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Pacific labour mobility has received an unprecedented level of attention in this year’s Australian Federal election campaign. Australian anxieties about Chinese influence in the Solomon Islands have dominated the headlines.
At the time of Tonga’s volcanic eruption and tsunami on 14 January 2022, there were an estimated 150,000 Tongans living overseas. Of these, close to 5,000 Tongan workers were employed across Australia and New Zealand under their respective Pacific temporary labour schemes.
The Kiribati government closed their international border late in March 2020, to keep their island population of approximately 140,000 people safe from COVID-19.
Stephen Howes The sugar museum in Mauritius (Brian Scott/Picture: SUPPLIED By STEPHEN HOWES, SHERMAN SURANDIRAN Both Mauritius and Fiji are remotely located islands situated far from global business centres, both developed as sugar plantation economies, but their economies have taken drastically different paths over the past half a century. Last year the World Bank reclassified Mauritius as a high-income country. Its 2019 income (GNI per capita) for the first time exceeded the $US12,535 ($F25,374) threshold for that category. Fiji, meanwhile, continues to be classified as an upper-middle-inco...