Those meetings

Re: Tell me there is method in thy madness?

This is a great editorial Mata’afa for it nails on the head the main outcome from these talkfests - NOTHING. For the ordinary folks at the makeki what does the talkfest at the fancy hotels in town actually mean for their lives? I would argue, very little. When the talkfest is concluded, there would be fancy communiqués released and empty promises to do more to address climate changes, rising sea levels, degraded environments, etc, etc. 

But these are exactly the same promises which were made last year and the year before that. The communiqués might be worded slightly differently but the message of empty hope remains the same.

The pollies and their advisers will pat themselves on the backs for the jobs well done in the aftermath of numerous beers and other alcoholic drinks and consumption of humongous amount of food. Meanwhile my friends at the makeki are in exactly the same position as they were before the fancy talkfest. The PM will humbug us with sweet words about the forum countries meeting its KPI’s, which seem to have expanded with time, and that this was a successful forum. All the while, people at the makeki continue to struggle to make ends meet with the high cost of living.

The talkfest circus will shift next year to some other country with its fancy hotels and it will be the same players getting together again to talk about the same issues. To this end I must admit admiration for the public servants and advisers who struggle every year to come out with different briefing material for their pollie masters about the same issues. How many ways can you phrase and re-phrase NOTHING. Nothing happens until the big western countries stop their polluting actions and nothing happens to us until these same countries decide to buy our acquiescence with dollars masked as environment funds. Nothing happens until whatever little money we get actually filters down to the man on the street through properly managed projects. 

Nothing happens until some other powerful countries stop overfishing our waters. Nothing.......nothing. 

Ask a guy at the tanoa ava at the makeki what the forum means to him and he will stare emptily into space and then whisper to you to f... off. That sums up the total relevance of these talkfests to his life - sweet nothing.

Sort of reminds about the annual church conferences. Occasionally something good might come off it but most of the time they are talkfests.

 

Vai Autu

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