New Zealand’s government is increasingly eager to promote the buy-in of Pacific nations for closer Defence Force integration in the region, amid concerns about militarisation of the region.

The security environment has been shifting rapidly, and regional defence is becoming more complex, leaving Pacific Islanders wondering if their “Ocean of Peace” is slipping out of their grasp.

In recent months, the defence and police forces of Australia and New Zealand have been increasing cooperation with counterparts in Pacific countries — including Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu — in efforts to combat transnational crime, especially the illicit drug trade.

• READ MORE: Other NZ defence policy reports

But as a number of Pacific Island countries weigh up signing major bilateral treaties or agreements with the likes of Australia, China and the United States, New Zealand has been steadily pushing Pacific regional defence cooperation on a number of fronts.

The communiqué from last October’s South Pacific Defence Ministers Meeting (SPDMM) in Chile is instructive.

The SPDMM — which involves New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Fiji, France, Papua New Guinea and Tonga — notes the leadership role New Zealand has taken on better coordinating regional defence architecture.

The member countries agreed to push for a defence advisor from their collective to be embedded in the secretariat of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), whose secretary-general Baron Waqa attended the Chile meeting and appeared to support closer integration.

While the advisor position is yet to be established, the SPDMM is surging ahead with a range of new regional defence initiatives, including developing the Pacific Response Group, under which defence personnel from Australia, Fiji, France, New Zealand and PNG work together to support coordinated humanitarian assistance and disaster relief responses across the Pacific.

Social licence
A briefing from the March joint meeting of the Defence and Foreign ministers of Australia and New Zealand, emphasised how they aim to promote “the sense of integration through Pacific defence forces’ and to “enhance the sense of Pacific forces meeting Pacific security needs”.

It also highlighted a keenness to “get more links between SPDMM and PIF so that these voices are heard directly by the region”.

“The briefings reveal New Zealand’s role in integrating and aligning Pacific defence forces alongside a considerable anxiety about regional social licence,” Pacific historian Marco de Jong said.

He said the language being used “speaks to a programme of influence and public relations, calibrated to downplay criticism that New Zealand is contributing to the militarisation of the Pacific”.

A representative with Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, Maureen Penjueli, who is also a long time advocate for Indigenous rights in the region, said there had been a lack of consultation with the wider Pacific Islands region about the new defence tack.

“We’ve seen so much occupation by those in the defence interests area. For example, the Australian National Security College takes a very primary seat at the Pacific Islands Forum on security. We’ve got competing interests, which is the Fusion Centre that’s in Vanuatu,” Penjueli said.

“When you add more and more players to this regional architecture that already has enough players on defence and security, it complicates the governance structure in a way. Who does it respond to? Who is it answerable to?

“It does not go through the rigour of national consultations, consultations with civil society around some of these bigger significant shifts around defence and security.”

Long-standing partner
New Zealand is a long-standing contributor to Pacific regional initiatives, and its Defence Force is well valued in the region, especially in responding to disasters, humanitarian needs, transnational crime and maritime security threats, and also including in training support.

New Zealand’s Defence Minister Chris Penk, who replaced Judith Collins in the role since March’s 2+2 Ministerial Meeting with Australia, said that New Zealand always sought to adapt its work with Pacific partners to their context, culture and operational needs.

He told RNZ Pacific that in order to support closer cooperation between Pacific militaries, members were also looking at a SPDMM Status of Forces Agreement.

“This would provide a common legal framework for personnel to deploy into each other’s countries more easily, strengthening our collective ability to respond to maritime security challenges as well as humanitarian and disaster relief events.”

Asked if New Zealand is contributing to militarisation of the Pacific Islands, Penk said Pacific partners had warmly welcomed the country’s continued presence and partnership in the region

“The New Zealand Defence Force contributes to regional responses where it is agreed that defence force personnel and assets should be involved, including humanitarian assistance, maritime domain awareness, fisheries patrols, and search and rescue operations.

“As a Pacific military, we are proud to work alongside our Pacific partners to help respond to the challenges facing our region.”

‘Ocean of Peace’
Penjueli warned that militarisation of the region was escalating against the wishes of most Pacific Islands people.

Making things more complicated, she said, was the growing number of security treaties and agreements that Island countries were being drawn to.

She said they were no longer just about defence or security inter-operability, and often included development and economic dimensions, arrangements that “entangled” Pacific countries into wide ranging commitments beyond traditional military and security ties.

Penjueli worried that the interests of the Island countries themselves were more than ever being buried under broader geopolitical jostling.

“We were told that this is to ready the region in an anticipation, to contain China, and we’re told that this is about the drug trade and the drug war that’s taking place.

“Yet for the Pacific, climate change or the climate crisis, remains our significant issue around security. So, I think the agendas are very different.”

At their last leaders summit, PIF countries signed up to the Blue Pacific Ocean of Peace Declaration, formally committing the region to peace, sovereignty, and climate justice.

However, Penjueli said being a true ocean of peace required demilitarisation and de-escalation — something which she suggested was not the direction that the defence-oriented governments of the region were heading in.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

I have seen the masked goons who terrorise our streets before. I saw them during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were “disappeared” by the military junta.

Victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate of their loved ones.

I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt.

• READ MORE: Ian Powell: The Nicolás Maduro kidnapping, US imperialist expansion and implications for New Zealand
• Jonathan Cook: From Gaza to Venezuela, the US has been unmasked as the serial villain
• Other state terrorism reports

I saw them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and once deported in handcuffs. I saw them in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria.

I saw them in Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried in mass graves.

I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported, and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming.

Terror is the engine that empowers dictatorships. It eliminates dissidents. It silences critics. It dismantles the law. It creates a society of timid and frightened collaborators, those who look away when people are snatched off streets or gunned down, those who inform to save themselves, those who retreat into their tiny rabbit holes, pulling down the blinds, desperately praying to be left in peace.

Terror works.

The iron doors have not yet shut. There are still protests. The media is still able to document state atrocities, including the January 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross.

Doors closing fast
But the doors are closing fast. ICE has deported over 300,000 people and detained nearly 69,000 others — as well as been involved in 16 shootings, including four killings — since Trump began his campaign against immigrants.

ICE, our Americanised Gestapo, is being birthed.

Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights, but economic, social and political rights — without them we are powerless. Resistance means organising to disrupt the machinery of commerce and government.

It means preventing arrests by patrolling neighborhoods to warn of impending ICE raids. It means protesting outside detention facilities. It means strikes. It means blocking streets and highways and occupying buildings. It means providing photographic evidence.

It means sustained pressure on local politicians and police to refuse to cooperate with ICE. It means providing legal representation, food and financial assistance to families with members detained. It means a willingness to be arrested. It means a nationwide campaign to defy the state’s inhumanity.

If we fail, the dimming flames of our open society will be snuffed out.

Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible.

Sporadic resistance
Opponents of the regime, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist. They throw up temporary roadblocks, but they are soon purged.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” notes that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.”

“What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?” Solzhenitsyn asks.

“Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

“After all, you knew ahead of time those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

Czesław Miłosz, in “The Captive Mind,” also documents the creep of tyranny, how it advances stealthily, until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime’s self-adulating slogans but, as our leading universities did when they caved to false allegations of being bastions of antisemitism, embrace its absurdism.

Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population — often unconsciously — conform outwardly and inwardly. It conditions citizens to relate to those around them with suspicion and distrust. It destroys the solidarity vital to organising, community and dissent.

Effective state terror
The historian Robert Gellately, in his book “Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany,” argues that state terror in Nazi Germany was effective not because of omnipresent state surveillance, but because it fostered a “culture of denunciation”.

Rat out your neighbors and coworkers and survive. If you see something, say something.

The worse it gets, the more established institutions, desperate to survive, silence those who warn us.

“Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges, people who are that and nothing more,” Solzhenitsyn writes of those who see what is coming. “And how they were laughed at! How they were mocked!”

The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose early warnings about the rise of fascism were largely dismissed, and who told fellow intellectuals to stop naively appealing to “the remains of a European conscience,” saw his books tossed into the bonfires in the spring of 1933 during the Nazi book burnings.

So far, we have not burned books, but have banned nearly 23,000 titles in public schools since 2021.

The authoritarian state cannibalises the institutions that foolishly aid and abet the witch hunts. It replaces them with pseudo-institutions populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens.

Columbia University is a shining example of this willful self-immolation. Nothing is as it is presented.

Violent kidnappings
There are increasing numbers of violent kidnappings by masked ICE agents in unmarked cars on our city streets. People are ripped from their vehicles and beaten. They are arrested outside schools and day care centers. They are raided at work, thrown onto the floor, handcuffed, driven away in vans and shipped off to concentration camps in countries such as El Salvador.

They are seized when they appear at court for a green card application or interview to finalise a visa.

Once detained, they disappear into the labyrinth of over 200 detention centers, where they are moved from one facility to the next to hide them from family, lawyers and the courts. Due process, once a constitutional right afforded to everyone in the United States, no longer exists.

“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

The FBI, in an example of how justice is perverted, refuses to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis, blocking access to any evidence that would allow them to file criminal charges against Jonathan Ross.

Killing of unarmed citizens by the state is carried out with impunity.

ICE has more than doubled the size of its force since early 2025 — to 22,000 agents — hiring 12,000 new officers in four months from a pool of 220,000 applicants.

It plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period to hire even more recruits, part of the $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE, to be spent over four years. Salaries for these new recruits, poorly trained and often haphazardly vetted, will range from $49,739 to $89,528 a year, along with a $50,000 signing bonus — split over three years — and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments.

New detention centres
ICE is building new detention centers nationwide in 23 towns and cities. It promises that once it is fully operational, it will go door-to-door as part of the largest deportation effort in American history.

ICE agents, intoxicated by the licence to kick down doors while wearing body armor and firing automatic weapons at terrified women and children, are not warriors as they imagine, but thugs. They have few skills, other than weapons training, cruelty and brutality. They intend to remain employed by the state. The state intends to keep them employed.

None of this should surprise us. The repressive techniques used by ICE and our militarised police were perfected overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Occupied Palestine, and earlier in Vietnam.

The ICE agent who murdered Good was a machinegunner in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families, does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah.

Aimé Césaire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in “Discourse on Colonialism” writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang.

Césaire writes:

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!”

And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civiliSation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Democracy’s last gasps
During the interregnum between the last gasps of a democracy and the emergence of a dictatorship, the nation is gaslighted. It is told the rule of law is respected. It is told democratic rule is inviolate. These lies mollify those being frog-marched into their own enslavement.

“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!”

Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us. Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare. Maybe there are limits to extremism. Maybe the worst is over.

These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us.

Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily demonised — the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest genocide, antifa, the so-called “radical left,” Muslims, poor people of color, intellectuals and liberals.

They strike down one group after the next. They blow out, one by one, the long row of candles until we find ourselves in the dark, powerless and alone.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.

Civil society forces in Chile are preparing to launch an international campaign to demand the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations.

This is based on Article 6 of the United Nations Charter against the backdrop of what the campaign describes as “continuous and systematic violations” of international law and resolutions of the UN General Assembly and Security Council.

The official launch of the campaign is due to take place tomorrow during a public event in the capital Santiago while a collection of signatures by electronic petition has already begun.

• READ MORE: Israel kills four Palestinians in Gaza — resistance fighters recover body of captive
• Other Gaza reports

Campaign data indicated that the petition addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had already exceeded 57,000 signatures, with a goal of quickly reaching 100,000 signatures.

The organisers of the civil society initiative say the rapid response reflects a “broad popular response” to the dire humanitarian situation in Palestine, and embodies “international civil pressure” to get the international system moving after decades of inaction.

At the media event introducing the initiative, lawyer and former Chilean ambassador Nelson Haddad presented the legal framework for the campaign, explaining that Israel had become a “pariah state according to the definitions of international law,” and that it “does not abide by UN resolutions, nor by the basic rules of international humanitarian law, and practises systematic violations that have been ongoing for more than seven decades”.

Campaign organisers say this mechanism has been used in historical moments, such as the Korean War and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that activating it now could constitute an “institutional pressure tool” capable of overcoming obstruction within the UN Security Council.

‘Reforming the UN’
The organisers also believe that the goal is not limited to imposing measures against Israel, but extends to “reopening the file of reforming the structure of the United Nations”, restricting the power of the veto, and restoring the principle of legal equality between states in order to limit the ability of one state to “disrupt international justice.”

The petition read as follows:

“We, the undersigned, respectfully but firmly appeal to you to initiate formal procedures to expel the State of Israel from the Organisation, in accordance with Article 6 of the Charter of the United Nations, because of its repeated violations of the principles contained therein.”

The letter continues:

“Emphasising that Israel, through official statements, declares its intention to eliminate the State of Palestine with all its inhabitants, infrastructure, and memory, and accuses every party that criticises its policies of ‘anti-Semitism,’ and practices repression even against Jewish citizens who oppose genocide, thus making its violations extensive, deep, and directed against everyone who disagrees with its orientations.”

The letter describes what is happening in the Gaza Strip as a “complex war crime,” noting that the occupying state is killing “Palestinians with bombs and missiles, destroying medical infrastructure, and exterminating nearly two million people through hunger and thirst”.

‘Starving population, poisoning the land’
Israel is also depriving the population of water, food, and medicine, and destroying and poisoning the land, representing “one of the most serious documented crimes in the modern era”.

The letter adds that the continued dealings of international and academic institutions with Israel are “unjustified and unacceptable”, and that “Israel must be immediately expelled from all international activities, all institutional relations with it must be severed, and a comprehensive arms embargo imposed that contributes to the continuation of the genocide.”

The message concluded by saying: “With Gaza, humanity dies too. We want Palestine to live, for it is the heart of the world.”

Pacific youth climate champion Suluafi Brianna Fruean has likened her first time in the United Nations building to primary school.

“It was my first time being in the [UN] General Assembly space,” Suluafi said.

“I sat there and I was watching everyone and it kind of reminded me of a mock UN we did when I was in primary school.”

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Big countries ‘lack ambition’ over climate crisis

But not in a jovial sense, she was seriously reflecting on the lessons she was taught as a child by her teachers.

“The three main lessons they always told us; be kind to your classmates, your neighbours, clean up after yourself, and be careful with your words.”

The lesson that was front of mind though was the importance of words — a lesson she hoped was dancing in the minds of the world leaders taking the floor.

And at the Climate Ambition Summit last week, the word “ambition” was underscored.

Climate ambition missing
“Yet [climate ambition is] not something we saw from everyone, including the US Head of State who was not present,” Suluafi said.

However, nations that did demonstrate ambition were Chile and Tuvalu, who named the “culprit” of the climate crisis — fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal.

Suluafi said it was critical those words are spoken in these spaces.

“How can we talk about the fight against climate change if we are not naming who we are fighting?”

“Words are important. It is words that literally can mean the sinking or the surviving of our islands.”

Suluafi wants to put to bed a “big misconception” perpetuated by the Western world.

“Pacific Islanders don’t want to move,” she stressed.

“The Western world will tell us that climate change is an opportunity for us to come and live in the West.

“We don’t want to live here!”

‘Go down with our islands’
For years [Pacific] elders have said that they “will go down with our islands”, she said.

Suluafi went on to say Pacific people live in reciprocity with the land.

“We are the land.

“Let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s call the fossil fuel industry out and let’s save my islands.”

“How can we talk about the fight against climate change if we’re not naming who we’re fighting? “– climate activists at #UNGA78 #Vanuatu presser read into weekend energy of NYC 75,000-strong climate march and absence of major emitters speaking at #climateambitionsummit #COP28 pic.twitter.com/v1t3bzh0tL

— Pacific Islands Forum (@ForumSEC) September 20, 2023

Message to polluters
As Australia bids to host COP31, she requests that they take it upon themselves to be “ambitious” with climate initiatives.

“They should not be given the hosting right if they are not actually going to be ambitious enough to represent our region,” Suluafi said.

She believes they have a real opportunity to champion the Pacific Ocean and region but need to be ambitious.

To demonstrate they are being ambitious, Australia will need to at the very least make solid commitments to climate financing, she said.

“What are the commitments that they will make to financing those most vulnerable to climate change including those in their very ocean, their neighbours in the Pacific?”

Phasing out fossil fuels will be another important step.

She said Australia, the UK and the US fail to name fossil fuels as the “culprit” and that needs to change now. Because of their inaction those nations were not invited to speak at the Climate Ambitions Summit last week.

“Because Australia and the US were examples of countries that have not been moving at the same speed as which they have been talking,” Suluafi said.

She said even the US, who was in the Climate Ambition Summit room, was not allowed to speak.

“The UN wanted to give the voices to those who have been ambitious to be able to speak at the Climate Ambition Summit.”

Lifting up the next generation
Suluafi believes having young people in the room at important meetings held at the UN is vital.

According to her, something she noticed while at the UNGA meeting was most of the people were paid to be there.

“It is their job to be here from nine to five or whenever the conference starts,” she said.

“And then you look around at the young people, the civil society, the volunteers, the indigenous people who have made their way into the room who are there because of passion and because of heart.

“We need more heart in these rooms.”

Suluafi commends the UN for inviting young ambitious climate warriors, even if she did not make it into the room this time.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Flying Fijians won its Rugby World Cup Pool C match against Australia 22-15 in Saint Etienne with the team’s fourth choice kicker, Simione Kuruvoli, leading them.

And the win came after 69 long years since Fiji last defeated the Wallabies in 1954.

Kuruvoli, who is ranked behind the injured Caleb Muntz, Teti Tela and Frank Lomani as a kicker, started the game at halfback and was given the goal-kicking duties.

• READ MORE: RWC2023: Manu Samoa claim win over Chile
• Tonga get reality check in Ireland drubbing
• Other RWC2023 reports
• RNZ RWC2023 news feed

He did not disappoint and his personal tally of 14 points ensured the Fijians managed to outpoint the Wallabies in the end, in a match that kept the 41,294 fans at the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard on their toes.

Head coach Simon Raiwalui called Kuruvoli into the starting line-up ahead of Lomani and the 24-year-old stamped his mark.

“I am grateful for the opportunity to start and the trust that was given to me by the coach and team management,” he said.

“It was a tense game and I just focused on my kicks to make sure that we were able to get the points needed.”

Fiji dominated
Fiji dominated the game — and in all facets of the game.

It was something similar to what they did against Wales in Bordeaux two Sundays ago.

The only difference is this time they were able to convert the statistical advantage into winning points in the end.

Kickable options saw Kuruvoli stepping up to the mark, claiming crucial points.

Coach Raiwalui said it was a great win and thanked the boys for sticking to the job at hand.

“We focused on Australia this week and the boys executed the game plan very well,” he said.

“Great to have the win but we are still building and will need to focus on the next one after this.

“Mostly proud of the boys. It’s not just for today, it’s a combination of work over time.

Two hard games next
“Two very hard games coming up. Let’s enjoy this win, will review tonight. I think a lot of the boys will be sore but super proud.”

Captain Waisea Nayacalevu thanked the players and fans for their support.

“Great team effort and the fans were fantastic,” he said. “Proud of the boys for the effort.”

The win means Fiji and Australia are tied in pool C with six points each.

Fiji will need to win both their remaining matches against Georgia and Portugal and hope that the Wallabies fall against Wales in their crunch match.

But that aside, the win over the Australians was celebrated by those who turned up, including Fijians who had flown in from Fiji, New Zealand, Australia and across Europe.

French fans who turned up to watch the game backed Fiji as they could be heard cheering for Fiji on the grandstand and they booed the Australians every time they were penalised in the match.

Australian Fijians say it was tough
The Australians had five Fijians in their line-up, with two of them, wingers Mark Waqanitawase and Suliasi Vunivalu, scoring their tries.

Samu Kerevi, Rob Valetini and Marika Koroibete were strong in defence and made some good runs but they were nullified by their fellow Fijians, who hit them with some bone-crunching tackles.

Vunivalu congratulated Fiji and said they were consistent.

“They started well and kept that throughout,” he said.

“We tried to come back, but they were very strong.”

Koroibete said it was a physical battle.

“They were on from the start to the end, we tried to keep up with them from the start but they were good,” he said.

“As a team we did not work upfront enough to counter that physicality.”

He said they will now have to focus on Wales.

Best Fiji team ever – Serevi
Sevens King Waisale Serevi, who was in the crowd supporting Fiji, said the Flying Fijians team in France was the best ever.

“I think it is the best team ever to play at the World Cup because we are going up and we have beaten Australia now,” he said.

“I believe that maybe we have won a game in the World Cup and going to the quarter-final, we still have two more games and the way we played today showed they can compete on this level.

“The Australia team are a good team, but I think the [Fiji] boys were better today.

“They played to the plan, they played to the strengths of the game they wanted to play. They did everything right and they did compete at the breakdown which is not really the Fijian way of playing rugby.

“I believe with the team that we have we can go through to the quarter-final and we have every opportunity to get to the semi-final.”

First half lead set the pace
Fiji led at halftime 12-8 with halfback Kuruvoli kicking all of Fiji’s points through the boots.

Australia managed a try to Waqanitawase, after the Wallabies had taken a quick lineout throw, with Samu Kerevi running through and passing on to Waqanitawase who dived over.

Fullback Ben Donaldson missed the conversion, but he had opened the scoring in the game with an earlier penalty close to the posts.

Australia was able to defend well against the Fijians in the first 40 minutes, keeping their opponents at bay inside their own half.

Fiji put together several phases and attacks in the first spell, with Kuruvoli masterminding their moves.

Josua Tuisova, Semi Radradra and captain Nayacalevu were all busy on attack while the forwards dominated in the ruck and scrum situations.

A telling factor Fiji displayed was their strong forward plays, holding their own in the scrums and lineouts as well.

But Australia challenged their throw-ins towards the end of the first spell and won two successive Fijian throw-ins near their own line.

Good start in second spell
The Fijians got straight back into the game in the second spell and Man of the Match, winger Tuisova scored out wide after he collected a bouncing ball from a Kuruvoli place kick off the base of a ruck.

They then missed a penalty attempt from Lomani and Tuisova swung the ball wide and out the sideline as they had an opportunity to run the ball with four players sitting outside him.

It was tit-for-tat after that as both teams tried to put phases together.

A penalty midway inside the Wallabies side of the field gave Lomani another opportunity to extend their lead and he made it 22-8 from that kick.

Australian fullback Ben Donaldson converted Vunivalu’s try and closed the gap to 22-15.

Fiji hung on with some great steals in ruck-ball situations to end the game with the famous win, even though Lomani’s last kick sailed wide.

Scorecard:
Fiji 22 – Tries: Josua Tuisova (43′); Conv: Simione Kuruvoli (44′); Pens: Simione Kuruvoli (12′, 21′, 27′, 33′); Frank Lomani (66′).

Australia 15 – Tries: Mark Nawaqanitawase (23′), Suli Vunivalu (68′); Conv: Ben Donaldson (70′); Pens: Ben Donaldson (3′).

Other Pacific results:
Results in other Pacific matches at the World Cup were mixed with Manu Samoa defeating newcomers Chile 43-10 at Bordeaux in pool D while Tongan coach Toutai Kefu admitted his Ikale Tahi side had been outclassed 59-16 by top-ranked Ireland at Nantes in pool B.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Tonga has named their strongest match-day 23 to face world No 1 Ireland in the French city of Nantes in their first Rugby World Cup pool match on Sunday morning (New Zealand time).

French-based prop forward Ben Tameifuna will lead the side against the Irish in a tactical move that sees captain Sonatane Takulua starting off the bench.

Manu Samoa, who arrived in Bordeaux yesterday afternoon, have also announced a strong team that will battle World Cup debutants Chile at the Stade de Bordeaux, also early on Sunday morning.

• READ MORE: ‘It was a tough battle’, says Radradra after Flying Fijians’ defeat to France
• Other Rugby World Cup reports

Head coach Seilala Mapusua has named his experienced flyhalves Christian Leali’ifano and Lima Sopoaga in the match-day 23.

Meanwhile, Fiji is expected to make changes for the crucial game against Australia at Saint-Etienne on Monday morning (NZ time).

Tonga focused
‘Ikale Tahi head coach Toutai Kefu said they are focused on Ireland, which began the World Cup with an 82-8 thrashing of Romania last weekend.

“This is a very exciting Tonga team who I think will prove to be very competitive against the best in the world,” he told media in Paris before the team left for Nantes.

“The players are looking forward to playing the best and testing themselves against a confident, capable Ireland team. We’ve been watching them for 12 months now and they definitely deserve the number one team in the world tag.

“The boys are excited to get out there and play. There will be no lack of motivation to do their country and their families proud.”

Kefu has retained the front-row trio of Tameifuna, Siegfried Fisi’ihoi and hooker Paula Ngauamo.

He has also gone for height and speed in the loosies and locks selections.

Vice-captain Halaleva Fifita and Samiuela Lousi start at locks while Tanginoa Halaifonua, Sione Havili and Vaea Fifita complete the loose trio.

In a major move, Kefu has opted to give Augustine Pulu the nod ahead of Takulua.

Takulua, Tonga’s most capped player, has been the first-choice halfback for the last six years.

Kefu’s backline choice sees William Havili at fly half while Pita Akhi pairs former All Blacks Malakai Fekitoa in midfield.

Former Mate Ma’a Tonga and Auckland Warriors winger Solomone Kata pairs Afusipa Taumoepeau on the wings, with former All Black Salesi Piutau manning the fullback berth.

Tonga lineup:1 Siegfried Fisi’ihoi, 2 Paula Ngauamo, 3 Ben Tameifuna (c), 4, Samiuela Lousi, 5 Halaleva Fifita, 6 Tanginoa Halaifonua, 7 Sione Havili, 8 Vaea Fifita, 9 Augustine Pulu, 10 William Havili, 11 Solomone Kata, 12 Pita Ahki, 13 Malakai Fekitoa, 14 Afusipa Taumoepeau, 15 Salesi Piutau; Reserves – 16 Samiuela Moli,17 Sosefo ‘Apikotoa,18 Tau Kolomatangi, 19 Semisi Paea, 20 Solomone Funaki, 21 Sione Vailanu, 22 Sonatane Takulua, 23 Fini Inisi.

Respect for Chile
Manu Samoa coach Seilala Mapusua said they respected the South Americans and have named a strong team to face them.

“The whole lead-up to the Rugby World Cup has been about Chile, our first game.

“And we are giving them the respect they deserve and making sure we not only do our own people proud but also make sure we are taking steps towards our own goal as Manu Samoa,” Mapusua told media in Bordeaux yesterday.

Mapusua said they do not underestimate Chile and believed their opponents had played well against Japan in their opening pool game last weekend.

“We need to start well. This is our first game at the Rugby World Cup,” he said.

“We have to nail the opportunities we get.”

He has named both his co-captains Michael Ala’alatoa and Chris Vui in the starting team.

With two experienced flyhalves in former Wallaby Christian Leali’ifano and former All Black Lima Sopoaga both available to him, Mapusua has gone for Leali’ifano to start.

He said he was lucky to have such talented flyhalves and both could play as well as the other.

“They are very similar in their roles with us. I expect them to control the game and really manage the team over the full 80 minutes.

“We are blessed to have them.”

Former All Black Steven Luatua gets to run in at No 8.

Manu Samoa lineup: 1. James Lay, 2. Seilala Lam, 3. Michael Alalatoa, 4. Chris Vui, 5. Theo MacFarland, 6. Taleni Seu, 7. Fritz Lee, 8. Steven Luatua, 9. Johnathan Taumateine, 10, Christian Leialiifano, 11. Nigel Ah-Wong, 12. Tumua Manu, 13. Ulupani Junior Seuteni, 14. Danny Toala, 15. Duncan Paia’aua; Reserves – 16. Sama Malolo, 17. Jordan Lay, 18. Paul Alo-Emile, 19. Sam Slade, 20. Sa Jordan Taufua, 21. Ereatara Enari, 22. Lima Sopoaga, 23. Ed Fidow.

Fiji to ring the changes
Meanwhile, the Flying Fijians are expected to make some changes to their team that lost 32-26 to Wales last Sunday in Bordeaux.

The Fijians meet the Wallabies on Monday morning (Fiji time) in a must-win game for them.

Josua Tuisova is expected to start at No 12, pushing Semi Radradra out to the wing, with Levani Botia also expected to start at No 7.

Coach Simon Raiwalui will name his team on Friday local time.

Raiwalui said their focus this week had been on the Wallabies.

“We have very good spirit, the boys were laughing again and they were training well,” Raiwalui said.

Fiji sits on two points behind both Australia and Wales and needs to win against the Wallabies to keep their hopes of a quarter-final spot alive.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

One aspect of May’s federal election in Australia has been strangely overlooked: Labor’s win follows a pattern among the main centre-left parties in Europe and comparable countries.

Traditional social democratic and labour-based parties are resurgent, and now hold office (on their own or in coalition) across all of Scandinavia and in Germany, Spain, Portugal and New Zealand.

Where the past decade has been dominated by talk of a crisis of the left, the debate is increasingly shifting to the crisis of the right.

• READ MORE: Labor has a huge health agenda ahead of it. What policies should we expect?
• Other Australian federal elections results

SREcholz ran an uncluttered campaign based on simple promises: a higher minimum wage, stable pensions, more affordable housing and a carbon-neutral economy.

The picture isn’t uniform, of course. Some countries have experienced the de facto demise of their main centre-left party. We might call this the “PASOKification” syndrome, after the sharp loss of support for Greece’s PASOK party, but it extends to other parts of Europe.

The Netherlands’ once-dominant Labour Party was placed sixth in last year’s election, with just 5.7 percent of the vote.

France’s main party of the left, the Socialist Party, was reduced to just 6.4 percent in the first round of the 2017 presidential elections and just 1.7 percent this year, but it sealed a deal to join the French Left’s first broad coalition pact in 20 years.

British Labour, meanwhile, lost the 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 elections. Despite the toxicity that surrounds the Conservative government, Labour leader Keir Starmer remains unpopular and unlikely to win the next election.

In Belgium and Italy, the Left’s situation is less bleak, though its main parties are far from hegemonic. In the highly fragmented Belgian system, the Flemish and Walloon socialist parties are part of the seven-party (yes, seven!) “Vivaldi coalition”.

Italy’s Democratic Party is part of the current Draghi-led national unity government, and in more recent times has held the prime ministership.

Outside Europe, the new “pink tide” in South America has seen, for example, 35-year-old Gabriel Boric win Chile’s presidential election.

Scholz ran an uncluttered campaign based on simple promises: a higher minimum wage, stable pensions, more affordable housing and a carbon-neutral economy.

Great to see New Zealand PM @jacindaardern again at @The_ANZLF in Sydney.

We will work with businesses and governments across the Tasman to drive better paying jobs and to support free and open trade.

Working together, we can seize opportunities for our mutual benefit. pic.twitter.com/cgIn2fUXpv

— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) July 7, 2022

Why the bounce back?
Some common factors help us understand the partial return of the left.

First, the vote share of the two main centre-right and centre-left parties has declined in most of these countries, yet the centre-left can still assemble a majority where the electoral system enables it.

Australian Labor’s record low primary vote of 32.6 percent is part of that trend, with centre-left parties in Norway, Sweden and Spain now capturing between 25 percent and 30 percent of the vote. And even when parties win larger vote shares (as in Portugal), they have usually needed coalition partners.

Nevertheless, centre-left parties remain a fixture in many party systems, and have found ways of getting back into office.

Second, the reinvigorated centre-left parties — including Anthony Albanese’s Labor — share common policy positions. We might sum them up as a “back to basics” strategy, with a clear focus on improved wages and conditions, job security and reinvigorated public institutions.

Albanese’s win has parallels with the victory of Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrat–led “rainbow coalition” in Germany. As one commentator described it:

Scholz ran an uncluttered campaign based on simple promises: a higher minimum wage, stable pensions, more affordable housing and a carbon-neutral economy.

Social democrats have sought to (mildly) rebuild public institutions. The Danish Social Democrats have pledged to increase public and welfare spending by 0.8 percent per year for five years.

Jacinda Ardern’s NZ Labour government has increased the minimum wage. Antonio Costa’s recent majority government in Portugal was built on a coalition united in seeking to reverse the austerity measures that followed the eurozone crisis.

Labor’s win follows a pattern of centre-left parties holding office in a number of countries.

The pandemic has also helped fuel a resurgence of social democratic parties, and @RobManwaring says some factors could help explain this bounce back. @Flinders https://t.co/ij414vCGsL

— The Conversation (@ConversationEDU) July 10, 2022

Common features …
This “new” minimalist social democracy has several entwined elements. First, the incoming governments have captured a mood, amplified by the pandemic, that centre-right governments have neglected key public goods.

Second, these centre-left governments have turned away from “third way” policies associated with leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. As catalogued here, centre-left parties have turned leftwards since the 1990s and 2000s.

Many of their party manifestos have a renewed focus on tackling inequality and increasing welfare spending.

Third, the centre-left parties have been gradually “greening”. Many are seeking to make renewables part of their reinvigorated industry and manufacturing agendas.

As Albanese and his colleagues know, this is a delicate balancing act, aimed at protecting employees in fossil-fuel-intensive industries while setting out modest climate targets. This “balance” seems to be hitting the electoral sweet spot by capturing public demand for action while allaying fears about the speed of transition — even if the targets fail to keep up with the science.

The final element is the longstanding “feminisation” of the parties. Many are reaping the rewards of the struggles by feminist MPs, allies and members to improve representation.

It’s no coincidence that four of Scandinavia’s five current centre-left prime ministers are female. The centre-left parties look modern and representative, and most have strong gender policies, especially on issues like the gender pay gap.

… And one significance difference
It’s worth noting a key difference between Australian Labor and its resurgent counterparts. Many centre-left parties in Europe have made strong pledges to invest in their welfare states — in part to see off the welfare chauvinism of radical right challengers.

In New Zealand, the Ardern government has announced a new unemployment insurance scheme.

The dynamics seem different in Australia, and Labor apparently sees little electoral value in shifting from its “modest” welfare agenda.

One important lesson for Labor is that in almost all the cases internationally, the centre-left has had to learn to govern in partnership with other key players.

This will be a pressing issue for Albanese as he deals with a record crossbench in both houses. It could even determine how long Australia’s centre-left party governs.

Dr Rob Manwaring is associate professor, Politics and Public Policy, Flinders University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

An indigenous activist on Chile’s Rapa Nui says new rules restricting internal migration to the island need to be rigorously enforced.

Non-Rapa Nui Chileans now need to have Rapa Nui spouses or children to migrate to the island without a work contract.

The activist, Santi Hitorangi, said the rule requiring a contract has previously been flouted.

READ MORE: Rapa Nui limiting visitor time to stop overcrowding

“The authorities are saying that once in action there’s going to be rigorous enforcement. So far we haven’t experienced that.

“What we have experienced is the ability of the Chilean authority in collusion with business people on the island, be it Rapa Nui or Chileans, they are keen to find creative ways to jump over those so called provisions.”

Santi Hitorangi said Chileans moving from the mainland had overwhelmed Rapa Nui’s infrastructure and warped its culture.

“The Chileans who come from the marginalised neighbourhoods of Chile and have brought crime, degenerating the culture. They are doing taxi tours and the problem with that is the information they give to those tourists. They are a warped perspective of who we are,” Hitorangi said.

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, had become overcrowded during 130 years of colonial rule and its environment was suffering with the water no longer being safe to drink, the activist said.

“Many of the underground wells are polluted because as long as we have had Chile on the island the waste has been dug in pits, plastics, chemicals what have you all covered over with dirt,” he said.

The Pacific Media Centre has a content sharing partnership with RNZ Pacific.