A lesson in longevity could be big takeaway from Ardern’s Fiji visit
If there was one thing the Prime Minister could take away from the past week in Fiji, where she spent most of it, was how to stay in power.
Fijian Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama, the former Naval Commodore of a fleet with virtually no ships, seized power in 2006 from a mild-mannered man, former banker Laisenia Qarase, who had been prime minister for six years.
The pair had met at Government House in Wellington just a few days before the coup to try to steer the country on the sort of democratic path that suited the military commander.
It wasn’t to be and they left with Qarase being offered the RNZAF jet to fly home, with Bainimarama following in hot pursuit.
I secured a seat on the jet and spent the next few hours talking to Qarase who knew he was fighting a lost cause. The military in Fiji were too strong and he appeared resigned to the fact there was going to be the fourth coup within days.
Bainimarama appointed himself Prime Minister and was effectively isolated from the international diplomatic cocktail circuit. Seven years later and after a lot of international pressure, he decided to return the country to “democracy”.
In 2013 he passed a law requiring all political parties in Fiji to have a minimum of 5000 members, possibly the highest in the world, before they could register.
With a population of just over 900,000, that was virtually an impossible ask and most of the minor parties disappeared without trace after being forced to surrender their chattels to the Government.
In New Zealand, with more than five times the population, parties struggle to come up with 500 members to register.
Bainimarama won the election the following year, although by a narrow margin over the original military coup leader, Sitveni Rabuka.
If Bainimarama’s requirement for registration was applied in New Zealand, most, if not all, minor and support parties would, like in Fiji, be wiped from the political landscape.
Still, we recognise Fiji as a democracy, as Ardern did this week, essentially because we had observers there and people turned up to the ballot box and do what they normally do.
They’ll do the same again in two years and if the last democratic election trend continues, then Bainimarama’s boat will have sailed and Sitiveni Rabuka, the first military strongman to take over the country twice – in 1987 – may be back in power. In reality, it’s stealth by numbers. What of the leader of the third coup in Fiji, the colourful, Americaneducated civilian George Speight who held MPs hostage for two months in 2000?
From hostage central he laid a bet with me, my house in Wellington for his in Suva, that he’d be occupying the Prime Minister’s chair a year out. The only thing he was occupying was a prison cell.
My house in Suva, unsurprisingly, never eventuated. It would no doubt have been confiscated as the proceeds of crime, anyway.
Unlike the other coup leaders, Speight was sentenced to death after pleading guilty to treason. But on the same day the sentence was handed down the death penalty was abolished by the Qarese Government and he languishes, out of sight and out of mind, in prison.
That’s democracy.