Corruption, illegal tuna fisheries and a ‘lifestyle tsunami’ trouble Pacific business editors

Sean Dorney's presentation ABC report on illegal tuna fishing in the Pacific on 28 October 2013.

HOW IRONIC. For two days this week, veteran Pacific affairs correspondent Sean Dorney from Australia Network was contributing hugely to an inaugural regional business media summit organised by the Asian Development Bank.

His final contribution to the seminar was a rundown on “tunanomics” and how illegal fishing was, for him, the biggest economic story confronting the Pacific.

He punctuated this presentation with an ABC video report from last October which exposed how lack of cooperation by at least six Pacific countries was undermining the Forum Fisheries Agency’s surveillance efforts.

Anthony Bergin, the Deputy Director of the Australian Security Policy Institute, estimates that about US$1.7 billion is lost through illegal and unregulated fishing activity in the Pacific. He’s proposing that the Australian patrol boat programme should not only be a Defence Department commitment but that Australian aid should also contribute to the programme now being developed to replace those 22 patrol boats that Australia has donated to Pacific countries but which are coming to the end of their work life.

No sooner than his fine contribution and the ADB seminar was over, Dorney found himself in the gun again with Fiji media "control freaks" - Dorney's description - who seem determined to use the controversial 2010 Media Industry Development Decree to gag anything deemed to be “un-Fijian”.

'Sulu censors' at work in the Fiji gagging regime

MAKING news in Suva is what’s not making news, reports Rebecca Wright for New Zealand’s TV3 Lateline show. The only story on Fiji Television to make it past government censors was about 24 people being held in policy custody for minor offences.

One of those in custody was one of the station’s own young journalists – Edwin Nand, detainedfor two nights for questioning about sending material to New Zealand media outlets. But he's now free. According to Wright:

3 News reporter Sia Aston and cameraman Matt Smith were not jailed, but they were harassed and then deported when their efforts to report on Fiji's latest political crisis upset the regime of Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama. “They want nothing but positive stories about the regime, the interim government. Anything outside that is just not allowed,” says Ms Aston.

Wright went on to quote Pacific Media Centre director David Robie: “It’s a classic situation that if you're going to have full out military control, you've got to have control of the hearts and minds of people and control information.” But only a couple of sentences or so were used out of quite an extended interview. Robie actually had quite a lot to say about the “sulu censors” and the latest censorship regime back in Fiji that vanished into limbo. Incidentally, the TV3 anchor for this story was ex-Fiji TV presenter Rebecca Singh.

Tonight, Russell Brown’s Media 7 team did another programme about the Fiji crisis with TVNZ Pacific affairs reporter Barbara Dreaver, former Fiji Daily Post publisher and columnist Thakur Ranjit Singh and David Robie. Watch out for it on Thursday night on the digital channel TVNZ7.
Meanwhile, Reporters Sans Frontières have come out with another tough statement against the regime, accusing it of dealing a “mortal blow” to press freedom and moving to a Burmese-style militarised system of prior restraint and censorship. In another development, journalism and media schools have now broken their silence over the Fiji crisis with a timely statement supporting expelled Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Sean Dorney and Fiji journalists who are being harassed and intimidated. See professor Alan Knight's DatelineHK blog for the full statement and 44 journalism and media educator signatories.

• Coup Four Point Five
  
• Media 7
• RSF on Fiji
• Sean Dorney appeal
• TV3 on Fiji news making