Vanuatu prime minister unthreatened by no-confidence motion

Transcript

The Vanuatu Prime Minister Joe Natuman says he's received assurances from his caucus that he's got the numbers to continue.

Last week, the opposition leader Moana Carcasses claimed that they had the support of 29 of the parliament's 52 MPs for a planned motion of no-confidence against Mr Natuman.

Support for the opposition's motion was initially signalled by around eight backbenchers in the government coalition but that was withdrawn earlier this week.

Following his caucus meeting yesterday Mr Natuman says he has the support of 37 MPs.

He also delivered a warning at the meeting following allegations that Chinese nationals have been backing the no-confidence motion.

He told correspondent Hilaire Bule that foreigners shouldn't interfere with politics.

JOE NATUMAN: The warning is that politics is an internal matter, any foreigner that comes here to do business, they should purely deal with doing business. We have regulations here, immigration and labour laws which say that when you come here you just concentrate on doing business, don't interfere in the internal politics. So if we find anybody sponsoring certain political groupings to destabilise government then we will certainly investigate them.

HILAIRE BULE: Today [Thursday 17 July] you held a caucus meeting to find out about your numbers, do you still have the numbers?

JN: Yes, we had a caucus meeting today [Thursday 17 July]. I was elected in May with 40 votes in parliament, and after our caucus meeting now, members of parliament assured me that we have 37 members of parliament still supporting the government.

HB: The alleged motion has been around for over three weeks now in Port Vila, and there is no clear reason behind the motion, do you think that the motion is serious or it's just aimed to destabilise the country?

JN: I don't think it's serious, I think they are trying to destabilise the country, they're trying to lobby members of the government side to go to the opposition. But as I stressed today to the members of parliament there was a reason why we toppled the last government, we toppled the last government because we thought things were not happening the way they should be. And we should not go back and entertain the old regime which has done certain things which we were not happy about and we put a motion in and we changed it so we are here to try to sort out the situation.