The price a small state set

The message High Commissioner Jeffrey Roach sent to Deputy Prime Minister Francis Sade puts a number on what Canberra is prepared to pay: more than 980 million Australian dollars in additional funding, 280 million of it over the next two years and a further 700 million after that. Sade described it as a routine update on the Community Partnerships Program; Pacific Minister Pat Conroy would say only that Australia does not comment on the details of a negotiation until the treaty is signed. The figures reached the public through a leak rather than through either government.[1]

The breakdown shows not only a total but a route. The free education policy carries 820 million Solomon Islands dollars, visa changes and security requests 275 million, and each of the 50 constituencies is down for 5 million before the end of the year. Money that arrives constituency by constituency reaches members of parliament one at a time. A cautious reading is that this is ordinary development programming on a donor's own calendar, and Conroy said Australian assistance follows OECD eligibility criteria. Even so, the schedule moves the payments through fifty separate seats rather than a single budget line.[1]

The chamber that is not sitting

Timing is the part Honiara controls. Matthew Wale survived the no-confidence motion when Manasseh Maelanga withdrew it and more members crossed to his coalition, and he then adjourned parliament indefinitely, saying he hoped to return before Christmas to pass the budget. Roach, for his part, asked both countries to lock the treaty in ahead of the November budget session. The adjournment and that request point at the same sitting from opposite directions: the date by which the terms are to be settled is the date a prime minister who has just survived a challenge has set for parliament's return.[1], [2]

An earlier column here asked what a Liberian legislator could audit in an agreement made by an exchange of diplomatic notes: Monrovia agreed to receive up to 1,200 people deported from the United States and explained the choice in its own historical language, while the legal status, screening criteria and cost-sharing stayed unpublished. The Solomon Islands case runs the other way and lands in the same place. Here the figures are known, because someone leaked them, and it is the instrument that is missing. What exists is an unsigned in-principle text, a parliament that has not sat to consider it, and money already sorted by constituency.[3], [1]

The one signal to watch

One signal settles more than commentary can. If the treaty is signed before the November budget session, the test is whether the funding schedule, constituency lines included, goes to members with the text when parliament resumes, or is described afterwards in a ministerial statement. By 30 November the annexed figures are either on the parliamentary record or they are not; in the second case the money has reached the constituencies before the terms reached the chamber.[1]