KEY POINTS:
Given Winston Peters' often abusive relationship with the news media in New Zealand it is tempting to make light of his plans to raise press freedom issues in Fiji with the Pacific Islands Forum Foreign Ministers he is hosting in Auckland tomorrow.
But I won't because it is too damned serious. What is coming out of Fiji is very alarming and good on Peters for putting it on the agenda.
Peters, according to an opinion piece today will discuss with ministers among other things the recently released report titled "Freedom and Independence of the Media: an Inquiry" by James Anthony, a 72-year-old Fiji-born Pacific scholar.
This report was commissioned by the discredited Fiji Human Rights Commission (FHRC) headed by Shaista Shameem, who gave the December 2006 coup by her very good friend Commander Frank Bainimarama a big tick.
It was completed last year but only recently released.
Basically it slams the Press Council, the media and the Fiji Times in particular, and proposes to license the media then tax them on their advertising, plus put out the begging bowl to India, China and Latin America to set up a "Media Tribunal" to fund state media, train reporters, empower politicians and bureaucrats "to deal more effectively with their counterparts in the media" whatever that means.
It recommends the FHRC borrow selectively from media legislation in Singapore and Tonga and suggests Fiji should be a more disciplined society, like Singapore.
The report hints at something rather ominous when it argues that 21st century technology and the transmission of information were of great importance.
"The time has come for all of us, together, to come to the realisation that these are national assets and that their ownership and control will determine one of our futures.
"This report urges the Fiji Human Rights Commission to make strong recommendations to the interim Government to protect our nation's ownership of these resources for this and future generations and to act with despatch with respect to these matters."
The report can be downloaded from the Fiji Times Online front page.
For its parentage alone, the FHRC, it is discredited. But the report itself is a shocker. It virtually blames the Fiji media rather than the Army for the coups.For example:
"From at least one of the highest levels of the interim government I received detailed information on how at least one major leader of the 1987 coup was forced, after reflection, to concede that he had been duped by the media into believing that the Bavadra government was simply an 'Indian puppet' government out to dismantle the underpinnings of Fijian ownership of ancestral lands under native customary tenure and other privileges which guarantee and fortify the paramountcy of Fijian interests.
"At the same highest levels of Government there were private, frustrated and frustrating reviews of what to do about the media which was now increasingly seen to have misused its unfettered freedom and turned it into license - license to divide and despoil a fragile polity...
"When latent division in a fragile society are exacerbated by irresponsible elements in the media, even the most reluctant governments must - and act decisively."
I've also just finished listening to an interview by Kathryn Ryan on RNZ's Nine to Noon with Virisila Buadromo, a former journalist and now the executive director of the Fiji Women's Rights Movement which is worth a listen. No doubt it will be on the RNZ website later.
I guess it is no surprise that a Government installed by the military would want to censor and control the news media. But to try and give legitimacy to that by getting a report commissioned through the Human Rights Commission is sickening.
