Australia’s strength in its international relations with the South Pacific rests on shared history, common values and cultural affinities for sport, family and religion. Pursuing Australia’s interests in an increasingly contested post-pandemic environment will require all the tools of statecraft, including using Australia’s considerable soft power.

Australia and the nations of the South Pacific share a deep love of sport. Sport doesn’t just build mutual respect and pride; it brings our region together through shared goals, heroes and achievements.

The launch of Australia’s sports diplomacy 2030 strategy was a recognition by the government that Australia has an opportunity to use its sporting strengths to support the sporting aspirations of its Pacific neighbours in a way that generates goodwill—and advances Australia’s national interests.

Rugby union is the Pacific’s sport of choice.

Rugby dominates conversations and the media and is played on every surface of lush tropical grass available on the islands. Simon Raiwalui, a former Fijian rugby captain and current coach of the Fijian men’s national team, the Flying Fijians, once said: ‘It’s the blessing and the curse of Pacific rugby. You can pick up a touch rugby union game on the street and you’ll find potential national team players.’

Australia’s kinship with the Pacific through rugby union is a diplomatic asset that other global actors and sporting codes cannot currently match. Players of Pacific heritage will have a prominent role with the Wallabies at this year’s Rugby World Cup in France—the third biggest global sporting event. Many Pacific rugby fans support the Wallabies and engage with our teams through social media, and most have an Australian club they follow with fervour.

Rugby is deeply intertwined with Pacific nations’ political and military elite. It has been customary for prime ministers and even kings, as is the case in Tonga, to simultaneously hold executive positions in their country’s rugby union governing body.

In Fiji, former prime minister Frank Bainimarama was also president of Fiji Rugby Union, and he personally appointed Fiji’s deputy armed forces commander, Humphrey Tawake, as Fiji Rugby’s chairman. New Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka represented Fiji in rugby union, and it is expected he will also become an office holder in Fiji Rugby Union.

During a joint press conference with Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong on the margins of February’s Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ retreat, Rabuka quoted Nelson Mandela, saying: ‘Sport … has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.’ He told Wong that while Fiji and Australia were bound together by geography, ‘it is sport that brings our people together’. Rabuka also reaffirmed that Fiji Rugby wanted to strengthen its partnership with Rugby Australia and the Australian government.

In 2021, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Rugby Australia entered the Australian Pacific Rugby Union Partnership under DFAT’s multimillion-dollar PacificAus Sports program. The scheme’s stated aim is to create opportunities for Australian and Pacific athletes to train, play and grow together. Australian diplomats in the Pacific are also keenly aware that rugby union opens doors and is a very useful tool in achieving strategic policy outcomes.

In 2022, the Australian government, backed by Rugby Australia, was a key player in enabling Fiji’s entry into the southern hemisphere’s premier professional rugby tournament. Australia’s financial support helped secure the entry of a men’s team into Super Rugby Pacific and a women’s team into Australia’s Super W competition. Members of Fiji’s elite and Australian diplomats are now ever-present figures at Fijian home matches, where the PacificAus Sports logo dominates on-field advertising.

Rugby Australia has been tasked by DFAT with delivering a series of sports diplomacy activities across the Pacific to amplify the PacificAus Sports message of ‘friends through sport’. Rugby Australia staff, players and coaches, along with colleagues from Oceania Rugby who partner with Rugby Australia on key projects, regularly visit the Pacific to support diplomatic events, deliver coaching clinics and contribute to sport-for-development initiatives such as Get into Rugby PLUS, a flagship program that pairs the learning of life skills with rugby to promote positive behaviour and gender equality and to prevent violence against women, girls and boys.

To promote gender equality across the region, DFAT directs its PacificAus Sports partners to provide opportunities for Pacific women and girls to take their places as champions in both sport and their communities. Using the common language of rugby, PacificAus Sports is arguably succeeding where previous DFAT gender investments have stalled.

The success of the Fijiana Drua is transforming gender norms on and off the field. After winning the 2022 Super W competition in their inaugural season, the Fijiana returned home as household names and heroes. Provincial chiefs and villages greeted the players with traditional welcome ceremonies and sevusevu, a cultural tradition that had until then been reserved for men only. A record number of women’s and girls’ teams are now showcasing their talents across the Pacific. The CEOs of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa rugby unions have reported unprecedented growth and community support for women playing rugby. In Fiji, schoolgirls’ rugby has grown from 12 to 81 teams—a remarkable feat, given that just months earlier many female players faced strong resistance from their communities for wanting to play rugby.

Australia is not the only country seeking to capitalise on the Pacific’s love of the sport. China has become more adept at using the subtle areas of cooperation in the Pacific traditionally dominated by Australia. In 2019, Beijing gave Solomon Islands a $70 million grant to construct a new stadium capable of hosting this year’s Pacific Games. China has also been working quietly with the Samoan government to redevelop sporting venues across the capital Apia.

Australia responded to China’s stadium diplomacy with its own $17 million grant to help Solomon Islands host the Pacific Games. The funding will assist with the refurbishment of school dormitories, which will be used for athlete accommodation. After the games, the dormitories will be repurposed for senior school students from remote villages who need board in Honiara.

The depth of Australia’s presence in the Pacific sporting landscape is something that China can’t match with surface-level investments. The people of Tonga still celebrate the anniversary of their team defeating the Wallabies 16 to 11 in Brisbane in 1973. Fijians reminisce proudly about the spectacular rugby match in which their players flung overhead passes and made clever switches of attack that bewildered the Australians at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1952. Our shared sporting history is a great equaliser that brings our region together.

However, demand for sports infrastructure is mounting in the Pacific. This is particularly true in Fiji, which is now the permanent home of men’s and women’s Super Rugby teams and two world-class, medal-winning international rugby sevens teams. A visit to Fiji to experience the electric atmosphere of a live rugby game is on the bucket list of most fans. However, Fiji lacks a modern stadium capable of welcoming larger crowds for regular international events.

Fijian leaders would undoubtedly welcome sports infrastructure investment from Australia. Modern grounds and training facilities would ensure a more equitable playing field between Australian and Pacific teams. The flow-on economic benefits from sports tourism would greatly assist Fiji’s post-pandemic economic recovery. The refurbishment of stadium facilities would be a low-cost, high-visibility win for an international donor seeking to increase its presence in the Pacific.

Australia is embarking on a decade at the centre stage of world sport with rugby playing the starring role. Australia will host the 2027 men’s Rugby World Cup and 2029 women’s Rugby World Cup. Rugby sevens will also be played at the 2026 Melbourne Commonwealth Games and the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.

A golden decade of rugby will create a significant opportunity for Australia to build on its PacificAus Sports success and invest in pathways and infrastructure that will deliver increased opportunities for Pacific nations to participate—and benefit economically—as world sport descends on the region.

In rugby union, it’s said you should always play to your advantage. With the right investment, the government can leverage this once-in-a-generation opportunity and leave a legacy for Australian diplomacy, rugby and PacificAus Sports in the Pacific.

The first stop of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s recent Pacific trip was Solomon Islands, where journalists have been complaining about their treatment since the government swapped diplomatic allegiance to Beijing from Taipei in 2019. Media freedom has deteriorated, and journalists say leaders are now taking their cues from China.

Two of the country’s most senior journalists, Dorothy Wickham and Georgina Kekea, both board members of the Media Association of Solomon Islands, called for a boycott of the official press event when it became clear that only two questions would be allowed—one from a Chinese journalist and one from a Solomon Islands journalist.

Wickham said journalists protested against the limit because it meant they couldn’t get the information they needed to do their job to inform the people.

The Chinese delegation’s fourth stop was Fiji, where journalists are often subjected to intimidation and even imprisonment when they are overly critical of the government. The 2022 World Press Freedom Index labelled Fiji as the worst nation in the Pacific for journalists and placed it at 102nd position out of 180 countries.

Local freelance journalist Lice Movono said there was a lot of secrecy from the very beginning of the visit and heavy security with no access to the Chinese delegation.

‘To be a journalist in Fiji is to be worried about imprisonment all the time. Journalism is criminalised. You can be jailed or the company you work for can be fined a crippling amount that can shut down the operation … But to see foreign nationals pushing you back in your own country, that was a different level,’ she said.

Movono said she had never experienced anything like the treatment from the Chinese officials and described it as being treated like a criminal.

She said when Wang met the secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, Henry Puna, during the visit, she watched as visiting officials tried to remove an ABC cameraman.

She said the Chinese official told him, ‘You’re not Fijian; you’re from the ABC and not welcome.’

Since then, Movono said she’s been trolled and abused on Twitter from seemingly Chinese Twitter accounts.

The ABC’s Stephen Dziedzic said he was surprised by and unprepared for the hostility towards the media. He described how a member of the Fijian military put a hand on his right arm at the joint news conference with Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, urging him to stop asking questions.

But in a surprise move afterwards, the Chinese ambassador to Fiji agreed to take questions and gave the first confirmation that the multilateral security treaty had been rejected by Pacific leaders.

Dziedzic said he didn’t feel manhandled, but it was a fraught and difficult situation. ‘It was ridiculous they didn’t take questions,’ he said.

The Fijian Media Association voiced its concerns, with General Secretary Stanley Simpson saying this sort of media treatment wasn’t limited just to Wang’s visit.

Simpson said that when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Fiji in February, only one media organisation was chosen to ask a single question during the entire visit.

In Vanuatu, which has a history of government pressure on the media, the Chinese delegation held a press conference, but again with no questions.

Australian freelancer Ginny Stein, who had been hired to file for China Global Television Network, the Guardian Australia and Agence France-Presse, says she was initially told the press conference was only for local media but was allowed to attend along with fellow Australian freelancer Ben Bohane.

Bohane says he’s concerned that weeks later local journalists are still waiting for details of the agreements signed with China to be made publicly available. He said nothing had been published yet.

Samoa has traditionally been the model of press freedom in the region, but it has slipped from 21st place in 2021 to 45th place in the 2022 World Press Freedom Index.

Alexander Rheeney is editor of the Samoa Observer, a newspaper that’s held in high regard throughout the region for its independence. He raised the issue of access to the Chinese delegation directly with the Chinese embassy on the Thursday before Wang flew into Samoa.

But they said there would be no joint press conference or even a one-on-one interview with the foreign minister. Rheeney said he got the impression that the Chinese were in control of the whole state visit and protocols including media queries.

In Kiribati, the Chinese delegation made a brief five-hour stop despite a strict Covid-19 lockdown. Local journalist Rimon Rimon said the government had been coerced by Beijing to accommodate the visit.

Rimon said the government had been very secretive and people were frustrated and angry after only learning about the trip from a post on Facebook. He wasn’t allowed to ask questions and was told to stop filming by police outside the president’s house while the meeting was underway inside.

Rimon said he believed the order came from the Kiribati government in agreement with the Chinese delegation. He said Kiribati and China signed 10 agreements during the brief stop, but none has been made public and he’s been unable to obtain details of them.

While the Chinese delegation was exempt from strict Covid-19 border controls, about 20 high-ranking officials including the president, his advisers and police had to go into quarantine for a week after the visit.

In Tonga, the biggest Pacific debtor to China, the media was again blocked.

Veteran journalist Kalafi Moala, a long-time advocate of media freedom in the Pacific, said there was no briefing and no press conference but media was allowed access to take photos.

Papua New Guinean journalists faced the same treatment. The timing of visit raised some local concerns because the government was in caretaker mode in the lead-up to the election.

Two questions were permitted at a scheduled joint press conference—one for local media and another for the visiting Chinese media. However, Wang later allowed the resident ABC correspondent, Natalie Whiting, one question.

The Chinese success in controlling the media on this trip ended in Timor-Leste. Newly elected President Jose Ramos Horta, a long-time supporter of a free media, won a concession to enable local journalists to ask three questions.

Australian media consultant Bob Howarth, a former adviser to the Timorese media, described the pushback against Chinese secrecy as a press freedom breakthrough. ‘Journalists there are very active, with the union and the press council working together … Most Pacific countries have weak press councils and don’t have unions,’ he said.

During last week’s visit to Fiji, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that Australian peacekeepers would soon be joining Fijian peacekeepers in the Golan Heights as part of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF).

The announcement doesn’t come as a complete surprise, but the timing is a little odd considering Morrison’s thinly veiled criticism of the UN system in his speech earlier this month at the Lowy Institute. The idea of joint Australian–Fijian peacekeeping deployments was agreed to in the Fiji–Australia Vuvale Partnership, signed by Morrison and Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama in September.

There’s also been an increasing interest in joint military cooperation since the announcement of Australia’s role in redeveloping the Black Rock training facility in Nadi, which will act as a regional training hub for military and police peacekeeping.

But this is the first time specifics have been revealed, such as the mission that personnel will be deployed to.

Morrison’s statement—made to Australian players in a locker room at the PM’s XIII rugby league match in Suva—indicated that Australian troops would be sent to ‘train and support’ the Fijian contingent deployed to Syria. At the end of August, Fiji had 194 personnel deployed there. There’s no indication yet of how many Australians will be going.

UNDOF has been mandated since 1974 to monitor the ceasefire between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights on the Israel–Syria border. Fiji has deployed troops to UNDOF since 2013 and continues to make a sizeable contribution today. It has maintained its commitment despite an incident in which 45 Fijian peacekeepers were held hostage by militants in 2014.

Australia has made contributions in the region through another longstanding mission, the UN Truce Supervision Organisation. UNTSO was created to monitor armistice agreements in the region. Australia also appears to have deployed a staff officer to UNDOF in May, perhaps an indication that preparations were being made for future engagement.

It’s not clear yet what form the joint engagement will take. A number of different styles of co-deployments have been used in recent years that could provide a template. Australian personnel worked with a unit of Japanese engineers at the UN Mission in South Sudan. Another good example is the co-deployment of peacekeepers from Timor-Leste with a Portuguese contingent to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, a partnership which provided a significant capacity-building opportunity for the Timorese. European nations regularly participate in joint deployments, allowing them to share the burden and responsibilities of contributing to peacekeeping missions.

Fiji has extensive peacekeeping experience and has been contributing significant numbers of peacekeepers since its first deployment in 1978, particularly in the Middle East. In contrast, Australia’s contributions to peacekeeping have on the wane for some time. Morrison made no mention of peacekeeping in his recent address to the UN General Assembly, which suggests that it isn’t high on our priority list for engaging in UN activities.

Australia’s Pacific step-up is at the heart of this move. A joint deployment like this allows Australia to demonstrate its commitment to the Pacific region and at the same time fulfil its desire for greater defence cooperation and interoperability with the Fijian military in a live mission setting.

In this context, it’s important to ask what capabilities Australia will bring that Fiji hasn’t already developed over its long participation in UN peacekeeping. Confirmation of the exact nature of Australia’s contribution will shed some light on this key question. Its effectiveness will depend on how the Australian contribution is embedded into the existing Fijian contingent and how its command structure may change as a result.

For Australia, there are advantages in deploying peacekeepers to this mission and in this manner. Australian forces will benefit from working with their Fijian counterparts in an environment in which Fiji has had a sustained involvement. Australia’s familiarity with that part of the world through its commitment to UNTSO would also be a pull factor for the decision to deploy to the Golan Heights mission.

Deploying to peacekeeping missions also allows nations to be seen as good international actors. In recent years, Australia—like many developed countries—has been extremely reluctant to deploy to peacekeeping missions because of the risk of losing personnel. That’s a danger that comes with a political cost to any government that chooses to contribute to a UN mission, and many nations don’t see the deployment of their personnel as worth the risk. The co-deployment with Fiji shows that Australia is seeking ways of engaging in peacekeeping that benefit it and the UN, and also mitigate at least some of the risk.

A number of details still need to be filled in about this joint deployment. However, it should be seen as an opportunity to develop a model for future Australian peacekeeping engagement. The emphasis should be on being smarter and more innovative than before to allow for greater Australian contributions to UN peacekeeping. A well-structured and well-tailored co-deployment has the benefit of enabling Australia to demonstrate its commitment to the region while also fostering people-to-people links and enhanced defence cooperation.

The absence of Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama from the recent Pacific Islands Forum’s Leaders’ Meeting in Pohnpei wasn’t a surprise: he hasn’t attended a Forum Leaders’ Meeting since 2007. But taking away the commission of his stand-in, Foreign Minister Ratu Inoke Kubuabola, while he was sitting in the absent PM’s chair at the Leaders’ Meeting was a surprise. So too was Fiji’s almost simultaneous announcement to withdraw support of the agreed legal text of the economic integration treaty PACER Plus sponsored by the Forum.

While each might have been an isolated event, these developments are consistent with a malaise eating away at the unity of the Forum as an effective regional body. After 45 years, the PIF is showing signs of a deepening confusion regarding its regional purpose. From its creation in 1971, the Forum’s struggled with whether it should be a political club of leaders setting the regional agenda or an aid implementing agency.

The 1972 Forum leaders had a bet each way: they decided to retain a club-like institutional informality, with annual meetings for themselves, while establishing a treaty-based organisation headquartered in Suva to administer aid projects. This inherent conflict of interest was largely glossed over for several decades: Australia and New Zealand sat in the Forum Leaders’ Meeting setting regional priorities, while their officials oversighted the implementation of aid projects through the organisation’s arm, where they were the principal donors.

Australia took an activist approach: it used the Forum to address perceived regional state incapacity to deal with terrorism and the misuse of sovereignty by some member states. The most notable intervention was the RAMSI mission in the Solomon Islands in 2003.

An ambitious long-term strategy for regional integration under the Forum was formulated in 2005. The ‘Pacific Plan’ was expected develop regional approaches that would be implemented by the Forum’s member states or regional agencies.

The 2005 Forum Leaders’ Meeting opened a treaty for signature to make the Forum an inter-governmental organisation, with the Leaders’ Meeting its decision-making arm. All eligible states signed the PIF Treaty almost immediately. But it’s still not in force more than a decade later. Dissatisfaction with the outcomes of the Pacific Plan resulted in the less ambitious ‘Framework for Pacific Regionalism‘ in 2014.

Last year the Forum’s unresolved duality became critical when the Third Pacific Islands Development Forum Summit of Leaders threw down the gauntlet regarding Australia’s and New Zealand’s role in the Forum, through its Suva Declaration on Climate Change. The following week, Forum Leaders endorsed the Suva Declaration, but with qualifications that worried island leaders; Australia and New Zealand didn’t feel obligated to follow this agreement in the Paris climate change summit. That stance cost Australia and New Zealand support within the Forum, as well European allies: they’d appreciated the Suva Declaration’s assistance for their strong climate change position at Paris.

This year political salt was rubbed into this regional wound when the 4th PIDF Summit endorsed the idea of a regional climate change treaty, with a provision aimed at Australia: it’d ban new or expanded coalmines. The gesture was symbolic: Australia wouldn’t be bound by it, not being a member of the PIDF and unlikely to join the treaty.

Overtly there’s no rivalry between the Forum and PIDF. But the raison d’être for the PIDF stems from Prime Minister Bainimarama’s determination to reduce or eliminate Australia and New Zealand’s decision-making role in the Forum. Institutionally there’s no contest between the bodies financially or politically. The Forum’s budget is in the tens of millions of dollars. The PIDF’s budget, relying on voluntary contributions, is said to be well under a million dollars.

Heads of Government absences from the Forum Leaders’ Meeting are generally very few. But the PIDF Summit this year only drew three heads of government. Some of the success the PIDF has claimed in giving a regional platform to business and civil society increasingly appears to be covered by the Forum. This shadowing of the PIDF by the Forum was also evident in Pohnpei when French Polynesia and New Caledonia were accorded full membership in the Forum Leaders’ Meeting.

Where the Forum goes after Pohnpei will partly depend on how Prime Minster Bainimarama chooses to shape relations between Fiji and its traditional friends and their role in the Forum. The PIDF still hasn’t been brought into the Council of Regional Organisations in the Pacific, the principal inter-agency mechanism for cooperation.

As the Prime Minister is now Foreign Minister, the means by which Fiji had re-established its participation with the Forum seems to be more vulnerable. Last week Prime Minister Bainimarama told the UN General Assembly that Fiji was ‘in the process of re-evaluating’ its relationships with the rest of the world and that in assuming the position of Foreign Minister he ‘intended to steadily reform this Ministry and refine certain aspects of our foreign policy. To give it a new direction and a renewed sense of purpose.’

If Bainimarama continues his personal boycott and another minister takes the Leader’s chair for Fiji at future Forum meetings, there’ll be a loss of corporate memory and perhaps less political support back in Suva. But not everything depends on Fiji or its view of what a healthy Forum might look like. Much will hang on the attitudes and views of the other members of the Forum, including Australia and how seriously they see the need for serious reform of the Forum, particularly its incompatible dual purposes. It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out before Samoa hosts the Forum next year.