Australia and the Pacific's lost generation.(The Pacific)

Not enough jobs is leading to poverty, unhappiness and it results in crime, violence and instability. In the Pacific, this could lead to a lost generation of young people.

--Alexander Downer

Australian rural and regional communities have jobs without workers and the Pacific Island nations have workers without jobs.

--Peter Mares

There is a strongly held opinion that the entry of Pacific nation workers into the Australian workforce on a seasonal or temporary basis is essential for the economic survival of Pacific nations and to the stability of those societies ... in the near future an Australian government may need to put aside purely domestic considerations in order to address this problem.

--Senator Judith Troeth

ONE OF THE IMPORTANT rules I've been taught in the South Pacific is of the need to just sit down and shut up for a while. The lesson lodged in my brain when I flew back to Fiji in 1987 to report on the second coup. I got a car at Nadi and drove along the Coral Coast, stopping at several villages along the way.