Yvonne joins PMC team for a week

By Dominika White: Pacific Media Centre
Yvonne Sargayoos is getting a taste of Pasifika as a student journalist at the Pacific Media Centre this week – and she hopes this will help provide a ticket to a career in international reporting.
Completing her postgraduate diploma in journalism at University of Canterbury this year after earlier completing a degree in political science and mass communications, Sargayoos volunteered for the first internship after hearing about the new AUT University-based research centre earlier this year.
After being involved with Te Amokura – the red-tailed tropic bird, as the centre is known - for only three days, Sargayoos says she has already built up more contacts than during her first semester at university and is enjoying the experience.
Sargayoos, 23, says she has also gained knowledge about the Pacific region - something she believes is important for New Zealand journalists. Full story and photo by Dominika White.

• Full story on PMC Online
• Pacific-style stories with an eye to the world

Pacific Media Watch - an antidote for parachute journalism

By Dominika White/Pacific Media Centre www.pacmediawatch.aut.ac.nz
Parachute journalism is inevitable, says Scoop.co.nz co-editor Selwyn Manning. However, he believes AUT University’s unique new media database may help provide more depth to covering Asia-Pacific issues.
The DSpace digital database, named Pacific Media Watch, was launched by AUT’s Office of Pasifika Advancement director Pauline Winter on June 9.
Manning says it is an “exciting” resource that contains accurate information for journalists to use and will help the quality of regional journalism by identifying issues in topics in which journalists have little knowledge.
Manning’s own experience in Fiji in 2006 proved to him how valuable online information is to international journalists.

• An antidote to parachute journalism - full story
• PMW database
• Original PMW website

Pacific Media Watch - the A-G summons to the Fiji Times

To Whom It May Concern,
Re: A-G Summons: A quick question to clarify the relationship here between the Fiji government and the media: Is there not public information or public relations personnel working for the government? Shouldn't this rather be their job instead of the leaders?
Thanks for the article,
Clare

Congratulations to the CI News team!

Congratulations to John Woods for his new role!
And especially to Phil and Wendy for keeping the Cook Islands News daily going through an economic crisis - something I wasn't able to do - and providing one of the stronger examples of media independence in the face of years of political interference in the industry.
Look forward to hearing some day what will be their next venture.
But in the meantime, some well deserved rest is long overdue!
Kia manuia,
Jason Brown

Goro Nickel halts pipeline construction

Further comment on the Goro Nickel waste pipe closure in New Caledonia. For the last few weeks pressure has been mounting on Goro Nickel to stop the development of a pipline that will pour toxic waste into the Havannah Chanel. Protests culminated in a tense meeting between Goro director Jeff Zweig and residents of Ile Ouen on Saturday. Groups in Noumea believe a decision to either continue or abandon the pipeline will happen on Friday. Residents of Ile Ouen that I talked to today were happy that the pressure they and others (like the CoDefSud group) have put on Goro looks like it is finally paying dividends.
Amateur footage of Saturday's meeting is posted below.
Jim Marbrook
Kanaky

YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqVALJRAQMA
Pacific Media Watch report: www.pmw.c2o.org/2008/kanaky5325.html

Our local Jakarta sweatshop

I live in a rumah kos, student accommodation that resembles a motor lodge back home with rows of rooms. My neighbours are mostly Indonesian students, generally well off, because from what I'm told this is an expensive place at 1.5 million rupiah a month - about NZ$200. Amazingly cheap by Auckland standards. To get to the kos you have to negotiate the maze of alley sized streets that make up the local kampung, village.
Just down the street is a place we refer to as a sweatshop. A small metal door that leads off the alley shows a small cramped room about 5m by 5m filled with desk and sewing machines, always humming. Every morning when we wander past we get followed by friendly salamat pagis that carry on even when we are long gone, in the evening its salamat malams. A friend that works for the Jakarta Post interviewed a few of the friendly workers one day and this is what she found. First of all it is a legitimate, to a point anyway, factory and the people are, as it seemed, happy. Unfortunately it is one of the many workplaces in the informal sector, meaning it doesn't fall under labour laws, although at least the people have jobs in a nation with soaring unemployment where 70% of people work in the informal sector.
The girl she talked to, through an interpreter, is one of the millions who have moved from the country to Jakarta in a hugely centralised country. The 20-year-old moved in with her husband last year to try and make money. She now lives above the factory for free, a huge bonus, and shares a room with her husband while the others sleep five to a room.
The young Indonesian girl works a whopping 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. For this huge week she earns a meager Rp 200,000, about NZ$30, sowing beautiful rainbow coloured nightgowns for export to UAE, Malaysia and Australia.
During an average day she get breaks from 12-1, 3-4, 6-7 (for prayers and eating) and in her small amount of spare time she sleeps and rests or wanders to the local mall.
She lives on the Asian staple of nasi, rice, which costs about Rp3000 a meal. Currently her life exists of little more than the cramped factory and whatever she can reach by walking in any time off that she is not sleeping in. What I see as the biggest shame about her story is that she almost had the chance to live a better life - she studied English for three semesters at university, usually a ticket to better pay, but couldn't afford to continue.
And she is well off compared to many here. How lucky we are.
Photos: Our local sweatshop, and one of the guys working on the beautiful nightgowns.
Dylan Quinnel
Jakarta

Dylan's YouTube video post Suharto's death

The contradiction that is Indonesia

Indonesia is considered to be a developing country and looking at the statistics and lives of a majority of the population, this seems bang on. A huge percentage are uneducated, a striking 50%, over 100 million people, live under the poverty line of US$2 per day and 70% of those employed work in the informal sector where they are not protected by labour laws.

Many in this 70% earn strikingly little and work very hard (more about that later in another post about a sweatshop near our Kos, student boarding house).

The contradiction is that a tiny minority are wealthy beyond anything we in New Zealand can fathom. Our richest man, Stephen Tindall would barely feature in their company. One rich son I have been told of owns two of the newest Bugatti cars each worth more than US$1 million. Neither of which he drives because they are one seaters and everyone here has a driver to negotiated the crazy traffic. One of these cars he has never actually sat in but says his friends think it looks good in the garage.

There are shopping malls here which beat the best NZ has to offer hands down. There you can buy the latest Gucci or Prada and a Starbucks Coffee costs exactly what it does in NZ. And I'm ot talking one or two either. What makes it even stranger is that the shacks and mansions, Bugattis and hand drawn carts are right next to each other and use the same pot-holed roads. But then that is the legacy of the developing world when capitalism, and in Indonesia's case, corruption, gets hold.

And yet they are all, except the super rich, some of the friendliest people you will ever meet.

Go figure.

Dylan Quinnell

Jakarta