Tag Archive for: South Pacific

Awkward alarum: China, Vanuatu and Oz

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Australia’s reaction to the idea of a China getting ‘a full military base’ in Vanuatu ranged from aghast to agog.

Coming amid what’s already a big chill in Canberra–Beijing relations, the base brouhaha is a cool wind from the South Pacific. It’s decidedly awkward, causing Canberra to hop around in an alert and alarmed manner.

Consider the alarum from several angles: the Fairfax reporting, Vanuatu’s response, China’s expanding role in the South Pacific and Australia’s interests.

Fairfax’s David Wroe kicked the yarn into life by reporting ‘preliminary discussions’ between Vanuatu and China but ‘no formal proposals’.

Wroe is a good journo with a solid track record as Fairfax’s defence and national security correspondent. He’s based in Canberra in the parliamentary press gallery. The sourcing of the story was in Wroe’s third paragraph: ‘senior security officials believe Beijing’s plans could culminate in a full military base’. By the end of the week, Wroe’s sourcing was more explicit: ‘Top national security figures in Canberra and Washington are deeply concerned about China’s ambitions for Vanuatu and its overtures to the small nation.’

In reading reactions to Wroe’s report, refer to a line beloved of journos and often attributed to Bismarck: Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.

In that spirit, always note what’s actually denied. Thus, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s response started with Vanuatu’s assurance to Australia ‘that no such request has been made’. A Bismarckian reading would be no formal request, but perhaps informal discussions. Turnbull then raised the strategic red flag: ‘We would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific Island countries and neighbours of ours.’

The eventual denial statement from Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Charlot Salwai said his government ‘will fiercely oppose any attempt to build a military base in the country’ while stressing close ties to China as a ‘friend and global leader’.

Most of the discussion about a China ‘base’ in Vanuatu focuses on the naval dimension and the future use/ownership of wharves built by China. Other bits of the Chinese bureaucracy could also be involved.

China’s ambitions in space mean it would like to have tracking facilities close to the equator. Currently, China has to deploy ships to do space tracking work.

The previous Chinese ground station in the South Pacific was in Kiribati in the six years to 2003—it was abruptly closed when diplomatic recognition was switched to Taiwan.

As China builds its power and prerogatives in the South Pacific, it can reach for permanent facilities to serve those interests.

We’ve come a long way since the previous decade when China’s overriding concern in the South Pacific was the fierce fight with Taiwan for diplomatic recognition. That brawl caused China to ramp up representation so it had more diplomats in the South Pacific than any other country.

By the end of the last decade, China and Taiwan had reached a tacit ceasefire in the recognition war. With that de facto truce holding, China has widened its vision, building its role as a key aid giver and business partner, serving the new and expanding Chinese diaspora in the Islands.

What China has won in the South Pacific is both simple and significant. As with Southeast Asia, China is now a significant player that must be considered and consulted when regional decisions are being made.

China asserts the same right that it has in East Asia: on strategic, diplomatic or economic questions, China’s interests must be respected. The South Pacific is a relatively cheap place to play. Not much money gets China a lot.

The way China talks to the Islands is in clear contrast to Australia’s language. Canberra’s emphasis on good governance, economic reform and anti-corruption policies has no counterpart when Beijing comes calling.

Apart from the issue of Taiwan, China runs a value-free foreign policy. There is no overt ideological struggle between Australia and China because only Canberra is pushing a value system.

The Islands are starting to confront the reality that China doesn’t argue about principles, but that in offering development loans, it wants the principal repaid. The South Pacific is used to Western aid that might have conditions but comes as a grant—no repayment needed. Not so Beijing. China does loans, not grants. The argument about Chinese influence concerns finance as well as strategic vision.

The China factor adds a competitive flavour to Australia’s offer to the South Pacific of security and economic integration. The integration agenda is a small-steps discussion with the Islands that should run for decades. But that dialogue is also about Australia reinforcing its traditional role in the South Pacific in response to growing Chinese influence.

The traditional Oz response to external powers sailing into the South Pacific—dating from Malcolm Fraser’s alarm at the arrival of the Soviet Union—is to ramp up the rhetoric and throw more aid at the Islands. The tradition is set to get another run with Vanuatu.

China, though, challenges Australia to offer more than scares and cash. Canberra needs to offer its vision for the South Pacific community and outline what we’ll do to build that community.

China’s South Pacific aid: what are we afraid of?

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Australia has always been the big fish in our Pacific pond, although we haven’t always lived up to our grand rhetoric of Pacific leadership.

In the recent foreign policy white paper, Australia pledged to step up its support to help create a more resilient Pacific and Timor-Leste. The paper notes that competition for influence in the region is growing, and proposes extending selected Australian government services into the Pacific and giving Pacific islanders access to the Australian labour market.

The white paper says we’ll help to integrate Pacific countries into the Australian and New Zealand economies and into our security institutions. It says, without providing details, that an Australian Pacific Security College will be established. Overall, the paper promises that Australia will bring ‘greater intensity and ambition’ to our approach in the Pacific.

However, the two main island players in the Pacific, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, along with smaller island countries, are forging closer ties with China. Australia is now explicitly expressing concern that China is trying to win favour by funding aid projects, some of little value, in the Pacific.

The foreign policy white paper doesn’t name China specifically; it talks about assistance from ‘other sources’. And it argues that such assistance may ‘undermine regional coordination’ and suggests that countries may have problems absorbing the aid and managing their debts.

But a senior federal government frontbencher made her concerns clear about China’s growing Pacific presence and the way it’s using concessional loans to bolster its influence. The minister for international development and the Pacific, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, fired a broadside against China, arguing that it was constructing ‘useless buildings’ in the Pacific.

‘We just don’t want to build a road that doesn’t go anywhere. We want to ensure that the infrastructure that you do build is actually productive and is actually going to give some economic benefit or some sort of health benefit’, she said.

Senator Fierravanti-Wells pointed out that on her 24 visits to the region she had come across nations concerned about the use of foreign workers in aid projects. Some countries, she noted, struggle to maintain donated facilities, so they aren’t used to full capacity.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman has called the minister’s remarks ‘full of ignorance and prejudice’, adding that Fierravanti-Wells should ‘engage in self-reflection’.

The Lowy Institute estimates that China has provided more than US$1.47 billion in aid to the region since 2006, mainly through concessional loans. The minister is rightly concerned that some Pacific countries are taking on debts they can’t afford to repay.

China emphasises that its Pacific aid is part of mutual assistance between developing countries. It steers away from sensitive areas like good governance to focus on infrastructure projects.

For the most part, the island states’ political leaders are well aware of the benefits and pitfalls of Chinese aid. The efficacy of Chinese aid is mixed across Pacific nations—projects in Samoa and the Cook Islands are more effective than those in Vanuatu and Tonga. Samoa’s prime minister has claimed that Chinese aid has been crucial in his country’s efforts to deal with the impact of climate change. The Tongan justice minister said it was good that his country could work with China as a partner.

China’s loans to countries in the region have an annual interest rate of 2–3% and a repayment period of 15–20 years, including 5–7 years of grace. But it’s unclear what the consequences will be when the islands, which have a high dependence on foreign aid and a real need for foreign investment, have to pay back the loans.

China is encouraging the islands to participate in the One Belt, One Road initiative, which will only strengthen China’s presence in the region.

The Turnbull government’s foreign policy white paper promises that Australia will engage with the Pacific’s ‘outside partners to encourage them to work in a manner that strengthens cooperation, builds more sustainable and resilient economies and maintains stability’.

Australia’s aid budget to the Pacific is over $1 billion, more than a quarter of our total aid budget. The region has been insulated from broader aid cuts.

It makes sense for us, where feasible, to engage with China to improve aid projects. For example, we’ve been conducting a malaria control project with China in PNG since 2016 (China sends technical experts). Nearly 95% of the PNG population lives in areas of high risk for malaria. The disease often affects the most vulnerable and represents a major health and economic burden. China has made huge progress in malaria prevention and control and has accumulated firsthand experience in those fields.

One other obvious area for cooperation is regional law enforcement. It’s not in China’s interest to be tainted with the criminal activities of its citizens abroad, and it’s in the region’s interest that such criminal activities don’t become entrenched. Last August, for example, Fiji deported 77 Chinese online scammers in a joint operation with Chinese law enforcement. Australia should actively seek appropriate avenues for encouraging Chinese participation in regional law enforcement processes. And there may well be other areas of mutual benefit, such as fisheries management.

It’s time to talk with our island neighbours about what might work best for them, to facilitate where we can, and to respect their final decisions—even if we consider that the help comes with strings attached.

Australia frets and fights over the South Pacific

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Up in the Arcadia of the political afterlife, some great Oz leaders are sharing an ambrosia sherbet and reflecting on the recurring rhythms of Australia and the South Pacific over nearly 150 years.

‘The old songs are still the best songs’, Alfred Deakin remarks in his usual meditative tone. ‘Remember how before federation it was the Germans and the French we worried about in the islands?’

‘Now’, barks Billy Hughes, ‘it’s the Chinese! I reckon I could just dust off all those speeches I made about the Japanese threat. And, of course that 1935 book Australia and the war today—that got me turfed from cabinet because it was all too true. In this game, you can get punished for being too right, too early …’

John Curtin coughs and leans forward, knowing the need to cut off Billy before he gets into the full flow of his anecdotage. ‘Ah, yes’, Curtin says, ‘ the Japanese on the doorstep, the seminal, pivotal moment in the way we thought about the island arc and about alliance and … Hang on, you blokes, here comes Bert. Careful, or we’ll get another Evatt rant about the bloody Yanks.’

Just then, the gong sounds for dinner at the Elysium Bistro, so debate is adjourned.

Down below in Australia, today’s pols are keeping up the grand tradition, worrying about foreign intruders, massaging the Oz strategic denial instinct, and lamenting our policy drift in the South Pacific. Old songs, indeed.

International Development Minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells frets about China’s arrival in the islands, while Labor’s shadow defence minister Richard Marles does the chorus about Australia’s policy myopia.

Senator Fierravanti-Wells says that, despite China’s ‘duchessing’ of politicians in the South Pacific, Beijing’s activities are being met with growing resentment in island communities. The aid minister told the Australian that China’s influence is ‘clearly growing’, yet much of its aid consists of ‘roads to nowhere’ and ‘useless buildings which nobody maintains, which are basically white elephants’. China has been kicking back with gusto.

In a thoughtful speech, Marles worries that Australia’s ‘holding pattern for the Pacific’ means the considerable resources we devote to the islands aren’t matched by much imagination or ambition: ‘There is no strategy or guiding philosophy about our role in the Pacific other than a general sense of obligation about providing help.’

Fierravanti-Wells is only guilty of voicing in more pointed language the fears expressed diplomatically in our foreign policy white paper—plus she did it during the slow news period of our summer silly season. The November white paper pointed to the new outsider in the South Pacific without naming China, talking of ‘competition for influence and economic opportunities’ straining the capacity to absorb aid, increasing debt and undermining regional coordination.

Looking past Chinese bombastic replies about Australian ‘ignorance and prejudice’, Xinhua gives us one good piece of advice on the need for Oz to ‘refrain from behaving like an arrogant overlord’. The conversation Canberra needs to have is with the South Pacific as much as with Beijing. As always in the islands, it’s easy for Canberra to proclaim its leadership; the real achievement is to get island followship.

Of course China’s influence is growing. Expanding power systems expand. And for a couple of centuries, coming powers have come to play in the South Pacific. The answer for Australia is not to panic but play to our strengths and do what we should be doing in the region anyway.

If a China ‘scare’ gets us to pay proper attention to the near neighbourhood we often overlook, then thanks for the nudge. The China bogey helps Australia focus on the geopolitics of its own doorstep.

As one example, Australia is going to do a lot of the paying when Papua New Guinea hosts the APEC summit in November (the early estimate had Oz paying at least one-third, but bank on it being higher). We’re putting up the cash because of our interests in APEC and as a good neighbour to PNG —and if Port Moresby is too much of a shemozzle, a lot of the blame will land on Oz. But we’re also splashing cash because we’re scared that China might step in and pay for it instead. Good policy has lots of different sources, not all of ’em pure.

The broad new thought that Australia is starting to play with is to offer not just partnership to the South Pacific, but economic and security integration—geopolitics meets geoeconomics in our immediate geography. The proposal to integrate the islands with Australia and New Zealand is one of the ideas in the foreign policy white paper that hasn’t got much attention. But it’s a biggy that will need decades of work.

Integration plays to Australia’s history and role in the region in ways that China couldn’t and wouldn’t match.

Australia and the South Pacific: trade, security and media soft power

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Three things Australia didn’t want to do in the South Pacific came to culmination this year.

Two of them were things Australia hadn’t wanted to do, but then changed its mind on. Having made the u-turn, Canberra embraced the previously shunned causes and pushed doggedly to completion: the regional mission to assist/save Solomon Islands (RAMSI) and the South Pacific free trade agreement (PACER Plus).

The third thing was something Australia had been doing for nearly 80 years—shortwave broadcasts to the Pacific islands. Then the Australian Broadcasting Corporation decided it didn’t want to do that anymore and cut shortwave transmissions in January.

The three cases fall into different categories of trade, security and broadcasting/soft power. Yet they deserve to be analysed together because they’re all aspects of how Australia thinks about—and deals with—the South Pacific. Each tells something of Australia’s performance as the South Pacific superpower—or, in the ABC case, non-performance. The three cases are tales of the Oz role and responsibility in the region.

Ending shortwave was ABC stupidity and technical bastardry. The national broadcaster has been frittering away Oz media soft power in the South Pacific. As Geoff Herriot commented: ‘For those concerned with Australia’s status as the region’s principal security partner, this should matter.’

The Canberra polity is scrambling to get a grip on the ABC’s acts of absent-minded abandonment, while the ABC confronts the meaning of its own blunder. In the horse-trading on media reform in the Australian Senate, the government agreed that the Communications and Foreign Affairs departments will review ‘the reach of Australian broadcasting services in the Asia Pacific region, including examining whether shortwave radio technology should be used’. The inquiry will have little difficulty gathering lots of affirmations from the South Pacific about the continuing value of shortwave.

The larger issue the inquiry can’t confront is that Australia talks the talk in the South Pacific, and often we do walk the walk, yet too often we don’t listen. As an example of the hearing problem, see this magnificently angry piece from the Vanuatu Post arguing that the ABC’s claim that the islands don’t listen to shortwave is symptomatic of an Australia that doesn’t listen to the islands.

The talk-walk-listen conundrum afflicted the tortuous negotiations from 2009 to 2017 of PACER Plus—the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations Plus. The treaty’s odd title tells much about the strangeness of this ‘comprehensive Free Trade Agreement covering goods, services and investment’. Not the least of the strangeness is that the South Pacific biggies—Papua New Guinea and Fiji—refused to sign. Another peculiarity is that Australia and New Zealand didn’t want or need PACER Plus in the first place. We spent nearly a decade constructing something that nobody was interested in having.

Australia and New Zealand reached for the deal only because the South Pacific surrendered to a European Union demand for a comprehensive agreement. This was all about Europe: multilateral structures are the way the EU sees the world, and the EU prefers to deal with reflections of itself in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. European aid to the Pacific islands was made hostage to a multilateral treaty, so the islands complied.

The Oz and Kiwi trade bureaucracies weren’t going to have the islands give Europe anything that we didn’t get too. And so we all had to do it because we all had to do it. The limits of PACER Plus meant PNG and Fiji felt no loss in refusing to sign. The one thing they wanted to talk about—labour mobility—wasn’t on offer.

In a funny way, the limits of PACER Plus demonstrate the importance of the Oz/Kiwi role in the region. Australia and New Zealand really matter; the negotiation couldn’t encompass those diverse roles. We tried to enhance trade interests, but ignored most of the significant parts of the elephant. PACER Plus was not bad. It was just a lot of time and energy spent on one part of the beast. We dealt with the trunk of the elephant and were surprised by the tusks. (The solution I offered to PACER Plus is here: replace a set of Oz/Kiwi demands with an Oz/Kiwi buffet, allowing the islands to adopt individual elements at their own pace.)

A negotiation on Australia’s central role in the region would have looked at the big stuff of deeper integration, speaking to the needs that are social and strategic as well as economic. To talk about what we and the Kiwis must do with the islands is to talk about a Pacific people policy—seasonal guest workers are the start of a conversation about integration that is going to run and run. The last century was the prelude. This century, we have the communications and the transport to make a Pacific people policy that joins us to the islands in ways that are far more intimate and rewarding. And demanding.

All this leads to the third case: the Australian effort in Solomon Islands. Here was a task Canberra spent years refusing. Finally, in 2003, Australia was forced to change its mind, leaping into action in a program that ran for 14 years and cost Australia nearly $3 billion. Before 2003, Canberra fretted about the lack of an exit strategy. By the end, that exit strategy question was being raised again. What Australia and the Pacific Islands Forum did in Solomon Islands was good and right. But why Australia actually acted when it did—and then kept going—is a deeply contested topic. Next week, I’ll turn to what RAMSI says about Australia’s role and responsibilities in the South Pacific; like much else about Oz and the islands, this is to be continued …

The ABC gets it wrong on its South Pacific service

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The technical bastardry of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in degrading its shortwave broadcasts to the South Pacific has been starkly revealed. The bloody-mindedness helps explain the dumb decision to turn off Australia’s shortwave service that broadcasts to northern Australia and the South Pacific.

The reveal happened in Parliament House last Friday, when the Senate Communications Committee took evidence on a draft Bill that would require the ABC to restore the shortwave services it killed on January 31.

After heavyweight evidence from Radio Australia’s old shortwave guru Nigel Holmes, Foreign Affairs and the ABC, the Committee’s final witness was earnest, if not expert: ‘twas me—my submission is here (PDF).

Foreign Affairs wimped out, saying that ending shortwave was all the ABC’s own work.  Echoing other submissions, DFAT described ABC Pacific services as:

  • a valuable channel for giving the Pacific news, Australian perspectives and content
  • advancing Australian public diplomacy: ‘We note that the annual operating cost of the ABC’s former shortwave service was an order of magnitude greater than the combined public diplomacy budgets of all of our Pacific posts.’
  • delivering warnings and updates during emergencies.

DFAT said the South Pacific wants shortwave, even though the ABC claims Pacific audiences have ‘moved away’ from shortwave.

The ABC submission opposed the Bill to restore shortwave, saying it would:

  • impinge on ABC independence by directing the Corporation to use broadcast technologies that have limited and diminishing audiences
  • impose significant costs for shortwave
  • oblige the ABC to deliver Pacific language services that haven’t been provided in the past.

The first point is the key, going to important questions about the ABC’s role and what it should do in the Pacific. These separate but vital issues lead directly to what the Parliament expects of the ABC in the Charter given it under law.

The second point is merely the ABC objecting to doing the duty it has performed for decades. The ABC claims the cost would double from $2 million to $4 million—thus  confirming how it has been running down the service.

The third point is odd. The proposed Act, sponsored by Senator Xenophon, calls on the ABC to maintain a shortwave service for PNG and the Islands, with ‘programs in languages appropriate for the 19 countries to which they are broadcast’. The ABC claims it’s presently giving the South Pacific a good service, with broadcasts in English and Tok Pisin for PNG (after closing the last vestige of the French Pacific service in February). If the ABC believes its own quality assurances, it can give an instant affirmative answer to the legislative demand for appropriate languages. Or is the ABC conceding that it’s not giving good/appropriate service?

Returning to point one takes us to the Holy Grail: the ABC Charter, enshrined in the ABC Act. Rather than impinging on ABC independence, the Parliament, which passed the Act, is telling the ABC to meet the first two elements of its Charter. The Senate is calling the ABC to account for failing its Charter responsibilities.

Under that 1983 Act, the ABC must give Australians ‘comprehensive broadcasting services’.  Killing shortwave to the Northern Territory fails that ‘comprehensive’ test. The ABC isn’t meeting its obligation to everyone across this wide brown land.

The Charter instructs the ABC ‘to transmit to countries outside Australia’. In an un-Charterish manner, the ABC is steadily gutting its South Pacific service. Killing shortwave highlights the Pacific withdrawal, as the ABC shrinks away from its international responsibilities.

When the ABC lost the contract to run the Australia Network TV service in 2014, the blame lay with the Abbott Government, which terminated a 10 year contract after one year. The ABC then compounded the damage with its bad, sad and mad gutting of Radio Australia as it terminated Oz Network.

On the decline of shortwave, the ABC offers assertions but zero evidence. For detailed discussion of the continuing utility of shortwave, see the submission by Nigel Holmes, a shortwave guru who was RA’s transmission manager for 23 years.

Holmes explodes the ABC’s wispy techno-babble smokescreen, showing how the ABC deliberately degraded the strength and performance of its shortwave signal. From 2015, the ABC turned off half its transmitters at Shepparton, Australia’s last shortwave station. This degradation had the predictable effect—desired by the ABC—of halving signal strength reception across the west and south-west Pacific.

The ABC is right that shortwave audiences have declined—a trend pushed by ABC bastardry against its own shortwave signal. After the switch-off in January, the Shepparton operator, Broadcast Australia International, announced its intention to sell the Shepparton site. If those transmitters are demolished, it’d cost $60 million to create a replacement shortwave facility.

Many other players see a shortwave future. As the ABC exits the South Pacific, China Radio International is making large investments, snapping up any shortwave slots becoming available and building new transmitters.

Another way of demolishing the ABC utility argument is to ask what’s changed in the South Pacific to make shortwave obsolete? The big Ds are exactly as they’ve always been: big Distances, big economic Development problems, and regular natural Disasters.

In villages across the Islands and in the mountains of PNG, people aren’t suddenly logging on to the internet. Mobile telephones are a significant new force, but phones don’t wipe away all Distance/Development/Disaster challenges. That’s why leaders in places like Bougainville find it ‘totally shocking’ that the ABC turned off shortwave. Here’s hoping the Senate maintains its sense of shock, and forces the ABC back to its Charter responsibilities and a Pacific broadcasting U-turn.

The crowded Pacific: re-considering the sharp edge of broadcasting’s soft power

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Long before the ABC abandoned shortwave broadcasting to PNG and the Pacific, its programming for indigenous audiences (as distinct from Australian expatriates) had become risible. For those concerned with Australia’s status as the region’s principal security partner, this should matter.

Broadcasting and related services to the Pacific have suffered from the ‘unclear, inconsistent and competing interests and intentions’ which, Joanne Wallis found, characterise this nation’s strategic policy in the region. That’s an issue both for government and the ABC. The cardinal rule when seeking to project the values and interests of our imagined community, the democratic nation-state, is to play the long game and do so with constancy.

In recent years, Radio Australia’s English schedule consisted principally of content re-broadcast from the domestic ABC networks, while the minimally-resourced Pacific Beat was the  remaining gesture to regional engagement. The Tok Pisin language unit, serving PNG, shrank from eight broadcasters to two. News bulletins, to my ear as a traveller in the region, have lost much of their Pacific-centric character. In vision, the ABC provides domestic news and entertainment, packaged as Australia Plus, which appears to have an insignificant profile.

There’s a marked difference between the ABC giving audiences outside Australia access to content intended primarily for domestic consumption (good for the Australian diaspora) and in applying a relevant audience focus to PNG and the Pacific. We should not confuse extended access with the purposeful use of media to engage regional audiences in pursuit of Australia’s national interests.

I offer four observations about the continuing relevance of international broadcasting and related media services, which may be considered with reference to the Pacific:

  1. State-funded international media are potent instruments of power projection. As the British Council reported in 2013, a ‘great game of the airwaves’ is being played out across politically contested regions. Nations including the UK have boosted spending on international broadcasting. They differentiate the purposeful use of media from many other uncoordinated or non-government manifestations of soft power.
  2. In 2012, an Australia India Institute taskforce chaired by John McCarthy commented on ‘how instant, global television can sweep away decades of benign perceptions’ of this country, and described Canberra’s public diplomacy as old-fashioned and chronically under-funded. It noted that Radio Australia’s performance in the Pacific and Southeast Asia suffered from lack of investment (and that the since discontinued Australia Network English language TV service was the wrong model in the congested Indian market).
  3. Having earned audiences’ trust, a well-conceived international service maintains an influential connection with them, even during periods of political tension or crisis as a study of the BBC’s Hausa and English language services demonstrated. Nigerian respondents, overall, were unfavourably disposed to the West, largely because of US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their perception of an anti-Islamic bias. Yet they continued to engage with the BBC, citing the accuracy and impartiality of its news, its use of personnel from the Nigerian diaspora with whom audiences shared a cultural affinity [my emphasis], and the depth of coverage.
  4. International services help to frame issues and assemble the picture that citizens have of one another, and of matters affecting their lives. It would be a mistake for policy-makers to view the role of such media through the limiting prism of adversarial journalism as practised in the Canberra bubble. By engaging with large audiences internationally, these media overlap with key functions of public diplomacy such as listening to foreign publics, advocacy, cultural diplomacy and exchange. This need not be inconsistent with editorial independence.

Returning to the Pacific’s crowded and complex geopolitical environment, the need for re-consideration goes beyond the ABC’s decision to cease shortwave transmissions to under-served communities.

An evolved media model for PNG and the Pacific should be a key element of Australia’s regional aspirations and not treated by the ABC as just another of its media properties. The four themes of Australia’s aid program are intended to support: economic growth, more efficient regional institutions, the development of healthy and resilient communities (including disaster resilience), and the empowerment of women and girls. Cutting across all strands is the promotion of good governance.

These suggest a mutually reinforcing dual rationale for a rigorous and entertaining service: delivering a regional good through a purposeful and culturally relevant broadcasting and digital media model; and promoting Australia’s influence ‘from the outside in’—through the quality of audience engagement with content and discourse, and attraction to the values embedded in the service. It would be multi-lingual, including a substantial Tok Pisin component.

To succeed,  this Pacific media service would operate as a distributed model involving contributors and media partners in PNG and island countries (dialogue, not monologue). It would maintain a close relationship with capacity building functions of the sort currently funded by Australian Aid and delivered through the ABC International Development Unit. And critically, this service would require a discrete management authority. Too often the ABC has struggled to synchronise this manifestation of the wider national interest with its organisational self-interest as the “national” broadcaster.

Doing smart stuff with shortwave in the South Pacific

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Pick the anomaly in this list of what Australia does and desires in the South Pacific:

  1. Australia wants a leadership role in the South Pacific, a fundamental foreign policy interest explicitly stated in 1901 in the Australian Constitution.
  2. Australia’s 2016 Defence White Paper gives a defence and security guarantee that stretches from Timor-Leste through Papua New Guinea to all of the South Pacific. Australia offers its strategic weight, proximity and resources to be the South Pacific’s “principal security partner”.
  3. Australia spent about $3 billion to restore order and rebuild the government of Solomon Islands over 14 years.
  4. Australia is giving $560 million in aid to Papua New Guinea. And Australia’s total aid to Pacific Islands this financial year is $1.14 billion.
  5. An independent media is an essential element in Australia’s overarching interest in South Pacific states that are free, democratic and growing. Yet, to save $2–3 million, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in January closed down shortwave broadcasts to the South Pacific, killing off a service with a 75-year history.

Number 5 is the clanger. The ABC Board decision to mute Radio Australia’s (RA) voice in the South Pacific trashes Oz interests.

The ABC exits as the region’s needs increase. The Pacific’s geopolitical potpourri is ‘crowded and complex’ with implications for ‘stability, security and cohesion in the region.’ (See the new ASPI report on the changing geopolitics of the South Pacific by the ANU’s Joanne Wallis).

My previous column argued that a shortwave re-think is the moment to end the ABC’s decade-long shredding of its Island service. A shortwave U-turn should embrace a new Pacific future: time to shift from exit to engagement, from retreat to renewal.

South Pacific Radio

Imagine the South Pacific not as a big ocean with specks of land, but rather visualise and hear a space full of overlapping radio voices with a musical soundtrack. Radio is vital. Radio is a key way the Pacific talks to itself: for example, the campaign to get MPs in Solomon Islands to donate high-quality radios (solar powered, battery or hand cranked) to their communities. Here are some reasons why the South Pacific shortwave service should be restored:

  • Shortwave isn’t ‘outdated’ technology in the South Pacific—it’s an essential element in the mix and will be for decades. The 21st century future of shortwave is the move from analogue to digital.
  • Natural disasters: shortwave isn’t blown away by a cyclone as local FM transmitters can be. Shortwave saves lives.
  • Shortwave resists political winds: FM relays can be closed by government directive—as Frank Bainimarama did to Radio Australia’s Fiji transmitters after the 2006 coup.
  • Serve rural and remote communities as well as cities: by all means broaden the reach by building FM transmitters in the South Pacific (although if FM is the future, the ABC needs to explain why it recently closed FM transmitters in Pohnpei, Palau, Kiribati and Cook Islands). FM reaches only the capital or a region, not the whole country. Australia wants to talk to everyone in the South Pacific.

Papua New Guinea

PNG must be at the centre of Australia’s South Pacific understandings. The restatement of constant interests was the theme of the 8 April joint press conference by Australian and Papua New Guinean leaders. This year’s an election year in PNG which, coupled with the chance of a Bougainville referendum in 2019, ought to catch Canberra’s attention.

  • The ABC should rebuild its PNG Tok Pisin service from two broadcasters towards the team of eight Tok Pisin broadcasters once fielded by RA.
  • Until the ABC can get FM transmitters right across PNG, it must maintain shortwave.

The ABC should read its own reports on the problems confronting PNG’s National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC): ‘Citizen Access to Information in PNG’ and ‘Governance and the Role of Media in Papua New Guinea’.

NBC’s issues are equally important for RA. A big problem causing a notable drop in PNG radio usage is the ‘worsening radio signal in some provinces.’ So the ABC’s answer to a deteriorating NBC signal is to turn off RA’s shortwave signal to PNG?

Rebuild RA and serve South Pacific media

RA’s South Pacific service must serve the region on every available platform from shortwave to social media. The rebuild needs lots of money and people—a cascading conversation involving many Pacific voices, not just a one-way Oz broadcast.

The ABC should be in the centre of the South Pacific ‘town square’ offering broadcast conversation and digital dialogue. The future isn’t a monotone old-media monologue. How might Aunty go about that task? Some ideas:

  • Double the RA team of Pacific broadcasters from six to 12, so that the evening service isn’t just a repeat of the morning program.
  • Create a combined News and Digital desk with people to do everything from Shortwave to social media. (Though Facebook is going to matter as much as the hourly bulletin.)
  • Bring a regular stream of Pacific journalists to work with the ABC in Brisbane and Sydney, as well as RA in Melbourne. Build a team of journalist “stringers” across the Islands to file regularly to RA. Journalists/broadcasters in the Islands face constant, controlling pressures from their governments; the ABC must help local media  serve the South Pacific.

Australia’s has abiding interests in South Pacific states that are free, democratic and growing. An ABC that acts as an independent, accurate journal of record for the Islands will serve Australian policy priorities as well as Island needs.

The WPS agenda must also be responsive to natural disasters

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Image courtesy of the Department of Defence.

This article is part of a series on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ that The Strategist is publishing in recognition of International Women’s Day 2017.

When Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, and her Labor counterpart, Penny Wong, visited Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu in December, emergency response was at the forefront of the agenda. Disaster response is a key priority of regional humanitarian action; most crises in the Indo-Pacific were the result of natural disasters, and from 2005-2014 natural disasters affected 1.4 billion people in the Asia Pacific region, 80% of the global total.

But there is another key statistic here: the impact on women. Women are more likely to die during disasters, and incidence of sexual and gender-based violence spikes in post-disaster settings. So any strategy for women, peace and security (WPS) in the region must incorporate humanitarian response.

WPS is founded in UNSC Resolution 1325 and targets the disproportionate and unique harm suffered by women and girls during and after times of conflict. Australia formalised its commitment to Resolution 1325 and its subsequent resolutions—collectively the WPS Agenda—through the establishment of a WPS National Action Plan (NAP) in 2012. (Read Susan Hutchinson’s assessment of the first NAP here). The 2015 UN global study on the implementation of UNSCR 1325 identified women’s vulnerability in humanitarian-settings as an emerging theme in WPS. Recognising that ‘principles of gender equality in humanitarian assistance are not limited to conflict-affected settings but equally relevant to natural disasters’, the study provided the impetus to expand WPS beyond the traditional parameters of armed-conflict. The Independent Interim Review of Australia’s NAP raised the possibility of expanding WPS action to include humanitarian response.

Disaster relief should be treated as a WPS issue for two reasons.

First, the disruption caused by natural disasters is analogous to armed conflict, and the security issues facing women in the two contexts overlap, because:

  • the breakdown of rule of law exposes women to increased violence, including gender-based violence
  • the destruction of key protective infrastructure like homes, police stations and shelters leaves women vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, including human trafficking
  • food and water shortages force women and girls to travel further and in less secure circumstances to gather basic resources and
  • the disruption of essential services, especially reproductive and maternal services, threatens women’s health.

Second, there’s a growing movement toward a gendered approach to disaster relief. In 2012, the UN Commission on the Status of Women adopted resolution 56/2, which highlights the disproportionate impact of natural disasters on women, and the social and economic factors that underscore women’s vulnerability. In March this year Australia co-hosted the high-level event ‘Achieving Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Humanitarian Action through the World Humanitarian Summit’. Ensuring that humanitarian programming is gender responsive was one of 32 core commitments developed ahead of the Summit. That attention has inspired a wealth of policy papers on improving gender awareness in humanitarian response in the Asia Pacific (see here, here and here). The Australian Civil Military Centre has published a comprehensive paper on incorporating gender issues into Australia’s natural disaster response.

The two agendas are mutually reinforcing. They both promote a gendered approach to peace and security during and, after a violent disruption, many of the prescribed relief efforts in disaster and armed conflict are convergent.

In the field, Australia’s Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) effort following Cyclone Winston, Operation Fiji Assist, is a prime example of the benefits of incorporating the WPS agenda into civil-military operations, including disaster response. A military gender adviser was included as part of the deployment of about 650 ADF personnel, to advise the Joint Task Force headquarters on incorporating WPS considerations into planning. Aid donations from ADF personnel were targeted at women and girls, including items such as sanitary products, nappies and school books.

Australia is a prominent contributor to disaster relief. In the past two years, the government provided humanitarian assistance to regional neighbours including Indonesia (Aceh earthquake), Vanuatu (Cyclone Pam), the Philippines (Typhoon Melor) and Fiji (Cyclone Winston). From July 2015 to April 2016 alone, Australia responded to 20 crises. The 2016 Defence White Paper (DWP) noted that humanitarian disasters have the potential to cause instability in our immediate region. It’s in Australia’s national interest to maintain a leading role in the Indo-Pacific to support humanitarian and disaster relief operations. Integrating gender perspectives into those operations will be essential to their overall effectiveness.

When it comes to including women’s security in natural disasters, some of the policy guidance is already there. Gender equality and women’s empowerment is a thematic priority of DFAT’s 2016 Humanitarian Strategy, and the DWP affirms the ADF’s ongoing support for WPS. Within the next two years DFAT will develop a new Foreign Policy White Paper and commence work on the second NAP on WPS. These are real opportunities to improve WPS outcomes where natural disasters occur.

Australia’s long dread of France in the South Pacific (part 2)

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Image courtesy of Flickr user Blue Mountains Local Studies.

The argument stretches over decades: can France stay in the South Pacific and, if so, on what terms? Being in the Pacific may serve the glory of France, but can France also act as a member of the Pacific?

When the war of words between Paris and Canberra was at its height in the 1980s, Australia’s Foreign Minister, Bill Hayden, crystallised a core proposition: Australia, he said, would be in the South Pacific forever, but you couldn’t necessarily say the same for France.

Hayden’s skepticism was grounded in a period when France seemed intent on ‘blowing up’ any hope of regional belonging—from nuclear tests to sabotage blasts in Auckland harbour. The France that went rogue and sank the Rainbow Warrior in 1985, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, has spent the following 30 years slowly adjusting its Pacific colours to try to become a different sort of regional warrior.

Grappling with that question of whether France can belong, Denise Fisher writes: ‘As in most key areas of France’s presence in the Pacific throughout history, ambiguity is rife’. That word ‘ambiguity’ keeps appearing. As Fisher notes, France’s behaviour is sometimes that of a power ‘in’ the Pacific, while at other times France can be a power ‘of’ the Pacific. New Caledonia’s vote next year will say much about whether France can be ‘of’ as well as ‘in’ the region. This is another three decade story.

After intermittent violence in New Caledonia through the 1980s, the moment of truth for the territory came in 1988. Members of the Kanak independence movement seized hostages on the island of Ouvea and demanded talks on independence. The fortnight siege from 22 April to 5 May—costing 25 lives—was broken by a military assault. To be a journalist in Noumea during this fraught period was to report on a society tearing at its own soul, peering into the abyss of civil war.

The Kanak leaders were urbanely French in language, manner and argument, but they wanted New Caledonia remade to serve Kanak identity, not French glory. Out of that tragic moment came the Matignon Agreements signed in June 1988, by the Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, deferring the issue of independence for a decade. They were succeeded by the Noumea Accords with a 20 year timeline. For his leadership in stepping back from the brink, Tjibaou was assassinated the following year by a fellow Kanak.

The Matignon and Noumea Accords have allowed France to play a long game. Tjibaou, the independence leader, legitimised an autonomy process Paris could use to seek permanence, not departure.

Now, the moment for decision approaches. One parallel between 1988 and 2018 is that each date with destiny is framed by the French presidential election calendar. Next year’s vote is the moment of decision that eventually arrives for any peace process seeking to salve deep differences with lots of time and cash.

The New Caledonia Accords have influenced Australian thinking about other independence issues—as well as altering Canberra’s assessment of France’s capacity to stay in the region.

The Bougainville settlement brokered by New Zealand and carried through by Australia was an Anglo version of Matignon—the deferral of the immediate decision on independence as a means to stop conflict and embark on a long period of preparation and development.

Prime Minister John Howard invoked the Matignon model in his famous and notorious letter to Indonesia’s President B.J. Habibie on 19 December 1998, on the future of East Timor. Howard’s letter stressed Australia’s continuing support for Indonesia’s sovereignty in East Timor. Reflecting what Canberra thought France had achieved over the Matignon decade, Howard said Habibie’s offer of autonomy could become part of a lengthy process ‘to convince the East Timorese of the benefits of autonomy within the Indonesian Republic’.

The aim, Howard wrote, should be to avoid ‘an early and final decision of the future status of the province. One way of doing that would be to build into the autonomy package a review mechanism along the line of the Matignon Accords in New Caledonia. The Matignon Accords have enabled a compromise political solution to be implemented while deferring a referendum on the final status of New Caledonia for many years.’ The Howard letter illustrated Australia’s judgement that the Matignon/Noumea Accords delivered Kanak autonomy but could keep New Caledonia as part of France; Indonesia should take the same lengthy route to retain what it wanted.

Ten days before Howard wrote to Habibie, on 9 November 1998, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, had warmly welcomed the New Caledonia referendum that strongly endorsed the Noumea Accord, stating:

‘A positive vote of over 70% and the high voter turnout demonstrate that New Caledonians want to assume greater responsibility for their own destiny. The result will maintain the impetus of political and social development in New Caledonia and help France to continue its constructive role in New Caledonia and the Pacific.’

Downer’s line about France maintaining its constructive role in the Pacific has become the new Canberra mantra. The South Pacific thinks France has rid itself of the habit of blowing things up. The Oz dread of France in the Pacific that ran through the 20th Century has faded. The dread has turn to desire…

Australia’s long dread of France in the South Pacific (part 1)

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Image courtesy of Flickr user IrenicRhonda.

A striking duality drove Australia’s thinking about France in the 20th century. Expressed as a chant it went: In Europe, Good! In the Pacific, Bad!

When Australia turns its gaze to Europe it sees France as an old ally, a cultural cornucopia and an expression of the Enlightenment. What finer destination could there be for an Oz traveller?

In the South Pacific, though, Australia long saw France first as a colonial rival then, just a foe. The fear of France’s Napoleonic potential in the neighbourhood was one of the elements driving Australia to become a country in 1901. Australia found it a lot easier to love France when it was on the other side of the world. In the South Pacific, we oscillated between fear and forgetfulness.

The suspicion about what France is up to in the neighbourhood was present from the moment of settlement. Six days after Captain Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet reached Sydney in January, 1788, the French explorer Jean-François de Galaup La Perouse arrived. Contacts between the two parties were polite during La Perouse’s six week stay, but Phillip never met La Perouse and the British were secretive about their purposes and plans. Such cordial distrust flavoured much that followed.

Australia’s has a deeply-rooted strategic denial instinct in the South Pacific. The instinct drives a constant quest to be the top strategic partner for Island states while minimising the role of outside powers. The fact that Australia can never achieve complete strategic denial in the South Pacific means that the instinct is beset by a faint, constant ache. Throughout the 20th century, that ache was directed at France—with other targets such as Germany and the Soviet Union/Russia, going as well as coming.

Australia’s South Pacific fixations—and the strategic denial twinge—are founding elements of the Commonwealth, actually expressed in the Oz Constitution.

The Constitution makes no mention of the post of Prime Minister or the function of Cabinet government, but the South Pacific role gets an explicit tick. Section 51 is at the heart of the document, defining the legal powers of the Commonwealth over such areas as trade, currency, defence and communications. Subsection 29 identifies the power over External Affairs. The next clause, Subsection 30, goes further and identifies the power over the ‘relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific.’ The two clauses express an implicit division of responsibilities. The new nation born in January, 1901, was happy to hand over the operation of most External Affairs powers to London; but, from the start, Australia would take hold of its interests in the South Pacific.

The Pacific element in the Constitution reflects the way the presence of other powers in the Pacific in the 19th century galvanised the six Australian states to federate.

The traditional inability of the states and the federal government to agree on much at all—still, today, a defining characteristic of the federation—makes the original act of creation even more striking. The first major convention of the states to discuss federation in 1883 was driven by the immediate need to get a common policy to oppose French and German colonisation in the Pacific. That was why New Zealand and Fiji were also at that first Sydney conference.

The first Australian spy, shortly after federation in 1901, was an Australian businessman who spoke French, dispatched to check French intentions in the Anglo–French condominium of the New Hebrides. France reciprocated the suspicion, and was still looking for Australian plots nearly 80 years later in the difficult breech birth that turned the New Hebrides condominium (aka: the pandemonium) into the independent nation of Vanuatu. The older residents of Noumea used to recall Australia’s naval show-of-force in World War 2, intended to ensure that New Caledonia sided with the Allies, rather than with Vichy France.

Australia’s dealings with France were strained by the traumatic birth of Vanuatu, Kanak unrest in New Caledonia in the 1980s, and 30 years of acrimony caused by French nuclear tests in Polynesia.

The twin issues of Kanak independence and French nuclear tests provided the then South Pacific Forum with high-profile, vital issues that united all Island leaders. France gave the Forum a convenient ‘hate figure’. The foreign foe is always a useful unifier.

One of the regional achievements of the Forum—the 1985 South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty—was made possible, and necessary, by anger at France. And France’s signing of the protocol of the Treaty, in 1996, enshrining the end to its nuclear tests, marked the moment when some rapprochement between Paris and the Pacific could truly begin.

The rapprochement process delivered France a big win last year—full membership of the Pacific Islands Forum for New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Forum membership is an early reward for the long-game France has played in New Caledonia over three decades. And next year that 30 year Accords process will be put to the vote in New Caledonia.

The old Australian fear of France in the Pacific has faded.