By Duncan Wilson
For a Prime Minister promoting major political and economic reforms while battling colleagues’ demands that he resign, the Cook Islands’
Jim Marurai appears remarkably unruffled. The former principal says his leadership and diplomatic skills, honed through work in the schoolyard, are trusted tools in the rough and tumble of politics.
“I try to please everyone, but sometimes I have to make the hard choices. I get blamed for some of these, but as long as the team stays together, that’s what I want,” he says.
Mr Marurai’s own Democratic Party has attacked the Prime Minister for some of his ‘hard choices’, especially the political reforms he first campaigned on in 2006. This includes combining electorate seats from a number of smaller electorates and introducing proportional representation, instead of the current ‘first past the post’ system.
For Mr Marurai, political change and economic reform are complementary. He wants government to be more responsive and accountable to its citizens; and he says this behaviour involves a broader concept of trade and development. The Prime Minister wants to increase Native Trade within the Pacific and with Mäori, and boost Cook Islands’ tax coffers.
“We should promote it [Native Trade] ourselves. Trade within the Pacific … well, what we trade now is black pearl and a little bit of paw paw to New Zealand, that’s all we can produce. We buy from overseas but we produce very little.”
The Cook Islands’ exports are worth about NZ$6mn, while its imports are valued at around NZ$200mn.
“That $200mn [in imports] is money leaving Rarotonga that could go on local projects and building infrastructure,” Mr Marurai says.
Mr Marurai suggests that Cook Islanders and Mäori partner in fishing and agriculture. Alongside other leaders, he often criticises owners of foreign vessels’ for overfishing of Pacific fish stocks, and the owners tendency to process the lucrative catch off shore, further depriving Island nations of jobs and revenue.
The Cook Islands are surrounded by one of the Pacific’s largest exclusive economic zones, almost two million square kilometres (1,830,000sq km) of rich fishing grounds for tuna and swordfish. The Pacific is responsible for as much as half of the global tuna catch, worth
US$3bn, but Island nations get very little by way of licence fees.
Mr Marurai has warned the Pacific Island Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) that overfishing is now threatening the bigeye and yellowfin tuna species. He wants “fresh approaches, so that conservation and management measures can be established.”
He says that Mäori expertise and investment in fisheries, extended to the Cook Islands, would help sustain tuna stocks, earn more from the resource, and diversify the economy. Agriculture is another area where native trade could benefit the Cook Islands, he says.
“Our economy is largely based on tourism and so growth will depend on the revenue from tourism. We want to try and revive other industries, including the pearl industry, which is still struggling after five years. But fishing is the most likely industry to grow our economy.”
The Prime Minister says the FFA, as a regional group, is responsive to Island concerns. The group includes seventeen Pacific Island states, and members collectively shape regional fisheries policy and monitor breaches.
Mr Marurai’s enthusiasm for the group contrasts with his pessimism toward international forums. He points to the climate change talks in Copenhagen late last year, and what he describes as Islands’ failure to secure tangible results. At Copenhagen, developing nations rejected a last-minute accord proposed by the world’s biggest emitters and announced unilaterally by the United States President Barack Obama.
The United Nations said it would ‘’take note’’ of the accord but not adopt it, effectively just acknowledging its existence. And Island representatives, from the Cook Islands to more vocal opponents such Tuvalu’s Ian Fry, warned that poorly defined emissions targets would lead to island nations being harmed by rising seas and climate change.
“We worked with small Island states on an oasis … including the Maldives and the Caribbean, so in one way we had agreement,
all together, to send our beliefs to the international community,”
Mr Marurai said. “[But] if Copenhagen is a measure of that work, no: the little boys don’t run to tell the big boys what to do.”
Mr Marurai’s scepticism towards certain international forums extends to some free trade deals. He is happy for his government to borrow from banks to improve infrastructure and promote sustainable development. But he shares other Pacific leaders’ concerns that free trade will harm protected Islands resources and economies, and proceed too quickly for the Cook Islands.
Mr Marurai witnessed the Islands’ political and economic reforms of the 1990s, which attempted to make the public sector more efficient but also led to significant emigration. He is adamant that such social dislocation won’t occur under his watch. To this end, the Prime Minister suggests promoting preferential trade and Native Trade to grow the economy.
“We definitely want to look at pursuing preferential trade agreements with the Pacific Islands, but we have a lot of capacity issues,” he says. “I think we have a responsibility as leaders to pursue any economic opportunity that is good for our people.”
Mr Marurai says he will be judged, in his final term as Prime Minister, on his reforms. His rivals, from his own party and across the political spectrum, are attempting to sideline him. The Prime Minister knows, in part from his experience as a teacher wresting with students,
that it may be a while before his political and economic reforms
gain respect.
But Mr Marurai says he will continue to promote his lessons of political reform and native trade for a good while yet.
