Transcript
KOROI HAWKINS: I am standing outside the House of Ariki where the Prime Minister Bill English has just been welcomed by the Cook Islands House of Chiefs but earlier this morning he met with the Cook Islands Prime Minister Henry Puna and his cabinet and following that he announced that New Zealand was committing NZ$15 million dollars to the Manatua submarine cable which you mentioned, and also a grant of NZ$8.8 million dollars to the Cook Islands for the design of a new reticulated wastewater system for Muri and Avana and also a further NZ$20 million dollars over the next three years for improving waste water infrastructure in the Cook Islands. He said these announcements are part of New Zealand's ongoing commitments to developing, to supporting the Cook Islands, and he also mentioned that the Cook Islands Government meeting of its side of these deals has made it easy for New Zealand to make these commitments.
DON WISEMAN: They have talked about this better connectivity. How much better is it going to be?
KH: Well this cable is coming between Samoa, French Polynesia and into Rarotonga and Aitutaki and it is supposed to bring faster low cost internet that they say is essential to the economic and social development of the Cook Islands, so right now, just looking at the estimates that have come through from the local provider, Bluesky, using roaming here will cost about NZ$10 dollars per megabyte and the data that we are filing right now is quite expensive. So it should make quite a difference I would say. He also visited a few training centres, nurse training centre and educational facilities and he alluded to the internet helping with the further development and improvement of those services and also questions were raised during the press conference about the drift of young Cook Islanders and qualified Cook Islanders to New Zealand and he hoped that connectivity and services like this would help to stem that tide and possibly encourage more Cook Islands to in Cook Islands.
DW: Now New Zealand has been involved for quite some time in a water supply system on Rarotonga, now they are working on a waste water reticulation system and a critical part of this is that it will help to clean up concerns about the quality of the water in the lagoons.
KH: Yes that's right. So this year there is expected to be 140,000 tourists visiting Cook Islands and the infrastructure just needs be more robust, it needs to be able to bear the brunt of all that impact on local services and make sure that it is not affecting the environment. So all of this is to try and mitigate so to speak the success of the Cook Islands tourist industry.
