Gordon McLauchlan: Softly, softly the way to go for Tonga

Tonga is going to come to a sticky end if it doesn't start to move towards a more balanced democracy with a greater sense of equality among all its citizens. But gradualism is the key to change, which makes it important that moves are made as soon as possible.

Those who think the present structure of constitutional government should be swept away and a New Zealand-style administration imported are as foolish as those who, like Clive Edwards, think they can preserve the old ways in some sort of social formaldehyde.

If the 20th century taught us anything, it is that damming up the route to modernisation leads ultimately to revolution, which almost always leads to another revolution and another in endless attempts to weave an acceptable social fabric.

The threat to the Tongan resistance to change doesn't come from theorists who find any monarchy anathema but from its own people as they travel to New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the developed world.

Especially to the educated among them, the obeisance of commoners to the royal family - crawling across the floor towards the throne, for example - will come to be seen as either high farce worth investment as a tourist attraction or a stupid anachronism.

Those who are not from the aristocracy will be angered by the corruption and the absurd, banana republic carryings-on of their so-called royal family and its hangers-on.

But gradualism is important. It would not be efficacious for a traditional society such as the one that exists in Tonga to have its old structures swept away on the assumption that what is good for New Zealand or Australia will necessarily suit Tonga immediately.

The great advantage the country has is that there are no diverse ethnic groups to accommodate within change. So the most sensible and productive course the New Zealand and Australian Governments can follow is to persuade foolish, obdurate men like Edwards, as well as the Royal Family and their advisers, that remote and relatively inaccessible though the small country is it will not be possible to preserve Tonga in a time warp and keep it untouched by the demands of people for a fair say in their own destiny.

So New Zealand and Australia should lean on the King and his courtiers and explain that they don't seek a dramatic, overnight imposition of a Western democracy with a full range of human rights provisions but that they want the Government to consider a plan for gradual change towards a democratic, more egalitarian future.

Plans should be made now for the transition to the next king, with some of his power diminished somewhat by a transfer of authority to a Parliament elected by all citizens and able to initiate legislation.

It should be acknowledged that managing a tiny country with thousands rather than millions of citizens has peculiar problems. Every issue quickly becomes even more personal than in New Zealand (which also suffers from this difficulty).

The Army should be kept proportionately small and the power of the police controlled by some special sort of supervision, perhaps by a committee which includes a couple of foreigners. A disproportionately large Army has been a curse for Fiji. Built up larger than necessary for defence to earn money by supporting United Nations peacekeeping forces, it has had an unhealthy effect on the country's politics, as big armies always do.

An immediate change in Tonga could be to have the King chair an upper house which would have limited powers of legislative revision. I feel confident that Australian and New Zealand constitutional experts could come up with provisions that would provide for gradualism, allowing for the transfer of more power to the people over the medium term.

Monarchs, as history demonstrates with reverberating clarity, do not lightly give up power, persuaded as they usually are that they care for their people more than their people care for themselves. Indeed, this is the stuff with which despots delude themselves - that they know best, that they are elevated by some god, some obscure tradition, or by their genes to a state of special wisdom and grace.

If you don't believe that - and who does nowadays - what other possible reason is there for their eminence and power? It's even acknowledged in monarchies such as Britain's that kings and queens should not have power except, perhaps, to attract foreign tourists.

Tongans have a proud place in the history of the South Pacific as sailors, traders and warriors of distinction. They were still trading over long reaches of the ocean, with Fiji and Samoa at least, when Captain Cook sailed in, and like all Polynesians they are people with great potential.

What a rare show of both imagination and common sense the King and his advisers could provide by accepting the reality of change in a way that will take them into a peaceful, egalitarian future.

I HAVE watched both the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, grilled on television this week on whether the Government misread the intelligence and overstated the threat - the clear and imminent threat, that is - that Iraq posed to the West. I was impressed by their unembarrassability, although Howard did seem to sweat a bit. Fortunately, Australians have a wicked sense of irreverence and a comedy show suggested that the Prime Minister had undergone an emergency nosectomy to remove his nose from George Bush's backside.