Below is the text of a statement given on Sunday 2 May in Brisbane at the University of Queensland by Lisa Williams-Lahari, founding member and Projects leader of Pacific WAVE (Women Advancing a Vision of Empowerment) Media Network. Her presentation followed that of PNG’s Susuve Laumaea, Chair of the Pacific Freedom Forum. Fiji's Sophie Foster, of the Fiji Times, Samoa’s Savea Sano Malifa of the SONG (Samoa Observer Newspaper Group) and Vanuatu’s Marie-Noelle Ferrieux-Patterson, former Ombuds and President for TI (Transparency International) in Vanuatu also featured on the afternoon panel.
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Kia Orana tatou katoatoa it e aroa maata o to tatou Atua, Talofa lava, I bid you warm Pacific greetings. This week last year, the inaugural meeting of a regional media freedom watchdog group, the Pacific Freedom Forum, was happening in Samoa. 12 months later, to the exact week, we are witnessing the inaugural meeting of a regional network of women in Pacific media, called WAVE. We have delegates from both groups here at this event, one a regional media freedom monitoring and advocacy body – the other a newly confirmed network of women working in news and media in the Pacific region. Together, both groups form a constituency of almost 400 online members spread across the Oceania region’s 22 countries and 9million people – not forgetting many millions of square kilometres of saltwater in all that. So we are excited to affirm our place at this key event.
I’m going to dive in to the overall theme of this session with an invitation to have some media freedom soup with me.
Pacific Freedom Forum is a regional media body, monitoring threats to press freedom and journalism ethics across Oceania.
