Transcript
For 20 years, the Noumea Accord provided a decolonisation roadmap with a simple end point - a vote for or against full sovereignty.
Pierre Frogier is a veteran anti-independence politician and now a member of the French Senate:
"Nothing has been done in the past five years to prepare a harmonious and peaceful exit from the Noumea Accord and at times I feel that my fears become a reality that 30 years after the Matignon Accord we are back where we started."
A former French justice minister, Jean-Jacques Urvoas, now a law professor, says in just about every aspect - the last decades have fundamentally changed how people in New Caledonia live and work.
Yet a fundamental point has been missed.
"The peace of compromise is not possible if this one element is not clearly identified and concentrated, and this dominant fact has not evolved further in New Caledonia in 30 years - everything has changed except this question - and that is the question of full sovereignty."
For Sonia Backes of the Caledonian Republicans, the choice is simple.
"We don't want a state, a neither an associated state nor a federated state."
She says financially, New Caledonia's well-being relies on it being part of France.
"Independence is not a credible alternative if we compare the level of our human development with the independent countries in our area, for example infant mortality in Vanuatu is five times higher."
Pro-independence politicians stayed away from the public seminar.
In recent weeks, however, they have articulated ideas of what an independent New Caledonia could look like. And this means that the remaining powers of France, including defence, policing and the judiciary, would be passed to New Caledonia.
Mr Urvoas points to challenges.
"The Supreme Court could hold the functions of the Supreme Administrative Court, of the Supreme Criminal Court and the Constitutional Court. Very good, no problem in theory. But I have found nothing on how these courts will be constituted, how the judges are trained, who would guarantee their independence, who will testify that they are impartial. And this is not a small matter."
There is a tacit consensus that the troubles of the1980s need to be avoided.
Divisions within both the pro- and anti-independence camps have absorbed a lot of political debate and energy.
Philippe Gomes, an anti-independence politician pushing for a New Caledonian citizenship, says he hopes to establish what the unifying forces are.
"We want draw up a declaration of a common heritage, a formal official declaration by the pro-and anti-independence sides before the referendum in order to avoid, as Le Monde put it in a recent article, a leap backward at this referendum."
While progress towards the referendum was made in talks in Paris earlier this month, a mammoth agenda remains.
Developments are expected at the start of December when the French prime minster Edouard Philippe arrives.
