As Air New Zealand flight 762 touches down on Norfolk Island, an external territory of Australia 1,412km east of the New South Wales north coast, residents of the island gather below, waving the territory’s green-and-white flag.



The display of patriotism is not for the benefit of the mostly elderly tourists on board the plane, but instead a show of support for Norfolk Island’s chief minister, Lisle Snell, who is also on board. He is returning home from Canberra, a defeated man.

Despite Snell’s appeals, on 12 May the Australian parliament made the bipartisan decision to revoke Norfolk Island’s autonomy, under which the island has been governed by its own legislative assembly since 1979.

Aerial video footage of Norfolk Island off the east coast of Australia Guardian

The threat of coming under Australian government law, order and taxation has been looming over the island for decades, with the commonwealth claiming the local government is broke, and that it lacks the money and resources to deliver health, education, justice and welfare services to an Australian standard.

Already, memorandums of understanding exist between Norfolk Island and the mainland for the delivery of services including education and healthcare.

Norfolk Island’s chief minister, Lisle Snell, at the window of his office in Kingston

But for many islanders, including Snell, the decision to abolish the Norfolk Island government has hit hard. All Norfolk Island laws will now be rolled in to New South Wales ones, with any legislation on the island that Australia considers outdated or inappropriate removed or replaced.

Australians know little about Norfolk Island, an idyllic, tax-free haven, even though it is just over a two-hour flight from Sydney and advertises itself as an ideal tourist destination. Despite its status as an external territory of the commonwealth, getting to the island requires an international flight, immigration clearance and a passport.

It doesn’t take much time on the island to realise that many Norfolk Islanders, too, have little knowledge of the Australian systems that will soon be imposed upon them. That will no doubt change now the transition period has begun to bring the island’s 1,277 residents under the federal taxation, immigration and welfare system.

Sitting in his office at the old military barracks building in Kingston, known as “downtown” on the island, Snell, 67, at times shakes as he comes to terms with the fact that as of the end of June he no longer has a job. He has already begun packing away personal belongings.

“It’s just a shock, being in Canberra last week and to witness how members of parliament could stand up and [say what they did] on the situation of Norfolk Island and get away with it,” he says.

“They said there had been consultation and that there was a majority of islanders in favour of removing the legislative assembly. How dare they? They referred back to reports from 20 years ago that don’t refer to the situation today and the improvement to the island since then.”

Snell says the island would never have needed the new system had it been allowed the rights to its own industry by Australia, including the right to to gain income from fishing, offshore banking and foreign aid.

He is now considering all legal options, including approaching the UN, to fight the Australian government over what he describes as a “wrong of horrific proportions” in abolishing the Norfolk Island government.

He has always lived on and loved the island, and perhaps because of this has less than a perfect understanding of the Australian systems, such as Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, to which the island will soon have access. He claims they will force islanders on to lengthy waiting lists while making visits to the doctor more expensive.

Contrary to the commonwealth’s claims, he says, great improvements have been made to the island’s hospital, as well as the school, which teaches children from kindergarten through to year 12 under an arrangement with the NSW education system. “We should be bloody proud of what we’ve achieved,” he says.

Before becoming involved in politics Snell, like most islanders, worked three jobs at once, including as a bus driver and selling DVDs. He earned $1,000 a week, double what he earns as chief minister, he says. The average salary on Norfolk Island is $29,000, on which residents pay no income tax, and most jobs are in the dwindling tourism industry the island has relied upon for its survival but which has barely recovered from the global financial crisis.

Anson Bay on the western side of Norfolk Island – one of its many beautiful beaches.

Snell says he left those jobs and entered politics believing he could make a difference. “If only could have looked into a crystal ball, I wouldn’t be here today,” he says.

“I thought I had answers to questions. Solutions to problems on the island. It has come home to roost now that it was an absolute waste of bloody time. I can recognise, now, we were banging our heads against a brick wall from day one.”

Perhaps what the Australian government most failed to comprehend, Snell says, is the affinity of Norfolk Islanders to family and to the land. “They are introducing a land tax, but we don’t see property as a commodity,” he says. “We are caretakers of the land, we are nothing without our land.

“I’ve been to may places like Tahiti and New Caledonia, places where Indigenous people have been displaced, and there is this resentment to it. They all say, ‘Whatever you do, don’t lose your land.’ Any land tax people can’t afford to pay here, and which leads to them losing their homes, will be the end of Norfolk Islanders.”

There’s a saying on Norfolk Island: “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” And it’s a reality many islanders are proud of. Those who are too sick or old to work are supported by family or community members, who see it as an obligation to care for those who can’t support themselves.

For this reason, Hadyn “Teddy” Evans, a farmer and backbencher on the soon-to-be dismantled legislative assembly, says many people reject the idea of receiving Centrelink welfare payments from the Australian government. They are fearful of becoming a welfare state.

Phill Evans (left) and his brother Haydn (right) at their farmers’ market stall. Haydn is a member of the Norfolk Island legislative assembly and works full-time job at his family farm

“That’s the culture we’re scared we’ll lose,” he says, selling his fresh produce at the farmers’ market, which is on every Saturday morning, rain or shine. “We’re scared of the human, community factor being taken away.

“When people rely on handouts, it can mean people also lose a lot of their humanity and love of each other. At the same time, it is up to us now to roll with the punches, make the best of it and fight for our culture.”

As a descendant of the Bounty mutineers, culture and heritage is important to Evans, as it is to many other islanders, who still speak their own language, a blend of 18th-century English and Tahitian. This heritage extends back to 1790 when mutineers from British navy ship the Bounty and their Tahitian wives settled on Pitcairn Island, a home that by the 1940s they had outgrown.

In 1856 the British government, looking to abandon its infamous penal colony on Norfolk Island, then constitutionally a part of Tasmania, offered the island to the Pitcairners.

The Georgian convict buildings leading to the Kingston pier

There was good reason for Britain to close down the penal colony and disassociate itself from the island as much as possible; it had gained a reputation for its severe and unlawful treatment of convicts.

The sadistic punishments they endured were captured by the author Robert Hughes in his book The Fatal Shore, in which he described a prisoner being flogged until “quite bare of flesh, and his [collarbones] were exposed looking like two Ivory Polished horns”. Other prisoners were locked in a water pit below ground where, if they fell asleep, they would drown.

Disputes about the rights of the Pitcairn people and their descendants to Norfolk Island extend back to this post-penal time, with continuing grievances over the extent to which islanders were granted ownership and authority of the island by the British and Queen Victoria – many claim the land was given to them as a gift, and that documents stating as such were purposely destroyed. Today born-and-bred Norfolk Islanders are both strongly attached to their land and fearful of losing their rights to it once the Australian government and its land taxes come in, perceiving it as a new round of colonial rule and punishment.

The fear of losing their culture is real. But so, among some anyway, is the ignorance of how significant a welfare system might be to those struggling to make ends meet. While some Norfolk Islanders leave the island to go to university, find work or travel, and come back with an understanding about the Australian taxation and benefits system, many do not.

And among some of those staunchly opposed to the Australian government are those wealthy enough not to be affected by the low wages and lack of access to healthcare many residents experience – they can, for example, afford to go to the mainland for treatment.

Judging how many people are for or against the coming change is tricky, though. Many seem afraid to express their support for the Australian government. This makes it difficult to tell whether the anger towards Canberra is a widespread sentiment or the opinion of a small but noisy minority. Neither the Australian government nor the Norfolk Island government can point to a poll or hard evidence of just how opinion is split.

While a referendum was held on the island this month, the question it asked residents was arguably opaque. Instead of asking the islanders who they would like to be governed by, it said: “Should the people of Norfolk Island have the right to freely determine their political status, their economic, social and cultural development, and be consulted ... on the future model of governance for Norfolk Island before such changes are acted on by the Australian parliament?”

A sign erected by the locals on the way into town affirming their desire to have a choice in their future governance

To this question, 624 people said “yes” and 266 said “no”. Snell and other islanders cite the result as evidence that the majority of people want Norfolk Island to continue to be self-governed.

For his part Australia’s assistant infrastructure minister, Jamie Briggs, only says “wide consulting” over many years has led the government to understand the majority of islanders want change – but he cannot point to a specific poll.

But over the past few decades dozens of Australian-led reviews have been carried out into the sustainability of the island, including a royal commission, 12 separate parliamentary inquiries and more than 20 reports from experts in various fields.

One of those reports, from March 2014, found that while the Australian government had been working with the Norfolk Island to introduce public sector and immigration reforms, as well as land valuations in the leadup to the introduction of municipal rates on island, progress had been, in Briggs’s words, “disappointingly slow”.

Despite issuing the island with emergency financial assistance each year and helping the fledging tourism industry by agreeing to underwrite its airline services, the report said: “The Norfolk Island government seems to lack the capability to address many of the key sustainability issues facing the island.”

Numerous reports have found the health system was not up to standard and that many laws were out of date with other Australian jurisdictions.

Some islanders have a different perspective though. They say compared with places like Samoa, the Cocos Islands or parts of regional Australia, their health system is of a high standard. They are proud of steps that have been made to improve services and are disappointed when media reports fail to mention this and their efforts to cooperate with the Australian government.

Dr Bob Challender, one of three general practitioners working on the island, feels he cannot weigh in on the politics of the situation, having only been on the island for eight months. But speaking from a purely health perspective he says he can see how the island’s one hospital will benefit from the Australian government’s increased involvement.

He has come from running a solo private practice in the NSW southern highlands and says working on the island can be “very challenging” in comparison. There are no specialists on the island, including surgeons.

“At home, if a patient was out of our depth, I could send them 20 minutes’ away to a very reasonable hospital down the road,” he says. “Here, the buck stops with us.”

A lot of locals accept that as just the way it is, he says. “In the night we had someone come in with chest pains and we had to decide whether he was having his first heart attack or whether he’d eaten too much at the restaurant last night,” he says.

“I’m hoping it was his meal, not his heart, because I sent him home. In Australia I would have sent him down the road for further tests. So you make decisions here you wouldn’t be so lax about in Australia.”

The empty operating theatre at the Norfolk Island hospital. As the island does not have the funds to employ an anaesthetist and a surgeon the GPs are now not allowed to perform any kind of surgery and patients must be sent off island for such treatment

Those requiring treatment beyond the GPs’ qualifications need to be flown off the island. By the time that is organised, it can be an eight-hour turnaround, Challender says. Unless the patient has private health insurance, which many islanders do not, the trip will cost $50,000.

While there is an operating theatre in the hospital, it is now locked up. “It has been condemned,” Challender says. This is because a review of the facility performed 18 months ago by the Australian Council on Health Standards found it did not meet Australian standards for elective surgery. Before then, the doctors used to performed “minor” surgery on the island if it was desperately needed – appendix removals or caesareans, for example.

Challender says the increased Australian government involvement means the hospital will get much-needed refurbishment, having been constructed using old military huts. Medications will also become much cheaper once patients have access to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, he says.

“For a child on the island, a decent asthma puffer will cost $110,” he says. “If they have social security in Australia, it’s about $5.20 – or about $32 for someone not on social security.

“We don’t see enough of some sick people because it costs them money to come to us, about $50 and, not being under Medicare, they get nothing back. We only get kids when they’re really quite sick, which is not the best way to treat children.”

It is for reasons like this that Elliott Evans, 19, who was born on and grew up on the island, has no fear of sharing his opinion that it needs to change.

“Norfolk Island is not sustainable,” Evans says. “You can’t expect an island of about 1,300 residents to prop up social services.

“We will be better off under Medicare because at the moment islanders are required to pay about $1,200 each year towards healthcare, and for what? I’m all for having a voice. But I do not support the self-governance model.”

He now works multiple jobs and says having to do so to make ends meet “isn’t right”. Unless he is content to work in the island’s tourism industry, Evans will have to leave the island to pursue further education and job prospects, as many have before him. Many do not return, and the population has dwindled over the years.

He believes the island will experience an economic boost that will give new industries incentive to establish themselves there, creating jobs.

His father, Glen Evans, also a born and bred islander, agrees. “At least with Australia behind us things will actually get done,” he says. “Like our roads. They’re all buggered. My mother was also born and bred here and she always used to say to me as well that we couldn’t manage without Australia behind us. It will be hard for some people but it will be good for them.”

Matt Biggs, 43, has also lived on the island his whole life and is a full-time fruit and vegetable farmer. Norfolk Island prohibits the importation of fresh fruit and vegetables, so much of the produce is grown locally by Biggs. His status makes him unusual – most of the islanders are obliged to hold down multiple jobs.

Local farmer Matt Biggs in his vegetable garden. He grows much of the fresh produce consumed on the island

Low incomes are a result of residents not paying income or land tax, with money for services instead raised through a 12% good and services tax, freight costs and a fuel levy – which in turn keeps prices high and which some say has contributed to a declining interest, from young tourists especially, in visiting the island. Most prefer cheaper destinations, such as Fiji.

Biggs admits he is likely to benefit under the new tax regime, which will allow him to claim tax deductions for business expenses and make him eligible for concessions available to small businesses.

“But it’s something I’m prepared not to get if it means we can keep our government, our voice,” he says. “That’s a huge thing to give up for the sake of money.

“I’m not opposed to change but I’m opposed to dictatorship. We live a simple life and we don’t want for much. But a lot of things will be imposed on us which could potentially change the things we do and the freedoms and way of life we have.”

Other business owners say they will be worse off now that they will be required to pay their employees a minimum wage, contribute to superannuation schemes and subscribe to Australian employment laws. Some are already laying off staff.

Like Snell, Biggs says there has been some talk on the island of getting the UN involved to help gain the right to self-determination. But he also says islanders are not used to being political. “We are a quiet people, we don’t like to be loud and boisterous,” he says.

Perhaps one of the louder advocates for Norfolk Island’s self-governance model was the late author Colleen McCullough, who lived on the island for about four decades and died there this year aged 77. She dedicated a chapter of her book, Life Without the Boring Bits, to the island’s struggles for independence.

When her husband, Ric Robinson – a quiet, largely reclusive man – gets word that a journalist is on the island, he wants to talk. He invites Guardian Australia to the expansive home he shared with McCullough – who many islanders worked for at some point, unpacking and hanging her artworks or laying her marble floors.

If somebody is hard done by here, the community helps out … Someone will just deliver stuff Ric Robinson

“She overdid it a bit,” he says with a chuckle as he walks through the hallway adorned with McCullough’s favourite art to the fern and marble-filled conservatory where she liked to work.

Robinson, whose ancestors are from the island, hands over historical documents he has collected over the years with titles such as The Pitcairn Settlers’ Rights to Norfolk Island. “It’s our homeland,” he says.

“We’ve never had their [Australia’s] system of bureaucratic control, we’ve never been a welfare-orientated state. If somebody is hard done by here, the community helps out.

“They don’t have to go to some bureaucratic buffoon and fill out 10 sheets of paper to ask. Someone will just deliver stuff. It’s a completely different system to what Australia has.”



Perhaps that system wouldn’t work in a larger place, Robinson says. But on a tiny island such as Norfolk, where everyone knows each other, it is enough. The concept of filling out forms to access assistance, or lining up in government offices to speak to someone, is foreign to them, he says.

While Robinson wants to fight for the autonomy of the island, “I don’t think the people here are ferocious enough,” he says.

Like many islanders, including Snell, Robinson believes that had Norfolk been allowed rights to the $60m in royalties generated each year by international fishing within the island’s exclusive economic zone – money that goes to Australia – the island would be prosperous.

Vonnie Grube at her home: ‘I just hope we don’t lose this sense of community’

Many here are land rich but cash poor. Vonnie Grube, 75, is able to continue to live on her expansive property thanks to the support of family and friends, who drive her around and check on her.



She is fearful she will now have to start paying land tax “because I’ve got a big property”, but says she doesn’t really know how the new taxation system will work. Some residents who are land rich are already relinquishing their properties to their children so they will qualify for the pension.

While Grube is saddened by the loss of the local government, she says she will do her best to be positive about it. “I just hope we don’t lose this sense of community, the freedom,” she says.

“We look after each other, we don’t have to lock our houses. Norfolk Islanders have a charming personality and a freedom that I just don’t want to change.”

Those freedoms include laws that allow children granted motorbike licences at 15 and let them fish freely without permits. There is a lack of fear of crime, which some say may increase if more visitors start arriving and if a culture of respect for land is lost. There is no sign of graffiti or rubbish. Police spend most of their time dealing with people speeding over the island’s 50km/h limit. Many people drink and drive, though it is against the law.

The only roundabout in the middle of town

Seatbelt laws were only introduced in 2011. Most people don’t bother to lock their cars or homes, and children grow up with a strong sense of family and community instilled in them, shamed by the community if they do wrong. If there is poverty, then it is hidden.

Now, a suspicion undoubtedly looms over the peaceful and picturesque island, where the cows that roam the countryside and roads legally have right of way, and Norfolk Island pines dot the rolling green hills.

Locals question the new coats of paint being applied to buildings in town. Who is paying for it? Are these where the Australian government intends to set up their offices? Several describe the buildings being refurbished for the purposes of Centrelink and Medicare as “elaborate” and describe money spent on the renovations as wasteful.

And there is one aspect the majority of islanders agree on, whether they support the Australian government stepping in or not; consultation was poor, and the information provided to islanders about how change will affect them is lacking.

At least some of the islander’s concerns about the impact of bureaucracy and the difficulty they believe it will lead to in accessing politicians and government staff appears to be true.

The island’s administrator, Gary Hardgrave – appointed by the Australian government to oversee the island’s transition once the government officially ceases to exist at the end of June – has his offices in the building next to the chief minister’s. He declined to be interviewed for this article.



In two or three years’ time, people will be vaguely aware this was ever an issue Jamie Briggs, Australia's assistant minister for infrastructure

Instead, Guardian Australia is referred to his Canberra-based counterpart, Briggs. The minister acknowledges a lot of work will be required over the next 12 months to help people understand the changes about to be made, saying many had never had to engage with bureaucracy before.

“We’re establishing an office – a one-stop shop – on the island, which should be open by the beginning of next month with dedicated staff from the human services offices who will move there to work from Norfolk Island full-time,” he says.

“This office will be a place people can go to be advised of their entitlements and can be informed about the tax system and, yes, there will be a surprise in all this for people who have never engaged with such services before.”

The system of government on Norfolk Island was “not acceptable”, he said, and he was confident people would adjust. “I understand there are some fearful of change and some are losing vested interests,” he says.

“But in two or three years’ time, people will be vaguely aware this was ever an issue.”

Some islanders, like David Bigg, 38, who owns a fishing charter, would beg to differ. He and other islanders don’t see themselves as Australian and says being self-governing is a vital part of their identity.

“We’re islanders, we’re descendants from Tahiti and 17th-century Englishmen, we’re not from Australia,” Bigg says.

“I don’t feel connected to one other part of the planet the way I do to this place. It runs through my blood, and they can try as hard as they like, but they can’t take out the blood that runs through our veins.”

His friend, Timothy Pearson, 44, chimes in. “It’s not a matter of belonging to the larger nation,” he says. “We belong to our own nation, five miles by three it may be.”