Fred Frederikse: Welcome to Te Moananui

Fred Frederikse

THIS column attempts to set the scene for the visit of the USS Sampson next week - the first visit by an American warship since the falling out over New Zealand's nuclear-free legislation.

A Samoan geographer once said about the island nations of the Pacific: "The rest of the world sees us as islands in a far sea; we see ourselves as a sea of islands."

The "millisphere" is one "lens" through which to look at the Pacific. By my definition a "millisphere" is the "the sphere of interest" of roughly one thousandth of the world's total population.

For the purposes of this breakdown, we are looking for entities of roughly seven million people, let's say fewer than 3.5 million is too small and more than 14 million too big.
By this standard, Aotearoa/NZ fits, but all the other Pacific island nations are too small. By adding them all to NZ we get a total population of roughly seven million - and the millisphere I call Te Moananui.

What then are some of the characteristics of Te Moananui? Five hundred years ago, before Magellan sailed across the Pacific, one language covered the largest area of any language group on earth.

Whether it was aloha, alofa or aroha, the word for love could be understood from Hawaii to Tonga and Aotearoa.

The indigenous flora and fauna of Te Moananui had developed in isolation and the effects of introduced species were profound and irreversible. Historical nuclear testing and dumping, predatory fishing practices on a vast scale, the accumulation of floating plastic pouring out of the industrialised Pacific rim and sea-level rise from climate change are some of the unique environmental issues facing Te Moananui in the new millennium; problems that have their making in the rest of the world but impact on our millisphere.

The American travel writer Paul Theroux, who lives in Hawaii, covers some of the human geography of our millisphere in his book The Happy Isles of Oceania.

One characteristic is that many of our people go elsewhere for work.

US president Barack Obama, from Hawaii, is one notable example; Tongan/English basketball player Steven Adams is another, and there are now Polynesian players in most American NFL teams. One in five New Zealanders works overseas, primarily in Australia, and whereas Auckland was once the world's largest Polynesian city, now it is Los Angeles.

Remittances back constitute an important part of many island states' economies.
Te Moananui is made up of more than 20 independent states, protectorates and territories - and one state of the United States of America.

The Pacific Island Forum, which has observer status at the United Nations, is one emerging governance entity with the potential to manage the $6 billion-plus annual tuna fishing industry, for example. The appointment of the ex-Labour MP, Shane Jones, as an economic development ambassador to the Pacific, recognises the growing importance of the Forum.

When Hone Harawira was still in Parliament, a delegation from Rapanui (Easter Island) met with him, calling for separation from Chile and monetary union with NZ and in Hawaii some native Hawaiians fly the flag upside down as a protest against the continuing American occupation, following the Dole coup of 1894, which ended the rule of the Hawaiian Kamehameha royal family.

The NZ geographer Kenneth Cumberland, in the 70s, described the Pacific as "an American lake".

This is reinforced today with American superbases in the Pacific - primarily the world's largest "gas-and-go" military arsenal on the island of Guam and the whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, revealed the importance of Pearl Harbour in Hawaii as a "five-eyes" cyber-spy base.

One of the last things George W Bush did before leaving office was to create the world's largest fishing reserve in the Mariana Trench, near Guam.

Laying claim to the deepest part of world's oceans naturally appeals to American exceptionalism; but were the Pacific Island Forum members ever consulted?

■Next week's column will be about the changing relationship between NZ and the USA under the Key National Government. I will attempt to find out at what level the "neither confirm nor deny" standoff between the USA and NZ was resolved and replaced with the pragmatic "don't ask" position.