Source: Dr Roman Grynberg

Every six years Pacific leaders meet at their annual summit to discuss who will win the lottery and get the six figure job of Secretary General of the Forum. It is quite literarily the lottery as the first Secretary General of the Forum, the late Henry Naisaili told me that he had saved a million dollars in his tenure of the post. This is possible because the Forum’s heads spend most of their six years travelling and can normally live off their per diems and simply pocket most of their salary. That was over 20 years ago and no doubt whoever replaces Neroni Slade will be able to save a good deal more.

But that is not a good reason to detain the entire region over an issue that will almost certainly be decided by the power (or cheque book ) politics and will have little impact on the direction of the region. There are at least three candidates who are up for the top job. The first is Ambassador Kaliopate Tavola, a very talented and able diplomat who has been dubbed the ‘eternal secretary general in waiting’ who has now been in the wings for a very long time. He is followed by Dame Meg Taylor from PNG and Dr Jimmy Rogers who will be strongly supported by the Solomon Islands. None of the political elite want him back in Honiara as he would be such an outstanding candidate for the job of Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands. Dr Rogers has to be excluded from the top job completely because there are so few people of his calibre and skills in the political elite in Honiara that his talents would just be completely wasted in an institution as vapid as the Forum. Dame Meg Taylor is also an exceptionally intelligent and qualified candidate. PNG has in the past put up some real lemons for high international office and she will neither embarrass PNG nor disappoint the region. So if these are the options and there are no Micronesians then certain facts are clear. The most obvious is there will not be Melanesian solidarity this time. Second if Ambassador Tavola wins the lottery then there will be three Fiji born people at the top. If Dame Meg gets the job there will be the unheard of situation of three women at the top of the Forum Secretariat. Without wishing to endorse any of these fine candidates I will confess that after 25 years of living in the islands I found that the best man for any job was almost invariably a woman because they would never assume they own the job and had to prove they deserve it.
The question of who will be the next SG is of course are minor personnel issues but it will occupy the press and the leaders. These are minor issues because who manages the Forum is not half as important as who controls the Forum and the answer to that remains a constant- it is the paymasters i.e. Australia and New Zealand. This will not change.
The issues that really should matter to the region will barely be on the agenda. Since at least the time of Noel Levi the Forum has achieved almost nothing tangible except for surviving, which will almost certainly be Neroni Slade’s sole epitaph. The reason for this is simple. There is little vision, no drive and no real role for the meeting of leaders except to be seen and to be heard and to consume a great deal of food and alcohol. The top-down Pacific Plan was hijacked by the aid bureaucrats and has simply become a sham. What the leaders need to do to themselves is what they expect of their juniors. Establish criteria for performance of the Forum meeting, make resolutions at the meeting that will actually be funded, and finally assure the implementation of past decisions through a system of peer review to make sure they do something that will actually benefit the peoples of the South Pacific. But of course, a Forum meeting which is actually accountable to the peoples of the South Pacific and achieves tangible outcomes, is the stuff of dreams. 
There remains a more pressing and immediate issue that will certainly be on the agenda and that is the negotiations over Pacer Plus, the free trade agreement between the Forum members. It is very likely that the two principle bargaining objectives of the Pacific Islands, to get a trade agreement that gives them security of labour market access for Pacific islanders to Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and security of development assistance will not be met. ANZ have made it perfectly clear that they will never make bound commitments in either area because of the precedent this will establish for FTA negotiations with India and other large countries. What ANZ are expecting is a profoundly unequal treaty i.e. the islands agree to bind their tariffs at zero or at low levels and in return ANZ promise to be nice and, if they are in the mood will grant labour market access and development assistance but certainly no legal commitments on either issue. This outcome is all the more absurd and unjust given that the island states already have duty free access for their exports under the unilateral SPARTECA treaty and so will stand to gain almost nothing from Pacer Plus. 
The last time this sort of inequality was written into treaty form was in the 19th century when European and American gunboats forced Japan and China to also agree to profoundly unequal treaties. For three generations these treaties were the written proof of the humiliation of the Chinese and Japanese people and they fed the nationalist and communist rebellions that ensued. 
Leaders can avoid this outcome which will only breed long term antipathy between the Pacific islanders and Australia and New Zealand through agreeing to recast Pacer Plus as an Oceanic Economic Community where goods, services capital and labour will be free to move. This would mean India and others could not use it as a precedent in a free trade area. But the question is which of these leaders is ready for such a bold step even though it would finally give the region a real legal structure to its institutions.

 Dr Grynberg is a former Director of Governance and Trade at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and now works in Botswana. This opinion appeared on Islands Business’ Viewpoint column in our August 2014 edition.