Pacific citizens: Though 50 years ago there was not much contact ...

Pacific Cooperation Foundation: Just as the Asia 2000 Foundation was ...

Tackling Pacific Island problems from within the Parliament: Strategic thinking about ...

The agenda: THEN: Social issues were important ...

Improving partnership: There is a need to revive the Pacific Islands ...

Tackling blindness among Pacific peoples: Tongan public health specialist ...

HIV AIDS - moral and medical solutions: Public health and other policy planners...

Tongan job solution: Managed employment is a Tongan New Zealander's private ...

The new tertiary landscape - what's in it for Pacific peoples?: Education is ...

Making good citizens: In our Pacific region, and elsewhere in the world ...

Involving Pacific peoples in local decisionmaking: The question all New Zealand ...

Tangata Pasifika? Michael Powles, who has worked ...

Endorsing good governance: Former New Zealand career diplomat Gordon Schroff ...

Need not be conflict: Issues in Pacific governance - where one size does not ...

Cooperation wins: Greater regional cooperation on common issues might ...

APEC and PECC: Though New Zealand seeks to be a good international ...

Advocacy on market access: The Pacific Islands Trade and Investment ...

Being Pa'alagi: The Being Pa'alagi programme, in which I looked back ...

Collaboration key to achieving vision: The vision of the Ministry of ...

Talk to all pacific cultures with one voice:
Ethnic Communications

Being Pa’alagi

By Anthony Haas

The Being Pa’alagi programme, in which I looked back at my work as a foreign correspondent and consultant in the initial self-determination era of the Pacific Islands, provided the basis for this DecisionMaker edition. If you learn what I learnt as the interviewees spoke, you may agree that we all have to 'lift our game'.

Being Pa’alagi Programme

The four essential aspects of the Being Pa’alagi Programme have me refocussing on beginnings – here, there, and the future. If you want to taste more of the political, economic and social self determination story of the Islands, and the multi cultural New Zealand development story that I helped write, there are places where, now and then, you can find out more.

Alexander Turnbull Library

The Pacific specialists in the Alexander Turnbull Library encouraged and enabled me to secure my Pacific papers for future generations, including tapes of early interviews with independence leaders. Oral archivists and historians encourage me now to help provide road maps to those holdings. Libraries, museums, publishers and others who protect and create access to public records are amongst those who have an interest in disseminating the insights of the people I have been privileged to interview.

The logic of creating a New Zealand Asia Pacific Documentation Centre, building on what other primary sources and I can make available, has gained fresh impetus and focus through the establishment of the Centre for Citizenship Education. The documentation – and dissemination of it – can help meet Pacific good governance needs with past experience.

Oral archives

A 2003 Stout Research Centre Fellowship at Victoria University of Wellington enabled me to start a new era of interviewing Pacific peoples, Pacific citizens, Tangata Pasifika, Te Waka moana nui a kiwa or however we may describe ourselves. An Australian Sesquicentennial Gift Trust for Awards in Oral History enabled me to start interviewing key former Pa’alagi, New Zealand cabinet ministers and officials.

Initially on the DecisionMaker website, and in due course through other media, public access will be possible, at least to some of the Pacific information and analysis of these and other New Zealanders:

• Frank Corner, who worked on independence for Samoa in 1962, and Gerald Hensley, who helped Frank;
• Roger Peren, who served in the South Pacific Commission in 1949;
• Phil Amos, who provided the political will that opened channels of communication between Pacific migrant and host society in 1972-75;
• David Lange, who sought to assert New Zealand values among Pacific neighbours without full electoral support;
• Michael Powles, from the generation of officials who sought to provide more effective aid and enabled the Pacific Cooperation Foundation to help lift our game;
• Gordon Shroff, whose active service in Pacific diplomacy, development and immigration spans nearly 40 years.

But as fits the values I reflected in Pacific journalism, my Being Pa’alagi programme series is anchored in the views of Pacific peoples:

• Rev Vaiao Alailima-Eteuati, of Samoan descent, who was inaugural president of the Auckland Pacific Islands Advisory Council in the 1970s;
  Melino Maka, of Tongan descent, a new generation of Tangata Pasifika Auckland community leader;
• Terry Chapman, of Niuean descent, and a former Niuean secretary to government who now says the survival issues for Niue are urgent;
• Lisiele Tongati’o, the planning and consultation oriented current New Zealand Ministry of Education Pacific manager.

Education

Pacific citizenship education content is being distributed to public servants in training, reached by the Victoria University School of Government (SOG) website use of DecisionMaker – and is being added to by briefings such as SOG Head, Professor Gary Hawke offers online about Pacific economic cooperation options for Pacific Island countries.

Pilots to apply the Centre for Citizenship Education, Being Pa’alagi and DecisionMaker experience to interested Pacific countries and communities are in design.

Published 3rd qtr, 2003

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