Fiji's top prosecutor still in self-imposed exile in Chch
A senior Fijian public official remains in self-imposed exile in Christchurch, despite continuing to receive a six-figure government salary since his reinstatement.
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has called out New Zealander Christopher Pryde, the country's director of public prosecutions, for failing to turn up to work for almost seven months since his reinstatement in January.
Rabuka said that since Pryde's reinstatment, he has been nowhere to be found, all the while earning FJ$250,000 (approximately NZ$184,000) per year.
Pryde was reinstated following a suspension in April 2023, pending an investigation into "allegations of misbehaviour" by the country's head of state, President Ratu Wiliame Katonivere, under direction of Prime Minister Rabuka.
The Otago-educated lawyer has held the Offfice of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) since 2011, during which time he laid charges against former Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama and the then-Police Commissioner at the time, Sitiveni Qiliho.
After his reinstatement, Pryde suspended the then-acting DPP Laisani Tabuakuro on 29 January over "insolent, grossly discourteous" comments.
"I have reviewed, in particular, a number of public statements you have made at various times without authorisation and which have caused reputational damage to the [ODPP] and brought the office into disrepute," Pryde wrote in a letter dated 30 January.
"I also note public statements you have made against me personally and the manner in which you have addressed me in email correspondence, all of which I regard as inappropriate and insolent, The last of which led to your suspension."
In a statement on 10 April, Pryde said that the removal was undone by now acting DPP Nancy Tikoisuva, who shortly after his resinstatement, filed her own complaints against him.
Pryde is now refusing to return to Fiji until the Judicial Services Commission (JSC) - the body that appoints and removes judges - issues a decision on Tikoisuva's complaints.
"I am ready to return to work, but I have insisted that the JSC give me a clear undertaking that I will not be immediately suspended and my salary cut upon my return to Fiji.
"I spent nearly two years under suspension and seven months without a salary (before his reinstatement) in breach of natural justice."
Pryde said that he wrote to Rabuka about his concerns.
This week, Rabuka posted on Facebook saying that he had "expressed serious concern" over Pryde's absence.
"I will have to find out why he has not been called and whether it is a matter for the Constitutional Offices Commission to consider again."
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That's actually reasonably clear for a bureaucrat put on the spot, but it's not in any way the meaning of 'knowledge rich'. This definition is about structure and constrained knowledge acquisition; it's about young people learning what the state wants them to learn, only what the state wants them to learn, and in the ways the state wants them to learn. The label contradicts the reality, possibly with political intent. A Humanitarian City The Israeli government has rightly been described as 'Machiavellian' (refer Machiavelli) when it represents its planned concentration zone in Rafah (Southern Gaza) as a 'Humanitarian City'. (Refer 'Humanitarian city' would be concentration camp for Palestinians, says former Israeli PM, The Guardian, 13 July 2025; and Israel turning Gaza into 'graveyard of children and starving': UNRWA chief, Al Jazeera News, 11 July 2025. And the new Israeli-American terror unit operating in Gaza is masquerading as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; refer What is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and why has it been criticised? Al Jazeera explainer, 20 May 2025. It is clear that the Israeli government is exploiting the increased naivete of the western news audience; a state of entrenched naivety that – as noted above – has become hard-wired in too many of our brains, thanks to the ongoing use of language which presents representation as reality. We should also note that, in Germany in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler was able to gain a groundswell of popular support through his representation of Jews as cunning and Machiavellian disrupters; it does not serve Israel well for their present-day leaders to give any semblance of support to Hitler's portrayal. Holocaust Through a relentless multi-decade campaign, it has become hard-wired into too many western brains that there was little more to World War Two than The Holocaust; ie that WW2 was essentially a battle between 'Hitler' and 'The Jews', and that it was resolved by white knights in the form of Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman coming to the rescue – albeit too late – by dealing to Hitler and giving (as compensation) Palestine to The Jews. In the process, most other narratives in that war are by now largely forgotten. World War Two was of course far more complex. Further, the label Holocaust is an inaccurate portrayal of those catastrophic events. One strength of the English language is its capacity to borrow from other languages. The correct label for this greatest of catastrophes should be that from the victims' own language; their label, the Shoah. The word holocaust, correctly used, has connotations of fire and brimstone (especially raining from the sky); the best-known biblical example being the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah 'documented' in Genesis. We may note that part of the divine and the diabolical intents of both the biblical holocaust and of the Shoah was to eradicate homosexuals. World War Two has a number of ready-made examples of true holocausts; many perpetrated by the Allies, starting with Operation Gomorrah which incinerated Hamburg in 1943, and ending with the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. The Holocaust obscures the holocausts, and much else. Inadequate representation indeed misrepresents the Shoah as a biblical spectacle, whereas it was really a coldly cynical mix of operations conducted in the then shadows. Was the Shoah a bigger catastrophe than Gomorrah? Probably yes. Genocide and Terrorism Earlier in the 2020s, people such as Paula Penfold and Liz Truss tried to represent the Chinese government's persecution of the East Turkestan (aka Xinjiang) Uyghurs as "genocide". They were 'weaponising' the g-word, part of a wider cross-partisan opportunity to demonise China during the Covid19 pandemic. In the light of recent events in the Levant, an obvious and unmistakeable genocide which too many people refrain from calling a 'genocide', those anti-China representations look rather silly. It is perfectly possible that people using the same identity label can be both victims of genocide and perpetrators of genocide; most likely at different places in different times. Most petty of all, this 'is it a genocide?' has become an elitist word-game. Anyone who thinks that if what is happening in Palestine does not meet some English-language definition of 'genocide' is morally bound to come up with an alternative word or phrase – presumably a somethingelse-icide – that more accurately conveys their assessment. Myself, I think that these events may be even more than a genocide; such as philosopher historian AC Grayling's term culturicide (from Among the Dead Cities) which expresses what – for example, the Morgenthau Plan – looked to impose on post-war Germany (seeking to reduce Germany, with a pre-war population of 80 million to an impoverished 'pastoral' nation of 30 million). Cultural erasure is more than genocide. Genocide is an unfortunate reality, a human propensity which has occurred in the past, is occurring in the present, and will occur periodically (unless finished by the 'final genocide', or biocide) in the future. Trying to weasel our way around it through an absence of language is a trait which has hard-wired itself, through denial and distractive fig-leaves, into elite cultures of complicity and impunity. Another such word is 'terrorism'. Winston Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris had no doubt about the meaning of that word. So did the victims of their fiery terror, in Hamburg and many other cities. Now the representation of 'terror' through this word is restricted to a selected subset of resistance organisations. Winston Churchill understood that meaning of 'terrorism', too. His friend – Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne – was assassinated in Cairo by fascist Lehi terrorists. (Re Lehi, see Stern: The Man, the Gang and the State, Al Jazeera 13 Aug 2024.) Appeasement This word may be used improperly, as a damaging misrepresentation of a political opponent, or avoided when it is most needed. (Grayling, in Among the Dead Cities, concludes that the Churchill/Harris holocausts on German cities, were in large part an ineffective appeasement of Josef Stalin.) Here's a correct recent use of the a-word: "With such uncontrolled power and aggressive posture, it seems Israel is seeking submission [in Syria and the rest of the 'Middle East' region]. The Trump administration's approach of solving crises by appeasing Israel will entrench this doctrine and push the region into further instability." (Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in lieu of Al Jazeera ban by Israel, Al Jazeera News, about 8:05am NZ time, 20 July 2025. She 'hit the nail on the head'.) Could someone who has been represented as an 'appeaser' ever be a justifiable winner of a Nobel Peace Prize? I think the answer is a 'qualified yes'; just as good fishers sometimes have to appease their quarry before reeling them in. But, I think, neither an appeaser of Netanyahu nor Stalin could qualify for that prize. In reality, appeasement has to be done sometimes. New Zealand dairy owners have been routinely asked to appease violent robbers. And, in the movies, when someone points a gun at someone and says "hands up", the victim almost always appeases the gunner, regardless of their moral position. 'Appeasement' is a representation that's both underused and overused; a representation designed to construct a deception. If we cannot distinguish between representation and reality, label and labelled, then we stand to become victims to all kinds of mischievous narratives. Cost of Living The Government and the Opposition both frame the alleged "cost of living crisis" as a problem of inflation rather than deflation. Indeed, the linguistic minefield around economic policy is so problematic that a whole separate article is required to examine it. The key issue for us here is that the 'cost-of-living' framing – ie representation – in government circles is that the economy must be in an inflationary phase and therefore a deflationary policy is required. However, when the New Zealand public complain about the 'cost-of-living' they are saying that prices are too high compared to their incomes; it's an 'affordability crisis', not an inflationary crisis. And clearly the deflationary retrenchment policies – meaning policies to slow the economy down, to instigate a recession – pursued by the government are a critical part of the problem. The government's solution is to represent its actual class-war anti-growth policies as 'pro-growth' policies. And the Labour Opposition completely falls for the way the government frames New Zealand's structural recession as a 'cost-of-living' crisis. At present, New Zealand has near-record-high (north!?) 'terms of trade', only slightly below the record highs of 2022. New Zealand's terms of trade are now 50% higher than they were in 2000, and nearly 100% higher than the dramatic lows of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. As when Brian Easton wrote In Stormy Seas: The Post-War New Zealand Economy in 1997, the terms of trade represented the stormy waves, some bigger than others; and the favourable crests of those waves were when New Zealand expected (and generally got) economic good times. The troughs during the Muldoon years – not Robert Muldoon's fault; he never had the power to shift the tides of a stormy world – were very difficult times for Aotearoa New Zealand. In these terms the twenty-first century has been the 'best of times' for New Zealand, and the 2020s the 'very best of times'. Yet they are also the 'worst of times', to reference Charles Dickens. (Many of our most potent truths come from literature.) New Zealand, like other countries, has experienced economic cycles and economic shocks. Through my lifetime one consistent cycle has been the short 'trade-cycle', on average about 32 months. We are near the crest of that cycle now. The last quarterly growth peak, September 2022, led to an annual growth peak of 4% in the year-to June 2023. Based on the usual timing of the trade cycle, June 2025 will be the next quarterly peak. It will not be pretty, if that will be the best GDP data that we get on this government's watch. Any positivity when the next GDP figures are released in September, in colloquial jargon, may be characterised as a 'dead-cat bounce'. The government is undertaking structural retrenchment under the cover of a 'cost-of-living crisis' that means very different things to different people. Insinuating that New Zealand has a crisis of inflation – taken as a synonym for 'overspending' – when it has a very real crisis of structural recession and growing unemployment, is a particularly cynical misrepresentation of reality. Conclusion We too easily fall for these misrepresentations of reality; for representations that, in our minds, become a reality like treacle; sets of overlayed representations which play tricks on our minds. That makes us, and our political Opposition parties, quite unable to form coherent critiques of the too many misrepresented and problematic things that are happening to us. In New Zealand, although we are allegedly at the 'bottom of the world', in the Far Southeast (fortunately not in the incorrectly named 'Middle East'!). We also pride ourselves as being in the West and in the Global North. What is genuinely true is that Aotearoa New Zealand is geographically very far from most of the rest of humanity. We could use that birds-eye bottom-of-the-world detached perspective to see past the labels, the frames, the self-serving narratives. We don't have to play 'silly buggers' when the rest of the world is so-doing; we can cut through the 'bullshit', to use some more colloquial jargon. We can be the North Star of the South. PS. With escalating geopolitical wars, and plenty of undertested nuclear weapons in the hands of numerous political sociopaths, being at 'the bottom of the world' may not be such a great place to be. All of us of a certain age remember British, American, and French nuclear testing in Oceania. Some, a bit older, remember nuclear testing in Japan. ------------- Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Keith Rankin Political Economist, Scoop Columnist Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s. Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like. Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
