 Hello and welcome to this latest Lowey Institute Live event. This is part of what we are calling the Long Distance Lowey Institute, in which we communicate our content and analysis online while we are unable to do so in person. My name is Jonathan Pryke, Director of the Pacific Islands Programme here at the Lowey Institute. A very warm welcome to everyone joining us from Australia, those dialing in overseas, and in particular our friends from the Pacific. I'd also like to welcome our Lowey Institute corporate members and supporters. Before we go any further, let me acknowledge the traditional custodians on whose land I sit, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. The Pacific region has been hit hard by the coronavirus. While 10 Pacific nations, through a lot of foresight and a little luck, have quickly walled themselves off from the world and stopped the virus from hitting their shores, no country has been able to avoid the economic devastation trailing in the pandemic's wake. The numbers are eye-watering. Fiji expects its economy to contract by 21.7% this year. Vanuatu expects to lose two in every five of its formal sector jobs. A region-wide economic contraction of more than 10% this year is on the cards. Governments across the Pacific are throwing every available resource towards keeping their economies on life support. Pacific nations are not alone in this fight. Donut organisations from across the world are doing what they can to help respond to this once-in-a-century crisis. While donors quickly adapt to where and how they're sending their aid, the way in which aid is delivered must also quickly adjust to the shut borders. The distance in the Pacific have never felt longer than they do in 2020. To help unpack these dynamics, I'm joined by a stellar panel of guests. Joining us from Suva, Fiji, where they're today celebrating their 50th Independence Anniversary, we have Audrey Omua, Deputy Director-General at the Pacific Community and a veteran diplomat and aid practitioner across the Pacific. Joining us from Sydney is Michelle Curf, who has led the World Bank's work in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific for the better part of the last five years. And finally, from Canberra, we have Charlotte Blundell, Assistant Secretary for the Pacific Partnerships and Human Development Branch in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Affairs and Trades Office of the Pacific. Thank you to all our panellists. We are also using this event as an opportunity to launch the third iteration of our Pacific Aid Map, an analytical tool that collates and analyzes data on all aid projects in the Pacific. Before I hand over to my colleague, Alex Diant, Project Lead of the Aid Map here at the Institute, a bit of housekeeping. At the bottom of your screens, you will see a Q and A button where you can submit questions to the panellists. And thank you to the dozens who have already submitted questions with their registrations. We will put as many of your questions as possible to our panellists later in the discussion. Please include the name of your organization or any other affiliation when you send through your question. With that said, over to you, Alex. Well, thanks, Jenna. Look, let me show you, let me explain you how we built the Aid Map before I show you how it works. So the first thing we had to do was to collect information on aid projects in the Pacific. As Jenna has mentioned, the purpose of this Aid Map is to look at all the aid flows that are coming from the aid, sorry, from the international community to the Pacific. And so to do this, we had to engage directly with development partners, but we also had to scrape down like every budget document from Pacific countries, every press release, every social media posts, just to be able to make sure that we found all the information we could on aid projects in the Pacific. What we ended up with is a data set of more than 38,000 projects and activities from the international community to the Pacific. Once we had this data set, we send it to each Pacific Island countries, so for them to actually validate the information we had. And then we put everything on an interactive platform, which is the Pacific Aid Map. I'll show you how it works. So this is the landing page of the Pacific Aid Map. You land on the year 2018, which is the year for which we have the most comprehensive data. However, you still have data from 2010 to 2020. The outer ring is what we call the Donner ring. And so it ranks Donner by order or sheer magnitude. So you see that here in 2018, Australia was the biggest Donner of the region, followed by the World Bank, New Zealand, China and the rest. If you click on one development partners, you see on the left the information automatically updates. And you see that for instance here, China committed $288 million to the Pacific that year in 2018 and only spent, well, and spent $241 million on 77 projects. Then you have on the left, you still have high level information. So the top five recipient, top five projects of China in that particular year. And the inner ring of the Pacific Aid Map are actually the Pacific Island countries themselves. So every time you hover over one of the Pacific Island countries, the information on the left automatically updates as well and gives you more high level information on the eight in that particular country on that particular year. On the left, we have implemented a series of filters so that every user can create their own Pacific Aid Map. You can filter by Donner, so we have a list of 64 donors this year. You can filter by recipients of Pacific Island countries. You can filter by sector. So we have 12 sectors from the OECD. You can also filter by aid type. So you can look whether a project is a grant or a loan or whether it is ODA aid or OF, other official flows. And you can also look by project according to its completion status. Is it being on hold, is it being implemented, complete? Now, let's say that we're interested in having a look at all the health projects in Papua New Guinea. What we have to do is just click on Papua New Guinea and then you see that automatically individual projects are to populate the map. We have approximately 1,500 different locations for projects in the map. And the interest, if you're looking for a health project here, what you would do is that you just select health in the sector filter. And then all the health projects will start to appear in the specific aid map. Every time you're over one project, you see the name of the project that the happy is on the left, the location, where it is being implemented. You also actually see how much money is being spent on this particular project. What is its completion status? You see some description of the project. Who's the donor? Who's the implementing partner? So we realize that actually not all donors have the technical capabilities to implement projects directly on the ground. And so they have to contract implementing partners to do so. Then you see the sector of this particular project that you have selected. And you see the aid type. Now, the purpose of the aid map was really to try to pin down every single project up to the street level. For instance, here in Port Moisby, we can see those two health projects from DADB in the World Bank. But the thing is that you can't actually put all the projects on the aid map. Like, how do you put budget support, for instance? How do you put scholarship? This is actually impossible. So what we had to do is that we had to expand the ambition of our Pacific Aid map to create additional features to analyze the underlying data. The first of those features is a dashboard. The dashboard allows you to compare one Pacific Island country with another, or one donor with another. Now, we've realized that in Australia, a lot of people are actually using the dashboard to compare Australia with another actually important donor in the Pacific, which is China. So let's do the selection right now. So here, while this is loading, you can already see that Australia has actually spent $920 million in the Pacific in 2018 on 4,000 project and activities. Comparatively, China has spent $241 million on a 77 project. This means that actually the project from China are much bigger in size, because China does focus quite a lot on big infrastructure projects. You can also actually have a particular look on a project from a particular sector. So here, you see that Australia spent $100 million on the health sector, whereas China only spent $7 million. The more you go down, the more high-level information start to scroll down. So you see the top five projects of each donor is the top five recipient of each donor, how much money they've committed, but you also see a sectoral repartition. So it means that you can see what is the donor specialization. In here, for instance, China spent a lot in 2018 on transport projects, 40% of its aid. Whereas Australia really concentrated its aid on education and government. But if you're interested in actually looking at all the health projects, you just have to click on Healths, and you'll see all the health projects appearing on the dashboard. Another tool we have is the graphing tool. So here, it allows users to create their own trend analysis on aid. So let's say that we are interested to see how much aid Fiji received from all development partners in the health sector. So this is actually a selection that we can do. So this is all the aid that Fiji received from 2010 to 2018. But then you can filter by the sector as a health. And you'll see here that actually there was a peak in health aid given to Fiji in 2014. And this is mostly due to the fact that into the 2012-2013, there was an outbreak of leptospirosis in Fiji that actually touched 1,500 people. But also in 2014, there was an outbreak of the dengue fever that infected more than 10,000 people. Another actually feature of this graphing tool this year is that you can actually compare the aid that a particular country received to the government expenditure that a particular country did for that particular sector. So here you see that despite the fact that health aid was actually decreasing over time, health expenditure by the government of Fiji was actually increasing. So those are the type of analysis you can make using the graphing tool of the aid map. Another page we have is a database page, which basically is a depository of the 37,000 project we have in the map. You can look for a particular project by name, by aid type, sector. You can also look for a project by implementing partner. So we have a list of 1,500 different implementing partner. Every time you click on one particular project, you have the more information that displays. So the name of the project, the description, the transaction history, the source of where did we get the information from. But also every time we could, like a website that is directly linked to the project. Also, since we published the map in 2018, we realized that many people are using the map and mentioning the map in their own report and analysis. And so we have actually made a depository of all those analysis here in this page. This is a new feature of the map this year. And so you can look for a report looking at a particular country or looking at a particular donor. Anyway, this is one of the new gadgets we have. And the final page is the app app page, where we explain how we build the Pacific Aid Map. We explain also all the key concept of the aid map, what is ODA, what is OOS. And from it, you can also download the full data set of the aid map. You can download actually the full data set for most pages. But you can also download the methodology here. So that's pretty much it for the aid map. Now, it is important to notice, to note that we are planning to update the map every year. We have done it, this is the third time, sorry, we are updating the map. And we are planning to do it many, many years, many more years. But every year we're doing this, there are actually key findings. Last year, for instance, our key findings led us to write a full analysis on whether the China's debt trap narrative was actually something happening in the Pacific. And we showed that it wasn't, at least for now, China is not engaged in debt trap diplomacy. And so this year, the key findings are numerous. The first one is aid to the Pacific as surged in 2018 by more than 25%. And it's reached now an historic high of 2.9 billion US dollars, which represent approximately 8.5% of the regional GDP. So that's quite of an increase for 2018. The second finding is that while Australia remains like the largest donor of the Pacific and in 2018 it had reached highest record, or record high levels, its share of total aid is actually decreasing. So in 2010, Australian aid represented 51% of the total aid given to the Pacific. In 2018, it only represented 32%. And this came from the fact that it's not because Australia is spending less, it's actually because there are more donors being engaged in the region and all those donors are actually spending more in the region. So over the full period, Australia and New Zealand still account for 52% of all the aid given to the Pacific. China remains actually one of the steady donor with 8% of all the aid given to the region. And the last actually important fact is that, well, especially considering the COVID-19 pandemic, is that our aid map reveals that aid hasn't actually played a very important role in the health sector of the Pacific. So aid represent 12% of all the health aid, sorry, represent 12% of the total aid given to the region. And that is actually much lower than the amount of aid allocated to governance or to infrastructure, which both of them are 22% to 23%. Anyway, so those are like the findings of the aid map. If you have any question, I'd be happy to answer them at the end of the event. Keep an eye on the Low Institute website and our digital magazine, The Interpreter for more insights and analysis from this year's update of the Pacific aid map. Now over to the dynamics of aid and COVID in the Pacific in 2020. I'm going to throw a few questions to our panelists before we jump into the Q&A. Our panelists have been briefed to keep their responses short and sharp, though the silver lining of the aid map not working is we got a bit more time to have this conversation. But we want to get through as many questions from the audience as possible. But first, let me get started. Audrey, let's start with you. From your perspective as Deputy Director General of the Pacific community, how are communities in the Pacific fairing from COVID-19 and the subsequent economic fallout? How is your work at the Pacific community pivoting? And what do you think needs to be done going forward? Oh, good evening, Bolivianaka from Suva. And thank you, Jonathan, for the invitation this evening to be with you all. I think it's fairly evident that the pandemic has had a crippling effect, of course, on the Pacific region. An emerging reality for all of us is the toll that it is really having now on Pacific communities and their livelihoods and, of course, their wellness. Some countries, of course, have been more severely hit economically than others. And our reality is that we are not only in the midst of a public health emergency, but we are still combating a climate emergency, not forgetting, of course, in the region we've recently just had a cyclone harrowed. And, of course, subsequently we're now facing an economic crisis. Early this year, our leaders in the region chose to close their national borders quite early out of a broad public health protection strategy. This, of course, meant stopping all flights, transportation links. And the region literally was sealed off. So for many Pacific countries who really rely on tourism, border closures, and other restrictions have had a devastating impact. And we have now seen massive unemployment layoffs, closure of tourism facilities, closures of small business and service industries. And, of course, our beloved regional airlines have come to a grinding halt. And, plus, you know, I'm really lively holds in the economic wellness of many of our communities that have been now affected. And Fiji, of course, we're now seeing a third of our workforce being unemployed. So countries such as the Cook Islands and Fiji, Samoa, Palau, and other tourism-dependent countries where we're recognizing that, you know, their GDP is anywhere between 20% and 70% really reliant on tourism. And these countries, of course, are on the front line of economic hardship. And potentially, some of these economies will contract up to 21%. And Jonathan, you mentioned in your opening remarks, Fiji is definitely one of those countries. And I no doubt, Michelle, will talk a bit more about that. But it is, I think, fair to say that many of our economies have very little room to counter the economic impact of this pandemic. Food shortages, food security remain a concern in the region. We have seen agriculture and food markets being disrupted. We have seen in the region that the pandemic has affected both the availability of food and, of course, access to food. And, of course, this is exacerbating already the burden in this region of NCDs. As well as the economic challenges and the livelihood impact issues, I think it's really important to note that there have been significant, I would call significant, social and human development challenges also. You know, the loss of income for communities, in particular for women, and the vulnerable has meant an escalation into hardship. This has been coupled, I think, with an increased challenge of safety for women and girls and families. We have seen the rise of family and domestic violence in the communities. And again, we've seen data, for example, here in Fiji, a real unprecedented increase of the use of domestic violence services. The picture is probably not too dissimilar from other country experiences around the world. The difference, of course, for the Pacific is that we're being a region that has been on a long human and social development journey and that living in this current COVID environment has the potential for us as a region to really, I think, regress on some of our more important human and social development indicators, such as education and health. And the example that I often reflect on is the closure of schools in this region. And we have seen schools close for quite long periods. This has been a difficult reality for many schools in the region who really don't have the robustness of systems to open and close with flexibility, nor to ably pivot and deliver remote educational options. And I think for some countries, children have been out of school for nearly five months of this year. And this has been an incredibly challenging time for many of our Pacific education systems. As most of you all know, a lot of our educational systems are based around classroom learning and physical infrastructure. So real limited ability to deliver remote education during these periods of great restriction. The impact of schools, of course, on girls has been significant where we are now beginning to see evidence of young girls in secondary schools not returning to school as they're now being redirected back into domestic duties. And this is for me, I think, a real reality. The priority, of course, in the region has been ensuring that the public health systems here in the region are continuing to be strengthened and preparation and readiness for COVID. And as of this month, seven countries in the region, Solomon Island, CNMI, PNG, BG, French Polynesian Guam, and of course, New Caledonia. As a region, we're now reporting around 5,700 cases. We've had 75 deaths. So our case fatality is up around 1.31, 1.4%. Just on your question around how is SPC pivoting its response in this crisis? The focus, of course, for many regional organisations, including SPC, of course, is at the moment to support the strengthening of our health system, both preparedness and readiness for the outbreak. SPC has a very large regional public health team and much of our efforts have been in training Pacific Health professionals, using PEP, clinical guidelines, preparedness and treatment, and of course, more for the health system strengthening. We've, of course, been working with WHO and many other partners in this space. As countries have started to think about their recovery and where their efforts need to be focused, we have been working fairly closely with our members on identifying areas that need our immediate assistance and in areas that are in our capability, of course, such as resource management, agriculture, fisheries, food systems, data and information, and resilience and capability development, and really working to ensure that investments in these areas don't suffer due to the current operating environment. We're a technical agency, and so we have been working with donors and partners to reprogram existing resources to areas of high need, and I think this has been really welcomed, of course, by countries in the region. The real challenge, of course, for agencies such as ours and, of course, others is that as a boots-on-the-ground agency, we've had to do a lot of rethinking about our service delivery model, where we would traditionally work alongside and in countries supporting and responding to their development issues. The current environment doesn't really allow us to do that, so, of course, we've had to explore different ways of working and rethinking our service models, and we're doing this by working with national counterparts, the NGOs, local consultants and development partners, many of them on the ground in these countries. We also have quite a lot of capacity in the region. Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Ponapeia have sub-regional offices. NSBC, of course, is located in those countries. I guess one of the key pivots, of course, is an agency that convenes a good number of ministerial meetings in this region. We have been exploring to a greater extent digital platforms for engagement and training. We've recognised, I suppose, and staying connected with our members that we must grow digital capacity, assets and services, designing purposeful digital engagement. And, you know, quite frankly, our members tell us that these are really welcomed innovations, but we're having to think very strongly about how we balance virtual fatigue. Zoom lethargy, so to speak, as many of these countries have really limited capacity to be zooming in constantly with partners and agencies. We're, of course, where we can't work in the field. We're focusing on desktop-based related work, policy, legislation, and guidelines, and so forth. And just ready to respond to your question on what needs to be done moving forward. You know, we've just come out of a couple of days of forum officials' meetings in preparation for both the leaders' meeting that's coming up. And I think there's a real agreement that this region does need to continue to build the resilience of our group civic. We really need to continue to ensure that the recovery around COVID-19 is clean, that it's green, and it's resilient. And to re-emphasise, of course, that climate change still remains, of course, the biggest security risk alongside the pandemic. You know, just one final comment, I think, Jonathan, is, you know, we really are unprecedented times here in the region, and our vulnerabilities are, I think, really heightened. And I think we really, as a region, need to calmly navigate our way forward. We're a region that's really used to shops and events, and we understand, of course, the importance of building resilience in every aspect of our work. I think in this regard, it's important that agencies such as ourselves and others don't really miss the opportunity to retain and to stay focused on the long-term sustainable development goals of this region, and that all our efforts and resources are not just drawn down to deal with emergencies such as this without real thoughtful consideration of the longer-term impact of short-term investments. You know, my caution to donors and partners is that in all your investments during COVID that we don't unravel the long-term development efforts that we continue to focus on most, and not be distracted, I think, by opportunistic investments, maybe due to some of the geopolitical tensions that are emerging in the region. So just a little bit from me, Jonathan, on how I'm seeing some of the issues emerging in the region currently. Thank you, Audrey. That was hardly a little out. You've covered so much ground in your opening remarks there, and, you know, it painted a very stark picture for how the Pacific is faring, and also I think you provide us a lot of hope as well. And, you know, if there's one thing we do know as Pacific Watchers and analysts and friends of the Pacific is that its greatest strength is its resilience. So we look forward to seeing you all pull through this crisis. Next, I'd like to jump to Michelle. Michelle, the World Bank must be very busy in every part of the world, helping respond to this economic and health crisis that is affecting, that is leaving no stone untouched. How is the Pacific faring compared to other parts of the world? How is the World Bank responding in the region? And what do you see will be the biggest challenges going forward for the bank? Many thanks, Jonathan. And thank you, first of all, for the invitation and very glad to be able to share some thoughts with everyone who's listening in. Look, let me say just a few words about the work of the bank, perhaps, worldwide in this crisis and then focus on the Pacific. I think we're all conscious of the fact that this is a crisis with almost no precedent. We must go back to the Great Depression of the 30s to see something of this magnitude. I think the estimates that we have are for the contraction worldwide of more than 5% in 2020 and a high probability, unfortunately, that up to 150 million people will actually fall in extreme poverty by the year 2021, marking a sharp reversal to the reduction of poverty that has been observed, basically, year in year out for the past decades. It would mean that, in fact, 1.4% of the world population would fall into extreme poverty within the first 18 months, basically, of the COVID crisis. The bank has focused its response, first of all, worldwide on basically helping countries to deal with the health emergency. The first thing that was done was to set up a fast-track facility and mobilize $4 billion of additional resources for countries around the world, and those $4 billion have now been committed. 82 projects have been approved by the bank, serving actually 82 of our client countries. In addition, as you can imagine, our ongoing operations worldwide have been repurposed to try to address the health emergency of COVID-19, and so it's an additional $2.7 billion which have been repurposed from ongoing operations. Now, looking at the future again worldwide, the fast-track facility, which in addition to mobilizing extra money, enabled us to process new projects much, much faster than usual, in a matter of weeks, in fact. This fast-track facility will be extended as far as these emergency processes are concerned, and basically $10 to $12 billion, which are not going to be additional. They will come from the financing envelope already available to countries, but $10 to $12 billion will be able to be processed through that fast-track facility in the year ahead to help countries purchase vaccines when a vaccine becomes available, and also to strengthen their systems so that we can help countries make sure that they can not only get the vaccines, but they can actually deliver those vaccines to their population. In addition to that, we are basically ramping up our lending this coming year. We have decided to front-load the financing from our IDA window, which is the window which we used for the poorest or the smallest of our clients, and almost all of the Pacific country clients of the world benefit from that window. We are front-loading our financing worldwide to the tune of $35 billion. And the same is true for the IDA window, which is the window reserved for the richer countries in the world, where a similar amount of money is expected to be committed within this fiscal year, so basically by June 2021. So this is worldwide. Now, focusing on the Pacific, the impact on the Pacific, I think you've already alluded to it. I think Audrey painted a very stark picture. Our numbers of course tell the same story. We see a number of countries, particularly those highly dependent on tourism, and basically look at contractions in FY 2020 or in 2020 of between 15 and more than 20%. We see some countries like Solomon Islands actually being quite affected by a decrease in exports of logs in the case of Solomon Islands, which is actually going to cause a contraction of close to 15% according to our assessment. And then you have countries like Samoa and Tonga who also rely to a large extent on remittances and those have also dried up to a large extent. And so those countries will also be hit through that channel. We are also conducting a number of socioeconomic surveys in the Pacific Island countries and some of the early results are quite stark indeed. I think Audrey has provided a lot of information. I'll just mention two specific points. Asked what measures they are taking to cope with the economic hardship that comes with the crisis. People in PNG put at the top of the list of measures that they are taking, basically putting their kids out of school. 52% of respondents say that this is a strategy that they have to adopt at the moment. In another stark, I suppose, data, if you want, or piece of data comes from Solomon Islands. 57% of people say that they've had to reduce food consumption because of the economic crisis. And we are also seeing a very large emigration out of Honiara and back into the villages to a tune of almost 20% of the population of Honiara, which certainly indicates a very major economic shock for the population of Honiara. So the Bank in the Pacific is articulated his response first around health and then around basically three main factors, protecting people, supporting firms and building back better. On the health front, we've mobilized about $84 million so far in 10 of our 12 client countries. This is for emergency health operation, purchasing personal protective equipment, strengthening the provision of health systems and services. We've also reallocated some existing funds within ongoing operations. And we've also triggered a couple of CATs, catastrophic deferred drawdown options. So these are operations that had been approved in the recent past with money basically set aside in cases of emergency. And of course, COVID-19 and in some cases a tropical cyclone, Harold as Audrey mentioned, were emergencies that justified accessing those contingent funds. And so that has been done in Samoa and in Vanuatu, for example. We are undertaking a number of activities under the banner as I mentioned of protecting people, supporting firms and building back better. One of the main concerns which again Audrey mentioned in her remarks as well is the fact that the coping strategies that people have to undertake and the fact that the provision of public services which is challenging at the best of time in the Pacific Island is of course even more challenging in the time of COVID-19 because of the fiscal constraints that the economic impact causes. These impacts can have very long lasting effect. When kids miss out on their education, this is not something that can be corrected basically immediately. When people see their social capital in terms of health for example deteriorating, this again creates very long lasting damage to communities and ultimately to the productivity of a country. So one area of response on which we are focusing are in the areas of education and health, basically beyond the emergency health response to maintain systems in working order and supporting governments is they are trying basically to cope with the economic impact without short changing the provision of essential services and similarly for education with of course an emphasis on digital platforms where possible which whose necessity is more obvious than ever. COVID-19 has also I think underlined the importance of having some social protection mechanism in place. We call them adaptive social protection. So systems that are basically ready to disperse money in case it is needed and the Pacific is really sorely lagging in that respect with the exception of Fiji no country in the Pacific among the developing country clients of the World Bank really has social protection systems covering a large part of their population and I think there is a realization on the part of our clients that the time probably has come to begin to think about this and to take steps towards progressively building such systems and so we are very keen to help countries think it through and to provide financial support where needed and we are engaged in these conversations and in these operations in PNG and in Fiji and we hope to be able to expand that. I've mentioned protecting farms I just say one quick word on this with a focus on tourism which is arguably the sector that is being the most hard hit which also is likely to take the most time to recover and so we've done some analytical work on this looking at what it would take basically what type of measures would need to be in place for the Pacific to be able to reopen and we are in conversations with our clients in counterparts in government in the Pacific on programs to basically prepare the tourism sector for a potential reopening in the months and in the years to come and we hope to be able to do that not only country by country but also through regional programs and then finally there is the building back better a lot of this of course has to do with labor intensive schemes in infrastructure and that building greener more resilient infrastructure a lot of it also has to try to help country whether the economic crisis without letting the macroeconomic situation deteriorate too much so we have engagements in the macroeconomic sphere with a large number of our Pacific Island clients this of course predates COVID by many years and this engagement remains of the utmost importance for us and so we are very actively looking at what we call budget support operations with all the technical assistance that accompanies those types of engagement in a large number of countries in those operations are there not only to try to fill a fiscal gap which is of course caused by COVID but also to provide support to enacting a number of very important forms that would help the other pillars of engagement which I've talked about so helping measures that would put in place the first building blocks of social protection for example measures that government are taking to protecting firms and measures that government would be taking to strengthen the functioning of their health system so all of that is part of our budget support dialogue with our own countries. I think Jonathan you asked me what might be of concern basically for us when we look at the future what I would say obviously in the very short term the concern is about containing the health impact of COVID the Pacific as you've mentioned has I think managed the health impact of COVID very well but nobody is able to really for good at the moment the thing that Solomon Islands just had a first confirmed case I think two days ago is a good reminder of that so that is something that we keep a short eye on and all of these emergency health operations which I mentioned are of course geared towards that short term priority. Then there is the distribution of vaccine once it becomes available and the effective distribution of these vaccines which I mentioned the support of key sectors tourism of course and then helping countries to manage debt. It is clear that the stock of debt is going to increase in the Pacific Islands the region is not highly indebted but its capacity to carry that is very limited and this is why countries were before COVID hit many of them were considered the high risk of the distress and of course the situation will only become worse because of COVID then looking a bit more internally and this is my last word we are of course concerned about our own ability to help our clients to the to the extent that we would like to be able to help them we've substantially increased our presence in the Pacific we now have about 70 staff and I'm not including consultants posted in the various Pacific Islands and another 70 people in Sydney this is a lot more than we had just a few years ago this presence on the ground in the Pacific Islands of course helps but still conducting business and helping clients implement the ongoing operation and prepare the new ones has of course become more challenging in the absence of international travel we are making the best possible use of all of the colleagues we have on the ground and of the digital resources at our disposal but in spite of best effort I think it is unavoidable that the speed of implementation of some operation and the speed of preparation of some will suffer from the inability to have the extensive face to face engagement from colleagues who are not on the ground which we are used to have let me leave it at that for now, thank you Thanks Michelle I'm just going to jump straight over to Charlotte conscious of time Charlotte as a largest development partner to the region how has Australia been shifting this age to be more responsive to the Pacific's needs what have you found to be the biggest challenges in pivoting in 2020 and what more can we expect from Australia in the future, thank you Jonathan thanks for the question and for having me I think I'd start by saying that in large part because of the step up and the efforts of the last few years to even further deeper now relationships in the Pacific we were really well placed to work with the Pacific this year in particular through what Michelle and Audrey have described has been quite a challenging year for all countries and for people personally so well placed I think there was an immediate response that was necessary and that was happening globally but also affecting the work that we were doing in the context of our development cooperation so at the early stages of the pandemic a lot of discussions around the implications of border restrictions but by and large I think by global standards the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand were quite early to put in place restrictions that I think have clearly saved lives so this is very important but we all acknowledge now has come at a huge economic cost I think so there was an immediate focus for us with the Pacific and with all the partners that we work with in the region on health and preparing health systems for the potential impact of the pandemic and so I think we had 130 requests for assistance between March and June that we were responding to from Pacific governments I think we delivered something like 33 tonnes of humanitarian equipment and that was sort of testing equipment, PPE this kind of thing we also had experts in the field and that included a mix of people that were already there that were part of development cooperation program so we have an amazing anaesthetist that works in the Port Villa Hospital and very keen to maintain some of these experts during this period and so we needed to put assurances in place to make that happen so around 100 essential advisers were kept in place by agreement with partners while others were being drawn back into Australia in that early phase and then we also did quite an immediate economic response and so it was around about April I would say where we did a full internal review of all of our development investments there's over 300 in consultation with Pacific governments and we were looking at what we could just delay mainly and we were looking at where we thought COVID would have an impact on the deliverables that would produce some savings and we were able to find 100 million dollars and we discussed with Pacific governments and of course with our ministers and our prime minister the best use of that money and it was then a bespoke set of packages but was part of our early response and so in Fiji that involved topping up the welfare system that Michelle was referring to with some additional cash grants that were targeted particularly at women-headed households and at children in P&G there was a lot of that additional money was being pivoted for provincial health services so that was an important part of our response but then we had a lot of the individual projects that are longstanding some of them very mature in the region like the Australia Pacific Training Coalition like Pacific women shaping Pacific development we were looking at how those programs adapt and ensuring that they were doing work that was absolutely time-sensitive and critical so I know that APTC did work with Fiji around micro skills credentials for people that were unemployed as a result of the impact of COVID on the tourism industry work of that nature some of our bilateral infrastructure teams with Pacific governments and other partners were doing things like micro hand washing stations and then of course the education teams who were planning to do with Pacific governments and other partners things like curriculum reforms they were moving to try and look at things like distance learning and preparing for the impact so this has been a really big year and there's been a lot of change but the underpinnings of the relationships and even the underpinnings of the big programs themselves I think actually were really well designed flexible the relationships were strong heaps of conversations picking up the phone and I think in the end I look back and think what a huge year we've had preparing now of course we need to we need to look further forwards be planning for 2021 and as Michelle said we are still not beyond the pandemic so there's still this ongoing risk of outbreak in the region and we've had medical experts in PNG helping PNG manage outbreaks and we're watching this case in Solomon Islands closely it would still be our government's position that we would not want to be a source of transmission into the Pacific so we're very conscientious about that in decisions we're making but at the same time we're trying to adapt and we've done things like resume our Pacific Labor scheme, our Seasonal Work scheme with an initial pilot in other areas there's been complete pauses so I manage a scholarship program that was targeting secondary school students who are going to come from the Pacific unaccompanied to Queensland and New South Wales from July and we took a decision with Pacific governments and with our minister to just temporarily pause the recruitment for students for that program and then that money is going to be redirected into education in the Pacific and we're just currently discussing how that's best used so huge adaptation happening we're doing a lot of work to reconceptualise a little bit the infrastructure financing facility it will be really important we think in part of our response to supporting the Pacific's economic recovery it can finance infrastructure that is critical economically to the region or socially to the region but it can also do that in a way that builds resilience green infrastructure so this is really important but also uses local labour and there can be upskilling attached to that this is something Australia does really well and I would just comment as well on what Audrey was saying about the importance of maintaining some of our really long-term work something that we're really proud of is our commitment to building resilient infrastructure and we had done some work after Cyclone Winston in Fiji on reconstruction with the Fiji government and for example there was one small public health clinic in a rural part of Fiji and it was hit again with Cyclone Harold and it was one of the only buildings that was still standing second time round after Cyclone Harold still in place so that provincial health services were able to keep going so we're really committed to making sure that our investments in infrastructure in the coming year and years ahead are going to have deliver that kind of resilience we all know that the Pacific is prone to natural disasters as is Australia so this is really an important principle I think the other area of engagement that we unequivocally committed to is supporting women and girls supporting a more gender equal region and our minister has had two virtual women leaders meetings and Audrey has been in those to discuss the impact of COVID on women and girls it is disproportionate and it is a threat to gains that have already been made and so we're committed to continuing work if not expanding work and talking to regional partners in particular and national governments to civil society and then the other area of work that I just wanted to touch on which is not development cooperation but it's related to work we're doing to build deeper connections or facilitate deeper connections between different parts of our community and so in sport and between churches we're continuing to advance that work and we were able in honour of Fiji day which is today but we're a bit ahead on Saturday we were able for example to stage a really nice exhibition match in Sydney actually between the Wallabies and the the Fiji legends and then we streamed that into Fiji as our effort to still celebrate that really important occasion even though as Michelle said it's difficult to do some of this work without that connectivity I think flights at the moment are 1% of what they were at this time last year so there are some of my reflections Jono and I know you're short on time so I'll just pause there the only other thing I wanted to say but in reference to the second half of your question about what more you might expect from us I think we it was budget week here in Canberra and there was a couple of announcements and one was a commitment of 1.44 billion in ODA to the Pacific from Australia this financial year so we obviously work on a July to June financial year unlike the Pacific which is mostly calendar but that's of course an important contribution and then in addition to that the government announced that it would establish a 300 million temporary two-year COVID response fund so that's supplementary and this is going to be important this is another capability it's going to allow us to be responsive again in 2021 and for the rest of this year to the needs of the Pacific in terms of both additional fiscal support that the countries may need but also this really important support for vulnerable people who are disproportionately affected by the crisis and in those areas that we're hearing about where we're concerned that we could see losses in gains to date or long-term implications from health impacts or from this extended period for some kids of being out of school so all of those areas will be part of the hours in the months ahead thanks thanks Charlotte thanks for that given time we might give us as a few minutes leniency at the six o'clock mark but I will do a bit of a speed round of questions and I will challenge all of our panellists to keep their responses to under two minutes each but let's get started so the first question I have here is from Darren Ward from the Direct Impact Group he asks will COVID and the related travel issues for localisation or will the economic crisis increase a dependency I might ask Audrey to have a crack at that one the second question I have is from Jean-Paul Penrose from DFID the UK aid program in Suva he asks given unprecedented levels of finance to tackle COVID-19 how resilient are these investments and will they guard against future shocks and finally and I might ask Michelle to have a crack at that one and finally we have a question from Fantasha Lockingham from the Fiji Hotel and Tourism Association she asks how can we assist Pacific Island country skilled and semi-skilled unemployed workers access jobs through the Pacific Labor Scheme or seasonal workers program now I've had quite a few questions on that one from the registrations so I might I'll pass that one to Charlotte so first over to you Audrey and just a reminder to panellists to unmute themselves and get their response. Thanks Jonathan and I did see that question pop up and I just caught the last bit of it actually which is around aid dependency in the region and we all know actually that the Pacific is one of the and probably is still the highest dependent region on aid per head of population I made some comments in my opening around the need to be really cautious around the way we keep investing in the region particularly given the demands that COVID are having on many of the countries and my caution is still remains around that we think very carefully about the sustainability of those investments I have no doubt that COVID is actually going to create a deeper and longer dependency on aid I have no doubt about that you know the traditional way of investments in the region comes in a number of different ways both through projects and programming you know we have huge resources flowing through regional organizations civil society NGOs and so forth and during COVID of course we're now seeing quite substantial cash donations flowing in and out of the region we've of course got significant contributions around medical supplies equipment testing equipment and so forth and you know the region as a whole has at times wanted to retreat a little bit back from budget support but at the foreign economic ministers meeting a couple of months ago there was a real call by Pacific ministers actually to partners to consider increasing budget support and so I think bilateral investments now by partners that have been said through the banks they are now contributing much more directly to bilateral support and enabling of course countries to counter some of the economic fallout so yes I do think COVID unfortunately is going to create a more conducive environment for a dependency for the region thank you Thanks Audrey I might now go to Michelle for that second question on the resilience of this new finance technology many thanks Jonathan yeah no very good question looking in terms of additional volumes of financing just talking about the World Bank and to put things in perspective basically three years ago we were committing about 300 million US dollars over three years in the Pacific a bit more than that I should say but the allocation that the countries could run directly from the bank was in the order of 300 to 400 million dollars we are hoping to be able to commit that in one year basically over the current fiscal year which ends in June 2021 so indeed substantially higher volumes of financing than before and we lead to resilient investments I believe so I think we should understand resilience in its multiple dimensions here so one is of course are things that are going to be built with that money going to be resilient and I'm thinking climate resilient especially and I think that it is fair to say that really has become a driving factor of all of the operations and projects that we do with climate governments in infrastructure I think Charlotte mentioned a very nice example of a clinic that had actually sustained successfully tropical cyclone harold we have similar stories for a school reconstruction program in Vanuatu which also actually sustained tropical cyclone harold and in fact served a shelter for the population very successfully so these are examples we are very proud of and that we intend to continue streamlining into all of our infrastructure operations I think another dimension of resilience is also investing in people so investing in education, investing in health investing in social protection and making people more resilient in many dimensions better able to cope with health crisis better able to cope with economic crisis, better able to adapt to a changing world and so as I mentioned I think an increasing part of the financing that is made available to Pacific Island countries is oriented towards those types of investments and then finally there is the macroeconomic resiliency which is at the core of the macroeconomic engagement that we have with countries which I mentioned at the core of the budget support operations that we are working on together with our client partners and so that will certainly continue to be a prime area of emphasis of our work in the Pacific thanks. Thanks Michelle I'll jump over to Charlotte now and an additional question to Charlotte we have so many questions on asking when are we going to get a travel bubble with the Pacific can you give us any indication well on the first question we have recommenced the labour schemes after a temporary pause but it is important there's a couple of things to talk through so one is that it's important that employers in Australia before they employ labour through these schemes they need to test the local labour market to ensure that Australians are given priorities for those vacancies and Pacific people understand that there's increased unemployment in Australia at the moment as well but we find and why the schemes exist is that there is unmet demand and so then the schemes exist to connect those people looking for work in the Pacific with employers in Australia looking for workers and the Pacific continues to be a really attractive source of workers to Australian industry so this is really important scheme and so what we've done for a process that I know people would like is we're working with state government with industry then with the Pacific governments and then with individuals on the resumption of recruitment for those programs but we've started with a particular pilot in the Northern Territory with the mango industry and then with a group of Vanuatu workers and there's it's time consuming at the moment as well because we need to go through different forms of pre-departure training there are different levels of health approvals and travel approvals necessary there aren't the connectivity of flights so it's going to take a little bit of time but this is a big priority on the second question around when we'll see travel bubbles in place this is also a priority but I would go back to something I said earlier which is it's still really important at this time when we don't have a vaccine yet that we're not a source of transmission we're not a vector and so we need to work carefully and then the Pacific governments need to consider their own position really carefully around border restrictions and travel rules so we can't move I think faster than is safe that's really important but we are working at the moment with New Zealand in the first instance on travel between Australia and New Zealand we're having an engagement with Fiji and other countries and it is a priority for us to get to a place and we think it is feasible where we do have that connectivity with our immediate neighbours but unfortunately Jonathan it's going to take as long as it takes to get this right but I can just say it's a really high priority for us and we'll have a really good plug for the next Lowy Institute Live event on Thursday the 15th of October where our director Michael Fully Love will sit down with former US Secretary of Defence James Mattis and former Australian Chief of Defence forces Sir Angus Houston you can register now on our website thank you all for participating stay safe and good night