Nauru

Pleasant Island, as it was named by the British when they first discovered it, Nauru is one of the Micronesian islands of the central Pacific; its closest neighbour is Kiribati.

Nauru carries the distinction of being the world's smallest republic (Monaco is the world's smallest monarchy). Sadly, it is running out of phosphates (ten thousand years' worth of bird droppings), which is a problem, because phosphates have brought a very high standard of living, and there is nothing with which to replace it. They have tried money-laundering, calling it "offshore banking", but they got found out and are now black-listed. They tried tourism, but all the guano put people off.

The latest ruse is to provide homes for all those asylum seekers that Australia doesn't want, for doing which they are being paid millions of dollars; and no, I cannot work out the per capita rate for relocated asylum seekers, because neither Australia nor Nauru is willing to publish the numbers of people or the numbers of Australian dollars, but we can assume that it isn't sufficient, as Australia is also in process of sending financial experts to the island to help them sort out that other piece of bird-shit, their budget. Their President is named Baron Waqa, but I don't think that's a real Baronetcy, more like those fake American ones such as Duke Ellington and Earl Ray Jones and Count Basie. You can tell things are bad in a place when Lonely Planet, which manages to make tourism in Siberia sound exciting, advises that the hotels and restaurants are minimal, and that the only tourism worth doing is the relics of the Japanese occupation in World War Two.



Marks for: 0

Marks against: Unknowable, but numerous. Marks are the German currency; this should be noted in Australian dollars.

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