Tag Archive for: Pacific Islands Forum

Pacific security in 2025

2025 will be a big year for Pacific security as Pacific island nations grapple with upcoming elections, disaster recovery, watching the situation in New Caledonia and navigating geopolitical tensions. The Australian government will be kept busy as it seeks to remain the region’s primary security partner.

In 2024, tensions escalated into unrest in New Caledonia, many Pacific countries faced political instability, natural disasters caused devastation across the region, and Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong declared that Australia and China are in a ‘permanent state of contest’.

Many of the same security challenges will feature in 2025, but new regional security initiatives and new governments could change how they are addressed.

In 2025, we can expect national elections in Australia, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Tonga and Vanuatu.

The Tongan and Vanuatu elections will follow political instability of late last year.

Tonga’s new prime minister, Aisake Eke, was voted in by parliament on Christmas Eve, following Siaosi Sovaleni’s resignation in the face of a looming motion of no confidence earlier in December. Eke will have less than a year to deliver before Tonga returns to the polls.

Vanuatu will hold snap national elections on 16 January after the president dissolved parliament in mid-November as a result of ongoing instability. Like most elections, people primarily will vote based on domestic issues, particularly as the country faces a lengthy rebuild of Port Vila following the December earthquake. But the election could have greater implications for regional security than usual.

Over the past few years, Australia has pursued a security agreement with Vanuatu. However, the proposed agreement has contributed to political instability and leadership change. While new leadership may present an opportunity to progress the agreement, continuing political instability may obstruct security development.

Even if the agreement remains stalled, the Australian government will have its hands full delivering on the promises it’s made across the region.

Just before Christmas, Australia made a flurry of announcements with Pacific partners—including Nauru, PNG and Solomon Islands—demonstrating its commitment to security in the region. Those agreements are in addition to commitments through Pacific owned and led regional security initiatives financed by Australia, such as the Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI) and Pacific Response Group.

The ‘permanent contest’ with China has shifted Australia’s approach to Pacific policy. In making agreements, Canberra has started adding conditions that support government’s aim of being the region’s primary security partner.

Agreements with Nauru and PNG, as well as the Tuvalu–Australia Falepili Union, have shown that Australia wants to ensure that its efforts, investments and infrastructure are adequately secured. In 2025 and beyond, Australia should ensure these agreements are transparent—for example, by detailing the strings attached to the deal to create a PNG team for Australia’s National Rugby League. This would set Australia apart from others, such as China, which still hasn’t made public any details of its 2022 security agreement with Solomon Islands.

Unfortunately, natural disasters and environmental challenges are almost certain in 2025. Humanitarian aid and disaster relief operations will be necessary as we approach the peak of the 2024–25 high-risk weather season.

The Pacific Response Group should provide a platform for regional military coordination on disaster response, but there’s still plenty of work to be done to show how it will interact with civilian or regional relief mechanisms, such as the PPI.

Competition with China is likely to continue to creep into this space, and those wary of China’s influence will be watching the use of aid in the battle for hearts and minds.

New Caledonia will also remain on the radar of many, with little progress being made on political negotiations. Political instability in Noumea and Paris is affecting efforts to recover from the 2024 riots. Pacific nations are ready to support New Caledonia and, if progress isn’t made before the Pacific Islands Forum this year, additional missions to the French overseas territory could occur.

Many eyes will be on the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, to be hosted by Solomon Islands in September. Positive security outcomes of last year’s meeting, including endorsement of the PPI, were overshadowed by a controversial change in recognition of Taiwan in an official statement. China is likely to further push Pacific nations to cut ties with Taiwan and undermine its legitimacy in regional forums, and Honiara might be more lenient towards Chinese pressure.

Pacific countries will have to ensure their voices are heard when navigating these tensions. To this end, Fiji and Vanuatu released their first foreign policy white papers last year, and in April PNG will table its first since 1981.

In September, PNG will celebrate its 50th anniversary of independence, so the month will be busy for Pacific leaders. Development partners will seek to capitalise on the occasion, making large announcements in partnership with PNG.

Very few of the events in 2024 could have been accurately predicted, including leadership changes, unrest and disasters. This year will be no exception, and the region and its partners must be ready, as always, to adapt.

A diplomat’s tantrum shows China’s insecurity in the Pacific

Beijing’s Pacific envoy threw a tantrum over a mention of Taiwan at the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) last week. In doing so, he revealed China’s deeper insecurity over its Pacific presence, especially because of the success of the Australian-funded Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI).

‘Leaders reaffirmed the 1992 Leaders decision on relation with Taiwan/Republic of China’ was the innocuous line from the forum communique, signalling no change in policy. But it led to a fiery tirade from the envoy, Qian Bo, on a supposed error and Taiwan’s status in the PIF. Qian said ‘it must be a mistake’ and angrily demanded that ‘there must be a correction on the text’. They were fierce words for a diplomat.

Shortly after he voiced his grievances, the communique was taken down and uploaded again, this time without reference to Taiwan.

Although Qian clocked a minor victory in removing the line, there’s more meaning in his behaviour. In a forum that relies on consensus, Palau, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu, which maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, blocked an attempt by the Solomon Islands—likely acting as a proxy for China’s interests—to revoke Taiwan’s status as a development partner.

The story of the 53rd PIF Leaders Meeting is not a positive one for China. The United States and Australia both announced major efforts that would entrench their presence in the region while furthering the Unlocking Blue Pacific Prosperity program.

Most significant was Australia’s $400 million backing for the PPI. Given the PPI’s origins in the Pacific Islands Chiefs of Police organisation, it is of genuine Pacific origin and targeted towards Pacific needs. Nonetheless, it will bolster Australia’s regional presence at China’s expense.

Australia has traditionally been one of the Pacific islands’ primary policing partners. In recent years, however, China has made internal security aid a key vector for spreading influence in the Pacific, sparking Western concerns. China’s policing activity has increased dramatically since 2020. Chinese police training, forces and equipment transfers have been most prominent in the Solomon Islands and increasingly ingrained in Vanuatu and Kiribati’s law enforcement.

Australia’s relative position in Pacific policing has declined, but now the $400 million spending in the PPI firmly reestablishes its prominence, giving China cause for anxiety.

Look no further than Beijing mouthpiece the Global Times to understand that anxiety. Both before and after Australian Prime Minister Albanese’s announcement, the Global Times posted articles decrying the initiative with exaggerated, false and hypocritical claims about Australia’s intentions. It’s campaign and evidence of pre-emptive efforts to influence Pacific leaders before the forum expose the extent to which the PPI worries China.

China’s and Australia’s successes at the PIF are different. Australia entrenched its status as a Pacific policing partner through its funding for a regional initiative, while China’s only achievement was removing a sentence from the communique. Although it could be considered a limited success, China could not push a genuine policy change in revoking Taiwan’s status. It was also unable to block the PPI through objections by Vanuatu and the Melanesian Spearhead Group.

Western narratives tend to be fatalistic, suggesting China’s increasing influence in the Pacific is inevitable. This leaders meeting demonstrates how little water this narrative holds. China has made significant advances in gaining influence in the Pacific, but it is still far from displacing the West. China has ostensibly captured the Solomon Islands, but Australia and the US will remain the partners of choice in many Pacific countries.

Even where Chinese influence is the strongest, the West has maintained a large presence. Australia and New Zealand recently upgraded an airfield in the Solomon Islands for $55 million. In fact, Chinese investment in the Pacific has been trending downward while Australia and the US are devoting more resources to partnerships within the region.

Qian’s outburst is not atypical of Chinese diplomats when challenged on their One China Principle, and his fierceness stems from the necessity of suppressing any hints of Taiwanese sovereignty. However, his anger also likely reflects China’s frustrations in the PIF. Changing Taiwan’s status and suppressing the PPI is its likely primary goal.

More broadly, Qian shows a degree of insecurity over China’s future in the Pacific. Despite its advances, it has also been thwarted at times—see, for example, the failure in 2022 of foreign affairs chief Wang Yi to get 10 Pacific nations to sign on to a sweeping memorandum of understanding.

Ultimately, Qian’s fiery words reflect Western accomplishment. The more insecure China is, the more it will rely on diplomatic fighting words like Qian’s.

Shuttle diplomacy to the queen’s funeral an opportunity for Australia and the Pacific

The state funeral of a respected international leader is always a solemn event but inevitably also an occasion for an impromptu summit. Certainly, a wide range of issues including the war in Ukraine, the global energy crisis and post-pandemic economic recovery will be discussed by world leaders outside the official proceedings of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.

While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will join allies, G20 partners and Indo-Pacific colleagues in these talks, he also has a regional agenda that will have begun on his journey to London.

In consultation with New Zealand, Australia offered to provide transport for invited Pacific island leaders to the funeral. This offer extended to being picked up by the Royal Australian Air Force to join the Australian flight. Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu have accepted.

Although it appears China’s President Xi Jinping is unlikely to attend the funeral, Beijing’s security challenges in the Pacific islands region as well as more broadly will provide the subtext for much of Albanese’s generous support to the ‘Pacific family’.

Most of the members of the Pacific family have compelling national and diplomatic reasons for wanting to join Albanese in attending the funeral of the late queen and to meet her successor.

When King Charles III ascended to the throne of the United Kingdom on the death of his mother, he became head of state for around half the membership of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF).* Besides Australia and New Zealand, King Charles assumed the crowns of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. In addition, via New Zealand, he is the head of state for the Cook Islands and Niue.

Perhaps rather more regionally consequential, King Charles became head of the Commonwealth of Nations, albeit not by hereditary succession but as per an agreement at the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

In the current environment of geopolitical rivalry regarding China, holding the Commonwealth together may be one of the more important challenges facing the new king. For many decades, the Commonwealth has been an important vehicle internationally for shaping and promoting democratic values and defending a rules-based international order.

Queen Elizabeth mentored the Commonwealth through difficult periods of decolonisation in various parts of Britain’s empire so successfully that, when the Pacific’s turn arrived, entry into the Commonwealth appeared welcoming, uncontroversial and virtually automatic.

Indeed, being part of the Commonwealth club has been so attractive that every eligible PIF member has joined. Today, more than four-fifths of the PIF states are members of the Commonwealth. Even twice-suspended Fiji resumed active membership after the suspensions were lifted.

Over the nine decades of its evolution, the Commonwealth has shifted from being a means for the dominions to negotiate their political and foreign policy relations with ‘Mother England’ to embracing the post-colonial concerns of the majority of the current 56 members.

The key tangible benefit for participating in the Commonwealth rests in the breadth and variety of its membership. The smallest Pacific states meet biennially with leading developing states as well as significant G20 countries on a level playing field.

By influencing the CHOGM agenda on issues of importance to them, PIF nations can amplify their concerns and influence globally. Recent meetings have addressed climate change, the blue economy and cybersecurity—all matters that have had high salience on the Pacific’s regional agenda.

Corridor diplomacy enables the Pacific leaders to lobby effectively individually and collectively on matters of particular concern using a common language with a shared body of values and experience.

In addition, the Commonwealth secretariat provides ongoing administrative support, which, for four decades, has had programs specifically targeted to the needs and vulnerabilities of small island states. These include aid facilitation in addition to linkages with important UN economic and development agencies.

The importance of the Commonwealth to the Pacific islands, however, is less its breaking new ground on their agenda than the role it has played in shaping and reinforcing the core interests and values that they have adopted themselves regionally.

The Commonwealth has articulated the need to protect democratic values through a series of pronouncements stretching from the Singapore Declaration of 1971 and the Harare Declaration of 1991 through to the 2013 Charter of the Commonwealth. These principles emphasise, inter alia, democratic processes, human rights, the rule of law and freedom of expression.

The PIF has made parallel assertions, adapted to regional circumstances, particularly in the 2000 Biketawa Declaration and reaffirmed through the 2018 Boe Declaration.

Significantly, both the Commonwealth and the PIF adopted mechanisms to promote and protect the implementation of these values. The 1995 Millbrook Commonwealth Action Programme provided for suspensions and expulsions for violations of the core principles of the Harare Declaration.

In part modelled on Millbrook, the Biketawa Declaration’s provisions included mechanisms for regional support to defuse an impending crisis as well as the processes to intervene should a serious breach of its principles occur. Both sets of sanctions were employed against Fiji after the 2006 military coup.

The 2003 Latimer House Principles provide another important crossover linking the commitment both the Commonwealth and the PIF have made to promoting democracy and the rule of law. This statement sets out agreed best practice for implementing parliamentary democracy, which has had significant influence in the Pacific.

By history, democratic traditions and institutions, the Commonwealth ties with the Pacific islands have made significant contributions to democracy in the region. Challenges to judicial independence in Kiribati, the peaceful transfer of power in Samoa and media freedom in Solomon Islands serve as indicators that the Commonwealth with King Charles III at its head will remain relevant.

A flight to Queen Elizabeth’s funeral will provide a sober but useful opportunity for Australia and the Pacific family to reminisce on the importance of the common values they share and perhaps renew their commitment to them.

* The exact membership of the PIF is uncertain at the moment. There may be only 14 members. Kiribati has left the regional body and the Marshall Islands has asserted that it couldn’t prevent its denunciation from taking effect. Given the reconstitution of the PIF under the 2005 treaty, the special arrangement for the territories of French Polynesia and New Caledonia may be invalid.

South Pacific vexed by climate change, Covid-19 and China contest

‘Brothers and sisters—our region has not faced a more vexing set of circumstances for decades. The triple challenges of climate, Covid and strategic contest will challenge us in new ways. We understand that the security of any one Pacific family member rests on security for all.’

 — Foreign Minister Penny Wong, speech to Pacific Islands Forum secretariat, Suva, Fiji, 26 May 2022

As ever, the South Pacific islands know they need Australia—although, as ever, that doesn’t mean the islands have to like that need. Or be happy about the central role Australia must play as times get tougher.

Australia’s sharper focus on what it needs in the South Pacific is partly matched by the region’s apprehensive understanding of what it faces.

Since being sworn in as foreign minister on 23 May (two days after the election), Penny Wong has crisscrossed the South Pacific—Fiji twice, Samoa and Tonga, New Zealand and Solomon Islands. On her third day in the job, her first major speech was to the secretariat of the Pacific Islands Forum.

No previous Australian foreign minister has spent so much time in the islands in their first two months. Wong’s travels represent a diplomatic duel with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, who had just done his own trek through the islands. The Pacific is now a place for active and direct strategic competition.

Six years as the opposition’s shadow foreign minister gave Wong a close view of those ‘vexing’ forces (synonyms: troublesome, disturbing). Australia’s Pacific step-up reaches its sixth birthday in September, so a lot has happened during Wong’s watch as shadow minister. Now she gets to run the mechanism of a major Australian policy response that’s still an ambitious work in progress.

History and geography are at the heart of the step-up, even as it’s driven by the duel. Canberra commits greater attention along with increasing amounts of cash. The galvanising element is China’s challenge to Australia’s traditional place as the pre-eminent South Pacific power.

The step-up has two drivers: the many things the islands need and the need to respond to China’s expanding power.

In setting out the three vexing challenges, Wong can tell a different story on how the new Labor government will deal with climate change. That’s made a significant difference to the atmospherics and the substance of discussions with the islands. At the summit of the Pacific Islands Forum, Australia and New Zealand could play their traditional role of good cop and good cop.

In her first-up Pacific speech and during the summit, Wong played climate as a trump card and a symbol of Australia’s role—a major point of regional agreement rather than difference:

As Australia’s first-ever climate minister, I know the imperative that we all share to take serious action to reduce emissions and transform our economies. Nothing is more central to the security and economies of the Pacific. I understand that climate change is not an abstract threat, but an existential one.

On Covid and contest, Wong can deploy another c-word: continuity. Labor picks up much of the previous government’s Pacific language, and not just the ‘Pacific family’ usage.

Symbolism and substance came together during the forum summit with the announcement that Australia’s Telstra had finalised the acquisition of Digitel Pacific, serving Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and Nauru.

In a break with the ‘privatisation’ orthodoxies of the past 40 years, Scott Morrison’s Coalition government bought Australia a Pacific phone company. Anthony Albanese’s government nods at a sound piece of policy, even with a hefty price tag. The China contest will cost lots of cash.

Foiling any Digicel flirtation with China cost the equivalent of A$2.1 billion. Canberra threw in US$1.33 billion, via the federal government’s Export Finance Australia. Telstra put in US$270 million but gets 100% of the equity. Telstra got the gift; Canberra pays. Government documents on the Digicel deal suggest a frantic on–off effort at whacking that China mole.

Wong’s use of the phrase ‘strategic challenge’ is merely a polite framing of China. And Wong’s description of what Australia can do with the island amounts to a compare-and-contrast damning of what China offers:

Australia will remain a critical development partner for the Pacific family in the years ahead. We are a partner that won’t come with strings attached, nor impose unsustainable financial burdens. We are a partner that won’t erode Pacific priorities or institutions. Instead we believe in transparency. We believe in true partnerships. We will respect Pacific priorities and Pacific institutions.

The climate–Covid–contest list of vexations can be an alliterative nod to the notion of the South Pacific as an ‘increasingly crowded and complex region’—the phrase used in the forum communiqué in 2018.

The communiqué this year reflected on 50 years of regionalism, highlighting that ‘the Pacific Islands Forum stands at a critical juncture in its history’, amid ‘intensifying geostrategic interest’. The range of challenges ‘exacerbate the region’s existing vulnerabilities and dependencies’:

Leaders noted that the region continues to be a highly contested sphere of interest, in a wider geopolitical setting with external powers seeking to assert their own interests. In the current strategic context, Leaders recognised the importance of remaining unified as a Forum family to address common challenges and to capitalise on key opportunities.

China makes ambitious offers to South Pacific states. Australia’s great counteroffer is to South Pacific people.

The political strength of the Australian offer is that it’s the bipartisan consensus of Labor and the Coalition. The dollars going to the South Pacific express the sense of the Canberra consensus. And Australia’s understanding of what’s going to be a long strategic contest.

Geopolitics looms larger than ever at Pacific Islands Forum summit

Last week’s meeting of Pacific Islands Forum leaders celebrated the region while confronting deeply familiar regional pressures.

The big questions rang out in Fiji as they have since the forum was created 51 years ago.

How does South Pacific regionalism protect the independence of the islands and deliver more for their people? What must the forum do as shield and tool to handle the big powers that always crowd the South Pacific?

The questions echo down from the first meeting of what became the South Pacific Forum in Wellington (August 1971) and the second meeting in Canberra (February 1972).

Ghosts from those times still stalk. Fundamentals do tend to have lasting force.

As the forum prepared for its first meeting in 1971, the historian Stuart Doran noted Australia’s worry that ‘a new organisation could provide a stage for attacks on, and attempts to reform, Australia’s attitudes to areas such as immigration policy, the trade imbalance with the South Pacific, and alleged economic exploitation. But difficulties of this kind were considered manageable “given authoritative and persuasive Australian participation”.’ Plus ça change …

From those creation moments in Wellington and Canberra, the kangaroo–kiwi double act has been a South Pacific feature.

Australia and New Zealand are enablers who want to belong; a core bit of region-making is deciding who is in or out. The forum helped two former colonial powers reinvent their roles and obtain full membership privileges.

The trans-Tasman twins offer strength, especially in financing the forum’s secretariat. An important bit of symbolism with a cash cost is that the kangaroo–kiwi contribution to the secretariat has been cut from 70% to 49%. The islands have chosen to pay more for what is theirs (helped by extra French cash from New Caledonia and French Polynesia).

As part of the forum’s foundation fabric, the Australia – New Zealand partnership has the smoothness of long effort. Beneath the surface, there’s always plenty of kangaroo–kiwi kicking and scratching about who is doing the thinking and the leading. Back in 1971 and 1972 there was much diplomatic rivalry and the Canberra system grouched about kiwi ‘grandstanding’. (Did I mention that some things never change?)

The double act worked well in Suva last week. The set-up work was done at the Sydney talks between prime ministers Jacinda Ardern and Anthony Albanese. The foreign policy speech Ardern delivered at the Lowy Institute was a fine example of the kiwi ability to stand close to the kangaroo while seeing things differently.

Ardern’s good humour was much assisted by the reality that she and Albanese could revert to the traditional roles of good cop and good cop at the Pacific Islands Forum.

Albanese went to Suva with a new story to tell on Australia’s climate change commitment. At the last face-to-face summit in 2019, Australia inflicted wounds and took bruises in a rancorous climate debate that nearly crashed the leaders’ retreat.

The Suva summit was talked up as the friendliest ever (with leaders posing for selfies with Albanese), and it issued a communiqué that didn’t push Australia on coal or what Fiji calls ‘the fossil fuel addiction’.

The happy vibe was undermined by the empty chairs—Kiribati, Marshall Islands and Nauru. The Nauru absence was because of Covid-19, but Kiribati and the Marshalls were the result of Micronesia’s exit from the forum.

The repair work should see Marshall Islands and the rest of Micronesia return, but Kiribati delivered a pre-summit shock by declaring that it’ll go ahead with its withdrawal from the forum.

At its creation, the South Pacific Forum was a Melanesian and Polynesian affair. Micronesia doesn’t feel the history in the same way, just as the geography imposes different perspectives.

Kiribati’s exit was as much about domestic politics as it was about unhappiness with the forum. But as with much in the islands these days, there’s a China element in the story. Join the thoughts: China is today a factor in the internal politics of South Pacific states; this is more than the old China–Taiwan wrangle over diplomatic recognition.

When the forum was created, the newly independent states wanted an instrument to handle their former colonisers. Now it’s great-power competition.

The islands struggle to push back at the new Indo-Pacific construct and their inevitable role in the central balance contest. As Meg Taylor, the forum’s secretary-general in 2018, described the task back then, the aim was to ensure regional priorities and retain strategic autonomy.

Alas for the island status quo, expanding power systems always expand and the history of the South Pacific over the centuries since it was a Spanish lake is that the big powers always come to play.

The new forum response is the 2050 strategy for the Blue Pacific to confront ‘critical challenges such as climate change, sustainable development and security’.

The quest to be friends to all but beholden to none gets tougher.

The contest is as disruptive as it is galvanising, as Anna Powles and Joanne Wallis note in advocating the Pacific’s need for an institutionalised mechanism, akin to the ASEAN Regional Forum, so island states can negotiate with partners on security. Join this with their writing on track 1.5 and track 2 dialogue in the Pacific. Powles and Wallis are a classy version of what the kangaroo–kiwi double act can do for the region.

The ASEAN Regional Forum was created in 1993–94, an optimistic time after the end of the Cold War when the Asia–Pacific was happily making new institutions.

A similar South Pacific security effort today responds to the new cold war. It’d draw on the hard lessons of the ASEAN forum’s three decades; it is still stuck on the first rung of the security-creation business, which is ‘confidence building’.

The ASEAN forum draws foreign ministers from across the Indo-Pacific for the annual meeting of foreign ministers. A Pacific version could be built on the existing meeting of foreign ministers, held before the leaders’ summit.

At 51, the Pacific Islands Forum is a successful and confident expression of the region, but in the security realm it certainly needs some confidence building.

China’s push into the region casts shadow over long-awaited Pacific leaders’ meeting

In ordinary circumstances, the opportunity to celebrate the Pacific Islands Forum’s 50-year contribution to Pacific regionalism would be expected to dominate next week’s leaders’ meeting in Fiji.

However, had circumstances been normal, the half-century anniversary would have been feted last year. Due to two years of border closures and travel restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Suva gathering will be the first chance in three years for the PIF leaders to meet formally.

Covid’s impact has gone well beyond simply preventing two annual meetings. Arguably, the absence of the face-to-face meeting in 2020 contributed significantly to the breakdown in communication that precipitated the Micronesian threat to withdraw from the PIF permanently.

Confirmation of the June agreement to resolve the Micronesian dispute will be on next week’s agenda. It’s not expected to be problematic unless complicated by what has emerged as the meeting’s most sensitive topic.

Ironically, the catalyst for healing the PIF’s internal rift is the issue that may open an even greater cleavage in regional coherence.

In mid-February, the Micronesian leaders announced a ‘pause’ in their denunciations of the PIF treaty, stating that progress had been made on addressing their grievances. They gave the other PIF members until June to confirm the promised reforms.

Less than a fortnight later, a leaked draft of a China – Solomon Islands security agreement has galvanised concern that this would be a not-so-thin wedge for broader Chinese security ambitions in the Pacific islands.

David Panuelo, the president of the Federated States of Micronesia, sent a three-page letter to Solomons’ Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare detailing his fear that the agreement would embroil the Pacific in a potentially ruinous broader geopolitical power struggle that would ‘fragment’ the region.

Panuelo’s concerns were reinforced when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced a 10-day visit to the Pacific islands in late May to promote two regional agreements.

The first, a proposed China – Pacific island countries common development vision, contained provisions for security and governance cooperation and outlined development aspirations. The second offered a five-year action plan to begin implementing the common vision.

Beijing’s initiative was surprisingly maladroit in both timing and execution. Its temporal proximity to the revelations about the Sino-Solomons agreement as well as its content suggested a desire to extend the Solomons pact to the regional level. An aura of secrecy was added because, like the Solomons pact, these regional proposals came into public view only when they were leaked to the media before the tour began.

The ham-fisted diplomacy of the tour elevated regional concerns when local media were prevented from asking questions of Wang and reports emerged that even newly won Beijing ally Kiribati had to be pressured into allowing the visit.

Again, Panuelo took the lead in denouncing the Chinese initiative by writing an eight-page letter to 21 Pacific leaders setting out the myriad risks embodied in the Chinese proposals. He also pounced on the marginalisation of the islander input through China’s circulation of a ‘predetermined joint communique’.

Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa articulated the views of many of the leaders who met with Wang in Suva in late May that the Chinese proposals should not be considered then. The breadth of the proposals, she argued, required the views of the entire membership of the PIF, not just those states recognising Beijing.

Following this rebuff, China proposed a parallel foreign ministers’ meeting alongside the PIF leaders’ meeting to regain some regional initiative. In the unlikely event it’s held, such a meeting would raise the dysfunctional prospect of the PIF leaders and their foreign ministers reaching different views on Beijing’s regional push.

Beijing has recently promulgated a proposal to synchronise its two stalled regional agreements with its Belt and Road Initiative. Whether that tactic would strengthen acceptance of its ‘vision’ is problematic.

The extraterritorial influence claimed in the Sino-Solomons security agreement has been reasserted against one of the PIF states that will have a say in the leaders’ meeting. Tuvalu was outraged when the Chinese challenged the composition of its delegation to the UN Ocean Conference because it included three Taiwanese nationals.

The traditional friends of the Pacific islands have responded with their own regional initiative to enhance their collective cooperation with PIF states. In late June, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and New Zealand announced the establishment of Partners in the Blue Pacific, a mechanism to more directly support the PIF’s 2050 ‘Blue Pacific’ strategy for regional development.

Wang wrote an op-ed in the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece the Global Times deriding the proposal as an ‘empty shell’, while other critics called it ‘AUKUS plus’ or a constraint on forum sovereignty.

Partially in reaction to all these developments, the PIF has decided to defer the normal post-PIF dialogue partners’ meetings to avoid direct lobbying by the non-PIF states during the leaders’ meeting.

Just how fully the sweeping Chinese initiatives and the various regional and extra-regional reactions will dominate the PIF leaders’ discussions will depend on how willing the member states are to reach a definitive response.

Thus far, the indications are that there’s little appetite for weakening ties with the region’s traditional friends or rewarding Beijing for its overreach in putting regional security so visibly on the table.

Nevertheless, the leaders are likely to feel that holding Beijing’s ‘vision’ at arm’s length is as far as they can go for now without intensifying Chinese pressure for some stake in the regional security game.

Sogavare’s expressed desire for a closer and more permanent security relationship with China on the very eve of the PIF meeting is a complicating development that tangibly reminds other members of the ties between the Sino-Solomons agreement and China’s regional vision.

This is the nightmare of geostrategic rivalry that the PIF has wanted to avoid for the past five years, and now it’s here with the potential for long-term adverse consequences.

All this comes when Australia’s new prime minister, Anthony Albanese, would prefer to be delivering his much more supportive message on climate change to an audience that has waited a decade to hear it.

Repeating history? Australia’s new intervention in Solomon Islands

Karl Marx claimed, ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce’, suggesting that failing to learn from experience tells something about those in power. At the first repeat, all the ensuing misfortunes are tragic because they were avoidable. The second repeat reveals inexcusable incompetence.

We are currently witnessing a case of history repeating itself with almost carbon-copy exactness in Solomon Islands today.

Rewinding to Honiara in June 2000, we find civil unrest paralysing the capital, with rioting causing deaths and the destruction of property. At the political level, the rioters’ key demand was that the prime minister resign.

The root cause was ethnic division between the large population of people from the island of Malaita who had moved to Guadalcanal (where Honiara sits) and the people of Guadalcanal who feared dispossession from their ancestral lands.

The Malaita Eagle Force, an armed militia created to protect Honiara’s Malaitans from the Isatabu Freedom Movement, a Guadalcanalese militia that had embarked on an 18-month campaign to expel the Malaitans.

Despite the deaths, destruction and repeated requests from Solomon Islands Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa’alu for police assistance to restore order, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer demurred, arguing it was an internal affair.

In June 2000, Ulufa’alu was forced to resign after being held under armed guard by the Malaita Eagle Force. Ironically, as a result of the coup, the current prime minister, Mannaseh Sogavare, was raised from leader of the opposition to the prime ministership.

One might simplistically draw the conclusion that Prime Minister Scott Morrison had learned the lesson of history. Sogavare asked for help and within a day Morrison responded with Australian assistance.

However, this assessment only takes into account the point in history when the crisis has reached a peak.

In order to avoid Marx’s tragedy of history repeating itself, the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) proposed a means to deflate a crisis before it exploded. Meeting in Kiribati in October 2000, the PIF leaders drafted the Biketawa Declaration to pre-emptively deal with threats to democracy such as the coups that that had occurred in Fiji and the Solomons earlier that year.

Given the similarities between the contemporary circumstances in the Solomons and those of 2000, it might be asked why Biketawa has not been used to deal with precisely the situation it was created to meet.

Frankly, it’s a good question.

For those with passing familiarity with Biketawa, the answer could be the need for a rapid response in a time of crisis. Certainly, the 2017 security treaty between Australia and Solomon Islands was the faster way of delivering police support.

The Biketawa process requires more time to activate. The secretary general of the PIF consults with the chair and, if they deem it warranted, they set up a ministerial action group, an eminent persons’ group or some form of mediation process.

Clearly, this is a ponderous process not built for speed.

The speed of the Australian response in today’s case is unique. Australia has no similar agreement with any other state in the Pacific, so this model is unavailable for use elsewhere.

The bilateral treaty itself is directly a consequence of the Biketawa Declaration.

The declaration’s processes enabled the 2003 establishment of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, or RAMSI, to deal the escalating civil strife that followed from the 2000 coup. Some 14 years later, the bilateral security agreement was concluded as part of the steps to provide for post-RAMSI security.

A critical weakness with the Biketawa process isn’t necessarily that it’s slow but rather that it requires action early enough avoid a physical crisis.

A potential threat to security in the Solomons has been recognised for well over a year, so there should have been time to set in motion the Biketawa conciliation arrangements.

Travel restrictions due to Covid-19 and a serious internal dispute made it difficult for the PIF to take a proactive role to initiate a regional action to calm the situation.

Equally, had Sogavare sought to activate the Biketawa process, the PIF would have found it difficult, but perhaps not impossible, to respond affirmatively for the same reasons.

The bilateral security treaty has allowed a quick response, but it gives Australia more ownership of the local security and political problems in the Solomons than Australia wants.

Morrison partially acknowledged this when he asserted that Australia is not in the Solomons to prop up the Sogavare government. In addition, he has sought support for the Australian intervention from Fiji, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand.

Yet already there are local concerns that the intervention is buying Sogavare time to get on top of his political problems and hold together a coalition that some have defected from.

The opportunity to use the Biketawa Declaration pre-emptively is now well and truly gone, but it’s not too late to use the regional crisis management mechanism it provides as well as a regionally sanctioned exit strategy.

The billions spent on RAMSI bought peace and stability for a time but did not solve the underlying problems that have festered in Solomon Islands since 1999.

The current armed intervention has been enabled by a post-RAMSI insurance policy that was taken out precisely because there was a lack of confidence that 14 years of constructive occupation had achieved its objective of national reconstruction and reconciliation.

Fixating on China or Taiwan as the cause of the current crisis is blame-shifting in an unworthy attempt to avoid accepting that the root causes of the problems in the Solomons are local.

Some external factors may be being exploited by local political interests. But they will be better dealt with by resolving the internal tensions that seek to draw these external influences into decades-old domestic antagonisms.

Re-engaging with Biketawa offers one way of bringing Australia’s ‘Pacific family’ into an exit policy that involves all sides of Solomons politics and society in trying once again to find an agreeable long-term solution to the crisis.

Pacific Islands Forum: Finding meaning in a ‘typo’?

Sometimes what appears to be a mistake is just prescience waiting for events to catch up. This may be the case with the ‘slip of the pen’ in the Federated States of Micronesia’s note verbale to Fiji implementing its decision to quit the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), as announced by the five Micronesian members—the FSM, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru and Palau—in an earlier communiqué.

The FSM denounced the Agreement Establishing the Pacific Islands Forum (2005) rather than the similar sounding Agreement Establishing the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (2000) cited in the Micronesian presidents’ communiqué.

The error could be dismissed as just a typo—someone left out the key word ‘Secretariat’ in hasty drafting. However, the slip cannot be attributed solely to a missing word. The note verbale actually cites the relevant article from the 2005 treaty rather than the appropriate article from the 2000 treaty.

Some have argued that this error will have no practical consequence. Since Fiji is the depository state for both treaties, it will know what is meant. Recent events, however, may well turn the FSM’s diplomatic faux pas into an act of prescience.

The error was possible because there are two treaties, but only one—the 2000 treaty establishing the PIF secretariat—is in force. Precognition rather than error may come from deliberations underway in the Fijian parliament to ratify the 2005 treaty. It’s said the decision to ratify will be the last needed to bring the 2005 treaty into force.

This issue highlights one of the long-standing concerns going back to the very origins of the PIF. The leaders who founded the PIF’s predecessor, the South Pacific Forum, strongly resisted taking their association down the treaty path.

The second leaders’ meeting held in Canberra in February 1972 devoted most of its time to organisational issues. Critically, the leaders wanted to avoid the bureaucratic constraints which they felt had stymied their efforts to reform the South Pacific Commission in 1970.

Nevertheless, they felt that they needed some administrative support for their development aspirations and, with some hesitancy, agreed to establish a small OECD-type office to be called the South Pacific Bureau of Economic Cooperation, or SPEC.

Both to limit costs and to preserve relative equality, SPEC was to be funded by a formula of balanced interests rather than membership. The island members collectively paid a third, Australia a third and New Zealand a third.

Contrary to some suggestions, SPEC was not intended to be a secretariat, and nor was it a new name for the 1960s Pacific Islands Producers Association (PIPA). PIPA was formally incorporated into SPEC in 1974 and SPEC was only given a limited secretarial role in organising the annual leaders’ meetings in 1975.

A second challenge for the 1972 forum meeting was expanded membership. Both Niue and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony were plausible candidates because of their membership in PIPA. Australia was keen to support the inclusion of Papua New Guinea.

PNG was hopeful, given the apparent inconsistency of having the Cook Islands as a founding member of the forum (even though it wasn’t fully independent) resisting fellow PIPA members Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony and Niue. A brokered decision held that none of the three had technically reached ‘final political status’ but, through its free-association arrangement with New Zealand, the Cook Islands had.

PNG was less than satisfied with that outcome. An expedited admission in 1974, a year before its independence, soothed, but did not eliminate a sense of Melanesian grievance at the Polynesian bias of the forum.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and SPEC had gradually acquired more responsibility on the forum’s behalf so that by 1988 it was officially rebadged as the South Pacific Forum Secretariat.

A treaty to formalise those changes and supplant the SPEC agreement was drafted in 1991 and entered into force in 1993.

This treaty was replaced in 2000 with a new instrument that changed the names of both the forum and the secretariat to recognise the membership north of the equator just as the Pacific Community had done in 1997.

An eminent persons’ group review in 2004 noted that the 2000 secretariat agreement was ‘out of date’ and recommended drafting a new treaty.

Significantly, the 2005 agreement overturned the 1972 decision not to formalise the leaders’ meetings by establishing the forum as an international organisation with the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat as its administrative arm.

This bold move became the 2005 agreement that the FSM has attempted to denounce, perhaps prematurely.

A variety of factors explain why the island leaders have resisted fully formalising the PIF as an intergovernmental organisation. Preserving the 1972 preference for the flexibility and equality of heads of government meeting unconstrained by bureaucrats is a recurrent one.

The PIF’s history of preserving flexibility and making its own rules as an association of leaders rather than as a formal international treaty organisation is central to the Micronesian states’ annoyance with the breaking of the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ on the selection of the PIF secretary-general.

If the 2005 agreement comes into force with Fiji’s certification of ratification, the regional turmoil may be seriously aggravated.

All five Micronesian states have already ratified the 2005 treaty and so will be members of the newly minted Pacific Islands Forum. A new round of denouncements with a new timeline will be needed.

Political questions regarding membership of the two French territories will also be raised. They were allowed participation (including voting rights) under the 2000 agreement as ‘Governments’. The 2005 treaty specifies ‘states’ not ‘Governments’.

Will the government of France allow French Polynesia and New Caledonia to claim statehood to accede to the 2005 treaty? Given the forthcoming third referendum in New Caledonia and the current pro-independence majority in the territory, this must be an open question.

If French Polynesia is no longer in a position to claim voting rights, it will rub some salt into the Micronesian wound, as the territory arguably may have given former Cook Islands prime minister Henry Puna the ninth vote to claim the secretary-general’s job.

As events stand now, the FSM denouncement looks more like prescience than error, but perhaps just premature.

The Pacific Islands Forum can survive this crisis too

There are many ways to respond to a serious crisis, but hyperbole and panic should not be among them. Some commentators have elevated the leadership controversy within the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) to an existential threat to Pacific regionalism. Hyperbole with a touch of panic?

For me, these analyses called to mind Agent Kay’s calming advice to Jay in the film Men in Black about handling an existential crisis. ‘There’s always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life’ on earth.

I have worked regularly on the regional architecture for most of my academic career, many times as an adviser to PIF governments. Although not at its formation, I had the opportunity to interview every island leader there on their expectations for the nascent association at the second South Pacific Forum meeting in Canberra in February 1972.

Every decade for the past half a century, it seems to me, there has been at least one ‘existential threat’ to Pacific island regionalism. All too often, if the media had its way, they would be region-busting and involve Australia in some negative way.

It is true that Australia should have done more to prevent the current crisis, which had been brewing for well over half a year. Australia had the resources to help reduce the limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic on the essential face-to-face dynamics of the PIF to assist in brokering a solution to the leadership impasse.

A brief review of the half-century of the ‘existential’ crises that the Pacific island states have survived demonstrates both the robustness and fragility of this system.

Historically, Fiji has been the single most important architect of the modern system. The importance of its leadership role cannot be minimised and certainly should not be overlooked in finding the deep roots of the current meltdown.

Fiji was the safety valve that prevented the 1970 existential crisis to regionalism when French, British and American intransigence to post-colonial reform threatened the survival of the South Pacific Commission.

Fiji’s first prime minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, took the lead in creating the association of independent states that became the South Pacific Forum, which relieved the pressure on the commission and allowed time for it to reform itself.

Ratu Mara was instrumental in including Australia and New Zealand as of right in the new association because he and his fellow islanders appreciated the sympathetic international strength the two would bring.

For most of the ensuing 50 years, Fiji has been the only island member that has been willing and able continuously to devote the resources to regional leadership. Its leadership has been an essential part of the glue holding the PIF together

Also, as Australia and New Zealand experience regularly, regional leadership can be a source of tension. Envy, differences of interest and perceptions of arrogance have beset Fiji as well.

Under Ratu Mara, Fiji tended to favour the Polynesian cultural traditions of the original island membership. This created tensions when Australia pressed for Papua New Guinea’s admission in 1972. The cultural divide grew as more Melanesian states secured independence.

The pressure for reform grew within the PIF as it had in the South Pacific Commission. The threat to the coherence of the PIF was relieved in the mid-1980s by the creation of the Melanesian Spearhead Group. Ultimately, Fiji relented and joined the group in 1998.

Fiji’s commitment to the PIF was seriously undermined after the 2006 military coup due to the role Australia played in using the PIF as a mechanism to punish Fiji.

The effort to isolate Fiji even extended to an Australian-led attempt to prevent the coup leader, Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, from assuming his turn as leader of the Melanesian group.

Bainimarama responded in the usual way by setting up a new regional association—the Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF)—to pursue a separate Fiji-centric regional agenda.

This was very much a deliberate existential dagger aimed at the PIF. The intent was to undo Ratu Mara’s inclusion of Australia in the forum by undermining the PIF to replace it with the PIDF.

That proved a bridge too far and the PIF survived, while the PIDF continues without yet achieving the effective regional role Bainimarama had intended.

For good or ill, arguably, Fiji is the keystone to effective Pacific island regionalism, and yet, for more than 15 years, it has been unwilling or unable to play the critical role upon which regional arrangements have depended for the past half-century.

This may help to explain the uncharacteristically nationalistic approach Fiji has taken at the expense of regional leadership, which in turn has contributed to the current PIF crisis.

Promoting its own candidate, Ratu Inoke Kubuabola, for the first time in 50 years, Fiji was unable to play its customary role as Dutch uncle to the region. And, when it switched to support the Cook Islands candidate, former prime minister Henry Puna, it strengthened Micronesian suspicions that the original Polynesian club was still running the show.

The repercussions may well undermine Bainimarama’s plans for a grand show when he assumes the PIF leadership at the 2021 leaders’ meeting in Fiji. If a third of the PIF leaders fail to attend, even the threat of this boycott will dampen the enthusiasm of invited leaders (including US President Joe Biden) to attend.

This is not to shift responsibility for the current contretemps away from Australia or to Fiji. Rather, it shows that Canberra is not alone in failing the region by omission or commission.

While history suggests that there are grounds for optimism, these rays of light will be shut out completely if the dark clouds of name-calling, blaming and entrenched position-taking are allowed to block them out.

Despite the variety of aspersions cast on its value to the region, to the Micronesian states and to Australia, the PIF has survived for five decades because it has utility to its members.

One key value is the force-multiplying influence that membership gives the five Micronesian states that have declared their intention to leave the forum. The five constitute the majority in the influential eight-member smaller island states caucus within the PIF.

Since 2006, the PIF has institutionally supported a program unit that was established specifically to target sustainable development in the smaller island states. With the help of this unit, the disaffected Micronesian states set most of the regional strategy for the smaller states, which has promoted their priorities on such issues as climate change, labour (mobility) and transportation.

Another possible ray of hope is the year it will take before any of the denunciations take effect. That may give time for cooler counsel or diplomatic balm to be applied, which, if the senior leadership in the region acts, could restore the regional balance.

Both Kiribati and Nauru will have time to reflect on their important transport and trade ties with Fiji and through Fiji to the wider world. The strategically important US-aligned Micronesian states may come to believe that even closer American ties cost the international and diplomatic flexibility that PIF membership gave them.

Some of the other actors may also use this time to consider the worth of contesting for a prize they helped to break.

The collapse of the Pacific Islands Forum is not yet quite the done deal that some commentary suggests.

Morrison’s Pacific step-up means nothing without real climate action

How good (really) is Scott Morrison?

Disappointingly, for Pacific leaders attending this week’s Pacific Islands Forum, the answer is becoming all too apparent, at least when it comes to the issue that matters most to the island states: the inexorably encroaching seas of the climate emergency.

Even before Morrison touched down in Tuvalu—one of the world’s smallest, most unique and, climate-wise, most vulnerable democracies—it’s clear that there is no prospect of any change in the Australian government’s abiding commitment to the coal industry or position on carbon emissions.

Australian prime ministers have a long track record of rarely failing to disappoint their Pacific islands counterparts, particularly at Pacific Islands Forums, which culturally are run on the Pacific principles of collective consultation and consensus—inapposite to Australia’s competitive spirit and donor-nation instinct for calling the shots.

But this week’s disappointment will hit harder than most. For the island states, which have been dealing with the very real impact of climate change for more than a decade, have an acute sense of how little time is actually left to do anything meaningful about what are already for them existentially high stakes.

Adding salt to the wound, ever since becoming prime minister, Morrison has actively encouraged the expectation that his government’s approach to the Pacific was going to be different; a real and genuine shift to a consultative and equal partnership.

For the most part, Morrison has been putting his money where his mouth is.

Already chalking up three visits to Pacific countries, one of his first actions as prime minister was to turbo-charge the Pacific step-up policy. Albeit with one eye on China, he has massively boosted the resources for the region available to the Australian departments of Defence and Foreign Affairs and Trade (although much of the latter was pulled directly from the existing, already much trounced aid budget).

Drawing on his personal insights and close church connections to the region, Morrison has purposefully peppered his public commentary on Australia’s relationship with the region, including a formal address at the University of the South Pacific in the Fijian capital of Suva earlier this year, with references to the shared heritage and future Australians and Pacific islanders enjoy, and the need for us to listen and work closely with our island neighbours.

‘Australia is not a remote observer of the Pacific, it is our home also and we’ve got a stake in what happens here’, Morrison told the audience of USP students from across the region. ‘So we stand with you as we look to those challenges. We know that to succeed, we must work together … We’ll do it by partnership, we’ll do it with patience and we’ll do it with respect.’

In the audience that day was Morrison’s Fijian counterpart, the former naval officer and army commander Frank Bainimarama, whom he has gone out of his way to cultivate. In January, Morrison became the first Australian prime minister to visit Fiji since Bainimarama took the reins of the nation, off the back of George Speight’s coup in 2000.

During the same visit, the two men announced the so-called vuvale partnership, using the Fijian word for family to articulate their intentions for a deeper Australian–Fijian relationship.

Pacific islanders, many only a generation away from living lives where survival was never quite a given, are acute observers of their fellow human beings. Australia’s actions (or lack of action) on climate change, and Morrison’s in particular, this week will ring out far louder than the most perfect pronunciation of vuvale.

Bainimarama is also the immediate past president of the UN’s leading climate body, COP (Conference of the Parties), and this year is attending the Pacific Islands Forum for the first time since declaring Australia and New Zealand should be ousted from the peak body some years ago.

In the lead-up to the forum, he reiterated his position on climate change: ‘Put simply, the case for coal as an energy source cannot continue to be made if every nation is to meet the net zero emission target by 2050 that has been set by the UN secretary general and every other responsible leader of the climate struggle.’

No doubt the well-informed Alex Hawke, Australia’s minister for international development and the Pacific and Morrison’s close political protégé, will have held the fort as best he could at the forum’s pre-meets and climate conference in Tuvalu. But Canberra’s early announcement of a climate change and oceans package, including $500 million over five years from 2020 to help Pacific nations invest in renewable energy and climate and disaster resilience, will have not helped our cause.

The timing of the announcement completely gazumps the key collective formal and informal consultations of the forum, particularly the traditional leaders’ retreat, where the officials are left behind for the day and the heads of government get to eyeball each other.

The package also totally misses the point. It is Australia, not themselves, that the Pacific wants to see fast-track the shift to renewable resources. It’s carbon emissions reduction from Australia and the rest of the world, not the Pacific, they most urgently desire.

In an indication of just how serious this rift could be, and unusually for the Pacific, the host of this year’s forum, Tuvaluan Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga, didn’t hold back in expressing his disappointment to journalists covering the opening session, before he’d even had a chance to welcome his Australian counterpart.

‘No matter how much money you put on the table, it doesn’t give you the excuse not to do the right thing, including not opening your coal mines. That is the thing we want to see.’

With the advent of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Australia is no longer the only big donor at play in the region, and we can no longer presume the same level of leverage we have enjoyed in the past. Without concrete actions to reduce the rate of climate change to put on the table, the PM might as well have brought his infamous lump of parliamentary coal to lay before the region’s leaders.

For all his personal connections and genuine enthusiasm for engaging in a more meaningful way, the PM won’t get the game-changer he’s seeking if he can’t find a way to heed the Pacific’s call for greater action on the causes, and not just the effects, of climate change.