KEY POINTS:
Former New Zealand Governor-General and all-round nice guy Sir Paul Reeves has just finished a meeting with Fiji Foreign Minister Ratu Epeli Nailatikau on the fringes of a special Pacific foreign ministers meeting at the Heritage Hotel in Auckland.
The pair both made presentations to the meeting in the
morning - in the top-floor Tearoom which has scrubbed up quite well since it was the cafeteria and children's playground in the old Farmers department store.
We are told that Ratu Epeli did not give any firm target dates in his presentation of steps along the way to an election, which is what the ministers want.
This is the third such special meeting of Pacific Island Forum Foreign Ministers on Fiji since the last coup in December 2006 - though there are a couple of Prime Ministers here, too: Young Vivian from Niue and Tuila-epa Sai'ele Malielegaoi from Samoa.
Sir Paul's involvement now is at the request of Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon, who is about to finish his second term of office and he headed the team that rewrote the Fiji constitution in 1997.
McKinnon was at the start of the Tonga Pacific Islands Forum where coup leader Frank Bainimarama later pledged not only to hold elections by March 2009 but said the military would live with the result.
Sir Paul is on a mission of facilitation and reconciliation.
He went to Fiji earlier this month and met with Bainimarama but his attempts to get a broader meeting of seven political leaders failed. While six were willing including Bainimarama - Labour's Mahendra Chaudhry was not - Bainimarama did not think it was appropriate at that time given that the Prime Minister he overthrew was conducting a legal challenge to the so-called "interim" Government that the military installed.
But Sir Paul plans to go back and try again and his meeting with Ratu Epeli was to confirm timing - the end of April, start of May.
He says he sees his role as a facilitator and does not want to be seen in any way as an "enforcer."
Sir Paul said his efforts in Fiji and the work of the council promoting the Peoples Charter were "parallel" and that at some point they might "converge."
But what he doesn't want to address is the even deeper constitutional pickle Fiji will land itself in if the interim Government wins support in a a referendum - for which there is no constitutional mandate - on a Peoples Charter that change the voting system, ahead of an election.