Good article Professor Wesley.

Not a lot of interest in the Solomons debacle amongst ordinary Australians is there!

That is a crying shame.

Australia has put in a sterling (if imperfect) effort there. But yes, if we pull out it will probably all get undone very quickly. So we are pretty compelled to stay, and not only at a scale large enough to keep the situation from falling apart, but at a scale large enough to make real progress.

Should we have gone in there in the first place? Well, how could we not have? How could we have continued to allow such corruption to prevail? We had to go in.

Could we have conducted the whole business in a much better way? Or would the offence taken at our very presence, or the magnitude and nature of the issues, have undermined any sort of methodology?

I don’t know.

All I can say is that it is an utter shame what is happening in such a beautiful country, which should be the archetypal South Pacific paradise.

a real problem is the way in which australia runs its ('our') foreign affairs policy in the pacific at present. too often it is a bullyboy approach, one that ignores the central place of women in pacific society - or fails to respect the wisdom of pacific women and their stake in their own country/ies, and one that too often raises issues of interference in the sovereignty of these island states.

some time ago, when the usa sought to dump its nuclear waste on johnson atoll, the australian government (sadly, under hawke) welcomed the 'initiative'. fortunately, it did not go ahead - to dump this waste on the backdoorstep of all our pacific island neighbours (not to mention the proximity to our own). now, under the howard government, us nuclear waste will be dumped right on our own territory, in the northern territory, for the measly sum of $12million to indigenous australian owners who are clearly being duped by the usa and sold out by the australian government.

yes, we do need to pay more attention to what 'our' government is doing in the pacific - and in so-called remote areas at home.