Of all the places and moments to sign a strategic deal, nothing linked to this year’s Pacific Forum summit has more sharply evoked the old warning that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Oddly, no one seems to have noticed.

On September 1, United States deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau, Aotearoa New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown signed a US$50 million deal to restore World War Two port facilities on Penrhyn Atoll in the northern Cooks. Media shorthand cast it as a new basing arrangement - another move in Washington’s response to China’s Pacific ambitions.

But it is the location of the ceremony that renders the whole thing faintly absurd. The three men signed the deal in Palau, 82 years after one of the bloodiest miscalculations in U.S. military history: the September 1944 invasion of Japanese‑held Palau, a battle now widely regarded as unnecessary, ill‑judged, and strategically pointless.

The irony is not simply geographic. It speaks to how great‑power strategy in the Pacific still struggles to escape its own historical blind spots.

Penrhyn - Tongareva to its people - was renamed by one Captain William Sever who in 1788 named the atoll after his ship, Lady Penrhyn. The ship was heading to China having unloaded a cargo of 104 female convicts in Australia.

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The Pacific Islands Forum is not dead, though it is often spoken of as if it were.

What follows is not an obituary but a testimonial to a much‑maligned institution that tried — sometimes too hard — to make life better for its people. Its failures were rarely its own. Like most political bodies, it was quickly shaped by civil servants and diplomats who bent it to their purposes.

The Forum has long been misread by a lightweight media that expects it to resolve missile tests, great‑power rivalry, and China‑style territorial disputes. Yet its best work has always been quiet and technical: fisheries, environmental protection, and the slow, practical improvements that matter in villages and on atolls.

I was, accidentally, present at its birth in August 1971. Outside Parliament’s Māori Affairs Committee Room in Wellington, I was told I could not enter because Pacific leaders were meeting inside. That was the Forum. Under Keith “Call me Kiwi” Holyoake sat Kamisese Mara of newly independent Fiji; Nauru’s Hammer DeRoburt; the Cook Islands’ Albert Henry; Australia’s Lance Barnard; Papua New Guinea’s John Guise; and Sāmoa’s Tupua Tamasese Lealofi IV — a gentle man I later knew well. His father had been shot dead by New Zealand police on Apia’s Beach Road in 1929.

The Forum’s first communiqué addressed French atmospheric nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll. It “expressed deep regret” that France persisted despite regional protest and warned of hazards to health, safety, and marine life. This was the Forum’s first collective political act, and it was anti‑nuclear.

This mattered. It was the Forum’s first collective political statement, and it was anti‑nuclear.

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A gathering of 17,500 people is the size of a Pacific independence rally, a music‑festival audience, or half a sold‑out Warriors match.

In Cook Islands terms, it is almost the entire population in 1978 — a reminder of how small, intimate, and politically sensitive the country was when Albert Henry’s Cook Islands Party (CIP) government tried to fly in voters by the planeload.

Today, as the Cooks faces a demographic crash, its latest election — which returned CIP’s Mark Brown, 63, as prime minister — sits oddly against the numbers. People are leaving the islands faster than they are disappearing from the electoral roll: demographic depopulation without equivalent political depopulation.

Given the corruption exposed in elections in 1978, the unchanging roll hints at a kind of Polynesian gerrymander. Under first‑past‑the‑post, CIP won 4,944 votes — 53.6 percent of all valid votes — and 16 of parliament’s 24 seats. Four independents have already pledged support, giving Brown a supermajority of 22 seats, enough to amend the constitution.

Winning a seat requires only a plurality, not a proportional share of the national vote. CIP ran hard in every electorate, while the opposition was fragmented and absent in several constituencies. The result was a landslide built on narrow pluralities.

That supermajority matters. Wall Street deepsea miners, encouraged by Brown, are circling the country’s polymetallic nodules, and a surprisingly forward U.S. ambassador, Jared Novelly, has declared the Cooks “either 1a or 1b on my priority list… I’m going to spend quite a lot of time in the Cooks.” Its vast and potentially rich exclusive economic zone makes it the world’s tenth‑largest country by area.

And while the country sits within the “Realm of New Zealand”, a colonial‑style foreign minister like Winston Peters on your back raises constitutional questions that a supermajority could bring to the surface.

But the oddest feature of the 2026 election is the turnout: 9,213 valid votes, a record, even as the resident population has fallen to around 14,000. The explanation lies in diaspora mobilisation, party organisation, and the demography of micro‑states.

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South Pacific islands have long been blessed — and more often cursed — by a strange cast of carpetbaggers and castaways and assorted colonial and local government officials.

Few places attracted more of them than the Kingdom of Tonga, which has a legendary track record of villains, opportunists, and outright con‑artists. Among the most notorious were Chief Justice William H. Stuart and his promiscuous wife Edith — or Starr — Stuart, a couple who came perilously close to destabilising the reign of Queen Sālote Tupou III.

It is a complicated story, best told through the work of biographer Elizabeth Wood‑Ellem and Tonga’s only resident professional photographer of the era, August Hettig.

The Hettig Collection

Although the Stuarts have made appearances before - notably here - this account begins with Hettig, if only because he captured a rare photograph of the dreaded couple. What is now known as the August Hettig Collection has been digitised by Auckland Council Libraries, revealing the cultural vibrancy of Tonga across the 20th Century.

Hettig, of German and Tongan heritage, worked as Tonga’s sole professional photographer from around 1916 until his death in 1974. The tropical climate destroyed most of his negatives; those acquired by Auckland Council Libraries in 2025 represent only a fraction of his life’s work — an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 images. Among the treasures is an envelope labelled Royalty, containing more than 150 photographs of Queen Sālote and the Tongan Royal Family.

Sometime between December 1937 and June 1938, Hettig photographed William and Starr Stuart outdoors. Sharply dressed, they give no hint of the chaos they would soon unleash.

Enter the Stuarts

Much of what followed never reached the public domain. Tonga, though nominally independent, was a British protectorate, and the onset of World War II ensured that events in Nuku’alofa were either unnoticed or quietly censored.

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Twenty‑nine years ago, Tahiti’s most dogged investigative journalist vanished without trace.

In a territory where high-level political corruption was routine, few believed Jean‑Pascal Couraud — “JPK”, 37 — simply walked away. His body has never been found. Now, after decades of obstruction, silence, and political manoeuvring, a criminal trial for murder may finally be called.

At the centre of the story remains the man long synonymous with Tahitian scandals: Gaston Flosse. The former five‑time Territorial President, now 95, insists he and his now disbanded paramilitary and spy units had nothing to do with Couraud’s disappearance. Despite his near senility and numerous statements that he cannot remember names and places now, Flosse will be a key witness, if not a defendant, should a trial occur.

In 1997, Flosse was at the height of his power. A close ally of President Jacques Chirac, he enjoyed direct access to the Élysée and preferential funding for Polynesia. His system fused local dominance with national patronage. He ran a spy agency from his office to monitor opponents and mistresses, while Paris looked away. He was also a staunch defender of France’s nuclear testing programme which ran from 1960 to 1996 at Mururoa Atoll. He opposed independence for French Polynesia.

A Journalist Who Knew Too Much

JPK was one of Flosse’s fiercest critics. First at Les Nouvelles de Tahiti, then as adviser to opposition leader Boris Léontieff, he exposed alleged corruption, patronage, and misuse of public funds. He revealed the so‑called “Japanese account,” detailing possible financial transfers from Flosse to a Japanese bank account linked to Chirac. When he joined Léontieff, he became one of the most dangerous threats to Flosse’s system.

Couraud vanished from his home in Arue on the night of 15-16 December 1997.

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August’s end marks an anniversary of a rare intersection of Sāmoan history and German anti‑Nazi resistance.

Two women from Vailima—mother and daughter—would one day stand against Adolf Hitler from within elite social circles. Their story is little known in Sāmoa, overshadowed by the tourist mythology of Robert Louis Stevenson, yet it forms a remarkable thread linking empire, war, and moral courage.

Beginnings in Sāmoa

Deutsch‑Sāmoa was established in 1900 under Governor Wilhelm Solf. In 1908 he returned to Germany to marry Johanna Elisabeth Susanne Dotti, 25 years his junior—intelligent, pensive, and striking. After their wedding they returned to Sāmoa, where in December they travelled to Savai‘i to confront Lauaki Namulau‘ulu Mamoe, the tulāfale who opposed German rule. The dispute ended with Lauaki’s deportation four months later.

During their ten days on Savai‘i, Johanna conceived her first child. On 31 August 1909, Dr Bernhard Funk rode his carriage up to Vailima—“in obstetric cases, especially,” a local said, “he is the man.” Johanna, aged 22, gave birth to Maria‑Elisabeth Augusta Margaretha So‘oa‘emalelagi Solf. So‘oa‘emalelagi, a taupou name from A‘ana, was shortened to Lagi—“gift from heaven.” The Gestapo would later call her that.

Lagi spent her first three years nurtured in Sāmoan, Cantonese, and German. In 1912 Solf was promoted to head the Colonial Office in Berlin. During the Great War he helped persuade Kaiser Wilhelm to accept an armistice. Hitler later accused him of “stabbing Germany in the back.”

Tokyo, Earthquake, and a Worldly Daughter

After the war Solf became ambassador to Japan. The family arrived in Tokyo in June 1920. On 1 September 1923, a massive earthquake struck, killing around 142,000 people. Solf survived, but the family fled to Hawaii to recover. Teenaged Lagi became enchanted with American life and had to be dragged back to Japan.

When Solf retired, Johanna established the family in Berlin’s diplomatic quarter. Their apartment—nicknamed maison japonaise—became a hub for Japanese diplomats and nobles. It was the beginning of a political circle that would later attract Gestapo attention.

On 30 January 1933, Solf watched torch‑bearing crowds celebrate Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Behind him, Johanna listened as he muttered: “Finis Germania.”

Lagi, worldly and striking, had studied arts in Munich and Paris. At 22 she eloped with Wolfgang Mohr, an engineer in Shanghai. Both families disapproved.

Shanghai: Codes, Refugees, and Rising Suspicion

Shanghai in 1931 was tense as Japan sought to absorb it into its “co‑prosperity sphere.” Lagi, fluent in Japanese and knowledgeable about Asia, provided her father with detailed reports. Their letters used coded names—later incriminating when the Gestapo began investigating the Solfs.

Lagi and Mohr aided Jewish refugees arriving in Shanghai, something the Gestapo would note. She witnessed the Japanese occupation of the city in 1937, when around 270,000 Chinese civilians were killed, followed by the Nanjing massacre of 300,000.

Solf, ailing, wrote to Lagi that he wished “to visit the land I love as my second home.” Japan, not Sāmoa, had become that place, though Sāmoa remained warm in his heart: “Sometimes don’t you wish you could turn the clock back twenty‑five years and return to Sāmoa?”

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A now‑empty 170‑year‑old prison in the centre of Tāmaki Makaurau is stirring debate over its future.

Some want Mount Eden Prison demolished; others imagine an Alcatraz‑style tourist site.

Retired sociologist — and former inmate — Greg Newbold told Radio New Zealand he favours preservation:

“Oh, it’s a museum… a relic of a past era. It should never, ever be pulled down.”

Whenever I pass the stone fortress, opened in 1856, I think of one of its most unlikely prisoners: Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, a tamaʻāiga of Sāmoa. Seized from his fale in 1928, deported to Auckland, and jailed in Mt Eden, he returned home only to be killed by New Zealand police months later on Apia’s Beach Road — the event Sāmoans call Aso Pogisa, the dark day.

The road to Mt Eden

By 1928 the Mau movement had united Sāmoans in a campaign for self‑government. New Zealand’s administration, in place since 1914, had become intolerable. Administrator Stephen Allen responded by creating a military police force and ordering the arrest of Tupua Tamasese, claiming he was a Mau leader.

Before dawn on 27 November 1928, 37 armed police raided Vaimoso. They carried Lee‑Enfields with fixed bayonets and two Lewis machine‑guns. Policeman Kenneth Grinling later wrote that the chief was “encircled with a ring of bayonets before the village could rub the sleep from its eyes.”

As Tupua Tamasese was led away, stones were thrown, and the Lewis gun was trained on the crowd. Handcuffed, he raised his arms and called out: “Filemu Sāmoa, filemu Sāmoa” — peace, Sāmoa.

He was held nine days before Judge William Woodward sentenced him to six weeks for contempt of court, then six months for resisting arrest. Allen insisted he serve the term in New Zealand:

“He is not a criminal, but a spoilt child… if subject to real discipline he may change his views.”

The voyage and arrival

Senior civil servant Carl Berendsen escorted him aboard the trader Tofua. Tupua Tamasese was handcuffed to a bunk. In Suva, Fiji police refused involvement; Berendsen hired two men — one to watch the other. He later told British scholar Margery Perham he tried to cheer the “poor boy,” calling him “Tammy,” a grotesque familiarity given Berendsen’s role in the arrest.

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The Cook Islands has reacted sharply to a showy political moment in the United States: the presentation to President Donald Trump of a gold‑plated replica of one of its deep‑sea nodules — a gesture made by an American mining company now seeking to virtually annex the country’s seabed resources.

On 8 August, American Ocean Minerals (AOM) chairman Tom Albanese handed Trump the gold nodule in a scene that felt uncomfortably like a Koh‑i‑noor moment — a powerful nation receiving a symbolic object from a weaker one’s natural wealth.

“I present to you a gift to the American people on a project I have been very involved with, its deep sea nodules,” Albanese said. “Like you, I am a fan of gold and this is a solid gold replica of a deep sea nodule…”

Trump, characteristically, responded: “Where’s the gold, come on, bring it up, I want the gold.”

He was handed the replica of one of the hundreds of nodules AOM has already removed from the Cook Islands exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

Albanese’s votive offering was hardly necessary. Trump’s new ambassador to Aotearoa New Zealand — and concurrently to the Cook Islands — Jared Novelly, arrived in July declaring that the Cooks were “either 1a or 1b on my priority list… I’m going to spend quite a lot of time in the Cooks.” The geopolitical signalling was already well underway.

The statutory Seabed Minerals Authority (SBMA) did not mention the gold‑nodule theatrics or Novelly’s district‑officer enthusiasm. Instead, it addressed the broader corporate manoeuvre behind the spectacle: what it called the “AOMC–Odyssey transaction.”

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In unusually blunt language, SBMA told Americans - and the world - that AOM holds only an exploration licence, not ownership of Cook Islands seabed minerals, and certainly not any automatic right to harvest them.

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Niue — the isolated “Rock” of the South Pacific — might yet save the world by saving the Italian honey bee (Apis mellifera ligustica).

Its tropical 261 square kilometres could become the insect world’s equivalent of Norway’s underground seed vault on Spitsbergen, that remote Arctic island of 37,673 square kilometres. The world may need both.

Niue’s potential role surfaces from a new job advertisement:

“The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat is inviting tenders from interested English‑speaking applicants for the position of Pacific Beekeeping Enabling Environment (BEE) Coordinator.”

The consultancy is tasked with “creating an enabling environment for honey trade in the Pacific.” Details quickly descend into the familiar thicket of workplans, agro‑value chains, and performance indicators — obscuring a far more compelling story: Niue could become the planet’s only dedicated bee sanctuary, protecting one of the world’s most important strains, the Italian honey bee.

Globally, honey bees are under threat from diseases, parasites, and the spread of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) across the Northern Hemisphere. Niue hosts the last known significant and sufficiently isolated stock of Italian honey bees free of all major diseases and parasites. Its bees have become an increasingly important genetic asset, and Niue itself an ideal sanctuary site.

Since 2018, Niue — population 1600 and 2500 km from Aotearoa New Zealand where 30,000 Niueans live — has been recognised as uniquely suited to such a role: small population, limited visitor numbers, strict border controls, natural isolation, a single port, and unusually pure bee genetics. It is confirmed to be pest‑free.

Oddly enough Niue, for those who live there or visit, is all about its wild and rugged coastline; what may matter to humanity more could be Niue’s rough, plant-clad area about the size of the Scottish city of Edinburgh.

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Sitiveni Rabuka, Fiji’s one-time military commander, coup leader and now prime minister, has finally said aloud what he and others have known for years: the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) is draining money from critical national development.

His admission during a meeting with the visiting United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix. With a faint air of irony, they meet at the Black Rock Camp on the outskirts of Nadi — a facility opened in 2022 at a cost of AUD$100 million, entirely paid for by Australia.

By contrast Australia is paying $63 million to upgrade and maintain Suva’s appalling Colonial War Memorial Hospital.

Perhaps if peacekeeping was ended, Fiji’s health care workers might be able to visit their patients in something better than a leaky old boat.

The Fiji Sun quotes Rabuka saying the meeting was an opportunity to tell Lacroix about the impact and the burden of peacekeeping, particularly the financing of contributions.

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In nearly 60 years of independence, Naoero - the world’s smallest republic, formally spelt Nauru - has accumulated a remarkable record of financial infamy: shell companies, Russian mafia connections, bizarre investment schemes, and repeated national bankruptcy.

Now this Pacific nation of 12,000 people, living on a mostly blasted, strip-mined 21-square-kilometres island just south of the Equator, wants to reinvent itself as a world leader in cryptocurrency. It is urging other Pacific states to join what it calls the Pacific Digital Assets Forum (PDAF), billed as a regional platform dedicated to digital‑asset regulation and digital finance, even if no other capital has signed up.

President David Adeang, heir to a long line of inept politicians, insists “there are exciting times ahead”.

It is as if he wants the rest of the South Pacific to forget — or politely overlook — the generations of financial failure, political turmoil, and corruption that have scarred Naoero since 1968. The republic is uniquely unsuited to regulate anything financial. And it matters to the region because Naoero wants to pull other states into its scheme, risking regional reputational damage.

The Bitcoin Billionaire and the President

In classic Naoero style, Adeang has granted honorary citizenship to 26‑year‑old Dadvan Yousuf (and his brother), a one‑time Iraqi‑Kurdish refugee turned self‑described bitcoin multimillionaire now living in Switzerland. Yousuf has been appointed Naoero’s sole international trade commissioner, operating from the newly created Office of the Trade Commissioner of the Republic of Nauru in the UAE — explicitly framed as an “independent initiative”, not a government organ.

“Mr Yousuf brings a unique combination of entrepreneurial vision, international network, and deep understanding of digital asset markets,” Adeang said.

After his re-election in October, President Adeang reaffirmed the government’s commitment to prioritise current and future economic prosperity.

“While the UN has ranked us the world’s fifth most vulnerable nation to economic and climate shock, we have decided that this is not our future,” he said.

Last year Naoero established the Command Ridge Virtual Asset Authority under Australian banker Brian Phelps to regulate cryptocurrency. Adeang said Phelps brought “integrity and impact” to the operation.

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Sāmoa’s once-lucrative tuna industry has not collapsed because the fish have vanished. It has collapsed because catching them is no longer profitable.

Quietly, almost without public debate, Sāmoa has allowed its industrial tuna longline era to end.

Albacore (Thunnus alalunga)—the “chicken of the sea” prized by canneries for its pale flesh—once filled Sāmoa’s 130,000‑square‑kilometre exclusive economic zone (EEZ). At its peak, the country ran one of the largest domestic longline fleets in the Pacific. Three‑quarters of Sāmoa’s total catch was albacore, most of it exported.

Highly migratory and capable of swimming vast distances at up to 80 kilometres an hour, albacore were once so abundant that in good years Sāmoa set seven million longline hooks in the water. Today that industry has virtually disappeared.

Together with neighbouring Tokelau’s 318,990 sq km EEZ—where industrial fishing has also effectively ceased—the Pacific now contains a fishing-boat-free expanse roughly the size of Papua New Guinea. The reasons, however, are different.

Tokelau’s troubles stem from alleged breaches of a key Pacific fisheries agreement (see more below). Sāmoa’s is simpler, and perhaps more worrying: the fish have moved, and no one is entirely sure where.

The day the tuna stopped paying

The bigger question is what has happened to South Pacific albacore. Scientists point to warming oceans, changing oceanography, shifting fish distribution, rising operating costs and labour shortages. Together they have created a fishery that is increasingly uneconomic, even though the stock itself is not considered overfished.

Sāmoa once had over 100 longliners supplying the Apia Fish Market and exporting albacore. Today, only a handful remain, and many are inactive. In the 1990s, passengers boarding RNZAF Hercules aircraft at Faleolo Airport were often warned not to carry tuna home.

“It makes the plane smell,” loadmasters would tell them. Few listened.

The Apia Fish Market overflowed with tuna flanks and whole fish sold cheaply enough for almost anyone to afford them. Combined with plentiful reef fish, it felt like an endless gift from the sea.

By late 2023, however, Agriculture Minister Laʻaulialemalietoa Schmidt—now prime minister—was delivering a stark warning to delegates at the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) meeting in Rarotonga.

“Sāmoa’s domestic tuna longline fleet developed in the mid 1990’s as the main foreign revenue earner, for our economy. In recent years, our domestic fleet has struggled with the high cost of fishing in addition to the reduction of catch rates of the South Pacific albacore tuna…. The South Pacific albacore tuna stock is important to Sāmoa.”

A fishery without enough fish

The minister pointed to data from the South Pacific Community’s Oceanic Fisheries Programme showing albacore tuna stock is “projected to continually decline under current fishing conditions…. (the) decline of the South Pacific albacore tuna must not continue,” Laʻaulialemalietoa said. “On that note I respectfully request that all (WCPFC) members, and our fishing partners interested in the South Pacific Albacore tuna, to urgently develop robust management arrangements for this resource.”

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Most Americans — including President Donald Trump — have, until now, only a vague sense of where the unincorporated and unorganized territory of American Sāmoa sits on the map.

Yet a quiet bureaucratic decision to initiate deep‑sea mining processes there carries vast and dangerous implications for the wider South Pacific. This is not a bureaucratic footnote — it’s a rupture in Pacific ocean governance. And it is a particularly tragic division of the ancient Sāmoa ‘āiga potopoto or collective family.

American Sāmoans, long among the most enthusiastic recruits to the U.S. military, remain U.S. nationals rather than citizens. And as Trump fires the starter’s gun on a nodules rush in the deep ocean, it’s worth recalling the words of Samuelu Sailele Ripley, whose family home in Pago Pago was seized by the U.S. Navy at the dawn of the 20th century. Ripley wrote to President Woodrow Wilson that God “never intended that the Sāmoan people should be exploited by the white race for personal gain…” Ripley worried about land, now it’s the ocean.

The Trump administration has announced plans for a lease sale covering nearly 127,500 square kilometres of American Sāmoa’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), bordering the Cook Islands/New Zealand Realm EEZ. It marks an increasingly intensive — and potentially aggressive — American policy aimed at dominating South Pacific resources.

This is not just about minerals. It is about power, precedent, and who gets to decide the future of the Pacific Ocean.

The move comes as the Cook Islands, long insisting seabed mining could be environmentally safe, increasingly loses control to Wall Street over its own nodules ambitions. And, in a parallel decision encouraged by American Sāmoa’s non‑voting Republican Congresswoman Amata Radewagen, Trump has also opened tuna fishing around dreamy Rose Atoll — the southernmost point of the United States.

The mining decision comes after Trump’s executive order, “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources”. The targeted minerals include polymetallic nodules, cobalt‑rich crusts, seafloor sulphides and phosphorites that contain cobalt, nickel, copper, rare earths, and other minerals essential for batteries, electronics, and defense systems.

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Sensitive official documents, many heavily redacted, suggest Wellington is scrambling to deal with a crisis over New Zealand’s management of tuna fishing in Tokelau, its territory north of Sāmoa.

The documents point to millions of dollars in lost revenue after Tokelau was expelled from the Pacific’s most valuable tuna management scheme. Exactly who or what caused the collapse remains obscured behind blacked-out passages in papers released under New Zealand’s Official Information Act (OIA).

The documents also point to New Zealand causing severe self-inflicted harm to its Pacific-sensitive reputation.

As reported here last month, Tokelau has used its tuna-rich waters to build a pathway towards greater economic self-reliance. The newly released documents suggest that strategy has unravelled. At stake are control of one of the South Pacific’s richest fisheries, millions of dollars in lost income and broader questions about how much autonomy Tokelau really enjoys under New Zealand administration.

The OIA material, released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, comprises 15 pages of correspondence and briefing papers. They reveal concern at senior levels of government that Tokelau, population about 1,500, had been expelled from the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) Vessel Day Scheme (VDS), a regional fisheries arrangement it joined in 2012.

On June 3, 2026, The Pacific Newsroom reported that Tokelau had been excluded from the VDS, operated by the PNA, an alliance of eight Pacific states established in 2007. The scheme allocates and sells purse-seine fishing days within members’ exclusive economic zones. Vessel days typically sell for US$8,000 to US$10,000 each, generating about US$500 million annually across the region.

Tokelau never publicly disclosed its VDS income. However, with an allocation of about 1,000 vessel days, annual revenue was likely to have been around US$8 million—close to half of Tokelau’s annual NZ$30 million budget.

OIA files from Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Oia 31009 Michael Field Combined Information For Release (watermarked)

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The ministry withheld parts of the released documents under provisions of the OIA covering national security, New Zealand’s international relations, commercial sensitivity, confidential third-party information, negotiations and personal privacy.

One “Sensitive” informal note, dated 19 December 2025, states that the Tokelau Government had advised Wellington that its participation in the PNA had been “abruptly terminated”.

It continued:

“This is a deeply concerning development that has significant implications for Tokelau’s fisheries management system and government revenue of about (figure redacted} per year. Fisheries is the only non-International Development Cooperation source of revenue for Tokelau.

“The Governments of New Zealand and Tokelau are working together to urgently reverse this outcome. Tokelau is seeking to engage at the leadership/political level, and New Zealand at officials’ level in PNA capitals and in Wellington.”

A following paragraph is entirely redacted before the note resumes:

“New Zealand is responsible under international law for the Tokelau EEZ. In practice, New Zealand and Tokelau work together to manage offshore fisheries. Tokelau manages the day-to-day fisheries activities, such as licensing vessels and selling fishing days. New Zealand maintains oversight through the Administrator of Tokelau.”

After further redactions, the note adds:

“...there have been no substantive changes to management arrangements that would alter Tokelau’s ability to participate in the PNA arrangements under the VDS.”

The briefing then outlines a joint response strategy.

“New Zealand officials and Tokelau... agree that it would best serve Tokelau’s interests for Tokelau to lead the response to this development, with our support.”

Tokelau would seek political intervention from PNA leaders while Wellington instructed its diplomatic missions to lobby senior officials in the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Palau, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu.

The documents also contain media talking points. Asked why Tokelau had been expelled, officials were instructed to say they did not “ know the full detail” and, if pressed, to emphasise that Tokelau managed its own fisheries.

Significantly, details of Tokelau’s VDS allocation and related information were themselves redacted.

Meanwhile, reporting from Majuro by Marshall Islands Journal editor Giff Johnson for Radio New Zealand shed further light on the dispute. Johnson reported that Tokelau’s removal had been shrouded in secrecy, but that former Tokelau leaders blamed increasing New Zealand interference in fisheries management.

According to Johnson, both Tokelauan and PNA fisheries officials said New Zealand began exerting much greater oversight of Tokelau’s Fisheries Management Agency from 2024 onwards. Tokelau itself alerted the PNA to these developments because they threatened the basis on which Tokelau, despite being a New Zealand territory, had originally been admitted to the organisation.

Dr Transform Aqorau, the founding chief executive of the PNA Office, said Tokelau’s membership had always depended on its ability to exercise sufficient operational autonomy over fisheries management within its 318,990-square-kilometre exclusive economic zone.

That autonomy, he said, also underpinned Tokelau’s long-term aspiration for greater economic independence.

“However, the position changed when New Zealand increased its oversight of Tokelau’s fisheries management and operations. Tokelau advised the PNA that this had materially constrained its ability to make independent decisions concerning its fisheries…. The difficulty arises from New Zealand’s intervention in the management to Tokelau’s exclusive economic zone and the conditions it appears to have imposed on Tokelau’s administration and delegation.”

PNA leaders in late 2024 and again in 2025 gave Tokelau more time to try to resolve this issue with New Zealand in order for it to continue its status as a party to PNA’s Vessel Day Scheme.

“Despite our efforts, Tokelau has been unable to resolve these issues,” then-Tokelau Fisheries Minister Otinielu Tuumuli said in a 13 November 2025 letter to the PNA.

“New Zealand has recently increased its oversight of fisheries management and operations within the Tokelau EEZ. This development has further limited Tokelau’s ability to make independent decisions regarding its fisheries.”

New Zealand was requiring a level of access to VDS data that it was not entitled to.

Aqorau said the issue of a country outside of the PNA group accessing internal information and data is a non-starter for all the parties.

“The PNA is an arrangement among Pacific Island resource owners and depends upon members being able to discuss commercially, politically and strategically sensitive matters in confidence. PNA countries will be extremely reluctant to reopen Tokelau’s participation if doing so provides New Zealand, whether directly or indirectly, with access to internal PNA information and decision-making.”

All of this is “regrettable,” Aqorau said, “because Tokelau itself has contributed positively to the PNA and has derived considerable economic and institutional benefits from the VDS. The decision was therefore not intended as a punishment of Tokelau. Rather, it reflected the practical reality that Tokelau could no longer participate in the same autonomous manner in which it had operated previously.”

The newly released documents, together with evidence from Tokelau and PNA officials, raise uncomfortable questions during the centenary year of New Zealand’s administration of Tokelau.

New Zealand has long assured the United Nations that its relationship with Tokelau is based on partnership rather than colonial control, and that decisions are guided by Tokelau’s wishes. The record emerging from these documents suggests a more complicated reality.

ⒸMichael J Field

The Pacific Newsroom

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China’s Own Goal in the Pacific

Article 6 captures the core intent: “Each Party recognises that an armed attack on any of the Parties within the Pacific would be dangerous to each other’s peace and security as well as the security of the Pacific, and declares that it would act to meet the common danger, in accordance with its domestic processes.”

Nuke Fallout to Ocean Sanctuary

The extraordinary twist is that nuclear blasted Mururoa Atoll is included. Although part of the Tuamotu archipelago, it lies just east of the Gambier Islands and is explicitly folded into the 680,000 km² zone. This classification places Mururoa under strict ecological protection.

Navy orders Sāmoans treated roughly

The churches were divided. While the Catholics backed the Mau, the Methodist Church sided with the administration. Church head, G S Shinkfield wrote to Australian Methodists saying that in Sāmoa they were ‘practically living under martial law.’ Large numbers of navy men ashore. He blamed the Mau for Aso Pogisā saying they had ‘overstepped the bounds completely.’

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Twenty-six years after he seized parliament, the man who helped plunge Fiji into crisis is back in public life — with the same old message and a new election looming.

At 10.45 am on Friday 19 May 2000, George Speight made his first public statement.

It was broadcast live across Fiji.

“Sit down, sit still and remain calm,” he said, standing on the floor of the Legislative Assembly and brandishing an automatic weapon.

“This is a civil coup by the people… Please co-operate so nobody will get hurt.”

The words were calm. The reality was anything but.

For the next 58 days, Fiji was held hostage. Parliament was occupied, elected representatives were imprisoned, the constitution was overthrown, and a nation was dragged through one of the darkest periods in its modern history.

Twenty-six years later, Speight is speaking to Fiji again - notably though in English for, the self-proclaimed leader of the indigenous iTaukei, barely speaks Fijian.

The man convicted of treason and imprisoned for 24 years has returned to public attention with the same misguided confidence and political arrogance that characterised his rise in 2000.

At 69, he presents himself not as a failed coup leader but as a participant in a national conversation about Fiji’s future.

That conversation matters because Fiji is moving towards another general election — and because Speight, despite his past, is legally entitled to seek political office.

What is alarming is that the current government of Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka - the original coup leader of Fiji - is weak and in disorder. The elections will be conducted under an appalling voting system based on little more than bingo cards, with a system that could easily favour a Speight candidacy. For the record, Speight has not said if he is standing yet.

The coup leader who never named the leaders

Earlier this month he appeared before Fiji’s Constitutional Review Commission and like some kind of huckster delivered bits of his old message. With an eye to his original masters, now rather old men, Speight did not identify those who helped organise, finance or encourage the coup that placed him at the centre of the crisis.

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As political and diplomatic theatre goes, events in Suva, Fiji, on July 6, were almost comically over-staged.

Gathered at Government House - with all the overdressed pomp Fiji’s elite can muster - were Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Fiji leader Sitiveni Rabuka, signing two treaties: one a military pact plainly designed to fend off China in the Pacific, the other carrying a faintly colonial economic flavour.

Just two kilometres away, surprisingly unnoticed by diplomats and media, sat China People Liberation Army Navy spy and tracking ship Yuan Wang 5. At the same time, a Chinese submarine test‑launched a ballistic missile with a dummy warhead that splashed down 1,500 km north of Suva, near Taiwan‑recognising Tuvalu, prompting a wave of carefully worded protest statements. The missile’s flight path also passed near the U.S. Army’s Ronald Reagan Test Range on Kwajalein Atoll in the Taiwan‑recognising Marshall Islands.

A lot of stuff from many nations splashes down in the South Pacific - so outrage has to be moderated. Just a couple of days before, near Guam, a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-8 Poisidon fired a missile into an old American warship, sinking it. No comparison between a ballistic rocket and an anti-ship missile, but New Zealand did make a bigger mess.

So is was quite a Monday — which brings us back to the Suva signing of the Ocean of Peace Alliance, or Veitacini Mutual Defence Treaty, a military pact between Australia and, for now, Fiji.

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Veitacini is a Fijian word meaning “to stand together as one family in defence and peace.” In Fijian political language, it carries a specific connotation: mutual protection among kin, not mere cooperation. Fiji is signalling that Australia is family, not a distant partner.

Article 6 captures the core intent:

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When revolutions or major power struggles end in victory, nations often commemorate them with a national day. America’s Fourth of July is the obvious example. Tonga, however, offers a very different story.

For decades, ordinary Tongans challenged the near‑absolute royal rule of their kingdom, seeking genuine democracy. Yet the movement’s gains have stalled, and in some respects reversed. The question now hangs heavily: did democracy fail in Tonga?

This year has seen a clear reassertion of monarchical and noble power, leaving the country in a semi‑democratic, monarchy‑dominated system where a small group of lords wield decisive authority. Tonga is no longer an absolute monarchy, but neither is it a fully representative democracy. It occupies a hybrid space where reform has slowed to a crawl — and in places slipped backwards.

The corrupt rule of kings Tāufa‘āhau Tupou IV (1918–2006) and George Tupou V (1948–2012) has never been fully reckoned with. Millions of dollars remain unaccounted for, alongside heavy debts to China. Meanwhile, the once‑vigorous democracy movement fractured after the death of its champion, ʻAkilisi Pōhiva (1941–2019), and has remained largely leaderless.

Tonga, with a population of about 103,000, is a lower-middle-income developing country heavily dependent on aid, remittances and labour migration to Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Despite the grandeur of its monarchy, it remains strikingly poor.

I first visited Tonga in 1977 on an inaugural Polynesian Airlines flight from Sāmoa to Auckland. During a stopover at Fuaʻamotu Airport, hundreds of Tongans gathered to watch the new arrival. The king was there too and, as he moved through the crowd, many people dropped to bended knees in veneration. It startled me — but in Tonga, it was entirely normal.

We flew on to Auckland, where the premiere of Star Wars had just taken place. Among those of us from Sāmoa who slipped away to a Queen Street cinema was a distinguished Tongan academic, who brought his mother along. Afterwards he asked what she thought.

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Live long enough and the world can change in remarkable ways.

Back in the late 1960s, I had an after-school job delivering fresh milk in glass bottles, door to door, for four cents a pint. Milk was almost a birthright in Aotearoa New Zealand: pure, inexpensive and even supplied free to schoolchildren.

Then one morning the radio carried a disturbing report. New Zealand’s National Radiation Laboratory had detected the radioactive isotope strontium-90 (⁹⁰Sr) in our milk. The same contaminant was also being found in rainwater and milk across Sāmoa, Tonga, Fiji, Tuvalu, the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau.

Scientists were debating the long-term health implications, but the source was clear enough: fallout from France’s atmospheric nuclear weapons tests at Mururoa and Fangataufa, around 4,700 kilometres away in French Polynesia. The islands themselves were receiving even heavier contamination.

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Between 1966 and 1999 France conducted 193 nuclear tests at the atolls. Only sustained pressure from Pacific governments and a global anti‑nuclear movement finally brought the programme to an end. That movement — so central to Pacific identity in the 1980s and 1990s — has largely faded into memory, recalled more by grandparents than grandchildren. As a result, the future of Mururoa and the nearby Gambier Islands has attracted surprisingly little international attention.

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Something strange is happening to Fiji’s military.

When, this month, the government budget was published the Republic of Fiji Military Force (RFMF) was allocated F$152.6 million, down from F$167.8 million in the previous year.

Cutting military budgets in a place like Fiji is almost unheard of, despite the RFMF’s proclivity to stage coups and, more recently, attempting to expand its role beyond defence by joining police in combating drug trafficking.

Former RFMF commander, coup leader and current Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka blamed the United Nations for the latest budget cut; they were not paying for the peace keeping Fiji was supplying. It’s hardly a new complaint.

What was unusual was the response of RFMF commander Major General Jone Kalouniwai, who not only publicly opposed the budget cut, but did it in such a conspicuous fashion that it almost appears he and his soldiers are already positioning themselves ahead of general elections later this year.

Kalaouniwai took out full page advertisements in newspapers to run his message entitled “Beyond the Budget — and Into the Grey Zone.”

For a man whose budget has just been cut, parts of it read with barely concealed anger.

“Fiji is not fighting a war in the conventional sense. But Fiji is absolutely in a crisis — one that is harder to see, harder to measure, and infinitely harder to win than any declared conflict. It lives in the grey. And it is growing.”

He quickly framed his message as “a conversation about the nature of the threat that faces us today — a threat that does not wear a uniform, does not declare itself at our borders, and does not announce its arrival with the sound of artillery.”

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Kalaouniwai and the RFMF have pushed themselves into a joint taskforce with police to combat international drug trafficking. The operations have proven lethal for some, and with dead suspects raise the question of military involvement in policing.

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