Fiji's Frank Bainimarama ... dogged persistence. Photo: Graham Davis

Pacific Scoop:
Analysis – By Graham Davis

The Australian foreign policy establishment has been plunged into an agonising debate with the gradual realisation that Canberra’s long-standing hardline approach to events in Fiji has failed.

The bipartisan consensus between Labor and the Coalition that the diplomatic cold shoulder and targeted sanctions would eventually bring the Bainimarama regime to heel has been shattered.

And now a high-level public split has emerged that would have once been unthinkable between Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and the most prestigious Australian think-tank on Melanesian affairs – the Lowy Institute. Read more »

While Kevin Rudd's foreign policy is ego-driven, regime leader Voreqe Bainimarama's Fiji is working diligently and effectively to undermine Australia in the Pacific and beyond. Photo: Graham Davis/Grubstreet

Pacific Scoop:
Opinion – By Graham Davis

It’s inconceivable that in any other Western democracy, a national leader would tolerate a cabinet minister behaving as a parallel figure on the world stage and actively undermining the whole edifice of government at home.

Yet that’s precisely what Australia’s Julia Gillard is doing through her failure to crush the audacious come-back campaign being mounted by Kevin Rudd, the man she dislodged as prime minister in a palace coup last year.

The current Gillard-Rudd impasse is an abject lesson for politicians everywhere on the absolute necessity to not just marginalise their predecessors when they take office but to drive a stake through their hearts. Read more »

Scott MacWilliam on a strategy rethink for Fiji. Photo: ANU

Pacific.Scoop
Opinion – By Scott MacWilliam in Canberra

The latest development in ANZ-Fiji relations shows clearly why the model of sanctions being imposed on the South Pacific nation-state encourages tit-for-tat, ill-conceived moves by all parties.

While one view is that ANZ governments have been deliberately egging on the Fiji military government to become ever more extreme, this seems a less likely explanation than another possibility.
Read more »