How does the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS) challenge the conception of what aid is, who works on it, and who benefits from it?

In the first part of the PLS mini-series, we profiled the hard yakka that is the daily grind inside Warrnambool’s meatworks. This episode we leave the factory gates and head out into the community to learn why the PLS is so much more than simple stratagem to fill gaps in Australia’s assembly lines. We cheer from the sidelines during a Timor-Leste versus Vietnam soccer match, dial home to see how the money earned at Midfields is being distributed and spent, celebrate Pedro Lay’s 40th birthday, share fish and chips with a remarkable Fijian woman called Ana, listen to a Timorese choir ring through the pews at local mass, and speak to our very own PLS fixer, Dr Michael Rose from The Development Policy Centre, about opportunities to expand the scheme.

Recommended reading: Feast your eyes on more meaty PLS content at DevPolicy, and read up on the Timorese experience in Warrnambool with a blog piece by Dr Michael Rose and another by East Timorese PLS worker Cornelio Dos Santos.

Something to workshop: Next week, The Development Policy Centre is hosting a one-day workshop on Pacific migration. To join in the discussion on regional labour markets, economic mobility, and social impacts of the various schemes, sign up here.

Behind the curtain: We are on air thanks to the ANU’s Development Policy Centre.

• Host, Gordon Peake: Twitter | Writing
• Producer, Julia Bergin: Twitter | Writing
• Sound Design: Luther Canute

Visual credits: Julito Couto Miranda interviews Dr Michael Rose on the sidelines of a Timor Leste versus Vietnam soccer match. Photo courtesy of MOU.

Foreign aid has traditionally occurred “over there”, so what happens when international development is delivered within our borders? 

This episode we take to the road and head to Warrnambool, a large country town in Victoria’s West, and the site of one of Australia’s more unusual and noteworthy aid projects: the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS). In a bid to understand the work and life conditions of the East Timorese and Pacific Islanders brought to Australia under the PLS, we turn to Warrnambool’s meat processing facility, Midfield Meats. Following a safety briefing and a head-to-toe kit of personal protective equipment, we venture inside the abattoir to get the full story. We speak with a number of East Timorese PLS workers, including Pedro Lay, Vicente Pinto, and Teresinha Klau, as well as Midfield General Manager Dean McKenna, Plant Manager Alistair Sharp, and Training Manager Mick Williams, dissecting what the job entails for both employee and employer.

Post-production fact check: We made two errors in the podcast and we'd like to correct the record.

1. The Pacific Labour Scheme is a temporary migration program, not an aid-for-migration program.
2. The ANU Development Policy Centre has been researching Pacific labour mobility since 2010 not 2015.

Recommended reading: Feast your eyes on more meaty PLS content at DevPolicy, and read up on the Timorese experience in Warrnambool with a blog piece by Dr Michael Rose and another by East Timorese PLS worker Cornelio Dos Santos.

Behind the curtain: We are on air thanks to the ANU’s Development Policy Centre.

• Host, Gordon Peake: Twitter | Writing
• Producer, Julia Bergin: Twitter | Writing
• Sound Design: Luther Canute

Visual credits: The flags of Timor Leste, China, Vietnam, and Australia  fly out the front of Midfield Meats. Photo courtesy of MOU.

The international aid set-up struggles to know how to work in countries that do not exist. Sometimes resources are poured into these places, and sometimes they are ignored entirely. But is splendid isolation from aid such a bad thing?

In this episode we travel to Somaliland, the northern most segment of Somalia, to tell the story of a nation that was founded on its own. We speak to Dr Sarah Phillips, an academic at the University of Sydney and author of the book When There Was No Aid, as well as Mohamed Ahmed, Sarah’s research assistant, and Ayan Mahamoud, former Head of Mission of the Republic of Somaliland to the United Kingdom, to understand how a place more state-like than state on the world map but with no flag at the United Nations, has built itself into the Horn of Africa’s sole democracy.

Recommended reading: For more on the state of play in Somaliland, read Sarah’s book When There Was No Aid, as well as Gordon’s blog piece “Doing better without aid: the case of Somaliland”. As for the global status quo on states, see the Handbook of State Recognition.

Behind the curtain: We are on air thanks to the ANU’s Development Policy Centre.

• Host, Gordon Peake: Twitter | Writing
• Producer, Julia Bergin: Twitter | Writing
• Sound Design: Luther Canute

Visual credits: Children looking after goats in a village near Somaliland's Burco region. Photo courtesy of Ayan Mahamoud.

Across the Pacific, communities are labelled as vulnerable because of the threats posed by climate change. And what do international development programs believe is needed to address this vulnerability? Resilience. 

This is a memorandum of understanding the unreasonable expectations aid places on local communities to deal with what are really global problems. We turn to Vanuatu where these buzzwords have been siphoned into a set of committees called CDCs ­– community disaster and climate change committees – and explore the issue with Dr Siobhan McDonnell, scholar at the Crawford School of the ANU, anthropologist, and legal adviser to the government of Vanuatu, and Jocelyn Loughman, a graduate student at the ANU and formerly a senior bureaucrat in the Vanuatu government. 

Recommended reading: For more words on CDCs, read Siobhan’s article “Other Dark Sides of Resilience”. 

Help feed flood victims in Timor-Leste: Support the pop-up kitchen of Timor Leste Agora chefs from MoU food.

Behind the curtain: We are on air thanks to the ANU’s Development Policy Centre.

• Host, Gordon Peake: Twitter | Writing
• Producer, Julia Bergin: Twitter | Writing
• Sound Design: Luther Canute

Visual credits: Vanuatu’s northern province post Tropical Cyclone Donna in 2018. Photo courtesy of Jocelyn Loughman.

The forest is a resource traditionally deemed more valuable dead, chopped down or transported away in trucks and boats. For decades, development donors and NGOs have appealed to the moral high ground, attempting to persuade the people who live in forest areas to safeguard it. But these people depend on forests to survive, so time and again, these efforts are met with the rational question, ‘what’s in it for me?’

BioCarbon Partners (BCP) is an African social enterprise based in Zambia that shows more value and worth can accrue to communities by keeping trees in the ground than by chopping them down. “To combat climate change, we need to protect our forests. To protect our forests, we need to invest in people.” In every sense of the word, BCP has built a self-sustaining livelihood ecosystem which allows communities to grow without encroaching on the forest that they live beside. To better understand the connections between conservation, carbon, communities and global commitments, we speak to CEO, Dr Hassan Sachedina, before juddering down Zambia’s dusty, potholed dirt roads with Communications Coordinator, Chloe Evans, to meet BCP’s community partners of the Luembe and Sandwe Chieftains.

Recommended reading: Read up on REDD+ with this Forest News explainer and a note from the IIED.

Behind the curtain: We are on air thanks to the ANU’s Development Policy Centre.

• Host, Gordon Peake: Twitter | Writing
• Producer, Julia Bergin: Twitter | Writing
• Sound Design: Luther Canute

Visual credits: Women gathering around a BCP borehole in the Sandwe Chiefdom. Photo courtesy of BioCarbon Partners.

The Quran and the Bible are not widely regarded as gender equality documents, but in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and remote Indigenous communities in Australia, these religious texts are being used to combat the very problems religious institutions often condone: gender inequality and gender-based violence. 

Faith and spirituality are deeply twined into the cultural fabric of these places. As a result, the language of custom and religion has much greater resonance than the vernaculars of human rights, law and feminism. In order to understand why faith is so central, how it has re-aligned with progressive values, and what role it must play in development efforts, we go on a five-person pilgrimage through the region. We speak with Dina Lumbantobing, co-founder of the Indonesian NGO, PASADA; Lies Marcoes, Executive Director of Indonesian policy institute, Rumahkitab; Tri Hastuti Nur Rochimah from the Aisyiyah National Board; Solomon Islands theologian Rev. Cliff Bird; and Grant Paulson, a Birri-gubba and Bundjalung man who works as faith and development adviser for World Vision Australia. 

Please be aware that this episode contains descriptions of sexual violence.

Recommended reading: We’ve gathered together extra reflections on the topic for the Devpolicy blog.

Behind the curtain: We are on air thanks to the ANU’s Development Policy Centre.

• Host, Gordon Peake: Twitter | Writing
• Producer, Julia Bergin: Twitter | Writing
• Sound Design: Luther Canute

Visual credits: Lies Marcoes facilitates a discussion on child marriage prevention with religious leaders and government officials in Cirebon West Java. Photo courtesy of Lies Marcoes.

Can travelogues reach recesses of the mind and prompt reflection in ways that extensively footnoted aid reports cannot? We speak to aid worker and author of The Rising Tide, Tom Bamforth, about what he learned from journeys on boat, helicopter, scooter and rattletrap bus in the islands of the Pacific. In the argot of aid, we also conducted some key informant interviews with those Tom met in the course of his travels, including Tataua Pese from Tuvalu and Linda Kenni from Vanuatu.

This is a memorandum of understanding about an aid worker in what the Tongan Fijian writer Epeli Hau’ofa called ‘this sea of islands’, of going beyond the tarmac road and seeking as many threads of a story as possible. We also uncover one of the few silver linings of COVID-19. 

Recommended reading: Tom’s book is available here. Gordon has written a Development Policy Centre blog about travel writing and the courage to write candidly on aid. We also touch on the work of a number of wonderful Pacific authors in the podcast: Epeli Hau’ofa, Teresia Teaiwa and Regis Stella. 

Behind the curtain: We are on air thanks to the ANU’s Development Policy Centre.

• Host, Gordon Peake: Twitter | Writing
• Producer, Julia Bergin: Twitter | Writing
• Sound Design: Luther Canute

Visual credits: Airstrip sports in Tuvalu. Photo courtesy of Tom Bamforth.

Aid is a darned sight livelier than that that is described in the bloodless language of official records and reports. So what do chlorinated phrases in development like capacity building look like when done right? We begin in Dili, Timor Leste, at Agora Food Studio, a restaurant set up by two slightly world-weary aid workers who found that they could achieve more in setting up a place that celebrates East Timorese food and developing East Timorese chefs and restauranteurs than through all those reports that they'd previously been slaving over.

We hear from Alva Lim and Mark Notaras, the two architects of Agora, as well as the restaurant’s project manager Paula Torres. Paula’s parents, Petrolina Torres and Paulo Soares da Cruz can be heard speaking in Tetun throughout the podcast. We also talk to the author of a work-in-progress Tetun-English idiom dictionary, Anacleto Ribeiro, to learn why food is the perfect entrée into understanding Timor Leste, and an ideal model for thinking about development.

The full menu: Agora Food Studio/ Timor Leste Food Lab: Twitter | Website

Recommended reading: Much of the material we had to fillet out of the podcast has been condensed into a piece for the Development Policy Centre blog. 

Behind the curtain: We are on air thanks to the ANU’s Development Policy Centre.

• Host, Gordon Peake: Twitter | Writing
• Producer, Julia Bergin: Twitter | Writing
• Sound Design: Luther Canute

Visual credits: Photo courtesy of Agora Food Studio.