Editorial: NZ sets new style at Pacific Forum

The Prime Minister must have made a splash at the South Pacific Forum meeting last weekend. The gathering is not accustomed to New Zealand rocking the boat. Australia, yes. The big country quite frequently makes evident its impatience with the polite, leisurely consensus that forum members like to call "the Pacific way." But New Zealand normally plays the go-between.

Not this time. Helen Clark, attending her first forum heads of government meeting, went to Kiribati determined to see that it confronted the principals at stake in Fiji. In that regard she was right in step with Australian Prime Minister John Howard and quite likely more pointed. It is hard to imagine that he went to the lengths she did, avoiding any contact with Fiji's interim Prime Minister, even during the social interludes. Helen Clark also refused to host the leaders' lunch on the second day, as New Zealand normally does, because Fiji's representative would be there.

That seems more than a little petty, particularly since she and Mr Howard got what they wanted from the discussions. It took all day but at the end the forum passed a resolution which will enable it to make a collective response to a future crisis such as that in Fiji this year. The decision is not retrospective, which means there is little the forum is likely to do, even now, in response to the dismissal of the elected Government of Fiji.

It might change the venue of its next meeting, particularly if it wants the New Zealand Prime Minister there. Helen Clark says that if it is held as scheduled, in Fiji, she will not be there. She made it equally clear, evidently, that she would not attend any future forum meetings if this one did not honour some standards of democratic rule. That would have been a shock not only to the island states but also, possibly, to our Foreign Ministry, which has long prided itself on a rapport with the Pacific.

Still the Prime Minister's threat was reasonable and credible. The forum has been silent in the face of challenges to constitutional rule in the Solomons and Fiji. Many have begun to ask what, if anything, it stands for.

To say it stands for consensus is not enough. If consensus means awkward issues cannot be confronted, then consensus is simply hidebound. The South Pacific is no longer a backwater undisturbed by tensions between chiefly privilege and majority rule, or indigenous people and migrants' rights. When crises occur, the forum ought to confront them, but unless a consensus is preserved nothing will come of resolutions such as that wrung out of the gathering at Kiribati by Australia and New Zealand, supported by Samoa and the hosts.

It will take more than the "Biketawa Declaration" to make many believe that the next time an elected government is overthrown by force, the forum foreign ministers will meet, offer mediation and perhaps dispatch a delegation to the troubled country. Should their efforts fail, forum heads have agreed they would meet to consider "targeted measures," perhaps sanctions or suspension of membership.

It is probably less than the United Nations and the Commonwealth would bring to bear against a member in breach of their principles. But the forum has had no principles besides non-interference in members' internal affairs, until now. If the weekend's resolution has breached that position it is a notable step. The next task is to forge a consensus on the electoral and constitutional standards the forum expects to be upheld within its club. If that is to be agreed, it will not be by threatening, brow-beating and snubbing people. It will have to be done in the Pacific way. Let's hope the Prime Minister can adopt that way of dealing, too.