Comments

Sounds like a plan - let's keep talking

Dear Tess many thanks for your response. You are absolutely right that student migration is another sub-set of intra-Melanesian migration. In my blog, I specifically focussed on labour migration. However, I am planning to look at student migration in more detail at some point. Perhaps something we could do together? Regards Carmen

Great article Bob. You are right that it is embarrassing for Australia that trachoma persists in some of our indigenous communities. As the Chairman of Ninti One Limited (and the Chair of the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP)) Dr Tom Calma AO recently publicised, the health in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia is a global shame. Indeed, for the world’s oldest culture, with all of its unique beauty, trachoma is but one of a long list of embarrassing situations. For example, a woman in the NT has an 80 times chance of being hospitalised due to assault compared to a non-indigenous woman (yes, eighty times) and one-in-eight children born in a group of remote communities in Western Australia's Kimberley region has foetal alcohol syndrome. So, you might ask, why does Australia have such a well-resourced and successful aid program yet we haven’t translated this wisdom to benefit indigenous Australia? More energy needs to be injected into learning from experiences in international development (and vice versa). ACFID is active in this area and they prepared a paper entitled: ‘Effective Development Practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities’, in February 2014. The Practice Note sets out to explain good practice principles for international non-government organisations (INGOs) and other interested parties engaging in development initiatives in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) communities throughout Australia. The ANU Development Policy Centre has generously given me a speaking slot at next week’s Australasian Aid Conference, where I will be delivering a paper on ‘International Development and Indigenous Australia: Learning from each other’. My survey of aid practitioners and people working in indigenous Australia has identified particular areas where we can learn from each other, and I will be describing these at the conference. It’s great that the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust (the Commonwealth) is supporting the elimination of blinding trachoma in Australia – and thank you for bringing it to our attention. Ninti One is helping to improve eye health in remote Australia as part of the ‘Vision CRC’ within the Brien Holden Vision Institute.

Thanks for this post Carmen, There is another subset of intra-Melanesian migration for which it may be possible to obtain figures and that is for study. The USP set up means that there is movement between Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji (although Solomon Islands is not, as yet, a receiving country) plus other Fijian universities are seeking to attract non-Fijian students. PNG has offered scholarships to Solomon Islands to study in universities in PNG. Plus there is a small amount of movement associated with studying at private institutions, predominantly bible colleges. Tess

I think Julie is on the money here. As an example, the UK government’s International Development Committee (a Commons Select Committee) <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/international-development-committee/news/substantive-pakistan/" rel="nofollow">proposed last year</a> that any future planned increases in UK development assistance to Pakistan should be conditional on action by the Government of Pakistan to increase the proportion of GDP it collects in tax from the wealthy. The chair of the committee said” “… the Committee is concerned that not enough tax is raised in Pakistan to fully finance improvements in the quality of life for poor people. In particular, we cannot expect people in the UK to pay taxes to improve education and health in Pakistan if the Pakistani elite do not pay meaningful amounts of income tax.”

Hi Marcus I think you raise a very important issue and one that merits further examination - the positioning of CSO/NGO groupings as between those that are donor-funded and those that aren't (and/or between those that receive core funding and those that don't). Certainly here in Vanuatu we have seen the 'NGO landscape' change significantly with the ramping up of presence and activity on the part of INGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children, etc. This has had a range of effects both positive and negative and we are yet to see what the longer term impacts will be. Tess

A pre-print version of Heather Marquette's article (without the pay-wall) can be found <a href="https://www.academia.edu/414923/Civic_Education_for_Combating_Corruption_Lessons_From_Hong_Kong_and_the_US_for_Donor-Funded_Programmes_In_Poor_Countries" rel="nofollow">here</a>.

Hi Marcus, Thanks for your comment - good to hear from you. I don't have any systematic data to answer your question from but the sense I got from the 2014 campaign was that neither type of civil society had much impact on electoral collective action outside of Honiara (aid world funded NGOs may have had other influences via civic education campaigns and the like but these, while useful, won't change the fundamental clientelist nature of Solomons politics, I think). So, to answer your question, I don't think, at this point in time there's much practical difference between aid-world supported groups and more organic locally grown ones; but in the long run, I suspect it will be the home grown groups that bring the greatest hope for transformative change, while at the same time still believing that aid can do good in the meantime. Terence

Hi Max, Thanks for your comment. One thing to note of course is that many of the world's tax havens are not developing countries (the Cayman Islands, Jersey etc.). More broadly though, I agree with both you and Ms Bishop that we would live in a more equitable world if businesses couldn't tax shop amongst different countries. Terence

Also, one of the reasons large companies operate in developing nations is for the tax benefits. If you remove those benefits then the companies might not find it worthwhile going there. I can't help wondering if what she really means is that Australia is losing a lot of tax revenue from multinational giants and if they paid tax it would help the government budget deficit.

Hi Terence, and thanks for your excellent post. Your work in this area is fascinating and should be of great value to those interested in human development in Solomon Islands, as it goes to what I think is the nub of the issue - how do Solomon Islanders organize amongst themselves to pursue what they perceive to be their political interests. And likewise to Tess for your comments about FSII. I agree with you both that FSII appears to be a genuinely organic civil society group that appears to be coalescing and distilling supra-ethnic SI interests at a national level, something that to date has been mostly unheard of in the political history of modern SI. I also agree that this is a necessary part of SI's political development. I'd be interested to know if you have any comment around 'donor-certified' and 'donor-non-certified' civil society advocacy in SI, and their effect and reach in the recent SI election (donor-certified meaning donor-funded). In your fieldwork, did you pick up any data that reflected the influence and effects of such groups? And following, do you think there are pertinent issues around whether a group is 'certified' or non-certified', vis-à-vis their influence with grassroots citizens? Thanks again for your great post.

Hi Amos, I think it is a picture that many Papua New Guinean household do not want to see coming into the new year. Hopefully the leaders will embrace this otherwise gloomy future in a positive light as a challenge. I think this year is critical - it could be argued that there is still potential in the current administration to rectify some of these issues. Or probably not? Regards, Bal