Budhau v Jean d’ARK

Budhau wrote:

There are some in here that are trying to convince us that FB may have ripped $2K, or that Chaud has not paid his taxes – that this makes these guys evil.

Quess what – ripping of the common Fijians has been part of our culture since independence – before independence, it was the colonialists that ripped of the same Fijians.

So when the Alliance was in power, ripping off the common Fijians, we all looked the other way because there was the Indian as the enemy.

In 1987 when the FLP came to power and was about to start a investigation on the collapse of those banks that went down with several hundred millions – what happend, those folks who were riding the gravy train – they sent in Rabuka.

The guys from Kubuna – they have been waiting for a very long time to get in on the gravy train – so when they had a chance they sent in Speight. And Speight was one pissed off guy back then because of the Mahogany deal money that he was connected with.

When the SDL was in power, they seem to be doing the same thing that the SVT was doing earliier. And the Old Alliance boys wanted back in this time around – so they couped Qarase.

So do you get the point the point – corruption and outright thieving is a way of life in Fiji – so trying to blame FB and Chaud with things that seem to be minor compare to what others have done ain;t gonna convince anyone that there two guys are evil.

If you want to be perceived as credible – you have to discuss this corruption issue frankly – and in future make sure that the common people do not look the other way – because there is the bigger enemy.

What will happen now is that Qarase will really work on this racial polarization, the common Fijian will be willing to totally over look all the thieving that the past administration has done and vote those guys back in – and there goes the gravy train again – until someone comes around to try and hijack the gravy train for themselves.

Which drew this response from JD:

Budhau,

You can’t be serious! It is sooo obvious that you are a Regime mole it’s not even funny. Just one of the many ways to figure that out is how you consistently go out of your way to waylay or distract the course of the discussions here at every post. The normal human reaction when confronted with consistently antagonistic views (like the freedom blogs are to yours) is to argue for a while and then just migrate off to friendlier company and surrounds elsewhere. That means your pig-headed, butt-in-ski cyber-squatting on SoliVakasama must surely stem from the fact that you have either been hired specifically for this role by the military propaganda unit, or else you simply have some kind of unresolved personal psychological or sociological issues that you can’t get a fix for anywhere else!

As for your patronizingly self-important contention that Fijians need to be “educated” about being ripped off by previous Governments, where have you been for the last 30 years? The Alliance party WAS voted out in 1987 (and again in 2006 if you count the NAPF). And the SVT WAS voted out in 1999, and again in 2001! In all those elections corruption WAS a significant campaign issue, and the resultant shift in Fijian voting patterns played a key part in the final results! So what the hell are you talking about, and where the hell do you get off claiming that it is only Fijian voters who need to be “educated”?

In any election, the defining issue is not what the whole electorate thinks, but rather what the swing voters in marginal seats think on key issues. In democratic elections the world over, swings of 10% or more are very rare. That means all over the world, party supporters are relatively stable in their voting patterns, with election results being decided by swing voters on the key issues of the day. So from election to election, 90% of Labor Party voters in Australia or Britain, or Republican voters in the US, or LDP voters in Japan will STILL vote for their parties REGARDLESS of the issues or scandals! Why should Fiji be any different? We are probably not as discerning as we need to be on certain issues, but our strong party loyalty is FAR from being unique in the world.

And why are you being so racist in your targeting of this issue? Because the Indo-Fijian voters are even more “hard-core” in terms of being stubbornly loyal to their party and leader, despite all the problems both cause for their own electorate and the nation! If you’re so bent on educating voters, why don’t you just spend your time trying to educate Indians on why they’d be better off not voting FLP at the next elections? Since there are less FLP voters than SDL ones, at least you’d be saving yourself some time, money and effort in implementing your education program from that side!

The reason is simple, and is something that appears to have completely slipped your conceited mind in all this. And that is that elections are not about what you or Frank Bainimarama, or Akuila Yabaki, or Mahen Chaudhry or Lai Qarase, or anyone else thinks about other people should think! Rather democratic elections are simply about what the PEOPLE THEMSLEVES think! So Frank Bainimarama can rant and rave day and night about what he thinks about media freedom, or FDB lending policies, or GCC priorities, or the NCBBF. But at the end of the day in a democracy, it is the people who give their verdict on the value of all those opinions and promises and perspectives, and whether they are even worth the time or trouble to bother about.

A democratic electoral framework offers the people the freedom to listen to anyone they want – or not! And they are free to make up their own minds on what they’ve heard, or what they understand. And they are free to decide for themselves on what issues are more, or less, important to them! So if a Fijian voter decides for himself that land rights and corruption are both important issues, but that land rights are MORE important to him if he has to choose between them, then who the hell are you to tell him different in a free democracy, Budhau? Likewise, Fijian politicians might believe that Indo-Fijians would stand a better chance of improving race relations if they chose an honest, ethical and trustworthy leader like Reddy, instead of a street-smart political animal like Mahen. But that is also none of their business, either.

In any case all the “education” any voter needs is to just let everyone have their say in the campaign period, and then let the voters make up their own minds at the end! Otherwise you are faced with two bottomless pits of open-ended propositioning. The first is time-based ie “I will just keep educating these people until they accept my opinions”! Well that is pointless because it defeats the whole point of getting their opinion in the first place because you are essentially saying “your opinion is invalid unless you agree with mine”. The second is focus-based and is also a waste of time to speculate on since it applies to everyone involved at all times. You might speculate that Fijians would change their voting patterns if they were more “educated” on certain issues – but the EXACT same proviso also applies to you and Frank Bainimarama and the Indo-Fijian electorate! So the solution to these two endless loops is not in “educating” others to accept your views if they didn’t already accept them during the election campaign. The solution is just for you and Frank and Mahen and Akuila to simply GROW UP, wipe the patronizing smirks off your condescending faces, and “educate” yourselves that in a democracy IT IS PERFECTLY OK for people to have different opinions to you, or to each other!

Also, the choice you have laid before the people here is a misleading one since the choice that voters have is not between the faults of SDL and some hypothetical political Nirvana. Their electoral choice is between the SDL and the FLP – plain and simple! In 2006, that choice lay between the known performance of the SDL versus the promise of the FLP. But now, 15 months later, we are in the realm of comparing track record with track record. And in that respect, we now have undeniable and empirical life-experience that for all its faults, the SDL was and is nonetheless demonstrably better than the FLP/NAPF/Military at running the nation’ affairs.

So in that respect, the people DID in fact “guess right” at the 2006 elections concerning their choice of who would do a better at running Fiji. (And even if they didn’t they’d have other chances again later to make things right again then.) So what are you talking about that Fijian voters need to be “educated”? If anything, the 2006 elections suggest that it was the FLP and NAPF voters who were mistaken, and who need to be taught about what expertise and qualities to look for when selecting leaders to run the economy, or about how to distinguish hype from fact in terms of the extent and resolvability of corruption in Fiji.

This is not to say that corruption is not an issue. But it does show that you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater through coups or regime change just because someone mentions corruption. The SDL’s reduced parliamentary majority after the 2006 elections shows that corruption allegations did have some impact on peoples’ choices. It’s just that this does not automatically mandate regime change, something borne out by the clear evidence since 2006 showing that corruption in Fiji simply wasn’t bad enough to justify treason or any other extra-Constitutional remedies! Moreover, the FLP/NAPF’s appalling performance in Government since 2007, plus the selective, unprofessional and detrimental performance of FICAC on the job, shows that there was not even enough corruption in Fiji to justify an SDL defeat at the 2006 elections, on that issue alone.

Not that Fijians would forever put up with slow progress from the SDL on the corruption issue. But this does show that things weren’t so bad that the people had no justification in giving the SDL at least one more term to make acceptable progress. The SDL/FLP Code of Conduct and Anti-Corruption bills were both due to be presented to Parliament in 2007. What was so unacceptable about that timetable, or so great about the FICAC Bill, that we couldn’t even wait a couple of months to see if the SDL could come up with something better (and more lawful)? Well of course we all know that that wasn’t really the issue at all, since Christmas 2006 was Frank’s last chance to conduct a coup (to save his own selfish ass from murder charges) before the May 2007 Supreme Court case ruled definitively on the role of the military under the 1997 Constitution. So if you want to talk about corruption Budhau, you’ve hit the mother-lode here, because trashing the nation, the economy and race relations just to avoid accounting for your actions before a court of law, is the most damaging, self-serving and objectionable kind of corruption you could name!

You be the judge!