By Euan Moyle, an intern with the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Islands Program.
- Quartz outlines the importance of New Zealand and Australia’s strategic pivot towards the Pacific Islands region in the face of increased Chinese influence.
- ABC’s Future Tense podcast looks at how the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals and Australia’s foreign policy “step-change” are shaping the future of Australian aid and development policy in the Pacific.
- The death toll from the earthquake in PNG’s Highlands has risen to 67, with concerns that it will continue to climb much higher. On the ground in PNG, there are already fears about the wider impact of the earthquake on PNG’s infrastructure, education and health systems.
- With the Academy Awards on Monday, Stefan Armbruster revisits Australia’s first Oscar win for the documentary Kokoda Front Line! in 1943, which recorded the bloody Kokoda campaign and the locals who assisted Australian troops.
- Still on film in PNG, Smithsonian Magazine reflects on what life is like today in PNG’s highlands thirty years on from the iconic Highlands Trilogy documentary series.
- On the Devpolicy blog, Helen Lee and Makiko Nishitani look at Pacific Islanders living long-term in rural Australia, people overlooked when discussing labour mobility and employment but who rely on the same seasonal agriculture jobs as temporary migrants participating in the Seasonal Workers Program.
- Scientists are beginning to unravel the complex genealogy of the people of Vanuatu, one of the last places on Earth reached by humans, with their findings possibly indicating three mass migrations of people from Indonesia and Papua.
