Mr. Speaker Sir;
Honorable Prime Minister;
Honorable Cabinet and Assistant Ministers;
Honorable Leader of the Opposition;
Honorable Members and all joining us in the gallery and online
Aaap sab ko Saadar Pranam, Aslaam walukum, Ni sa Bula Vinaka saka
Mr Speaker, we begin our Parliament this year in a very holy month. Our Christian Brothers and Sisters are praying and fasting in preparation for Easter late this month. I wish Ramadan Mubarak to our brothers and sisters from Islamic Faith as they too embark on a month of fasting and prayers. Hindus, too, are marking Fagun maas as they prepare for Holi also later this month.
This week there is World Spiritual Leaders Forum organized in Hydrabad India where leaders from different faith traditions are coming together to see how each faith can contribute to Peace in a world full of strife. Terrorists come together and unite in their quest for destruction; so why can’t faith leaders join hands to build peace? For that we have to make an effort to learn about each other’s traditions and customs without fear of losing our own identity.
Hon Speaker as His Excellency reminded us in his gracious speech, we are blessed with diversity of cultures and faiths. Yet while many of us enjoy the different festivals and have a basic understanding of each other’s beliefs, narratives promoting fear and insecurity have never allowed us to fully embrace each other. Much more needs to be done to allay those fears.
Mr. Speaker His Excellency lamented that, some unscrupulous politicians continued to instigate mistrust among our communities for their own political ends. So when Hon Prime Minister called himself a Vulagi, when he was a visitor at an event, this was drummed up, because this was what he had called non indigenous community. Even Chiefs when they enter a territory beyond their own, within Fiji are called vulagis!
This simplistic interpretation is what might be called, in other countries, a “dog whistle”.
Some politicians will capitalize on the use of the word to prey on the insecurities of non-indigenous people, to suggest that they are being left out or treated as different. Many of us with a heightened sense of insecurity are ready to believe the worst – so when we hear this narrative, our fears are made worse.
Even when we have lived together for generations we don’t understand enough the extent of our fears and insecurities relating to other communities. Those of us who are not indigenous surely understand that for the Taukei, their identity is the Vanua, land, its customs, traditions and its people and all of these are dear to them.
Migrant communities feel insecure that the land they live on, to which they form a different but also real attachment, could be taken away from them. What is the work we need to do as leaders to ease the tensions and fears that these issues raise? There are surely ways that we can see these issues not as a contest or a competition, but as a way in which we share and co-operate, work together, contributing different things, and live in harmony with one another.
We need to acknowledge our past, look at narratives of the past and how pain, trauma and insecurities have been transferred from generation to generation. Indenture, coups and evictions from land have traumatized my community and our sense of belonging. Melanesians, Rabi and Kioan, Chinese, Part-Europeans, all have had a history that is not talked about. We don’t learn about it in schools. Instead we rely on stereotypes passed down between generations. Political upheavals in the last three decades have impacted every ethnic group and there are scars we carry.
Mr. Speaker one of the key focus areas for our Government will be to work on healing through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and building social cohesion so Fiji and its people can reach their full potential. Leader of Opposition has shared today that we need to integrate multi culturalism in all spheres of our life that is our intention Mr. Speaker sir. School curriculum will be reviewed to integrate our history, much of which was removed by the last Government. The Coalition Government has reintroduced Ratu Sukuna Day and added Girmit Day to celebrate our leaders and remember our history. Truth and Reconciliation Commission will provide a platform for collective healing and get passed the hurdles of pain to get to the truth.
Honorable Prime Minister and under his leadership, entire Coalition Government is committed to this process.
This may be a difficult walk Mr. Speaker. It is hard to look within ourselves and do the hard work. It is easier for us to ignore these things and pretend that everything is fine. But we cannot go into the future as a nation, secure and united, until we have confronted the demons of the past. There are painful conversations to be had in our Vanua settings, with non-indigenous communities, political prisoners and their communities as we prepare for the Commission.
Mr. Speaker I wish to pay tribute and acknowledge the efforts of Ro Jone Kalouniwai, the Commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces for his own initiative of healing and reconciliation within the RFMF that he began this month. We know that RFMF has played a role in many disruptive political events and, as the Commander stated recently, for the TRC to succeed in Fiji, it was important for RFMF to work on healing and reconciliation from within.
Mr. Speaker I am grateful that we live in times with leaders such the Commander and Hon Prime Minister who are committed to steering the Nation forward from its painful past.
I want to invite all segments of our community to engage in the TRC process including the business community, civil society, the public service and religious groups to create an environment of learning about each other’s cultures and faith traditions. Enabling a Muslim worker to quietly conduct his or her mid-day prayers at work during Ramadan, or reflecting together, in a neutral and non-religious way, on the message Easter brings, would be ways in which we could bring people together, show respect and support inclusion. Only when we have learnt each other’s’ values in each of our cultural and faith traditions do we embrace each other’s’ authenticity, and only then do we enable each other to grow to their full potential.
Mr. Speaker this is a challenge I issue to one and all – to take the time to try and learn from others around you whose faiths and ethnic and cultural identities are different from your own. As one who has spent more than 20 years on this journey, let me assure you, that the greatest learning from these engagements is about oneself. We can learn to see ourselves in a different light, to understand how, within our own faith and traditions, we can be better and serve others better. I look forward to the journey of healing for this Nation Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker I would like to thank his Excellency for highlighting the wide-ranging work of the Government to strengthen our core social protection programs.
The development of an Adaptive Social Protection Strategy and Implementation Plan will position these programs as an effective defense, protecting and supporting Fijians to deal with the impacts of climate change and disasters.
Fiji has developed a national Adaptive Social Protection Strategy and Implementation Plan in 2023 funded by the World Bank.
This Strategy aims to strengthen the role and performance of the social protection sector in helping households, communities, civil society, local government and Fiji overall in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters, and in mitigating the impacts of climate change.
Fiji has recognized the value of adaptive social protection, which is defined as building the resilience of households by investing in their capacity to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to shocks, protecting their well-being and ensuring that they do not fall into poverty or become trapped in poverty as a result of disaster impacts.
The development of Fiji’s first Anticipatory Action (AA) Framework in 2023 will enable financing to be triggered by the forecast of an approaching hazard instead of only reacting to its impact following the event. AA Framework was developed in partnership National Disaster Management Office and is funded with the support of United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) and World Food program.
Our Ministry has the responsibility for cash transfer to selected beneficiaries of social protection program and prepositioning of necessary supplies. This improves the ability to deliver prompt pay-outs so that those affected by climate shocks can action time-sensitive preparedness and response measures.
Hon Speaker, to guide the staged implementation of the Strategy, the Government has developed its first 5-year Implementation Plan, which identifies two main approaches for enhancing the delivery of Adaptive Social
Protection:
i. to expand social protection benefits and reach in disaster hit communities.
ii. to implement community-based Adaptive Social Protection actions in 14 priority districts (one in each province) which are at heightened disaster risk and facing the impacts of climate change.
An essential pre-requisite for delivering Adaptive Social Protection is investing in a robust and high-coverage social protection system that can deliver benefits in a reliable and timely manner and can be scaled up in times of crisis.
In addition to the Adaptive Social Protection Strategy, the Government is committed to strengthening the design and delivery of its portfolio of recurrent social protection programs through an ambitious and wide-ranging package of reforms with the support of the Australian Government.
These reforms are focused on strengthening program inclusion, efficiency and effectiveness, in alignment with the objectives of the 2021 Social Assistance Policy, across the six major social assistance benefits administered by the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Protection.
Mr. Speaker,
Our Ministry is considering several program and policy reforms to ensure that beneficiaries are receiving sufficient support and to enhance the coverage and accessibility of the core social protection programs. We are currently undertaking a range of operational reforms to ensure the system is delivering support to people in a transparent and cost-effective way. This includes:
i. Ensuring the public have access to information and understand their social protection entitlements.
ii. Setting up mechanisms for effectively responding to complaints and,
iii. Strengthening tools to measure how well Fiji’s social protection system is working.
The Ministry is digitizing social protection and developing a new automated integrated beneficiary management system – to make it easier and more cost-effective for government to deliver and for beneficiaries to access social protection.
Hon Speaker, as His Excellency has laid out this year we have a lot to do. To my many friends in the Opposition, I want you to know that I value your work among your supporters and party members. I value the work you do to scrutinize and criticize the Government’s work.
I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his commitment to work with the Government on what matters to our people and the Nation- I hope, you will also see the value of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on which we are embarking and give to this process your full support.
We cannot be effective in this work without your help. Nothing is more important than for all of us to be able to show our people that our differences and debates in this House are not about enmity or hate.
They are about working together to make our country better and stronger. I know that deep in our hearts this is what we all want and I look forward to hearing from everyone on how we can make our process better, more inclusive and something which will lead to lasting change.
I THANK YOU HON. SPEAKER.