The Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation is again under threat. This time it’s not from gunmen during civil unrest but from a prime minister who appears to want to turn it into a government mouthpiece.

Twenty years ago, journalists at the SIBC were being threatened at gunpoint over their coverage of the conflict that disrupted the country between 1998 and 2003.

As the SIBC celebrates its 70th anniversary, there’s concern that the public broadcaster known as the ‘Voice of the Nation’ is about to become the voice of the Solomon Islands government or perhaps the voice of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.

It barely survived the civil disturbances that led to the arrival of the regional peacekeeping mission RAMSI in 2003.

But it has survived the many challenges of the past 70 years because its staff believe in the public broadcaster’s critical role as a unifying force. For many Solomon Islanders, it is their only source of reliable, factual news and information.

But it now seems the Sogavare government wants to control the SIBC’s editorial policies for news, current affairs and on-air programs, ending its trusted role as an independent public broadcaster.

Although there’s no censorship of the SIBC yet, the move appears to be about the threat of control if the government decides that only its views should be heard, especially if there’s another crisis. Journalists often don’t need to be directly censored when they know they’re being monitored and watched by those in power.

Some observers wonder if Sogavare is planning to consolidate control of all information in the Solomons. His recent decision to sign a US$66 million ($103 million) concessional loan with China for the construction of 161 mobile communication towers suggests this might be his aim. First the radio station, then the mobile network. Don’t forget the government has also passed legislation to postpone the general election, which was due next year, until April 2024.

The prime minister has previously shown his contempt for a free media. Two years ago, he threatened to ban Facebook after criticism of the government over its decision to switch allegiance from Taipei to Beijing and its handling of the distribution of funds during the Covid-19 pandemic.

As 150 journalists from across the Pacific gathered in Honiara this week for the 6th Pacific Media Summit, it became clear that the Sogavare government’s decision to take control of the SIBC was made without consultation with its board or management.

SIBC Chairman William Parairato said there were never any meetings between the office of the prime minister and the corporation, only complaints about news and current affairs programs.

It’s also reported the government owes the SIBC SI$4 million ($766,000) in unpaid program sponsorship.

Parairato told the official opening of the SIBC’s 70th anniversary celebrations that the corporation has already started suspending government radio programs because of the unpaid debts.

He said the SIBC had made an operating surplus for the past 10 years except for 2017, ‘and to say the broadcaster had been operating at a loss as a SOE [state-owned enterprise] was not technically true’.

But this is the government line. The prime minister’s office says the government stripped the SIBC of its SOE status to rescue the organisation because it hadn’t made a profit since 2014. A spokesperson said it depended on government grants for its survival.

The spokesperson said the SIBC would maintain its editorial independence to ensure its content met basic broadcasting standards of fairness, balance and neutrality, which had been eroded in past years.

The perilous situation for journalists in Solomon Islands has changed rapidly since the government pledged diplomatic allegiance to Beijing in 2019. Media freedom has deteriorated and journalists say leaders are now taking their cues from China.

Journalists know what it’s like to be targeted. At the height of the civil unrest that began in 1998, they were often threatened over their reporting. Two prominent journalists were forced to escape to Australia.

They included ABC Radio Australia’s stringer in Honiara, Sam Seke. He fled with the help of insiders in the Malaitan-controlled police force and the Malaita Eagle Force militant group after being warned his life was in danger.

Earlier this year, a freelance journalist relocated to Australia after her investigations into the relationship between Sogavare and a Chinese businessman resulted in harassment from police. She said the police told her an order for her arrest came directly from the prime minister.

She was advised by the Australian high commission to move to Australia for her safety.

More recently, Sogavare has again shown his dislike for independent journalism by threatening to ban foreign journalists from entering the country.

The restriction followed a report by the ABC’s Four Corners in August that investigated China’s growing influence in Solomon Islands.

As the region’s journalists discuss issues facing their industry, including the growing threats to media freedom, Sogavare is attending the first US – Pacific island leaders’ summit with President Joe Biden, called to target China’s growing influence and counter perceptions that Washington has abandoned the region.

At the centre of concern is Sogavare’s security deal with China, which was signed in April. It’s a deal he told the UN General Assembly at the weekend that his country is being unfairly criticised for. It’s not yet clear if this secret agreement with China is behind his decision, reported by the ABC, to refuse to sign an 11-point declaration between the US and Pacific countries that had been expected to be signed at the summit. While a draft was leaked, the final version of the Chinese deal remains secret, preventing Solomon Islands media from reporting its details. Could there be a clause preventing the Solomons from signing a security deal with the US?

Disclosure: The author worked in 2005–06 as an adviser on the SIBC’s Media Strengthening Project, which was managed by the ABC.

The world knows the Republic of Kiribati as a very low-lying nation in the mid-Pacific that is in danger of inundation as the climate changes and sea levels rise.

Much less is known about its strategic location and the attention now being paid to it by Beijing, which has proposed large-scale dredging to reclaim land from lagoons. The aims are to raise the height of atolls and create land for industrial development, including two major ports. The massive works will likely be carried out by the same fleet of dredgers used by China to build artificial islands in its aggressive expansion into the South China Sea, and will almost certainly cause the same severe destruction of coral reefs in Kiribati.

Australia will ignore this activity at its cost.

Kiribati lies at the true geographic centre of the vast Pacific Ocean, straddling both the equator and the 180-degree meridian of longitude, and is the only country in the world to span all four hemispheres. Comprising 32 coral atolls and one raised-coral island, Kiribati has three distinct island groups—the Gilbert Islands in the west, the Line Islands in the east and the Phoenix Islands in the middle—with separate exclusive economic zones. The combined EEZ covers 3.5 million square kilometres, about half the size of Australia, and hosts some of the largest remaining potentially sustainable stocks of tuna and other migratory fish, as well as deep seabed minerals. The land area of all the islands combined is only 800 square kilometres and the population is approximately 120,000.

In September 2019, the government of Kiribati switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, amid accusations of inducements from China. In June this year, the Tobwaan (‘Embrace’) Kiribati Party (TKP) secured a second four-year term in government, amid accusations of election irregularities by all sides.

The TKP’s national development manifesto, the ‘Kiribati 20-year vision’, which looks set to be integrated into China’s Belt and Road Initiative, gives highest priority to building two ‘transhipment hubs’—major ports in a tiny country that has no economic market for such facilities.

One hub is planned at the capital of Tarawa Atoll in the west, which was the site of the first major amphibious landing by US forces in the push against Japan during World War II. The second is planned at the strategically located Kiritimati (‘Christmas’) Atoll in the east, directly south of Hawaii and the major US bases there.

The atolls of Kiribati have very limited land area and are only a few meters above sea level. Like other low-lying atoll nations, Kiribati is directly threatened by climate-change-induced sea-level rise and other impacts that are already occurring. In addition to the transhipment hubs, the 20-year vision proposes large-scale land reclamation. The stated objective is for commercial and industrial development, and ostensibly to raise the atolls as a climate-change adaptation response.

The proposed major island-building and development of so-called transhipment hubs raise the prospect of Chinese military bases, or, at least initially, potential dual-use facilities, being established right across the centre of the Pacific, stretching along the equator for nearly 3,500 kilometres from Tarawa Atoll to Kiritimati Atoll. China also has a moth-balled satellite tracking station in Kiribati, which may now be reactivated.

These facilities would give China control over the world’s best tuna fishing grounds plus swathes of deep-sea mineral resources, and a presence near the US bases at Hawaii, Kwajalein Atoll, Johnston Atoll and Wake Island. They would also be positioned directly across the major sea lanes between North America and Australia and New Zealand. During World War II, Japan’s attempt to block the same lanes were defeated, starting with the Battle of the Coral Sea and then the taking of Guadalcanal in Solomon Islands. Today, China is moving to achieve control over the vital trans-Pacific sea lines of communication under the guise of assisting with economic development and climate-change adaptation.

The developments in Kiribati are part of a much larger Pacific-wide Chinese strategy. Another permutation of China’s ‘island-grabbing’ in the Pacific is the leasing of the highly strategic Hao Atoll in French Polynesia, ostensibly to develop a $2-billion-plus fish farm in the atoll lagoon, which is large and deep enough to accommodate an entire naval fleet. Hao Atoll was a significant French base in the 1980s and 1990s, used to support nuclear weapons tests on nearby Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls. It has an airfield, built by the French, with a runway long enough to accommodate large, wide-bodied transport aircraft.

Control of the facility at Hao, along with those proposed in Kiribati and elsewhere across the heart of the Pacific, represents a power-projection capability that is orders of magnitude beyond the old ‘three island chains’ construct applied to China by strategists for decades, and requires an urgent realignment of the strategic response.

Vulnerable Pacific island nations and territories are increasingly turning to ‘assistance’ from China because they perceive that their development needs are not being addressed by other partners and that their very real concerns about the existential threat from climate change are largely brushed aside by Australia and the US. Meanwhile, China panders directly to such concerns and bills itself as a global leader on climate change, despite now being the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Australia’s Pacific step-up needs a lot more ‘up’ in its ‘step’ if such developments are to be effectively countered—and if vulnerable nations like Kiribati are to be kept in Australia’s ‘Pacific family’ as promoted by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. For its own national security, Australia needs to more overtly recognise both the climate change and broader development concerns of Pacific island countries, and tailor its development assistance to address these concerns in a much more meaningful and concrete way.

Merge a couple of fairy tales for some judgement lines on Australia’s Pacific step-up.

Canberra likes to think of itself as the handsome prince. The Pacific islands, though, can perceive a sleeping beauty or a slumbering giant—part of the story, potentially important, but not always alive to what’s happening.

Playing on the ‘step’ theme leads to the fact that often Australia is seen as the ugly stepmother or selfish stepsister (think climate change and the ‘Pacific solution’).

Awoken, Australia pushes to be the king of the castle: the top economic and security partner for the islands. The self-proclaimed partner of choice is anxious to be chosen.

Looking in the magic mirror, Canberra asks, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’ Trouble is, the mirror replies that this is a complex question with different answers. And, by the way, China is looking good these days.

The mirror offers Canberra a sharp instruction: ‘Toughen up, princess! Time to get going.’ This wisdom informs Australia’s six inquiries and reviews touching on the step-up.

The toughen-up line also applies to the tough insights offered in the Whitlam Institute survey of island attitudes to Australia in Solomon Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu, based on field research conducted in late 2019. The report, Pacific perspectives on the world, shifts us from tales to the truth of poetry, rendered by Robert Burns: ‘Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us!’

The Whitlam Institute said the focus groups and one-on-one interviews with 150 Pacific islanders offered these messages:

– The quality of Australia’s relationships matters more than the quantity of our aid or trade;

– Our values, norms and ways of doing things are a vital part of how we conduct our engagement with the Pacific;

– Australia, and its historical relationship, is valued but we are one of many partners for Pacific islanders.

The institute’s director, Leanne Smith, says the step-up is a step in the right direction, but it’s ‘perceived to be a unilateral Australian initiative, something being done “to” the Pacific rather than with countries of the region’.

Australia is seen as an important partner, but as Smith observes, there’s also ‘a perception of a certain level of racism and disrespect directed towards people from the Pacific’.

When I was reading the report, my mind went back to a conversation with a great Fiji journalist and fine bloke, Robert Keith-Reid, the founder of Islands Business magazine. It was the year 2000 and Suva was under military rule because rebels had seized parliament, holding the prime minister and cabinet hostage (covering my third Fiji coup, I called this ‘The strange saga of Speight’s siege in Suva’).

Keith-Reid’s house near parliament had a temporary military post in its front yard; typically wry, he reported that his young daughter had been taught by the troops how to strip down a weapon in near-record time.

After making what turned out to be accurate predictions about the ambitions of the military commander, Frank Bainimarama (he’ll always be the supremo, to me), Keith-Reid mused on Australia’s role in the South Pacific. We were drinking wine, but it should have been Fiji Bitter, because Keith-Reid delivered the tangy truth with characteristic Suva bite: ‘Everyone around here [the South Pacific] knows that Australia is needed. But that doesn’t mean you’ll ever be loved.’

If I have a creed for Australia in the islands, that’s it, in the words of Robert Keith-Reid. We’re needed. The need cuts both ways. We need and want much from the region, just as the region needs much from us. The mutual needs offer a lot to work with.

As ever, the islands know they need us, but it doesn’t mean they have to like it, or us—or like their dependence. It’s what my grandpa called the 10 quid rule—if you loan a mate 10 quid, he’ll owe you, but he mightn’t repay you with mateship. The Labor Party version of this goes: ‘Why does he hate my guts? I never did him a favour.’

Australia wants the power and the central place in the South Pacific. Again, the need goes in both directions. We matter and what we do matters greatly. We’re always a big target—as we should be, because we want to loom large.

Writing about Oz in the Pacific over five decades, I often use the line that Australia always presents as the leader, but has a lot of trouble getting followers.

An easy demonstration of this—a twin version of the islands conundrum—is to look at the relationship we have with New Zealand. Here is the 10 quid rule writ large.

The Kiwis are our brothers and sisters and often know what we should be doing in the region before we work it out for ourselves. But the push-pull, shove and biff, and slagging and sledging are constants. Again, the Kiwis know they need us but they don’t have to like it—or love us. Mutual need provides plenty of the needed glue.

We should expect no more love and devotion from the islands than we get from the Kiwis.

The security calculus tells the story. I jest that there’s an envelope in the big safe at the centre of the NZ defence ministry with a single piece of paper giving their fundamental defence strategy: ‘To get to us, they have to go by Australia. Take a deep breath, relax, put on your serious voice, and ring Canberra to check what they’re doing.’

Works for the islands as well.

Australia’s security guarantee to the region doesn’t buy much love, because it’s a commitment to our interests as well as theirs.

Australia is big enough and strong enough to roll all of that into our role. We had better, because that’s the way it is—and we must work to make it continue. We must put ever more breadth and depth and listening into our relationships with New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific—plus Timor-Leste as the start of the arc.

A lot of shared history, along with shared interests and values, should both drive and steady Australian approaches. Toughen up and get to work, prince.

There is something a little disconcerting about the work done jointly by the Department of Communications and the Arts and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in their report of the review of Australian broadcasting services in the Asia–Pacific. Not because the report lacks informational worth, but for its underlying premise and the hermetic sense it conveys about Australia’s place in Asia and the Pacific.

Read the detail and you’ll find that Australia is located 3,200 kilometres from Papua New Guinea—a claim that is broadly correct if you’re standing in Melbourne. From Australia’s northernmost population centre of Saibai Island, on the other hand, it is only four kilometres to the PNG mainland—roughly the distance across Port Phillip Heads from Point Lonsdale to Point Nepean.

Similarly, the report gives the distance from Australia to Indonesia as 4,000–7,000 kilometres when the city of Merauke, with a population almost double that of Darwin, is less than 600 kilometres from Nhulunbuy in East Arnhem Land, and about 1,100 kilometres from Darwin itself.

This is not intended as nit-picking criticism but an indication of how, despite the value of industry and market data in the report, it expresses a lack of situational awareness. Partly this may be a consequence of terms of reference that offered little purposive guidance; it’s also partly due to the report’s narrow frame of economic analysis.

The report provides a definition of ‘economic benefits’ to be derived from multi-technology broadcasting and content provision to Asia–Pacific territories. Direct benefits accrue to the broadcasters concerned, and to other Australian industries as a result of those broadcasts. But the report offers no definition of ‘indirect strategic policy objectives’—a rather troubling omission by the departments responsible for Australia’s media policy and foreign policy.

It is a form of inverted logic to preference economic over national strategic perspectives when the function of the former stands as an equal pillar with the latter. In this respect, the underlying tone of the report is so ‘end of history’, at a time when the nation is having to rethink the fundamental dynamics of its international engagement.

The prism of economic analysis narrows to a point of blindness when the report claims that Australian governments have funded international broadcasting services as a matter of market failure—that is, in recognition of the risk that Australian broadcasters would underinvest in Asia–Pacific broadcasting without public funding. There’s no mention here of strategic purpose—let alone the role of international broadcasting as sovereign infrastructure—apart from a general (and reasonable) desire to build partnerships between countries in the region.

It’s true that, in 1931, the commercial broadcaster Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) established the ‘Voice of Australia’ as this country’s first short-lived English-language international radio service. For a few years, AWA managed to deliver an audible signal to Europe, using the call sign of a laughing kookaburra (just as Radio Australia would do in later decades). Similarly, the Seven Network briefly and unsuccessfully operated an international television channel acquired from the ABC in the mid-1990s. Both were commercial services undertaken for corporate self-interest.

It’s inappropriate to equate commercial failure with a notion of the market as anything more than one critical determinant of national sovereignty. From the outset, government intervention in the marketplace of ideas occurred with strategic purpose. In 1939, prompted by the British government, Prime Minister Robert Menzies established what became a multilingual international shortwave service as an instrument of political warfare.

In the 1950s, the Cold War Planning Committee invested in Radio Australia (and the establishment of the ABC’s news operations in Asia) to complement British and US campaigns against communism. In 1963, the government strengthened its political focus on Indonesia and Southeast Asia by building a powerful transmission facility in Darwin. In the 1980s, Radio Australia elevated the Southwest Pacific region as a broadcast priority, following the resolution of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser that Australia had a responsibility to keep the region free from influence of the Soviet Union.

And in 1990, the departments of Communications and Foreign Affairs jointly sponsored a cabinet submission on Radio Australia, which included a summation that could have been written for the ages:

Our strategic interests are arguably greatest in the Pacific and South East Asia, our economic interests greater in North Asia. Moreover, in the totality of our interests, some countries in North Asia, such as China, are more important to us than many of those in South East Asia or the Pacific … However, in terms of impact alone, the South Pacific is crucial.

That’s where the relevant discussion should begin. The review of broadcasting defers to the government’s yet-to-be-released soft power review for consideration of potential ‘external benefits’ of international broadcasting services and the setting of strategic objectives. Simplistically, it identifies a potential market of four billion people in Asia and the Pacific, while noting that the ‘actual demand’ for Australian services ‘is determined by the willingness and ability of Asia Pacific audiences to pay for those broadcasts’.

The utility of such econometric framing is far more remote from the field of challenge than the report imagines the distance to be of Papua New Guinea from Australia. The report’s definition of ‘demand’ for Australian broadcasting services—those available to be supplied and those actually used—makes scant allowance for what actually comprises the highly asymmetric and diverse Asia–Pacific marketplace of ideas.

For Australian policymakers, the challenge of reaching out to engage key overseas publics calls for a great deal more than econometrics, and needs to be anchored by an understanding of place and strategic principle.

The South Pacific calls global warming its top security threat. And China’s arrival is warming discussion of island security.

Both trends explain why, for the first time in its 18-year history, Singapore’s Shangri-La Dialogue had a session on the islands: ‘Strategic interests and competition in the South Pacific’.

The secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, Dame Meg Taylor, said not since World War II and the Cold War had the islands been so strategically relevant.

Drawing on the words and spirit of last year’s Pacific Islands Forum communique, Taylor said the region is ‘complex and competitive’, with a dynamic marked by both ‘cooperation and competition’.

The commander of Fiji’s military, Rear Admiral Viliame Naupoto, observed that three major powers are having an impact on the South Pacific: the US, China and climate change.

‘Of the three’, Naupoto said, ‘climate change is winning and climate change exerts the most influence on countries in our part of the world. If there’s any competition, it’s with climate change.’

Taylor said the islands had decided to ‘securitise the climate emergency’ by expanding the concept of security. Like all the speakers on the South Pacific panel, she referred to the first point of the forum’s Boe declaration on regional security:

We reaffirm that climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and our commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

The commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, said in all his visits to the islands he was confronted by the region’s description of climate change—‘robustly and literally’—as an existential threat, from fresh water and liveable land to natural disasters.

The head of international relations and strategy at the French defence ministry, Alice Guitton, said France, Australia, New Zealand and the US must coordinate responses to island security needs. She said the four powers should improve their cooperation for maritime surveillance, preparedness for humanitarian and natural disasters, and measuring infrastructure at risk.

Sitting with Guitton, the secretary of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Frances Adamson, said that it was a mark of changing times that Australia and France were ‘embracing each other’ in the islands. That was a wry Adamson nod to the way Australia’s 20th-century dread of France in the Pacific has now turned into a desire that France stay and contribute as a key strategic partner.

Australia, the quintessential status quo power in the South Pacific, sees France as a bastion of the existing order. No longer is France the feared outsider prone to blowing up both bombs and its own interests in the region.

New outsiders are causing Canberra to fret.

Adamson said Australia has ‘an abiding interest in the sovereignty and security of the South Pacific’, but added that ‘Australia does not see our region through a narrow lens of strategic competition…Our approach should be driven by the wellbeing of the blue Pacific and its peoples.’

In an elegant alliteration, the foreign affairs secretary said Australia wants a South Pacific that is ‘secure, stable and sovereign’.

During questions, China joined climate change in the security discussion.

Taylor’s response was a brief recap of the friends-to-all policy she laid out in her February speech, ‘The China alternative: changing regional order in the Pacific islands’.

The Pacific Islands Forum saw expanded roles for other countries in the region, she said, and China has ‘a very strong and valued relationship with many members of the forum’.

Davidson repeated recent US criticism that Beijing is putting pressure on the government of Manasseh Sogavare in Solomon Islands to drop diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in favour of China.

‘The concern is the coercive approach to force Solomon Islands to switch recognition’, he said. ‘That is certainly not the objective of our free and open Pacific vision, nor is it in alignment with that free and open vision.’

The admiral’s description of China’s actions draws on the critique he offered the US Senate in February:

Beijing is leveraging its economic instrument of power in ways that can undermine the autonomy of countries across the region. Beijing offers easy money in the short term, but these funds come with strings attached: unsustainable debt, decreased transparency, restrictions on market economies, and the potential loss of control of natural resources.

Davidson’s language was what you’d expect from a US admiral. When it comes to senior diplomats, usually you get a certain flexibility that presents as nuance. There was no softness, though, from Adamson.

Australia’s top diplomat was asked about the decision by Australia and the US to redevelop the Lombrum naval base on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

First, Adamson did proper diplomatic duty, stating that PNG had ‘invited’ Australia and the US to help and that ‘this is definitely not going to be an Australian naval base or a US naval base.’

The thought that follows is that, crucially, it won’t be a Chinese naval base.

Canberra was galvanised last year by the prospect of a Chinese-developed port on Manus, along with possible Chinese development of other PNG harbours at Wewak, Kikori and Vanimo.

As ASPI commentary noted, the real strategic value of Manus lies in its forward position to monitor and control air and sea activities in the archipelagic approaches to Australia and the wide sweep of the Pacific from Micronesia to Kiribati and Nauru to Solomon Islands.

The Shangri-La session on strategic interests and competition in the South Pacific heard Adamson express Oz interests in language any admiral would endorse: ‘The Australian government made it clear that any foreign base in the region would not be welcome. We would strongly condemn and oppose that. It would have obvious negative impact on Australia’s strategic situation and the strategic situation of the region.’

Strongly condemn and oppose. No code there.

Welcome to a complex and crowded South Pacific.