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Michael Field, Pacific journalist
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Opinion
August 22, 2006 It is easy to lose sight of simple truths amidst all the self promotion and back slapping going on among the South Pacific leaders who bravely faced Voreqe Bainimarama’s empty chair and told him things they would not have had he been there.
August 17, 2008 They’ve laboured mightily Fiji’s coup apologists and produced 23,222 words for us all to read. The new Draft People’s Charter for change, peace and progress which takes up 6,555 words in the document.
August 2, 2008 It is a moment on intense sadness to learn that Tokelau leader Falani Aukuso is dead. Worse still is to hear that he took his own life.
July 22, 2008 When I got the invitation to speak here I was in Mumbai where – at about the same time - a retired Indian civil servant had stopped me to find out my origin.
June 23, 2008 Fiji's military appointed Ombudsman Shaista Shameem has written a report on the "circumstances and facts" involving the deportation of Fiji Times publisher Evan Hannah and Fiji Sun publisher Russell Hunter. June 8, 2008 When Pope Benedict XVI warmly greets Voreqe Bainimarama you know it is not out of Christian love or religious charity. It is just crude politics. Updated with new information
June 8, 2008 When National Party leader John Key thinks about the South Pacific, its from a first class recliner on an airliner 10,000 metres above it heading toward his Hawaii holiday home. May 3, 2008 Fiji’s Military Government is on the verge of an ignominious defeat. Voreqe Bainimarama’s ammunition is running out and he has no reserves. The nation’s souls are weary and anxious about what happens next.Defeat will be disaster; poverty and despair will follow.
March 2, 2008 Mahendra Chaudhry's single biggest problem is not his tax but the fact that he cannot be trusted. He says, with the force of the Fiji Military behind him, that he is honest. But, in a rather more fundamental way, he has demonstrated he is ambitious, venal and untrustworthy.
February 27, 2008 A lecture from Voreqe Bainimarama on ethics is akin to taking the word on good governance from Hermann Goering. Fiji's military strongman returned from India over the weekend (where he went entirely unnoticed and more on this below) and launched a bitter attack on journalists, saying, in a rather tortured fashion typical of his modest schooling, that "the media still misconstrues by deliberately ignoring the ethics of a responsible media organization...."
Really clueless in coup coup land Imagine if some chap came along and robbed your home, but in the act of doing so was caught. In most parts of the world this would be regarded as a fair cop. Caught in the act. Off to jail you go. But not so in Fiji and certainly not so in the complicated world of worthy lawyers.
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