust in the media.
The only academic Pacific media journal is soon to enter its 19th year of publication and is one of the feathers in Professor Robie’s cap. He is founding editor.
Professor David Robie speaks to Radio New Zealand Pacific reporter Leilani Momoisea. Image: Alex Perrottet/PMC
Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Rob Allen referred to the large and diverse audience in the AUT University conference rooms and observed that it “says lots about David’s life and work”.
Professor Robie said he had started with the Dominion, the New Zealand Herald, and the Melbourne Herald before working as chief subeditor then editor of Sunday Observer in Melbourne, covering politically delicate stories such as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam during the controversial war that divided the Australian public.
He talked about a collection of journalists who had influenced him — and at this paper it was the controversial Wilfred Burchett who was prevented from reentering his own country after reporting the Korean and Vietnam wars from the “other side”.
Dr Robie’s newspaper hired a plane and flew him from Noumea to Brisbane so he could regain an Australian passport.
Africa and beyond
Professor Robie then catalogued how he has reported contentious issues around the globe, from working at the Rand Daily Mail reporting on apartheid issues, to covering coups and independence movements in the Pacific.
He went on a 13,000-kilometre trip from Cape Town to Cairo to report in a freelance capacity for independent news services such as Gemini.
“It ended up being a year-long 20,000 km journey in two stages from Cape Town to Paris,” he said.
He even reported on issues over the emerging Trans-African highway from Mombasa to Lagos: “The big problem was most of this road didn’t actually exist” and his “road-to-nowhere” story featured as a cover story for African Development magazine.
His return to New Zealand via the Pacific followed working for Agence France-Presse in Paris and covering the independence issues of the Kanak people in New Caledonia and French nuclear testing in the Pacific.
He has tracked the same kinds of political events in most of the countries he worked in, noting that “feudalism, militarism, corruption and personality cults isolate people from national – and regional – decision-making”.
“Political independence has not necessarily rid the Pacific of the problems it faces, and, in many cases, our own Pacific political leaders are part of the problem.”
Professor David Robie’s inaugural professorial lecture in 2012. Video: AUT/Café Pacific
Pacific issues
Reflecting on his experience on the Rainbow Warrior, including the infamous chapter of its bombing at the hands of French spies, Professor Robie lamented that not much attention of the New Zealand media was focused on the Pacific, apart from “crisis” stories.
“While the New Zealand media has strongly highlighted the New Zealand role championing a nuclear–free Pacific, it has been less generous about the efforts of Pacific Islands leaders and countries,” he said.
Whether it was the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor, the People Power overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, the 2000 coup in Fiji or the Ouvéa massacre in New Caledonia, Professor Robie did not fail to mention each demanding chapter of Pacific sagas.
And in Papua New Guinea, working at the national University of PNG was one of the “sternest challenges I have ever had as a journalism educator”.
Working with students on the UPNG journalism school newspaper Uni Tavur earned them the first ever award from the Pacific, including New Zealand, from the Journalism Education Association of Australia (JEAA), with the 1996 “Ossie Award” best newspaper for a series of investigative reports.
Working at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji earned similar results with the student newspaper Wansolwara, whose student journalists defied a ban on the paper and the closing down of the university during the 2000 coup. The students continued reporting and the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ) at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), published the reports online, scooping the Ossie Awards that year.
Media hypocrisy
Professor Robie described events where his writing and critiques of the media earned him the ire of media owners, especially in Fiji, where they attempted to remove him from his position, and the country.
Professor Robie and the PMC team sing the waiata Nga Iwi E at the end of the address. Photo: Karen Abplanalp/PMC
“It is an irony that media executives who are so quick to invoke media freedom for themselves can be equally zealous about suppressing academic freedom or alternative media freedom,” he said.
Professor Robie explained the birth of the Pacific Media Centre and the continuation of the Pacific Media Watch project, which started in partnership with Peter Cronau of ABC Four Corners based at UTS in 1996.
He mentioned the focus on diversity and independence struggles, among other developmental issues facing small island countries in the Pacific.
“The media play an important role in that struggle and thus news values applied by indigenous media are often at variance with those of the West (First World), East (Second World remnants) and developing nations (Third World) in a globalised world,” he said, referring to his “Four worlds” model developed from his own research.
He said more modern influences such as the Nepali Times editor-in-chief Kunda Dixit, Vanuatu-based photojournalist Ben Bohane, and Professor Arlene Morgan of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism were pursuing culturally in-depth “deliberative journalism” models.
Scope for research
Professor Robie stressed that journalism education was a developing field and contained many possibilities for academic research, particularly in a global media climate that was lurching towards sensationalism and away from investigations.
He talked about a collaboration with ACIJ’s Professor Wendy Bacon, who is editor of Pacific Journalism Review’s new Frontline section.
“There are already success stories in this genre of research,” he said.
“Karen Abplanalp, for example, has produced a major investigation into the NZ Superannuation Fund investment in the giant Freeport McMoRan gold and copper mine at Grasberg in West Papua.”
He finished with comments about media “blind spots” in the Pacific, including West Papua, where foreign journalists remained banned.
“This is no excuse for journalists to turn their backs on Melanesian people who are on the brink of genocide,” he said.
“When did the last New Zealand journalist report there?”
He paid tribute to growing independent news groups using citizen journalism resources such as the Sydney-based West Papua Media Alerts.
He repeated that global warming was another blind spot, especially within the Pacific and mentioned that crucial research was been undertaken by postgraduates at the Pacific Media Centre into media and climate change.
Finishing on a hopeful note, Professor Robie spoke of the new Fijian magazine Republika, which pledged to “act as a mirror on society without fear or favour”.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Rob Allen commended Professor Robie for putting his personal reflection into the address and an “adventurous career” that had been described.
“He is the only person [in professorial addresses] who stood on the stage and made life at AUT sound rather sedate and quiet with what he experienced before,” said Professor Allen.
‘Sense of purpose’
He said Professor Robie was driven by a “sense of purpose”.
“We do get people who want to be a professor because they want to be a professor, and there are some people who are professors because of what they are. And sometimes they have a sense of purpose that stands out.
Professor Allan’s remarks highlighted Professor Robie’s passion for critical and deliberative journalism, saying that it was important to provide possible solutions, which is a key component of the type of journalism Professor Robie was proposing, particularly in developing countries.
Journalism students at the University of South Pacific’s Laucala campus in Fiji gathered to watch the live stream of Professor Robie’s address and sent this picture via their Facebook page.
“What will we do? It seemed to me by the end that’s what makes David stand out,” he said.
“Not only is he an academic, a journalist, he is a committed person whose questions will always be: What is the truth and what will we do about it?”
Students at the journalism school at the University of the South Pacific watched the live stream of Professor Robie’s address from Suva, Fiji, and sent good wishes through their newly-launched WansolwaraFacebook page.
He even reported on issues over the emerging Trans-African highway from Mombasa to Lagos: “The big problem was most of this road didn’t actually exist” and his “road-to-nowhere” story featured as a cover story for African Development magazine.
