Samoa's new Prime Minister says she's ready to get to work and "get the house in order" after a tumultuous battle to leadership.
The island nation's election was in April, but after four decades of single-party control and 22 years with the same prime minister, neither the exiting HRPP Party, nor its leader Tuilaepa Sa'ilele Malielegaoi, were going down without a fight.
On Friday, the country's appeal court called time on that, doing what Samoa's voters had done and declaring the Fa'atuatua I Le Atua Samoa us Tasi (FAST) party government and Fiame Naomi Mata'afa prime minister.
Fiame, who is the daughter of Samoa's first ever prime minister, became the first ever female prime minister of Samoa.
"Like most things, you have to get your house in order and I think making sure that the public service servants feel confident that as a new government it's the business of government they have a role to play, but they also need to understand that this is a new government and we have a programme that we would like to implement," she told Breakfast this morning.
"Government work, it's not that sexy and our first order of business of course is to get a budget in so that government operations would go."
But while Fiame is making plans to get her government moving, she said the former prime minister is still yet to concede.
"The conventions usually is that the outgoing (PM) they make the contact to concede, he hasn't done that in any formal way," she said.
"He actually sent me a message to say whether we might give them seven days, but as you know John, the court in its decision said that the new government is in place from last Friday at 4.30pm, so the message has gone, they've had the weekend and by end of today the offices should be cleared for government to move in tomorrow."
However, Fiame added that she asked the former government if they would entertain a meeting between the two cabinets this afternoon but she's yet to hear back.
While she hasn't heard from the former leader, though, Fiame said she'd had a conversation with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and received support from New Zealand's Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta.
"It's very affirming when you have the Pacific family offer their support for our new government, thank you," she said.
Later on Breakfast this morning, Ardern said the news was "fantastic", adding that she'd met with Fiame several times.
"New Zealand's relationship there is already strong and it was wonderful to be able to pass on behalf of New Zealand our congratulations to her early on Saturday morning and looking forward to working," she said.
"We got straight into a conversation about vaccine, Covid, borders - there's a lot of work for us to do together."
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