Editor,

While I agree with your correspondent Josephine Latu of Tofoa that the Ashika commission of enquiry teaches Tonga a lesson, I am more concerned about what lessons Tonga wants to learn from this. That list will be too long to go into here but we can expect it to be longer by the time the Commission reports on its findings.

I'd like to pick up on two relatively simple lessons that I've learned. First is that the decision by government to hold a full enquiry through a Commission such as this and bringing into play the impartiality of commissioners unconnected to Tonga, was the right and proper course of action given the circumstances. Had we listened and caved in to some of our self-serving members of the Parliament who called instead for a parliamentary enquiry, the lessons that Josephine refers to would not have been so stark and in her words - dizzying. Instead of a useful learning experience to help bring closure to those of us who lost family members in this disaster, we may have been treated to a political point-scoring side-show, notable by its absence at this enquiry. While our MPs do get it right sometimes, they do not and never will get it right all of the time.

Lesson two is that while we appear to have a pretty good system in place to conduct the business of governing and operating a public service, everyone including the general public take the attitude that these guidelines are there to be ignored if it proves to be personally inconvenient.

I have included we, the general public in this because while our senior public servants, government officials and Ministers are getting a hammering at the hands of Varitimos right now, I acknowledge that far too often our own attitude to officialdom is to ignore them if it is personally inconvenient - in fact we often "buy" off that inconvenience in one way or another and therein allow this habit to become a national characteristic. Is it sheer coincidence that the only verbal abuses that I've witnessed at an international check-in counters over the last 30 years of traveling has been by our own families insisting that their luggage be loaded against the safety advice of the airline staff. The last incident was at Auckland International as everyone loaded up for the trip home because of the Ashika bereavements. The irony wasn't entirely lost on those of us behind this family but it could have easily been my own close family members. The fact that we may never truthfully know who all the passengers were that died on the Ashika on that fateful day and that the 74 listed would at best be a guestimate, speaks not only of the comprehensive failure of a system but also of a our own attitude and the need to look at how our public behavior has also shaped the attitude of those who are there to serve us.

Sefita Hao'uli