While Australia has removed Mara permanently from its travel ban list, Key said, "We have no intention of doing that at this stage."

"It will be an opportunity for New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials to talk to him and get a sense of what his perspective is. But it doesn't mean he'll be granted a visa to come back. He'll be like a number of people who have been put on the ban for a good reason and they need to prove to us there's a very good reason why they should be permanently taken off."

Mara is back in Tonga but is expected to come to New Zealand as early as Monday.

Source

• www.stuff.co.nz
• Image: TVNZ

Mara began his campaign in Australia by invoking the mana of his father, Fiji's respected founding father, the late Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara.

However, according Graham Davis, "The problem is that some of his new acolytes are people who Mara senior loathed and blamed for the destruction of his own presidency in 2000 and the destruction of his attempts to forge a thriving multiracial nation in Fiji."

Graham Davis is a journalist best known for his incisive investigative stories over a twenty-year period for the Nine Network's flagship Sunday program, which he joined in 1983 after a radio career in the BBC, ABC and Macquarie Network.

Source

• Australia Network News
• Grubsheet - Unholy Alliance on Fiji
• Grubsheet - The Camera Does not lie
• Image: 3.bp.blogspot.com

• Vidya Lakhan president of the Fiji Association of Sports and National Olympic Committee (FASNOC), said the ban amounted to political interference in team selection and should be unacceptable to the International Rugby Board (IRB). "If Fiji cannot send its best team to take part in the World Cup then we should consider boycotting the World Cup," Lakhan said in a Press Conference on Tuesday.
• Fiji Rugby Union CEO Keni Dakuidreketi has dismissed talk of a boycott saying the Olympic committee had not consulted with them. "We were annoyed with that sort of unsolicited statement coming from an organisation that has nothing to do with our World Cup preparation," he told Radio New Zealand International.
• Former FRU chairman Bill Gavoka says a boycott could backfire with Fiji sidelined like South Africa was in the apartheid era. "The idea of boycotting the world cup is quite silly," he told the Fiji Times, adding it would "only invite derision and get us nowhere".
• IRB chief executive Mike Miller holds out hope that some diplomacy will see the issue resolved before September. ‘If people can talk quietly behind the scenes then often things which some people think can't be resolved, can be resolved.' Miller said. ‘But talking about it in public really doesn't help. ‘I am confident that Fiji will come to Rugby World Cup, I am confident that all the matches will take place in New Zealand, and I am confident that Fiji will acquit themselves very well. They've been playing very well and they will have a very good team in New Zealand.'

Source

"The bipartisan consensus between Labor and the Coalition that the diplomatic cold shoulder and targeted sanctions would eventually bring the Bainimarama regime to heel has been shattered." says Graham Davis. "Australia grossly underestimated Frank Bainimarama on two crucial fronts. One was his resolve to enforce his own version of tough love - to end the entrenched racism that has bedeviled Fijian democracy with an enforced period of dictatorship leading to fresh elections on the basis of one man, one vote for the first time.

Graham Davis is an independent Fiji-born journalist and publisher of the political blog Grubsheet

Source

• Grubsheet
• Image: Sunday Observer