Consensus among multilateral and bilateral donors in the region on the Pacific Island states’ best economic policy options saw the prioritisation of economic restructuring in donor aid programming from the mid-1990s. ^[6] Inspired by two World Bank reports on economies in the region (World Bank 1991, 1993), the urgings of neo-liberal policy advocates in Australian and New Zealand academia,^[7] and the restructuring experience of New Zealand, ‘economic reform’ (as it’s euphemistically termed in the Pacific) has been underwritten primarily by the ADB through a program of lending that is now being strongly criticised for having saddled Pacific Island states with burdensome debts. ^[8]

The Pacific Islands Forum, formerly the South Pacific Forum, has played a key role in regional economic restructuring, functioning as a channel for the diffusion of neo-liberal economic ideas and thinking among Pacific Island leaders, and as the principal implementing agency in the externally driven program of ‘reforms’.^[9] From 1999, the work of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat began to focus increasingly on trade liberalisation and compliance with WTO principles and trade rules — two regional trade agreements, the Pacific Island Countries Trade Agreement (PICTA) and the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (with Australia and New Zealand; PACER), emerged from Secretariat processes. After the signing of the Cotonou Agreement between African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and the EU in 2000, and the inclusion of six more Pacific Island states in the ACP group, the Secretariat also assumed responsibility for coordinating negotiations between Pacific ACP countries and the EU on a Regional Economic Partnership Agreement, and subsidiary agreements. Meanwhile, with Tonga successfully completing its WTO accession requirements in November 2005, Vanuatu requesting a reopening of the WTO accession package it agreed to and then shelved in 2001 (with a view to renegotiating the terms on which it joins the WTO), and Samoa preparing to accede, Pacific states are moving rapidly down the path of liberalisation.

Although discordant notes have been heard within the Pacific Islands Forum ^[10] and Pacific Island leaders were vexed about Australia and New Zealand’s manipulations to secure PACER,^[11] and although Vanuatu officials have expressed strong criticisms of ADB-designed reform programs (Gay and Joy n.d.), the Forum Secretariat remains committed to pushing economic ‘reform’ and trade liberalisation in the region, national governments appear to still be firmly on board for the rest of the regional reform voyage, and ‘reform-speak’ has become the dominant discourse in the region, within and outside government.

Publications of substantial critiques of current economic policy are rare. Mainstream academia in the Pacific has largely taken no issue with ‘reform’ policies or their economic rationale. The process of economic restructuring in the region has indeed been facilitated by the virtual absence of contrary academic opinion. ^[12] Not only have most regional economists failed to debate, much less critique, the neo-liberal economic arguments of economic ‘reform’ advocates within governments and intergovernmental institutions, several have been active advocates of these policies. The recent restructuring and marketing of programs and jobs at the University of the South Pacific has made many academics beneficiaries of market-based ‘reforms’, introducing new inequalities through non-transparent processes of private negotiation on individual employment contracts that would have been considered unfair in a previous era.

There is a general dearth of information in the public domain on the origins, objectives and implications of structural adjustment policies, little if any coverage in the mainstream media of the negative impacts of such policies or of trade liberalisation elsewhere in the developing world, and next to no informed debate on these issues in national parliaments. The finding by researchers who produced the USP Report on Strengthening Regional Cooperation through Enhanced Engagement with NGOs that 59 per cent of participants in the consultations they held knew ‘little/nothing about trade’ is not surprising; nor is the finding that 63 per cent knew ‘little/nothing about what the Forum Secretariat does’ (Sutherland et al. 2005).

Organised civil society opposition to ‘reform’ in Pacific Island countries has tended to be sporadic, confined largely to national contexts, and occurring at different times, over different issues and involving different protagonists, such that solidarity from civil society organisations in other parts of the region has most often been limited if not completely absent. Moreover, in most Pacific Island countries, pressing national issues have often taken precedence over programs of ‘reform’, claiming the attention and energy of NGOs. Even where broad coalitions of NGOs have emerged, such as in Fiji with the NGO Coalition on Human Rights and the Human Rights and Democracy Movement in Tonga, challenging economic and trade policy has not really been part of their remit. Ironically, precisely because the strongest NGOs are preoccupied in pro-democracy, anti-corruption struggles, so-called economic ‘reform’ has been able to proceed largely unchallenged. Even more ironically, these movements often cite political conditionality and good governance discourses in support of their causes, without fully appreciating their neo-liberal nuances, association with deregulation/liberalisation policies and their implications.

The earliest resistance to ‘reform’ policies in Fiji occurred immediately after the military coups in 1987 and came from the trade union movement, which challenged the repressive labour laws imposed by decree and tax-free factories, two of the earliest elements in the post-coup government’s deregulation program, and subsequently opposed other dimensions of structural adjustment, including taxation ‘reforms’, corporatisation and privatisation of state entities, and public sector ‘reform’. In addition to soliciting solidarity action against the labour decrees, the Fiji Trades Union Congress published statements in the press, and when permits could be obtained organised public protests, all of which were usually portrayed as oppositional ‘political action’ because of the Congress’s close links with the Fiji Labour Party, which had been deposed in the coup.

The leading and most persistent critic of economic restructuring from within the churches in the Pacific has been Fiji-based Father Kevin Barr, whose prolific writings, on behalf of the Fiji Council of Churches’ Research Group, the Peace, Justice and Integrity of Creation project of the Catholic Church, and, more recently, the Ecumenical Centre for Research, Education and Advocacy (ECREA), combine a strong critique of economic globalisation based on Christian social theology with evidence-based analysis of growing poverty in Fiji and the region. Largely due to the publications and advocacy work of Fr Barr and those with whom he works, church-based organisations can be credited with tracking and critiquing current economic policy and its impacts in the region. This work has not been uncontested, however, and the metamorphosis of the Fiji Council of Churches’ Research Group into ECREA gave Fr Barr and others in the Church working on economic justice issues a far freer hand.

Violent opposition to economic restructuring occurred in PNG in 1995 when massive protests were staged against an IMF/World Bank-proposed Land Mobilisation Program aimed at ‘freeing up’ land and providing security of tenure or property rights. Six years later, in 2001, 13 days of rioting and protests over government plans to retrench one-third of the PNG Army on the advice of a Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, funded by Australia and led by a former New Zealand Secretary of Defence (Standish 2001), saw four students shot and killed. ^[13]

In October 2002, after pressure from various official quarters, the private sector and civil society, and the realisation that it had ‘given away too much’ (Kelsey 2004a), the Vanuatu Government shelved a completed WTO accession package. The accession negotiations, which began after Vanuatu applied to join the WTO in 1995, had subjected Vanuatu to a range of WTO-plus demands from the WTO Working Party, including demands for radical liberalisation of services. ^[14] In Oxfam New Zealand’s view, acceding under the terms agreed to by Vanuatu would have exposed the country to ‘the worst kind of corporate cream-skimming in the education and hospital sectors’ (Oxfam NZ 2005). Vanuatu’s supposedly publicly endorsed Comprehensive Reform Program, which began in 1997 and was underwritten by an ADB loan approved in 1998, had in large part been aimed at preparing Vanuatu for WTO accession, as indicated by the tariff reductions and value-added tax put in place by the Vanuatu Government as part of ADB conditionality (Oxfam NZ 2005: 10).

The most recent civil society challenges to reform and trade liberalisation have occurred in Tonga. A massive strike by civil servants in 2005 was triggered by the impacts of public sector reforms, which had introduced large remuneration increases for very senior public servants. The success of the strike, together with the growing strength of Tonga’s Democracy Movement and public disenchantment with the impacts of a consumption tax (introduced to offset expected revenue losses from tariff reduction once Tonga joined the WTO), encouraged a broad coalition of NGOs, trade unions and church organisations to convene a workshop in late October on the implications of Tonga’s accession to the WTO under terms agreed to during WTO Working Party negotiations, and subsequently to organise a public campaign to try to stop the Tongan Government from proceeding with the accession plans. Though the campaign did not succeed in halting the accession process, it raised public understanding of Tonga’s WTO obligations and their social and economic implications.

Organised opposition to neo-liberalism and ‘reform’ at the regional level has until recently been largely absent, intermittent expressions of concern notwithstanding. Although an annual NGO Parallel Forum, convened since 1995, at the same time and in the same location as the Pacific Islands Forum, provided an opportunity to regional NGOs to closely monitor and track the work of the Forum Secretariat in driving the regional reform agenda, and to advance policy critiques and an alternative vision, participating organisations seemed to be preoccupied with their own work programs, which did not include keeping a watching brief on regional economic policy commitments and their implementation at the national level. Criticisms of the ‘reform’ agenda made at Parallel Forums were therefore not sustained by any substantial research, analysis and advocacy work carried out regionally, or even nationally, by way of follow up. From 2001, a number of initiatives saw a stepping up of regional-level responses to ‘reform’ and trade liberalisation. In 2001, after a regional consultation convened by the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Pacific churches adopted a collectively authored platform document to which Fr Barr contributed, critiquing economic globalisation and the neo-liberal ideas and values that fuel it. Titled ‘Island of Hope’ — The Pacific Churches’ Response on Alternatives to Economic Globalisation, the document asserted Pacific economic values of redistribution or resource-sharing and communal ‘ownership’ and social values of sharing responsibility for the welfare of kin, and investing in social solidarity. The same year, a Regional Consultation on Globalisation, Trade, Investment and Debt, organised by ECREA and held in Nadave, Fiji, brought together regional NGOs working on development and rights, and triggered the creation of the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) with the objective of conducting research, analysis and advocacy on economic and trade policy issues.