Soft parliamentary diplomacy for more women MPs in the Pacific

Picture this scenario: hundreds of Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian men being escorted around Beijing for meetings with state officials as China hosts a delegation of most of the members of Parliament from countries of the Pacific Islands region.

Imagine the hand-wringing that’d be going on in Canberra, Wellington and probably Washington.

Now flip the idea around and picture this: three dozen Pacific women arriving in Wellington in a mid-winter southerly for a development and connection event at New Zealand’s Parliament.

Those women are the majority of all female elected representatives across the Pacific Islands countries. It’s a very similar idea, but almost no one noticed.

The Pacific is a region where the vast majority of elected representatives have always been men, where the institutional and social barriers to women standing for parliaments around the region are deeply entrenched. 

The struggle to raise women’s representation in the Pacific has been a long one, with gains particularly hard to come by in some countries. But the aim is to go higher, much higher. So to have 31 of the women MPs come together this week for a wānanga at the Parliament of a country whose 120-seat legislature is currently evenly split between females and males seemed fitting.

Uneven playing field

Consider for a second how in New Zealand we have an even split between men and women across the 120 MPs in Parliament. Papua New Guinea has pretty much the same amount of seats in their Parliament. But their number of women MPs? Two.

In Fiji and Samoa, over ten percent of their 50-odd Parliament seats are filled by women. And in Niue, the smallest of all the countries, a quarter of the legislature's 20 seats are filled by women.

“The smaller Pacific nations countries are doing better than us,” said one of PNG’s two women MPs, Kessy Sawang of the Rai Coast, who was among the delegation in Wellington.

She said with PNG’s population of about 12 million, there are some 6 million women and girls who need better representation. But in PNG it’s not a level playing field, particularly when it comes to elections.

“We face a lot of challenges from cultural barriers, money politics, threats and intimidation. If you look at the history of elections in PNG, every time there’s observers and research carried out, a lot of reports come out after every election.

"The issue is we’ve got to act on those reports to actually make the playing field fairer and more conducive for women.” 

A permanent parliamentary committee set up in PNG’s previous parliament term, when there were no women MPs at all, has been considering the creation of four reserved seats as some sort of starting point, and consultations are ongoing.

But the idea of reserved seats has been proposed and dumped before by PNG’s big men, a decade ago. Only nine women have been elected as MPs in PNG since it gained independence in 1975. Progress is painfully slow.

Women’s support

The Samoa model, where there is a special measure to ensure a minimum of 10 percent of women MPs in Parliament, has caught the attention of the parliamentary committee in PNG. Although, PNG’s Autonomous Region of Bougainville itself was already the first place in the Pacific to enshrine a provision for reserved parliament seats for women in its regional legislature. 

Two women MPs from Bougainville were here this week: Amanda Masono of Bougainville North, and Geraldine Paul of Central Bougainville. Despite Bougainville’s matrilineal cultures being well established, they both said it was far from the case that as MPs they enjoyed widespread support from women.

“We women need to support each other,” Geraldine Paul explained. "In most cases, women are the gatekeepers, they’re the ones that actually nurture the cultural practice in Melanesian society. We bring our men up, we go out of our way to ensure our men are looked after.

"They have traditional man houses where cultures are preserved for men and that process goes into decision making as well. It put a very negative recognition to women."

She said change didn’t happen overnight, and it was up to women MPs like herself to set examples to other women. 

“I’m not sure how to say it but we need to make [the idea of] women in politics sexy. Women have to see that it’s something that they want to do, rather than think ‘this is not my space’. Women can lead. Instead of us shutting down, shying away from our responsibilities, I think it’s time for us to shine our lights out there.” 

Assertiveness

Few women MPs in the Pacific have served for as long as O’Love Jacobsen of Niue, who has served in the Assembly since 1988, apart from a six-year stint as High Commissioner to New Zealand. She has seen women long struggle to get these roles across the region.

“We surrender leadership roles in politics to men because, I think, we underestimate our own strengths and ability to be able to take those roles,” she said.

“In the previous (Niue assembly) session there were three women. This time around we had six women in the house. I put my name up to run as Premier against a male.

"I did that because I believe in democracy. Also to test the waters and see where do our women who have now come in, and new as they may be, where do they stand in all this. Not one of them voted for me.” 

She acknowledged cultural factors held some people back from voting for women, and some women back from attempting to enter politics.

“It’s that element of respect that kind of interferes with the real desire that women wanted to sort of push themselves a little bit more. But if you’ve got relatives who say ‘don’t forget that this is our person, or he’s related to us, we need to consider that he’s there as well’.

“If we’re going to consider that we can make a valuable contribution then we need to be a little bit more assertive,” Jacobsen said.

Climate change pressures

For parliamentarians, one of the benefits of regional networking is the range of ideas they get exposed to as they build relationships. 

For Bougainville’s Masono, this week’s wānanga was helpful in giving her ideas for addressing her people’s major issues related to climate change, “how we can mobilise together to take on those effects of climate change on the islands”.

She said the different countries had common issues and none were more pressing than climate change. 

“As a woman MP and coming from one of the islands in Bougainville who always faces the challenge of climate change and food security, from this conference I’ve learned how other Pacific Islands countries actually have climate change policies that I believe we could – instead of reinventing the wheel – Bougainville can actually adopt and tailor to suit our context.”

Bougainville is a special case within PNG, a region still reeling from a civil war in the 1990s, where a referendum on independence was held in 2019.

While non-binding, the result was 97.7 percent of voters opting for independence, an emphatic expression that PNG’s national Parliament is due to deliberate on in the next year or so. There's no guarantee the outcome will be full independence for Bougainville.

But whatever Bougainville's future political status, it's likely women will play a role in shaping it.

This week's wānanga was funded and hosted by the New Zealand Parliament's Tai a Kiwa: Stronger Pacific Parliaments programme, which began in 2019 following a Memorandum of Understanding between the Clerk of the House of Representatives and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade with a stated aim to provide relevant and practical assistance to Pacific counterparts. 

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RNZ’s The House – journalism focused on parliamentary legislation, issues and insights – is made with funding from Parliament’s Office of the Clerk.