"My People's Alliance Party government will take action to end the ordeal of Professor Brij Lal and his wife and welcome them home."
Sitiveni Rabuka, launching his new party
"A military coup was unleashed to restore the status quo ante. Opinions differ about its causes and the involvement of key players in it. Mr Sitiveni Rabuka, still in public life, might one day shed light on the events..." Professor Brij Lal, in his Fiji Times Opinion piece
Fijileaks: Under the Racist Coupist Rabuka, another Lal, our Editor-in-Chief, saw his Fiji passport cancelled in 1988 following the discovery of the arms shipment to Fiji (arms requested by politicians still craving for political power), and for two decades had to travel on a United Nations Travel Document (Refugee Passport, originally designed for displaced Jews fleeing Adolf Hitler and the pograms). He is yet to reclaim his Fijian citizenship despite thousands (both opponents and supporters) benefitting from FFP's Dual Citizenship Decree. The Fiji Times Opinion columnists refuse to hold Rabuka to account, for it doesn't suit their political agenda. Previously, some were Bainimarama's grog buddies. Recently, we informed Fijians of all races to think very hard before jumping to support politicians opposed to FFP government. History teaches us that they will BETRAY you for the sake of Political Power
Cry, the Beloved Country
'The logic of racial politics came to the fore in the April 1977 general elections when 24 per cent of the Fijian communal votes went to Sakeasi Butadroka’s Fijian Nationalist Party, causing the Alliance’s temporary defeat. The Alliance leader Ratu Mara realized anew the advice of David Butler of Nuffield College, Oxford, that Fijian unity would be a prerequisite for Fijian rule. To that end, the Alliance government put its multiracial ism on hold and began to consolidate its ethnic base." | 'I only met Ratu Mara once in 1967, and I may have said this-not as a constitutional expert but as a sensible observer.' Sir David Butler, May 1987 to our Founding Editor-in-Chief, then his former student |
On Sunday, 17 OCTOBER, Sir David Butler celebrates his 96th Birthday in Oxford
Fijileaks: Our Founding Editor-in-Chief feels duty bound to point out a particular reference to his former academic supervisor at Oxford, Sir David Butler, under whose supervision he wrote his study of Fiji's Racial Politics - The Coming Coup, later published as Fiji: Coups in Paradise - Race, Politics and Military Intervention. In his Opinion piece for the Fiji Times, the learned Professor Brij Lal writes as follows: 'The logic of racial politics came to the fore in the April 1977 general elections when 24 per cent of the Fijian communal votes went to Sakeasi Butadroka’s Fijian Nationalist Party, causing the Alliance’s temporary defeat. The Alliance leader Ratu Mara realized anew the advice of David Butler of Nuffield College, Oxford, that Fijian unity would be a prerequisite for Fijian rule. To that end, the Alliance government put its multiracial ism on hold and began to consolidate its ethnic base."
Our Founding Editor-in-Chief had the previous year finished his manuscript, approved by Sir David, and contained a Foreword by the Oxford don, when the racially motivated Rabuka's 1987 coups happened. Since Sir David had read, corrected, challenged and criticized every line and the 12 chapters of the study over a period of three years, he was well placed to respond to Ratu Mara's reference to him at a press conference shortly after the May 1987 coup. Coincidentally, his son, the late Gareth Butler (1965-2008), had just joined the BBC in 1987, at central talks and features in the current affairs department of Bush House. The Fiji Coup was his first assignment, and so the BUTLERS turned to our Editor-in-Chief for guidance. The young Gareth, born and brought up in Oxford, who had chosen journalism, unlike his Oxford academic parents, did a fantastic job, explaining to the world the '1987 Coups'. In any case, he used to have general conversations with our Editor-in-Chief at his parents house or whenever he was visiting Nuffield College to see his father. Gareth's journalism career took off after that first Fiji broadcast. He steered BBC Radio 4's election night coverage, taking charge of editing the general election programme of 2005, countless local council elections, European polls and US election nights. His last job at the BBC was as deputy editor of The Politics Show, which he had joined at its birth in 2003. Lets return to Sir David Butler. After the 14 May 1987 Coup, our Editor-in- Chief went to Sir David's office in the college and showed him a news item where Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara had blamed him: 'I felt that the [1970] Constitution was right and I had consulted a constitutional expert, David Butler by name, and his opinion was that the Constitution is right and [if] Fijians stay united, we would still have power for a long time". Responding to Ratu Mara's statement of 28 May 1987, Sir David wanted our Editor-in-Chief to put across his response, which was included in post Coup chapter, 'Soldiers in Paradise'. David Butler: 'I only met Ratu Mara once in 1967, and I may have said this-not as a constitutional expert but as a sensible observer.' Ironically, Ratu Mara's public statement implied that Sir David was indirectly responsible for the plight of the Indo-Fijians and our Editor-in-Chief. Sir David had not only supervised the study but had introduced our Editor-in-Chief to Professor Sir Brian Keith-Lucas, then the only surviving member of the three-man team which reviewed Fiji's electoral system in 1975. Sir Keith, formerly of Nuffiled College, Oxford, had kindly commented on Chapter Three, "The Electoral System" and had shared further insights into what transpired behind the scenes during the review process. Sir David also introduced our Editor-in-Chief to Sir Zelman Cowen, the former Governor-General of Australia and Provost of Oriel College, Oxford. Sir Zelman made helpful comments after reading Chapter Four on the 1977 Fiji constitutional crisis and the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. Our Editor-in-Chief always found it puzzling that his own research and writings including the contents of Fiji: Coups in Paradise have never warranted even a passing reference in any of Professor Brij Lal's writings and published works, to date. As for the Fiji Times, it has never published a dissenting Opinion from our Founding Editor-in-Chief, for it doesn't fit squarely with the writings of the cabal that have captured the Opinion column of that paper. Finally, in 1992, when Sir David retired as Official Fellow of Nuffield College, he passed on to our Editor-in-Chief a thick file relating to his role in the founding of the Alliance Party, the behind the scenes role during the drafting of the 1970 Constitution and other private papers and exchanges between British rulers and the political leaders in Fiji. We hope to publish them one day. On Sunday, 17 OCTOBER, Sir David Butler celebrates his 96th Birthday in Oxford. Its a long journey for a man who transformed the study of British politics, Opinion Polls, the Electoral System, and the fate and fortunes of British political leaders, beginning with Sir Winston Churchill. Sir Butler had two lengthy meetings with Winston Churchill in the early 1950s. Sir David was only twenty-five when he met Churchill.The first, on Monday 6 February 1950, was a four-hour dinner that the two enjoyed at Churchill's country home Chartwell after the former Prime Minister had seen Sir David Butler's January 1950 Economist article explaining the concept of 'swing' in elections. Sir David has frequently described this evening as one of the key turning points of his life. On the way home, Sir David wrote up his recollections into a six-page account, which survives in the personal Sir David Butler archives at Nuffield College, Oxford
Meanwhile, we let Professor Brij Lal speak to us through his Fiji Times Opinion column, Fiji: Where Things Fall Apart:
Reproduced from National Federation Party Facebook:
By Professor Brij Lal
Fiji is a bit like Churchill’s Russia, a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ Here is a beautiful country full of a talented population, sophisticated infrastructure and abundant natural resources which is sadly prone to debilitating self-inflected wounds that hobble its present and dent its future. One coup is bad enough for any country, but three (or four) in short succession is sheer madness.
Yet, despite the mayhem, there has never been a serious reflection on why things have turned out the way they have, why ‘the Centre Cannot Hold,’ to quote Chinua Achebe again. Its leaders kept sweeping the dust under the carpet but the dust never goes away. Or, to change the metaphor, they keep trying to turn the hands of the clock back but that does not do the clock any good.
The ghosts of past misdeeds have never been exorcised. They will continue to haunt the country: that is the lesson of history. There will always be a misguided colonel or a commodore lurking in the shadows dreaming of grandeur and glory, and fancying his chances. It has happened before.
Fiji’s problems lie in the failure of its leaders to confront the conundrum of its history. . Instead, they have always averted their eyes and kept on pouting pious platitudes about being a ‘beacon of hope to the world’ as Pope John Paul II intoned on a fleeting visit to Fiji in November 1986. Alas, prophesy was not his forte.
Colonial Heritage
Fiji’s problems start with the policies Fiji’s founding governor Sir Arthur Gordon promulgated soon after the cession of the islands to the United Kingdom on 10 October 1874. Three contending, not say contradictory, understandings formed the foundations of Fiji’s political culture.
The indigenous Fijians, now iTaukei, were by policy shielded from mainstream society and confined to their subsistence lifestyle under the leadership of their traditional elders with powers codified at law. In time they came to believe, or rather, were led to believe that their interests would be paramount in their own affairs. It was a protective concept.
Europeans, for their part, believed they would enjoy a privileged place on account of who they were and their preponderant contribution to the colonial economy. And Indo-Fijians, in their turn, demanded parity with other groups as full British subjects.
These competing demands constituted the critical conundrum of colonial Fiji. The British never really seriously sought to reconcile, preferring instead to invoke the happy metaphor of a three-legged stool upon which each group made their different and distinctive contribution. Fiji began to believe the myth.
The protocols and practices of the colonial government were occasionally challenged through strikes and boycotts but never seriously threatened. Tropical torpor did the rest. The status quo prevailed.
Towards Decolonization
In 1960, London sent a new Letters Patent to Fiji, the first since 1937, expanding the Legislative Council, enfranchising women, extending voting rights to all Fijians who until then had been represented in the Legislative Council by Great Council of Chiefs’ nominees. Internal self-governance was on the horizon and, beyond that, independence itself.
These proposals elicited distinct responses in Fiji, especially about the pace of change and its precise character. Fijian leaders saw no need for haste. The emerging Fijian leader Ratu KKT Mara explained in 1961 that he saw no advantage in independence, saying ‘we are not as stupid as that to ask for that,.’ rupturing Fiji’s ‘happy and historic relations’ with the United Kingdom.’ European leaders concurred.
AD Patel, the Indo-Fijian leader, disagreed. Independence would come to Fiji sooner rather than later, he said. The question was whether it would come as Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, or as Durga, goddess of destruction. For him, colonialism as a form of government ‘stands universally condemned in the modern world.’
London listened to the democratic argument but it sympathized with the Fijians. They had ceded the islands to Britain in the first place, and they were the ‘loyal race,’ in Julian Amery’s words. So, they worked to devise a formula with all the appearance of democratic representation but left the Fijians in control. Race formed the cornerstone of colonial thinking.
Independence
That was reflected in the 1970 Constitution. The principles of paramountcy, privilege and parity were retained, and ethnicity occupied the primary focus of electoral representation. The death of AD Patel in October 1969 had silenced a compelling voice for non racial political culture. His successors had succumbed to the logic of racial politics.
On the electoral system, the main cause of disagreement in the past, Governor Sir Robert Foster in his last Despatch of 8 October 1970, the UK had ‘fluffed’ -his word- the issue. The British did what the British do best: shift responsibility to a royal commission to be appointed after the first general elections to look into the matter, knowing that the entrenched power elite would never countenance any change that could conceivably jeopardize their own position, even if it was in the greater national good.
A royal commission under Sir Harry Street was appointed in 1975 and recommended proportional system for Fiji, but its report was still-born and hurriedly buried unmoaned in the bowels of the parliamentary library. The British had quietly washed their hands of the mess they had created. Ensconced in office, the Alliance would not budge, and the NFP was imploding. An opportunity for progressive political reform went bagging.
‘Race is a fact of Life’ became the new mantra of independent Fiji. Accordingly, every issue of public policy came to be seen through the prism of race. You were asked for your race when you opened your bank account, took out your driving licence, when you left or re-entered the country. Race stared you in the face at every turn.
The logic of racial politics came to the fore in the April 1977 general elections when 24 per cent of the Fijian communal votes went to Sakeasi Butadroka’s Fijian Nationalist Party, causing the Alliance’s temporary defeat. The Alliance leader Ratu Mara realized anew the advice of David Butler of Nuffield Collage, Oxford, that Fijian unity would be a prerequisite for Finjan rule. To that end, the Alliance government put its multiracial ism on hold and began to consolidate its ethnic base.
Predictably, the leading and indeed the founding members of the Indian Alliance, including Sir Vijay R Singh and James Shankar Singh, left the party and headed towards the NFP and later the Fiji Labour Party. The racial chasm became deeper.
Orthodoxy Challenged
The old understandings were finally ruptured in 1987 when the NFP-FLP Coalition narrowly won the general elections. A military coup was unleashed to restore the status quo ante. Opinions differ about its causes and the involvement of key players in it. Mr Sitiveni Rabuka, still in public life, might one day shed light on the events, but until then, certain things can be safely assumed.
Rabuka got carried away by hubris and public adulation to claim the sole authorship of the coup, but it is now clear that there were many individuals, interests and institutions behind him: the Methodist Church, the Taukei Movement, defeated politicians, sections of the Great Council of Chiefs, a concert of disgruntled forces united by the single goal of turning the hands of the clock back. We will never know who or what because, no one bothered to enquire in case the truth cut too close to the bone.
In the mid-1990s when Rabuka forged a remarkable working relationship with his once arch nemesis, Mr Jai Ram Reddy, in a rare moment of epiphany to embark on the road to reconciliation which culminated in the promulgation of the 1997 Constitution. It was an achievement of proportions whose import was not fully appreciated at the time. Another opportunity lost.
1997 and Beyond
But that triumph was short-lived. Once again, the politics of race reared its ugly head. Some iTaukei leaders who had voted for the 1997 Constitution began to campaign for its repudiation; one or two would miraculously join Frank Bainimarama’s cabinet as champions of multiracial. In 2000, backed by these ethnonationalists, George Speight launched his improbable putsch against the government of Mahendra Chaudhry.
Surprisingly, the GCC asked for the constitution to be changed. the very same one they had unanimously supported a few years back. ‘Right mission, wrong method,’ some chimed in.
George Speight is languishing in jail, but there can be no doubt that he was a frontman for others who quietly slunk into the shadows when the putsch seemed destined to fail. Where are they now? Once again, there was no enquiry into the causes of this tragedy.
Six years later, in December 2006, Commodore Frank Bainimarama overthrew the democratically elected government of Laisenia Qarase. It was not a coup, he said, but a ‘Clean Up Campaign,’ he said. But a coup by any other name is still a coup. And cleaning a country of corruption, no matter how endemic, can never by itself be a convincing enough reason to commit treason. The motives behind the coup remain murky.
Police Commissioner Andrew Hughes spoke of ‘shadowy characters’ behind the Commodore’, and Mr Bainimarama has himself said that prominent citizens, including businessmen, wanted him to do his coup. But no one was brought to justice, there was no enquiry. Who were these enablers of treason? Where are they now? Might they not be plotting their next move if things do not go their way? They should be called out and held accountable for their nefarious activities.
2013 Constitution
The 2013 Constitution is promoted as heralding a new, bright future for Fiji. It is true that it has many features which have ended the foundations of Fiji’s politics of the past. Fiji’s character has changed dramatically. The paramounts are gone and Indo-Fijian are now a third of the population. Many more Fijians live in urban and per-urban areas whose needs and interests are different to those of their rural counterparts. Travel and technology make the national boundary porous.
It is not clear that the light some see on the horizon comes from a new dawn breaking or from the flames of a funeral pyre of the old order dying. The fatal flaw of the present constitution lies in its provenance. It was conceived in secrecy and imposed by a decree. Citizens had no say in its formulation of implementation and therefore no ownership of it. Loyalty cannot be coerced, nor the deep human yearning for freedom extinguished by a decree. There can be no honour in illegitimate usurpation of power no matter what the excuse. The end will come. hopefully not with a bang but with a whimper.
Meanwhile, for the foreseeable future, to use the words of Matthew Arnold, Fiji is fated to wander ‘between two worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born.’
Dr Brij V Lal, an Emeritus Professor of The ANU, was a member of the Fiji Constitution Review Commission chaired by Sir Paul Reeves.
Fiji is a bit like Churchill’s Russia, a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ Here is a beautiful country full of a talented population, sophisticated infrastructure and abundant natural resources which is sadly prone to debilitating self-inflected wounds that hobble its present and dent its future. One coup is bad enough for any country, but three (or four) in short succession is sheer madness.
Yet, despite the mayhem, there has never been a serious reflection on why things have turned out the way they have, why ‘the Centre Cannot Hold,’ to quote Chinua Achebe again. Its leaders kept sweeping the dust under the carpet but the dust never goes away. Or, to change the metaphor, they keep trying to turn the hands of the clock back but that does not do the clock any good.
The ghosts of past misdeeds have never been exorcised. They will continue to haunt the country: that is the lesson of history. There will always be a misguided colonel or a commodore lurking in the shadows dreaming of grandeur and glory, and fancying his chances. It has happened before.
Fiji’s problems lie in the failure of its leaders to confront the conundrum of its history. . Instead, they have always averted their eyes and kept on pouting pious platitudes about being a ‘beacon of hope to the world’ as Pope John Paul II intoned on a fleeting visit to Fiji in November 1986. Alas, prophesy was not his forte.
Colonial Heritage
Fiji’s problems start with the policies Fiji’s founding governor Sir Arthur Gordon promulgated soon after the cession of the islands to the United Kingdom on 10 October 1874. Three contending, not say contradictory, understandings formed the foundations of Fiji’s political culture.
The indigenous Fijians, now iTaukei, were by policy shielded from mainstream society and confined to their subsistence lifestyle under the leadership of their traditional elders with powers codified at law. In time they came to believe, or rather, were led to believe that their interests would be paramount in their own affairs. It was a protective concept.
Europeans, for their part, believed they would enjoy a privileged place on account of who they were and their preponderant contribution to the colonial economy. And Indo-Fijians, in their turn, demanded parity with other groups as full British subjects.
These competing demands constituted the critical conundrum of colonial Fiji. The British never really seriously sought to reconcile, preferring instead to invoke the happy metaphor of a three-legged stool upon which each group made their different and distinctive contribution. Fiji began to believe the myth.
The protocols and practices of the colonial government were occasionally challenged through strikes and boycotts but never seriously threatened. Tropical torpor did the rest. The status quo prevailed.
Towards Decolonization
In 1960, London sent a new Letters Patent to Fiji, the first since 1937, expanding the Legislative Council, enfranchising women, extending voting rights to all Fijians who until then had been represented in the Legislative Council by Great Council of Chiefs’ nominees. Internal self-governance was on the horizon and, beyond that, independence itself.
These proposals elicited distinct responses in Fiji, especially about the pace of change and its precise character. Fijian leaders saw no need for haste. The emerging Fijian leader Ratu KKT Mara explained in 1961 that he saw no advantage in independence, saying ‘we are not as stupid as that to ask for that,.’ rupturing Fiji’s ‘happy and historic relations’ with the United Kingdom.’ European leaders concurred.
AD Patel, the Indo-Fijian leader, disagreed. Independence would come to Fiji sooner rather than later, he said. The question was whether it would come as Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, or as Durga, goddess of destruction. For him, colonialism as a form of government ‘stands universally condemned in the modern world.’
London listened to the democratic argument but it sympathized with the Fijians. They had ceded the islands to Britain in the first place, and they were the ‘loyal race,’ in Julian Amery’s words. So, they worked to devise a formula with all the appearance of democratic representation but left the Fijians in control. Race formed the cornerstone of colonial thinking.
Independence
That was reflected in the 1970 Constitution. The principles of paramountcy, privilege and parity were retained, and ethnicity occupied the primary focus of electoral representation. The death of AD Patel in October 1969 had silenced a compelling voice for non racial political culture. His successors had succumbed to the logic of racial politics.
On the electoral system, the main cause of disagreement in the past, Governor Sir Robert Foster in his last Despatch of 8 October 1970, the UK had ‘fluffed’ -his word- the issue. The British did what the British do best: shift responsibility to a royal commission to be appointed after the first general elections to look into the matter, knowing that the entrenched power elite would never countenance any change that could conceivably jeopardize their own position, even if it was in the greater national good.
A royal commission under Sir Harry Street was appointed in 1975 and recommended proportional system for Fiji, but its report was still-born and hurriedly buried unmoaned in the bowels of the parliamentary library. The British had quietly washed their hands of the mess they had created. Ensconced in office, the Alliance would not budge, and the NFP was imploding. An opportunity for progressive political reform went bagging.
‘Race is a fact of Life’ became the new mantra of independent Fiji. Accordingly, every issue of public policy came to be seen through the prism of race. You were asked for your race when you opened your bank account, took out your driving licence, when you left or re-entered the country. Race stared you in the face at every turn.
The logic of racial politics came to the fore in the April 1977 general elections when 24 per cent of the Fijian communal votes went to Sakeasi Butadroka’s Fijian Nationalist Party, causing the Alliance’s temporary defeat. The Alliance leader Ratu Mara realized anew the advice of David Butler of Nuffield Collage, Oxford, that Fijian unity would be a prerequisite for Finjan rule. To that end, the Alliance government put its multiracial ism on hold and began to consolidate its ethnic base.
Predictably, the leading and indeed the founding members of the Indian Alliance, including Sir Vijay R Singh and James Shankar Singh, left the party and headed towards the NFP and later the Fiji Labour Party. The racial chasm became deeper.
Orthodoxy Challenged
The old understandings were finally ruptured in 1987 when the NFP-FLP Coalition narrowly won the general elections. A military coup was unleashed to restore the status quo ante. Opinions differ about its causes and the involvement of key players in it. Mr Sitiveni Rabuka, still in public life, might one day shed light on the events, but until then, certain things can be safely assumed.
Rabuka got carried away by hubris and public adulation to claim the sole authorship of the coup, but it is now clear that there were many individuals, interests and institutions behind him: the Methodist Church, the Taukei Movement, defeated politicians, sections of the Great Council of Chiefs, a concert of disgruntled forces united by the single goal of turning the hands of the clock back. We will never know who or what because, no one bothered to enquire in case the truth cut too close to the bone.
In the mid-1990s when Rabuka forged a remarkable working relationship with his once arch nemesis, Mr Jai Ram Reddy, in a rare moment of epiphany to embark on the road to reconciliation which culminated in the promulgation of the 1997 Constitution. It was an achievement of proportions whose import was not fully appreciated at the time. Another opportunity lost.
1997 and Beyond
But that triumph was short-lived. Once again, the politics of race reared its ugly head. Some iTaukei leaders who had voted for the 1997 Constitution began to campaign for its repudiation; one or two would miraculously join Frank Bainimarama’s cabinet as champions of multiracial. In 2000, backed by these ethnonationalists, George Speight launched his improbable putsch against the government of Mahendra Chaudhry.
Surprisingly, the GCC asked for the constitution to be changed. the very same one they had unanimously supported a few years back. ‘Right mission, wrong method,’ some chimed in.
George Speight is languishing in jail, but there can be no doubt that he was a frontman for others who quietly slunk into the shadows when the putsch seemed destined to fail. Where are they now? Once again, there was no enquiry into the causes of this tragedy.
Six years later, in December 2006, Commodore Frank Bainimarama overthrew the democratically elected government of Laisenia Qarase. It was not a coup, he said, but a ‘Clean Up Campaign,’ he said. But a coup by any other name is still a coup. And cleaning a country of corruption, no matter how endemic, can never by itself be a convincing enough reason to commit treason. The motives behind the coup remain murky.
Police Commissioner Andrew Hughes spoke of ‘shadowy characters’ behind the Commodore’, and Mr Bainimarama has himself said that prominent citizens, including businessmen, wanted him to do his coup. But no one was brought to justice, there was no enquiry. Who were these enablers of treason? Where are they now? Might they not be plotting their next move if things do not go their way? They should be called out and held accountable for their nefarious activities.
2013 Constitution
The 2013 Constitution is promoted as heralding a new, bright future for Fiji. It is true that it has many features which have ended the foundations of Fiji’s politics of the past. Fiji’s character has changed dramatically. The paramounts are gone and Indo-Fijian are now a third of the population. Many more Fijians live in urban and per-urban areas whose needs and interests are different to those of their rural counterparts. Travel and technology make the national boundary porous.
It is not clear that the light some see on the horizon comes from a new dawn breaking or from the flames of a funeral pyre of the old order dying. The fatal flaw of the present constitution lies in its provenance. It was conceived in secrecy and imposed by a decree. Citizens had no say in its formulation of implementation and therefore no ownership of it. Loyalty cannot be coerced, nor the deep human yearning for freedom extinguished by a decree. There can be no honour in illegitimate usurpation of power no matter what the excuse. The end will come. hopefully not with a bang but with a whimper.
Meanwhile, for the foreseeable future, to use the words of Matthew Arnold, Fiji is fated to wander ‘between two worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born.’
Dr Brij V Lal, an Emeritus Professor of The ANU, was a member of the Fiji Constitution Review Commission chaired by Sir Paul Reeves.
Fijileaks: While it is a fact that the 2013 Constitution of Fiji was imposed without consultation and through a Decree, HISTORY shows that Ratu Mara's Alliance Party was defeated under the 1970 Constitution, and the Peoples Coalition, under Mahendra Chaudhry, won power in 1999 under the 1997 Constitution (Rabuka-Reddy Constitution, drafted by Brij Lal and his team). So, it is possible to unseat FFP under the 2013 Constitution. But certainly not by NFP, led by that 'Smart Ass Professor' BIMAN PRASAD, the Fiji Times' blue-eyed political boy. We also believe Sitiveni Rabuka and his People's Alliance Party are not the rightful party to dislodge FFP and take power after the 2022 elections.
"It would be unthinkable today. In the middle of a general election campaign with only two weeks to go before polling, a young, unknown research student from Nuffield College, Oxford, was summoned to a booze-fuelled tete a tete dinner with the leader of the Opposition at his country house. The student had written a piece for the Economist headed ‘Electoral Facts’. Crammed with data on by-election results, turnout and Gallup polls, it gave a formula for working out the ratio of votes to seats. The eminent politician had recognised this as ground-breaking stuff and he wanted to know more.
The year was 1950. The great man was Winston Churchill and the student was David Butler who, despite his youth, was already well on his way to revolutionising the analysis of elections. Years later he said that after that encounter with Churchill he was never in awe of any other situation or person.
The Churchill story is the opener in ‘Sultan of Swing’ by Michael Crick which tells story of how David Butler, an academic, became the first “telly don”, transforming the TV coverage of elections and devising one of the best known props of the small screen – the swingometer. “You invented that swingy thing”, observed the Queen when she knighted him some 55 years later. “More or less," he replied.
By the time he met Churchill, the 25 year old Butler had already pioneered the use of percentages in interpreting election results. In doing so he launched the new science of psephology. The name – more elegant than the suggested alternative of “electionolgy”- is derived from the Greek word for pebble which the Athenians dropped into an urn to vote. It was by what David Dimbleby called “the magic of psephology” that the BBC was able to predict the result of the 2017 election only minutes after the polls had closed.
Butler has analysed every British election since 1945, through the Nuffield election book series as well as in his broadcasts. In telling Butler’s story this book takes us on a canter through 70 years of democratic history, covering the interplay between government and academia as well as the changing relationship between TV and politics. "