Does Australia owe Fiji $75 billion reparations for historical blackbirding?

Image: iStock In 2023, an American economics firm, Brattle, provided its reparation calculations to a symposium on Transatlantic Slavery Reparations chaired by international judge Patrick Robinson. Brattle calculated that the USA and slave-trading European countries owed the Caribbean and Americas US$130 trillion for wrongs done over a 400-year period. The reparation numbers are shocking but the symposium’s panel of experts approved them. Overruling them, Judge Robinson decided a better approach would be for those slave-trading countries to fund a levelling-up process aimed to help the descendants of those slaves, many of whom are still clearly disadvantaged, especially in the USA. In my book “Knights, Plights & Flights” I contrast the journeys made by transatlantic slaves to those of the people of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu who were transported for work in Australia and Fiji. The sorry fact is that there was little contrast in their treatment during the journeys. Many islanders were taken against their will – forced to do so after witnessing terrifying acts of violence imparted on some who resisted, and there are well-documented stories of those thrown overboard for their continuing resistance. Living conditions on certain cotton estates of Fiji were so poor that 62% of...