Australia is committed to helping Tonga with its political and economic problems, the Australian Foreign Minister, the Hon. Alexander Downer, told the press in Nuku'alofa on Friday, April 21.

Mr Downer, at the start of a three-nations tour of the Pacific, to Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu, stayed over-night in Tonga, and met with key people in the Tonga government.

He said that Australia is a strong friend of Tonga and his country is committed to that relationship. "At the political level the [Tongan] government has set up the National Committee for Political Reform and in our view, it should be given help and support as it goes around consulting the people of Tonga of the political reform they might want or they want. I think the whole process of consultation with the ordinary people in the country is a very sensible and a very constructive process of consultation."

Both Australia and New Zealand have contributed $250,000 each to the NCPR.

On the economic front Mr Downer said that it was known that the Tongan government "has some financial challenges," but during talks he had with the Prime Minister and especially the Minister of Finance they discussed the assistance that Australia had given Tonga during the past few years to improve the capacity of the Customs Service, "to match the assistance, to assist with improving the fiscal standing of the government of Tonga."

He said that Australia could provide technical staff to help Tonga implement solutions to its economic problems.

"We are looking at providing additional economic and financial management assistance.

"As far as Tonga is concerned there was a bruising dispute last year over the public service wages, the settlement was reached and the down side of that settlement was that people went back to work but it left a large bill to be paid, and obviously government has to work through that, and I think there are ways we can help. They have got their own ideas, we are not so much putting in new ideas. We can bring technical staff to help them implement their ideas."

When Mr Downer was queried about the possibility of economic assistance in the form of allowing Tongan labourers to find work in Australia under a 'Guest Workers Scheme', he did not have anything new to say on the issue. He repeated what Prime Minister Howard said in PNG last year during the Pacific Islands Forum meeting, that Australia has a strategy to the problem of unemployment in the islands by building an Australian Pacific Tertiary College in one of the island centres, "where we can build up the skills of the people to ensure they meet the standards and qualifications that are required in Australia, and when people have the skills they then have the qualification to apply to migrate to Australia. They will also have much better capacity to contribute to their own society. What Howard said in PNG was to improve the skilled labour in the region rather than just sucking out labourers from the region."

On the issue of West Papua, Mr Downer said that, "we are not a supporter of the disintegration of the Republic of Indonesia. I mean we live next door, not everyone in the Pacific Forum. Only two of us who live next door to Indonesia, one in Papua New Guinea and Australia. We have a long maritime boundary with Indonesia, several thousands kilometers, so you can imagine why we don't see the sense of Indonesia disintegrating. You know if you support the break-up of Indonesia and if it happens, a lot of violence happens from it, which it would be, and a lot of dead, people would say why did you do that. So you have to address this problem with a degree of wisdom not just emotion, and wisdom tells me that we should support Indonesia...…move to establish special autonomy for West Papua, but we should not be support secessionist movements."