Development grant gives boost to Pacific Media Watch freedom project

By Lucy Mullinger: Pacific Media Centre

A Pacific media freedom monitoring project that began life campaigning for two journalists and a parliamentarian languishing in a Tongan jail almost 14 years ago has been given a boost by a $15,000 development grant.

Pacific Media Watch, founded by volunteer journalists concerned about a free media in the region, campaigned with a petition to have the “Tongan three” released from jail.

Now the project is run by AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre and it is being revitalised as a digital media freedom and development database.

The Pacific Development and Conservation Trust grant will be used to expand the regional database and community journalism resources which focus on media freedom, environmental issues, human rights and a sustainable press.

Current PMW contributing editor Josephine Latu of Tonga (pictured above interviewing) says the project gives media freedom in the region “publicity and a buzz” and professor Olaf Diegel of AUT’s Creative Industries Research Institute, which includes the Pacific Media Centre, says the grant is a “tremendous boost” for media research.

One of the founders of PMW, award-winning Sydney investigative journalist Peter Cronau, believes the grant will help the project keep up the challenge.

“In smaller communities there is a risk that political and commercial influences can have a more substantial effect on influencing the reporting of events,” he says.

Keeping democracy alive
“A group like PMW keeps an eye on such transgressions and ensures they are given the openness and oxygen that keep democracy alive.”

The PMW project was adopted by the Pacific Media Centre in 2007 and has been developed by Pacific Islands contributing editors based in AUT’s School of Communication Studies for the past three years.

PMW was originally established in 1996 at the University of Technology, Sydney, by Peter Cronau, then director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, and then Papua New Guinea-based NZ journalist David Robie.

Associate Professor Robie, who is now director of the Pacific Media Centre, says this is the first external funding for the PMW project.

“The voice of a ‘free press’ in the Pacific often used to be an issue owned by cozy elite media proprietors,” says Dr Robie.

Nowadays groups such as Pacific Media Watch, Pacific Freedom Forum and Pacific Islands News Association are contributing to issues of media freedom being constantly debated around the region.

Dr Robie believes this is partly due to a perceived greater danger for journalists and the media in the region - “especially in the face of a sustained onslaught from the censors and the military regime in Fiji”.

Global media agencies
Although there are other larger global free media agencies such as the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Sans Frontières in Paris, Cronau believes a smaller programme such as PMW can devote more time to local issues and continue to follow-up on them long after world attention has declined.

“There is a localised corporate memory that allows the connections to be made between current events and the relevant historical background,” he says.

The catalyst which established the programme was the jailing of Taimi ‘o Tonga journalists and editors Kalafi Moala and Filokalafi ‘Akau'ola, along with pro-democracy MP in Tonga, ‘Akilisi Pohiva, for alleged contempt of Parliament in September 1996.

With help from the PMW, which organised a petition of more than 100 media signatures from the Pacific region, and other groups such as the Commonwealth Press Union, they were freed by the Supreme Court in Tonga after it had ruled that their imprisonment was unconstitutional.

Moala has been a staunch supporter of the project ever since it started and has contributed many articles on the Pacific Islands region.

He believes the PMW is a great help information-wise to Pacific peoples.

According to Moala, media organisations across the Pacific benefit from the information that comes from the Pacific Media Centre.

“I do not know what others are doing in terms of Pacific research, but what we get out of AUT is definitely superb,” he says.

Contribute submissions
The PMW and PMC also contribute submissions on media matters, such as for an independent review of the Fiji Media Council just months before martial law was declared in April 2009.

“We are also constantly working behind the scenes with journalists who are in jeopardy,” says Robie.

Contributing editor Josephine Latu says: “We try to watch for new projects or developments in the area and promote them by giving them publicity and a buzz through news coverage on our partner Pacific Scoop, as well as dispatching emails and newsletters to our subscriber list.

“We also document these developments by storing news stories, research papers, or important media reports in our database.”

Dr Robie says: “This is an important development for us and will enable the PMC to significantly improve the resources made available through the university’s PMW database and integrate it with other digital developments planned by the centre for later this year.

“The grant will help in expanding and improving our services, for instance, giving our database and website a makeover and making them more interactive with users. The grant will hopefully allow us to bring more Pacific Island people, or Pacific-interested people on board,” he says.

The centre also wants to organise other events in the future which will showcase and promote more student media work - such as the Flavorz film festival held last November, where a range of short films by Māori, Pasifika and diversity television students were shown.

The grant will be used to help Pacific people express their identity and worldview through media and to contribute to New Zealand's knowledge base, says Latu.

“Pacific media does not only mean news coverage about the region - it also involves alternative perspectives and angles of these same issues from local people.

“We also need to bring this aspect of diversity to NZ media.” she says.

'Trememdous boost'
Professor Olaf Diegel, director of the Creative Industries Research Institute at AUT, says the $15,000 development grant represents a tremendous boost to Pacific research.

“Until the creation of the Pacific Media Centre there has been relatively little true research into Pacific media. Even getting the public and government to understand both the value of Pacific media-related research, and what constitutes good media research has been a challenge,” he says.

“ It is only when tabloid worthy events - such as the coups in Fiji or Samoan tsunami occur - that we even realise that there is such a thing as Pacific media” he says.

He believes “this kind of synergy between research, industry and education” makes AUT the top institution in the field of Pacific research.

“I am convinced Pacific Media Watch will become a vital source of information on all things Pacific, and will be used extensively by the media, the government and the community.”

Is there a future for Pacific journalism? No doubt about it, says Cronau

“As long as there are those who act to inhibit free speech and the work of inquiring journalists in Pacific countries, there will be a need for Pacific Media Watch's unblinking eye.”

The Pacific Media Watch digital repository: www.pacmediawatch.aut.ac.nz
More information about PMW.
The original PMW website, hosted by a community NGO.

Public right to know - new PJR edition

Pacific Media Watch

Trauma and exiled writers, the challenge of environmental journalism in Delta land, issues of editorial “slant” in health reporting and use of te reo Māori in newspapers are some of the topics featured in the latest edition of Pacific Journalism Review.

The October edition is a special “Public right to know” joint issue published by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre.

A selection of eight peer-refereed papers, mostly drawn from the PR2K7 conference with the theme “Giving them what they want” (PR2K), has been published in this edition co-edited by professor Wendy Bacon, director of the ACIJ.

The PR2K conferences, which have been held regularly since 2000, have mostly focused on how the right of people to know what is happening has been frustrated by legal, political and social constraints on the media in the Asia-Pacific region.

“While these key concerns remain, in 2007 and 2008 the conference organisers challenged participants to present papers which explored how contemporary media developments are shaping and being shaped by new relations with the public,” Bacon writes in the editorial.

Bacon herself contributed a major role in one of the key research articles, along with two Bangladeshi colleagues, about the urgency of environmental coverage of Delta land, showing up the “neglect” of reporting ecological devastation by Australia and New Zealand media in some parts of the region and why change is needed.

This year is the Year of Climate Change in the South Pacific and several small island nations have stretched their resources to provide better environmental reporting.

John Carr focuses on journalism as storytelling and argues that a “viable public sphere” needs narrative templates for critical social, political and environmental issues that need to engender a sense of shared participation.

John Roberts and Chris Nash examine the reporting by two Sydney newspapers of the controversial issues of a safe injecting room in the face of complaints of bias.

Investigative journalism
Marni Cordell presents a pilot study on the state of investigative journalism in Australia with a focus on the ABC’s flagship Four Corners programme. PMC director associate professor David Robie provides a comparative case study on the controversial Fiji news media “review” in the lead up to the regime imposing martial law and censorship at Easter.

Other articles outside the main PR2K theme include a study of the “intentional use” of te reo Māori in New Zealand newspapers in 2007 by the Kupu Taea project at Massey University, a comparative study of teenage views on journalism as a career in Australia and NZ by professor Mark Pearson of Bond University, and a New Caledonian mediascape from aid analyst Nic Maclellan.

The review section includes a feature essay on the book Shooting Balibo written by Tony Maniaty about the murders of the “Balibo Five” television reporters and journalist Roger East by invading Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1975.

This edition, co-edited by Jan McClelland and Dr Robie, has been dedicated to AUT research administrator Jillian Green, who had been a strong colleague, friend and supporter of PJR and this month lost her struggle with cancer.

The next edition of PJR has the theme “reporting conflict” in association with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and will be published in May 2010.

• Pacific Journalism Review can be ordered on the PJR website www.pjreview.info or through the ACIJ www.acij.uts.edu.au

• Call for papers for May 2010.
• Pacific Journalism Review
  

Couple fight Pacific nuclear wall of silence

By Pippa Brown: Pacific Media Centre

Cook Islander Tau Greig and her husband Wayne Meyer hope this month’s granting of the right to sue over British nuclear testing in the Pacific will be the turning point in their private battle to succeed.

They are tired of fighting the wall of silence that greets them when they open up the debate.

They now want someone to help coordinate the victims and their descendants affected by the radiation from these tests.

About 1000 veterans from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Britain, who took part in atomic tests in the 1950s, won the right to sue Britain’s Ministry of Defence for exposure to radiation.

From their first letter to British Prime Minister John Major, 14 years ago, Tau Greig and Wayne Meyer have been fighting - and they are sick and tired of it. Other letters have been written to other ministers as well, among them former prime ministers Tony Blair, Jim Bolger and Helen Clark, and Phil Goff and Winston Peters.

They feel they have been ignored by the New Zealand and Cook Island governments who they think should assist them.

It is hard to recognise that Tau Greig was a very competitive sportsperson.

Greig is now in an Auckland rehabilitation home and has been told her condition is degenerative.

She is in a wheelchair, has difficulty speaking and is dependent on 24-hour care.

Sea sickness
It was 14 years ago that Meyer realised his wife Tau was sick, when after a bout of sea sickness she never got better. It took another 10 years before a diagnosis of the genetic disease spinocerebellar ataxia was made.

Her diagnosis is atypical, in other words, she only carries three to four genetic imprints and not the 10 that make up the disease.

“It doesn’t fully conform to the diagnosis,” says Meyer.

They think Tau’s ill-health is related to nuclear radiation exposure received from Britain’s Operation Grapple tests in the Pacific during the 1950s at Christmas and Malden Islands.

About 50 years ago, when Greig was only 10 years old, she and her family witnessed a test while playing on the island of Rakahanga, in the northern Cooks, when she saw a brilliant flash across the sky. Then the ground shook.

In the evening the sky turned red and stayed red all week. A few days later the lagoon became white and frothy. The fish all died and floated on the surface. The villagers burnt the fish.

The Grapple tests happened 10 years after the Japanese were devastated by nuclear bombs in Hiroshima. It is hard to believe they thought it was safe, says Meyer.

“We were never told to leave.

They said they would come back,” says Greig as she struggles to talk.

“They never gave food and never came back,” Meyer says.

Exploding bomb
The aircraft carrier HMS Warrior visited Rakahanga and advised the islanders they were going to explode an atmospheric hydrogen bomb over Christmas Island, north of Rakahanga. The islanders were told not to drink the water nor eat any vegetation or fish for the next three to four months.

“The Warrior never came back so we had to live on coconuts for the next three or four months,” writes Greig in an earlier letter to the British Home Office.

It is thought to be one of the biggest hydrogen bomb tests ever recorded, says Meyer.

After the bomb families started dying as soon as the next day, a lot of children died. They got dysentery and started vomiting and died, says Meyer.

“[Former Cook Islands Prime Minister Dr Terepai] Maoate told the people they had dysentery because they were unclean,” he says.

In fairness to him he said he didn’t know what caused the children to get sick and die, says Meyer.

“We don’t know how many died.

“There are no records,” says Meyer.

Sir Terepai Maoate, who worked as a young doctor on neighbouring Manihiki Island, told a Cook Islands Research Association conference in 2008 that he had treated fatal cases of diarrhoea and vomiting. He said he had seen people with enlarged thyroids, but there had not been any connection to nuclear testing.

Birth defects
There were a lot of children born with the birth defect club foot in the northern Cooks, says Meyer.

“The islanders buried their limbs in the sand to stop them twisting, but a lot still died.

“People left the northern Cooks because they thought there was a curse on them,” says Meyer.

He says the Cook Islands government refuses to acknowledge the likelihood of damage because of the distance of Rakahanga from the Christmas and Malden Islands. There was a no-go zone of 400 nautical miles.

It is estimated that the northern Cooks are in an area 300–500 miles south-west of Malden Island.

Roy Sefton, nuclear test veteran and chairman of New Zealand Veterans Association, served on the ship HMNZS Rotoiti during Operation Grapple. He suffered his first bout of ill-health at 21 which has continued throughout his adult life.

The HMS Warrior was part of an exercise involving most of the ships at Operation Grapple where their job was “showing the flag” aiming to generally placate and ease any fears Islanders had, says Sefton.

The area of the exclusion zone that was declared dangerous to ship and aircraft covered 750,000 sq miles but there was no logic to how this zone was drawn up he says. It was not drawn out in a square or circle and there are large areas that are just cut out from the edge of the square in the ocean.

“It looks very much like a doctored scenario,” says Sefton.

Wind hotspots
The only reason he can think that this was done was to lessen the concern of people on the islands.

“Even with exclusion zones there is no guarantee that the radiation will stop exactly at that point,” says Sefton.

Other factors such as the unpredictability of wind at altitude and the phenomena of hotspots or blowback affect the spread.

Hotspots and blowback are created where either large or small areas are affected by radioactive fallout that has been blown together as weather conditions change. It was predicted that the wind would blow in a north easterly direction for 5000 sq miles but it may not have, he says.

“There may have been areas which were quite a considerable distance outside the exclusion zone where these hotspots have occurred,” says Sefton.

In 1973, the New Zealand government took a legal case against the French nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll through the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

They argued about the danger of the tests and consequential spread of radiation to the population and environment of the radiation in New Zealand and other Pacific Islands, says Sefton.

“In relation to Tau’s case, it illustrates the ability of radioactive materials to go anywhere,” he says.

Grapple 4 was a particularly dirty bomb and it made atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers,” says Sefton.

Painless, invisible
“If you have been impregnated with this stuff, it’s painless and invisible and you don’t know about it.

“If you get hit with a bit of shrapnel you know and you have an idea if you are going to survive or not,” he says.

Dr Al Rowlands is the molecular scientist and the lead researcher of the Massey University study which strongly influenced the veterans’ win to sue Britain’s Ministry of Defence.

In his research, Dr Rowlands found huge disparities between the control group and veterans group.

The control group showed genetic damage of 10 translocations per 1000 cells against the veteran’s group where the frequency was 29 translocations per 1000 cells. In comparison workers close to the Chernobyl accident and clean-up had about 20 translocations per 1000 cells.

“The New Zealand government never fail to surprise me,” says Sefton.

Back in 1973, when they took their case to court at The Hague in a very well researched case on the dangers and ill-health of radiation to the Pacific, they would have spoken with a lot of expert advice.

Sefton claims the government and Veteran Affairs have applied double standards and never used this information.

• This week French Polynesian nuclear test veterans, who had their case for compensation rejected, have vowed to fight on. The French government has previously said it would compensate for any victims from nuclear testing carried out in French Polynesia from 1960 until 1996.

Eight former test site workers who took their case to the Tahiti court have been unsuccessful because under local ruling the complaints cannot be ruled on.

Top picture: Tau Greig and husband Wayne Meyer in Auckland 2009 (Pippa Brown) and above, on Rarotonga 2008.

Pippa Brown is an AUT Graduate Diploma in Journalism student on internship with the Pacific Media Centre.

British nuclear test Grapple Y 1958
Cook Islanders may have been exposed to radiation

Undersea volcano, climate change step up turtle worries

By Olivia Wix: Pacific Media Centre

An undersea volcanic eruption off the coast of Tonga this month worries marine biologists over a risk to Pacific feeding grounds for sea turtles.

The volcano spewed ash into the sea and into the air near the low-lying volcanic islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha’apai.

The area is a common turtle feeding ground for some turtle species.

Massey University vulcanologist Dr Jerome Lecointre says an event like this can have severe consequences for species within the sea.

He says the eruption may have killed many nearby creatures.

“The eruption was sudden. There was no warning and people couldn’t do anything to lessen the impact,” he says.

Dr Lecointre says the heat of the water would be the most devastating to the marine life.

“At the surface it was boiling, it would have been much hotter in the sea,” he says.

The water continues to boil until the volcano stops erupting.

“It makes sense that the marine life would be killed. The eruption would have had much more devastating effects if it was land-based.”

Population decline
Sea turtle populations have been on the decline for years, although fears surrounding the impacts of climate change on them are only now being realised.

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) believe an increase in extreme weather events, rising sea levels and increased temperatures are the main contributing factors towards the decline of the turtle populations.

The “red list” classifies all six sea turtle species in the Pacific as endangered. The leatherback and hawksbill species are considered critical.

SPREP and WWF predict that increased air and water temperatures would be the main climate related reason sea turtles become extinct.

SPREP’s marine species officer Lui Bell says warmer air temperatures increase the heat of sand. This can impact on the species as the temperature of the nests determines the sex of a turtle.

WWF South Pacific’s regional marine officer Penina Solomona says: “Research has indicated that climate change can influence the sex ratio of hatchlings.

"This means a hotter beach can result in the inundation of nests, further decreasing the number of hatchlings recruited into the population.”

Bell says the ideal temperature for incubation is 30 deg C. This means that if the eggs are buried in sand less than 30 deg C it will produce a male – higher will create a female.

Kelly Tarlton’s fish department team leader and turtle expert Nik Hannam says that as temperature rises more female turtles will be born.

“This is making them becoming the predominant gender.”

Bell says: “As more females will be born they will not be able to maintain their population for long.”


Sexual maturity
Research has shown that currently only one in 1000 turtle eggs will stay alive until sexual maturity at the age of 25 to 35. Bell says this will also play a major role in the declining population.

“Female turtles usually lay between two to five different clutches of eggs per nesting season, each having been fertilised by a different male,” adds Bell. This means that the amount of clutches a female turtle can lay will decrease.

Sea turtle conservation groups have discussed a strategy for when populations start to become predominantly female. In these situations, eggs would be incubated below 30 deg C to produce more males.

The warming of the sea has also had major implications for the turtles. Warming sea levels have caused extreme coral bleaching in South Pacific nations.

WWF says this will negatively impact on the sea turtle populations as many rely on coral as their main food source. Hatchlings will be most severely impacted, as coral is their main food source until they are old enough to migrate to bigger feeding areas.

The death of many young turtles has also been attributed to the warming sea. This means turtles venture further out of their normal migratory zones.

Hannam says New Zealand tends to end up with turtles from Australia and the Pacific.

The turtles that usually come to New Zealand are sexually immature (under 10 years old) and get caught in the trans-tasman current.

“The turtles get too cold, so end up with hypothermia and are too sick to return to their nesting and feeding areas,” adds Hannam.

He says this is where his team at Kelly Tarlton’s steps in. They care for the turtles and get them back to full health. They then release them when the waters are warmer and they are strong enough to swim back.

Nesting times
Sea warming also alters nesting times. The usual nesting times are from October to February.

Bell says turtles “sense when to nest by the temperature. When the seas become warmer the nesting season will be delayed, it will give them less time to lay their eggs.”

Rising sea levels and extreme weather events also play a major role in the future of the species.

During the 20th century, sea levels rose 15cm. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change indicates that this is expected to increase, with the Pacific islands being most severely effected.

Countries such as Tuvalu and Tokelau are among the worst affected – and both are common nesting areas for many sea turtle species.

Solomona says the rise in sea level can result in the overcrowding of nests which further decreases the number of hatchlings in the population.

She says that cyclones and king tides are among the most destructive extreme weather events that affect the turtle populations.

“Storm surges and strong tidal action only make the problem of habitat loss worse,” she adds.

Floods and tsunamis that hit the islands wash up turtle eggs buried in the sand and wash them to sea, potentially killing thousands of turtles.

Picture: Dizzy, a rescued green turtle found on a Northland beach and being cared for by Kelly Tarlton's marine centre. Photo: Olivia Wix.

Olivia Wix is a student journalist on the Asia-Pacific Journalism course at AUT University.

Underwater volcano erupts off Tonga - video
South Pacific spared quake damage
Undersea volcano erupts off the coast of Tonga - video

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