Good neighbours care about each other

As China continues to build its presence in the Pacific, we can no longer afford to be a paternalistic older sibling to places like Samoa, says Patrick Thomsen.

As a Samoan, I care about its election because Samoa is the home of my ancestors. And I’m not talking about an ancestor who appears in my dreams to confer pearls of wisdom from the other side. My latest ancestor, my mother, who confers to me genealogically my land rights in Samoa, is sitting in the living room while I write this piece, talking to relatives via Facebook Messenger.

I believe New Zealanders should also care about the Samoan election as it is tied closely to our identity as a country and is crucial to the aspirations we have for our place in the world.

New Zealand once had designs on Samoa becoming the crown jewel of its developing mini-Pacific empire. After ‘‘losing’’ what was then Western Samoa to the Germans in 1899, this country invaded and captured Western Samoa in 1914 at the start of World War I, making Samoa the first enemy territory taken by the allies in WWI.

New Zealand’s administration of Samoa was a disaster, and others have written extensively on how its administrators acted with murderous disdain, racism and colonial intent.

Upon independence, Western Samoa’s government was made to develop a governance system and bureaucracy that mirrored Westminster-style democracies, and that mirror was firmly placed in front of New Zealand’s public sector.

For many years, Samoans learned and were examined using New Zealand educational curriculums. We were then drawn to work in New Zealand factories; many of my kinfolk continue to work on New Zealand farms and orchards as ‘‘unskilled’’ labour.

When we became dispensable, we even had Privy Council decisions that adjudicated in our favour, at the end of the era of the Dawn Raids.

Yes, it’s clear New Zealand needs to learn more of its own history, but the point I’m making is that these legacies and symbols of New Zealand’s colonial past are something our country is ‘‘kindly’’ trying to exorcise from its identity.

Which makes this also a critical moment in New Zealand’s foreign policy journey. As China continues to build its presence in the Pacific, we can no longer afford to be a paternalistic, often patronising, older sibling to places like Samoa. China is better resourced than us, is more willing to assert its interests into relationships than we are, and also far more agile in dealing with Pacific governments.

And we are already seeing the small pond in which we were once the big fish run out of water. Our Government is uneasily tight-lipped on things happening domestically in China for fear of trade repercussions.

So, how will we manage and maintain our relationship and position within the Pacific under the new geopolitical arrangements of the region?

So, yes, you may think as New Zealanders that the election in Samoa is small peanuts. And why should you care about the election for a parliament that has only 51 members, in a country of only 200,000 inhabitants?

If we are truly to shake off our colonial ties to Britain and avail ourselves of colonisation as the basis of shared identity, we need to learn to be a good neighbour. When will we finally make good on Te Tiriti o Waitangi? And consider carefully, who do we want to be friends with?

Samoans, genealogically, are kin to Ma¯ ori, although, for most of us, our place in the settler-colony was enabled by colonial governments and their successors complicating our relationship as one that is both settler and kinfolk. But New Zealand still has to reckon with the fact that it, too, is in the Pacific, and the lands this colony thrives on were stolen from a Polynesian people.

So aside from all the connections many New Zealanders have to my ancestral homeland (I haven’t even mentioned transnationalism), I think New Zealanders should care, because in this regional geopolitical powder keg we currently live in, no person is an island.

Especially we, who are positioned on the edges of the great oceanic Pacific continent, and trying to build a future that is no longer tied to our colonial origins.

Seuta’afili Dr Patrick Thomsen, of Samoan descent, is a lecturer at the University of Auckland. He is currently the principal investigator for the Manalagi Project, working on the health and wellbeing of Pacific Rainbow communities.