Sydney Morning Herald

Australia refuses to throw lifeline to drowning Tuvalu

Tuvalu ... going under.

By David Wroe

The tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu - which faces being submerged by rising sea levels - has pleaded with Australia to help resettle its 11,000 citizens, but it has been given short shrift.

While Western governments argue in Bonn this week about the future of the Kyoto protocol on global warming, the Tuvaluan Government is considering abandoning the islands its people have lived on for thousands of years.

As their homeland slowly disappears beneath their feet, Tuvalu has approached Australia and New Zealand about resettlement, believing the nation will be uninhabitable within decades.

The pleas to New Zealand have been well received, but Australia has been more dismissive, says Tuvalu's Acting Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Mr Pusinelli Lafai.

Farmers were already feeling the effects of coastal erosion, rising salinity and sea levels, Mr Paani Laupepa, the acting assistant secretary at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, said from Tuvalu yesterday. "The island is full of holes and seawater is coming through these, flooding areas that weren't normally flooded 10 or 15 years ago."

At its highest point, Tuvalu is less than five metres above sea level.

Mr Lafai said Tuvaluan delegates raised the matter of resettlement in Canberra this year. But "the statement was hardly out of their mouths before the Australian delegation shut it up ... Australia is absolutely against opening up any dialogue".

A spokesman for the Immigration Minister, Mr Ruddock, said Australia would join a co-ordinated international response to any environmental disaster. But Tuvaluans could not get special treatment as environmental refugees and would have to apply under the migration program like anyone else.

The Catholic and Anglican churches have urged the Prime Minister to ratify the protocol on greenhouse gases, calling it a "moral issue".

-- Anonymous, July 19, 2001