Another excellent article from the pen of Charlie Charters:
AND SO IT STARTS …
The Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka readies us not for what he MAY deliver, but what he MAY NOT deliver in the next six months.
And his messaging is clear.
Get ready for the possibility of no Referendum on the wretched 2013 Constitution this side of the General Election.
That means at least one more General Election under the hated ‘who is my MP’ d’Hondt + Single Constituency system.
But that also means, get ready for the possibility of no referendum on the Great Council of Chiefs and the long tail of hot button, i-Taukei issues that have dominated submissions to the Constitutional Review Committee.
Why?
We may not have the money, Rabuka says, shrugging his shoulders, rather improbably playing the role of thrifty housekeeper after splashing upwards of $6m on the fiasco that is the Commission of Inquiry.
[The Fiji Revenue and Customs Service also messed up the PM’s ‘poor-me’ messaging last week by saying they had collected a record $3.51 billion in revenues – that’s $136m more than the $3.374b that has been factored in to all Government projections.]
This is how the table of options looks to me.
– The staging of the once-every-ten-years national census is a non-negotiable. The census has to happen on time or every aspect of managing the country is put out of whack.
– And the general election has to happen before February next year or the country falls off a constitutional precipice into a place we’ve never been before.
– So, axing the referendum, according to Rabuka’s not-so-subtle nudging, is may be the prudent thing to do. Fiji Government needs to live within its means etc.
And that is what Rabuka is openly suggesting in this Fiji One News report in a way I have not seen happen before.
In truth, as we see the shape of the next election, you could understand Rabuka’s thought process.
Unlike 2014, 2018 and 2022 this is not shaping up into a binary contest – one big name vs another.
It’s more like Rabuka vs a raindow of alternatives, principally his former Coalition partners and the FijiFirst/PeopleFirst offer.
And then some parties new and old, for whom crossing the five percent threshold could actively discourage voters for the fear of ‘wasting’ their vote.
So by any analysis, Rabuka stands to profit the most from the continuity offered by d’Hondt + Single Constituency.
Just like Bainimarama did until the Coalition’s one-MP-win in 2022.
The mirror image of that is true too.
Rabuka’s prospects in 2026/2027 make him the politician most disadvantaged by disbanding d’Hondt + Single Constituency in favour of a return to the multi-constituency structure and either first-past-the-post or any other form of proportional representation.
Rabuka is the last ‘Big Man’ standing in this wretched single constituency d’Hondt system that Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum and advisors so obviously selected for Bainimarama for that very same reason.
Rabuka’s calculation would be that with his brand recognition and The People’s Alliance‘s rather tragic retreat towards appealing to an i-Taukei audience and no-one else, he can get enough personal votes to pull through a larger number of MPs than anyone else.
If the CRC determine to break away from Single Constituency and put that option to a national referendum, the quality of candidate MPs becomes of much greater significance, not just that they are attached to the tailcoats of a Big Man.
My old ‘constituency’ of Vuda, however that’s marked out under a potential return to multi-constituences, would give me maybe a half-dozen potential MPs to consider.
All the voters would get to give them a hard looking-at because the number of candidates is bite-size and manageable.
You can’t hope to do that with the ridiculous 342 candidates you had to wade through in 2022, all asking for your vote under the Single Constituency model.
The big question from the Rabuka nudge – get ready to give up something I promised you – is:
a) is this a trial balloon? Just Rabuka floating an idea, as he does regularly, and then walks it back – civil service job losses, no civil service job losses etc.
b) or is this a way of triangulating public opinion so that, with the excuse of prudent financial housekeeping, he gets us ready to nod along when Rabuka boots the CRC’s proposed Constitution into the long grass of the next Parliament of the Republic of Fiji?
and c) how will ‘Sorry but no referendum’ play with his increasingly narrow i-Taukei voter base, which is shrinking back to having a definite older, more traditional and rural vibe?
Will it break through that no referendum means delaying for at least another two to three years a vote on re-establishing the GCC within the constitution, and all that that might mean?
Will that prove one broken or fudged promise too many or will the avalanche of returned titles and other i-Taukei goodies prove to be enough sugar to make this bitterest of pills go down?
#Fiji#FijiPolitics#FijiPol#FijiGovernment#elections
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