KEY POINTS:
A couple of trips on the annual parliamentary calendar are considered the dux de luxe of junkets: the Speaker's Tour - to Europe later this year - and the Foreign Minister's Pacific goodwill tour.
Winston Peters is heading away on Sunday on his Pacific jaunt with an Air Force 757 laden with MPs, spouses, officials, business people, and aid organisations. Destination: the Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands and Samoa.
The outriders going with him are Labour ministers Luamanuvao Winnie Laban, and Mahara Okeroa; Maori Party co-leader Turiana Turia; Green MP Sue Kedgley; National's John Hayes, a former Pacific specialist diplomat; National MP Judith Collins whose husband is Samoan; New Zealand First MP Brian Donnelly who taught in the Cook Islands, New Zealand First MP Doug Woolerton; Labour's Sue Moroney; and independent Taito Philip Field, who could well be away when the High Court releases its first decision on his case, though a procedural one.
The Italian and French Ambassadors are also going.
A word of warning to the expedition in the Marshall Islands. I was there in 1996 with Jim Bolger to cover the Pacific Islands Forum, when it was still called the South Pacific Forum.
Beware the turtles on your plate. I opened the curtains of my ground floor hotel window one morning to discover a giant turtle upside down being roasted alive on embers for the leaders' feast later that day, head and legs flapping in agony.
It was a gut-wrenching experience and not made any easier by the fact that this was one of the greatest honours that the locals could bestow on their guests. I saw it later that night served up in its shell at the poolside banquet. Bolger said he didn't have any.
Ironically, the forum also contained some waffle in its communique that year about protecting turtles.
The forum these days is dealing with grittier issues and this trip won't be a junket for Peters, or at least it shouldn't be. New Zealand needs all the goodwill it can muster in the Pacific at present.
Within months the Solomons Parliament will decide whether to renew the mandate of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (Ramsi), and if so, whether there will be new conditions.
The forum is also dealing with Fiji's next election (accepted "in principle" to be held in March 2009). Peters will doubtless be pressing New Zealand's position on the Fiji coup as hard as possible to counter views such as those expounded in today's Herald.
The coup apologists believe this one is the deserving coup and if you don't agree then you just don't understand Fiji or how corrupt Qarase was.There is no acknowledgment that coups are corrupt, whether they are conducted by George Speight or Frank Bainimarama, and that perhaps there is no just cause to fight previous corruption with present corruption.
