Ministerial sex scandal threatens Fiji’s Rabuka government
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has ordered a website to remove intimate photos allegedly taken of Fiji’s Minister for Women.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has intervened in a sex scandal that threatens to fell Fiji’s Rabuka government, ordering a website to remove intimate pictures allegedly taken of the country’s Minister for Women and Children.
Lynda Tabuya denied online reports of a tryst with married cabinet colleague Aseri Radrodro in Melbourne’s Windsor Hotel during a parliamentary study trip last August that was sponsored by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs.
The lawyer and former Miss Hibiscus beauty queen said the photos – allegedly taken by Mr Radrodro while his wife slept in a room down the hall – were “fakes”.
The Office of the eSafety Commissioner ordered the Grubsheet Feejee website to take down the images.
“We confirm the person in the intimate images located at the URLs detailed in the table … does not consent to their intimate images being posted on the website administered by you,” the regulator said.
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka sacked Mr Radrodro – his former son-in-law and one of three minority party MPs that provided him the numbers to form government – just over a year ago.
On Friday, Mr Radrodro’s Social Democratic Liberal Party (Sodelpa) called on Mr Rabuka to reinstate their MP to cabinet, but stopped short of issuing an ultimatum.
Grubsheet Feejee’s editor, Graham Davis, a former Fiji government communications adviser, told the eSafety Commissioner that the images were published in the public interest, but agreed to take them down.
“The wife of one of these ministers accessed the images and texts on her husband’s phone that demonstrate that the ministers lied to Fiji’s Prime Minister when they told him they were not having an affair and he, in turn, misled the nation,” Mr Davis told the regulator.
“So there is a public interest component that goes beyond mere titillation,” he said, adding: “However, I accept the law as you have outlined it.”
The University of Tasmania’s Richard Herr, a former director of the Centre for International and Regional Affairs at the University of Fiji, said the scandal’s fallout posed a serious threat to Mr Rabuka’s hold on government.
“The fact that the Sodelpa management board has just backed Radrodro’s reinstatement shows the fragility of the party executive’s commitment to maintaining the coalition agreement,” Associate Professor Herr said.
He said Mr Radrodro had been associated with a substantial rump within the Sodelpa party that preferred to align with former prime minister Frank Bainimarama’s defeated FijiFirst Party after the 2022 general election, and was suspected of voting against Mr Rabuka in a secret ballot after the election.
Associate Professor Herr said the Australian government would be watching with alarm at the Rabuka government’s growing instability, after its “enormous relief” at the peaceful change of government just over a year ago.
“January 1 marked the longest period for any government following a peaceful transfer of power. And already it looks somewhat shaky,” Associate Professor Herr said.
Fiji is notorious for its “coup culture”, with Mr Rabuka staging two pro-indigenous Fijian coups in 1987, and his most recent predecessor Frank Bainimarama seizing power in 2006 before winning elections in 2014 and 2018.
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