Soft parliamentary diplomacy for more women MPs in the Pacific
The majority of all female elected representatives across the Pacific Islands region visited Wellington for a development event, showcasing the merits of soft diplomacy, Parliament-style.
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." …