Tapu Misa: Tonga's plight would be funny if it wasn't so tragic

It almost seems unsporting to pick on the Kingdom of Tonga. I mean, where's the challenge?

Here is a country that has had to hire a public relations firm to stop it from being an international laughing stock for doing some truly silly things. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone - certainly not in Government or in the royal family - that it would be much cheaper if they just stopped doing silly things.

In Tonga, just about any scheme is possible, no matter how harebrained. Some of them have been dreamed up by the King himself, who, despite being Tonga's first university graduate, has shown a propensity for falling under the spell of a long line of international conmen and characters of dubious repute.

One of them, an American Buddhist who sold health magnets, talked the King into making him a court jester, and when he wasn't making the kingdom laugh, he doubled as a financial adviser.

He managed to lighten the country's coffers by some NZ$40 million. They probably didn't need it anyway. The money had been sitting in a Bank of America account and not the Tongan Government's vaults because, as the King told the French news agency AFP, the Government would just have used it for roads.

With such rich pickings, someone was bound to write a book about it, and it is only right that it should be a Tongan journalist who has suffered at the hands of the empire.

Kalafi Moala is a former missionary turned newspaper man who now produces the independent newspaper Taimi o Tonga from his Penrose home. His book is called The Kingdom Strikes Back. I have a feeling that it will.

No Tongan has ever written a book of this kind. To say, as Moala does, that the King is out of touch, that he is responsible for Tonga's parlous state of affairs, that he is the hatcher of far-fetched schemes such as the plan to import throwaway tyres from the United States to be burned for fuel, is to court trouble.

But then Moala has had his unfair share of that. He has been banned from the country of his birth, sued for defamation, threatened with the loss of his business and has even seen the smelly inside of a Tongatapu jail.

He puts the blame for the kingdom's troubles - the crumbling infrastructure, struggling economy, high migration rate, poor living standards, human rights abuses - on an outdated system of government that puts all the power in the hands of one individual: the ageing Taufaahau Tupou IV.

The King and his children dominate the political and business landscape. Prince Ulukala Lavaka Ata is the Prime Minister. And among many businesses owned by the King's other children are Tongasat, which owns the satellite orbits allocated to Tonga by the United Nations, and Shoreline, the company which now supplies the island's power.

Moala is also highly critical of what he calls the delusions of Tongans. To quote Tongan academic Futa Helu: "Tongans, especially those of the so-called upper social classes, have prodigiously overblown egos and are massively deluded as to their worth as persons."

I would not go that far, but I will agree with Paul Theroux's summation of Tongans as "being somewhat haughtier than your average Polynesian".

Tongans have long boasted that, as the only island nation to resist colonisation, they are unique in the South Pacific. That is true. Not many other Pacific countries could claim to have sold off citizenship rights to the likes of former Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, all the while denying it.

And no other Pacific country has had its flag blacklisted, as Tonga has, after ships flying its flags of convenience were found in one instance to be carrying arms and explosives thought to be meant for Palestinian terrorists, and in another trying to transport 1000 Kurdish refugees to Italy.

It would be funny, if it weren't so tragic, if it weren't that with every idiotic scheme or royal excess, Tonga goes quietly down the drain.

Should we care about any of this? Yes.

As Moala's book points out, there are plenty of New Zealand connections. Clive Edwards, Tonga's thin-skinned Police Minister, who has been unstinting in his efforts to clamp down on press liberties, graduated from Auckland University and practised law in Auckland for many years. He was an Auckland City councillor.

The King himself is a sometime resident of Epsom and, as it happens, is a constituent of Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff. And many Tongans escaping the system end up here - about 40,000 since the 1970s.

Surprisingly, Moala does not advocate getting rid of the monarchy altogether. He just wants the balance of power to shift to a democratically elected government. But he knows they are not likely to give it up unless the international community backs Tongan calls for democracy.

That's where New Zealand could play a part. Perhaps it is time to stop seeing Tonga's absolute monarchy as quaint and eccentric but basically harmless.

As Moala's book points out, it isn't harmless at all.