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As China seeks greater influence in the South Pacific, its manipulation of local news outlets is having a serious impact on media independence.

Most Pacific media organisations are struggling financially, many journalists have lost their jobs and China is offering a way for them to survive—at the cost of media freedom.

It’s not just the ‘no strings attached’ financial aid and ‘look and learn’ tours of China for journalists; it’s about sharing an autocratic media model.

Prominent journalists and media executives say Pacific leaders are copying Chinese media tactics and stopping them from doing their jobs.

China is one of the worst countries in the world for media freedom. It ranks 177 on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. Now it’s trying to influence media around the world, especially in countries which have signed up to its Belt and Road Initiative. That includes 10 Pacific island nations. Four remain with Taiwan.

China has spent an estimated US$6.6 billion over 13 years strengthening its global media presence. It took over Radio Australia’s shortwave transmitter frequencies in the Pacific when the ABC shut down its shortwave service in 2017.

China’s national television service is about to start broadcasting by satellite into Vanuatu.

In a 2020 report, the International Federation of Journalists warned that foreign journalists were wooed by exchange programs, opportunities to study in China, tours and financial aid for their media outlets. Beijing also provides free content in foreign newspapers and ambassadors write opinion pieces for local media.

The federation’s report found that journalists frequently think their media is strong enough to withstand this influence, but a global survey suggests that’s not the reality and China is reshaping the media round the world.

These attempts at ‘sharp power’ go beyond simply telling China’s story, according to Sarah Cook, research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan at Freedom House. Their sharper edge often undermines democratic norms, erodes national sovereignty, weakens the financial sustainability of independent media, and violates local laws.

Journalists say this is an ideological and political struggle, with China determined to combat what it sees as decades of unchallenged Western media imperialism.

There’s mounting evidence from the Pacific of the impact of Beijing’s worldwide campaign, particularly in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

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

Media outlets are vulnerable to offers of financial help. Many journalists have lost jobs and others haven’t been paid for months. It’s estimated there are just 16 full-time journalists left in Honiara.

There’s been little advertising since the November 2021 riots, a situation exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. The only income for one privately owned media outlet is from the small street sales of its newspapers.

Earlier this month, the Solomon Islands government held its first news conference for 2022 after months of pressure to talk to journalists. The government denied there were restrictions on media freedom.

As the media struggles to survive, China’s ambassador is offering support, such as more trips to China (after the pandemic) and donations including two vehicles to the Solomon Star and maintenance of the newspaper’s printing presses. In the experience of other media, these offers are often followed with pressure to adhere to editorial positions congruent with those of the Chinese embassy.

While some journalists are resisting the pressure and holding a strong line, others are being targeted by China with rewards for ‘friends’.

Chinese embassies throughout the South Pacific are active on social media. In Solomon Islands, the embassy’s Facebook site includes posts about its aid assistance for Covid-19, joint press releases with the Solomons government and stories from official Chinese news outlets.

There are numerous examples of the growing impact on media freedom.

A freelance journalist has relocated to Australia after her investigations into the relationship between Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and a Chinese businessman resulted in harassment from police. She said police told her an order for her arrest came directly from the prime minister.

She was advised by Australia’s high commissioner to move to Australia for her safety.

Veteran journalist Dorothy Wickham was among a group of Solomon Islands journalists who accepted an invitation for a ‘look and learn’ tour of China soon after the Sogavare government swapped allegiance to China in 2019.

She said the trip left her concerned about how Solomon Islands would deal with its new diplomatic partner.

‘By the time our tour concluded in Shanghai, I was personally convinced that our political leaders are not ready or able to deal effectively with China. Solomon Islands’ regulatory and accountability mechanisms are too weak. We have already shown some spirit with our attorney general rejecting a hasty deal to lease the island of Tulagi, the capital of one of our provinces, to a Chinese company, but I fear how fragile and weak my country is against any large developed nation let alone China.’ she wrote in an article for The Guardian.

One senior media executive that said if his own government, Australia, and New Zealand didn’t assist, he would look to China. ‘There is too much talk about the role of media in democracy,’ he said. He thought the Chinese ambassador understood that his organisation had its own editorial policy. Soon after that, though, he was asked to publish a press release word for word.

Another media executive said he only had to ring the Chinese embassy and help arrived. He said China was rapidly moving into his country’s media space with no expense spared.

High-profile Vanuatu journalist Dan McGarry says he has no doubt that some Pacific governments are following China’s lead and adopting its contempt for critical speech and dissent.

In 2019, McGarry left Vanuatu to attend a forum in Australia, but his visa was revoked and he was banned from re-entering Vanuatu. He told the ABC’s Media Watch program at the time that he had no doubt it was because of a story he wrote about the secret deportation of six Chinese from Vanuatu.

The six were arrested and detained without charge on the premises of a Chinese company with numerous large government contracts before being escorted out of Vanuatu by Chinese and Vanuatu police. McGarry said he was summoned by the prime minister, who told him he was disappointed with his negative reporting.

McGarry said he had no evidence that China tried to influence the Vanuatu government over his residence, but he’d seen a tendency in Pacific leaders to emulate behaviour they saw elsewhere.

Now back in Vanuatu, he said the decision to refuse his work permit was still under judicial review and he’s seeking financial compensation.

In 2018, Papua New Guinea journalist Scott Waide was suspended by EMTV under pressure from Prime Minister Peter O’Neill for a story he wrote about a diplomatic Chinese tantrum and a scandal over the purchase of Maserati cars for the APEC meeting in Port Moresby.

Waide told the ABC that Pacific governments were taking lessons from China in dealing with their critics using media clampdowns and intimidation. That didn’t necessarily involve direct instructions from Beijing, ‘but people watch, people learn’.

A dispute over media freedom has escalated with the sacking of the head of news and 24 journalists at EMTV in PNG. They were initially suspended but later terminated for supporting their editor over interference from a government minister about a story involving an Australian man charged with drug trafficking. On 9 March, the EMTV news manager was sacked for insubordination. The network has since hired a new team of recent graduates with little experience—just months before the scheduled elections in June.

These examples give a sharper edge to concerns about China’s growing influence in the South Pacific and  the lack of an Australian media voice there. The ABC’s presence has been described as a whisper. There’s only one Australian journalist based in the region, the ABC’s Natalie Whiting in PNG. Meanwhile, Xinhua has a correspondent based in Fiji and China has recently been recruiting Pacific journalists for its global TV network.

The situation worries Australia’s national broadcaster. ABC managing director David Anderson told a Senate hearing in February 2022 of growing Chinese influence in the Pacific. ‘The single biggest piece of information that comes back to us from the public broadcasters is concern over the pressure the Chinese government put on them to carry content,’ he said.

In November 2019, the Melanesian Media Freedom Forum at Griffith University expressed concern about growing threats to media freedom. It called on Pacific governments to fund public broadcasters properly to ensure they have sufficient equipment and staff to enable their services to reach all citizens and to adequately play their watchdog role.

Australian journalist, media development consultant and trainer Jemima Garrett says media executives are at risk of being captured by China.

She has no doubt that China’s growing influence is a major story, but with so few Australian journalists based in the region, even significant developments in the China story are going unreported.

Author’s note: Some of the Pacific journalists in this story have asked not to be named or identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The Pacific Islands Forum states have made a bold claim to be the authentic custodians of the Pacific Ocean’s marine resources and health through the forum’s ‘Blue Pacific’ strategy.

In essence, the PIF members have attempted to parlay their vast collective exclusive economic zones into diplomatic and political assets to advance their climate-change and marine-resources agendas more robustly on the global stage.

The 30-year strategy sets out an extensive range of objectives that the Pacific states want to achieve and challenges they need to meet to succeed.

The strategy is essentially aspirational. The forum’s members don’t have the capacity alone to defend the breadth of the strategy’s reach, and much depends on international sympathy for the legitimacy of their ‘Blue Pacific’ claims.

This support has been forthcoming from important regional supporters. Australia and New Zealand support the strategy as members of the PIF, and the US has offered symbolic acknowledgement through its BLUE Pacific Act.

In order to maintain the international support on which the strategy depends, PIF states must meet at least two essential conditions.

One is that they individually act in conformity with the strategy’s spirit and aims, and the other is that they sustain their collective support for the strategy.

The first condition now appears to be at risk, according to a report by New Zealand–based 1News which claimed that the Kiribati government will deregister the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA).

In 2007, President Anote Tong moved to legislatively protect the special environmental values of the Phoenix Islands and requested that PIPA be listed as a World Heritage site. This archipelago comprises more than 400,000 square kilometres of pristine coral atolls and ocean.

World Heritage registration has been supported financially by the Phoenix Islands Protected Area Trust Fund, whose contributing partners include Conservation International and the New England Aquarium.

The Kiribati government has confirmed its intention to revoke the national legislation and deregister the PIPA. However, it argues that PIPA wasn’t contributing to the national income to the extent predicted.

The leaked cabinet papers cited by 1News estimated that $200 million in annual licensing fees would be available if the enormous marine reserve were opened to commercial fishing.

Regional fisheries sources have pointed out that this figure is seriously inflated since the regional regulatory mechanism, the Vessel Day Scheme, is fixed for Kiribati and so revenues wouldn’t necessarily be increased by opening PIPA to fishing.

The instigator for the government’s decision is reportedly China, which is thought to have two goals in mind—one overt and the second less transparent.

China’s primary aim is to win preferred access to the extensive tuna resources that have been cosseted for years by PIPA’s protective boundaries.

Second, PIPA is close to American waters. China is said to want to develop an airstrip on Kanton Island that was built by the US during World War II up to an international standard.

The airfield is 1,600 nautical miles (2,963 kilometres) southwest of Hawaii and therefore seen as uncomfortably close to US military interests in the Pacific.

If this is a genuine objective, it could be an issue for both Kiribati and China. Washington retains some continuing rights to the airfield.

Article 3 of the 1979 Treaty of Friendship and Territorial Sovereignty between the Republic of Kiribati and the United States asserts that US-built facilities such as the Kanton airfield ‘shall not be made available to third parties for military purposes except with the agreement of the Government of the United States’.

The Kiribati government has labelled the role of China in this matter as ‘neo-colonialist’ in a Facebook press release and attacked the media for making the matter public.

Whether the national legislation will be changed and the World Heritage status of PIPA revoked is still being contested within Kiribati. The minister for the environment, Ruateki Tekaiara, is reportedly opposed to the change.

The opposition and former president Tong are concerned that the move would seriously erode the international community’s trust in Kiribati’s environmental commitments.

And that could influence international perceptions as to the moral claim to custodianship more generally for protecting the health and resources of the Pacific Ocean under the ‘Blue Pacific’ agenda.

The government’s move certainly has been ill-timed, coming as it did into the international spotlight in the final days of the COP26 climate conference. Not a good look by one of the poster states threatened by sea-level rise.

As one of the five Micronesian states that are in the process of withdrawing from the PIF, Kiribati is heavily involved in the second critical factor in the prospects for the strategy.

Even if the dissolution of the PIF doesn’t eventuate, there will be some residual damage to the ‘Blue Pacific’ brand.

Extra-regional willingness to respect the PIF states’ genuine commitment to long-term fundamental objectives is likely to look a little less compelling in the wake of the move against PIPA.

On the other hand, if the PIF fragments into two regional organisations with diminished memberships, will there be any appetite for funding two separate bodies with distinct and separate ‘regional’ agendas such as the ‘Blue Pacific’?

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

ASPI’s first big policy impact was arguing that Australia must intervene to save Solomon Islands. The institute’s 2003 description of Solomon Islands as ‘a failing state’ was one element in the Howard government’s policy somersault.

The key factor in the U-turn was a cry for help from Solomon Islands—the institute’s role was a timely report on the new direction needed.

The plea from Honiara came as Elsina Wainwright’s Our failing neighbour set out how Australia should step in to stabilise Solomon Islands after five years of turmoil. The conflict, she wrote, had ‘paralysed the country’s capital, stifled its economy, disrupted government, discouraged aid donors, and inflicted suffering and hardship on its people. It has virtually ceased to function as an effective national entity.’

Former prime minister John Howard paid tribute to the impact of Wainwright’s report:

I especially recall in its early years that ASPI took a different position on the possibility of intervening in the Solomon Islands. In time the government decided on a course of action which chimed with that put forward by ASPI. It was a significant change in policy direction. Events demonstrated the wisdom of that change.

Much Canberra policy orthodoxy was swept aside as Australia galvanised to create what became the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI).

Previous Australian policy had been judiciously proper in respecting the sovereignty of South Pacific states. This hands-off stance was explained to me in 2002 by the secretary of the Foreign Affairs Department, Ashton Calvert: Canberra’s aim in the South Pacific was to ‘cleverly manage trouble’.

A gap had opened between defence guidance about Australia’s determination to fight for the island arc and what Canberra would do for the stability of the troubled nations of the arc. Well into the 1990s, Australia promised to do its bit so island states could ‘look after their own strategic interests’; in a crisis, the focus of the Australian military would be ‘evacuation of Australian citizens’.

At the start of 2003, Australia’s policy in the South Pacific was to manage problems without getting too close to what was going wrong. The foreign policy white paper, released in February, noted that Australia had major interests in the stability and development of the South Pacific. But under the heading ‘What Australia can and cannot do to help’, the statement expressed the non-colonial mantra:

When problems are so tightly bound to complex cultural traditions and ethnic loyalties, only local communities can find workable solutions. Australia stands ready to help those South Pacific countries willing to help themselves by tackling the problems of poor governance and economic underperformance.

Two months after the white paper, on 22 April, the prime minister of Solomon Islands, Allan Kemakeza, faxed a desperate letter to Australia’s prime minister pleading for help. The chaos in Honiara had become so bad that cabinet couldn’t convene for fear of being held ransom by armed gangs. The new (British) police commissioner in Solomon Islands couldn’t arrest one of his own senior officers who had walked into the Treasury and demanded money.

The response to that appeal from Honiara was the start of the policy revolution.

The Pacific chapter in the white paper was to have set the policy course for the rest of decade. By July, those prescriptions had been shredded as Australian police and troops led the regional intervention into Solomon Islands—a remarkable example of how declared policy and set strategy can be remade by events and changed political judgements.

Solomon Islands was in dire need and the Pacific Islands Forum supported action. Australia would lead with the essential money and muscle. Yet, in launching the intervention—and in its eventual resilience and endurance—a key to success was in the name: it was a regional assistance mission.

The forum offered legitimacy as well as support. The Solomons turned for help not just to the region’s big power but to all its neighbours. In all the twists of Solomon Islands’ politics in coming years, that regional dimension was RAMSI’s anchor as well as badge.

ASPI offered fresh thoughts to a government in need of better answers, as Howard’s cabinet discarded the advice of officials in deciding to intervene. Wainwright reflected that her report provided a ready-made blueprint:

We proposed the operation should be police, rather than military led: the security challenges facing Solomon Islands were of a kind best tackled by police, and the optics of a police-led operation would be more benign. Such an intervention would require Solomon Islands’ consent and should be multinational, with regional endorsement and participation. It should have two phases: the first would address the law and order crisis, and the second would be a comprehensive, long-term capacity building program to tackle governance and economic challenges which were fuelling the crisis.

Australia stopped worrying about an exit strategy from its own region and made a commitment to the Solomons.

A year later, in June 2004, Howard used a speech to ASPI to describe the terms of his government’s somersault, and a confident ‘new phase’ in Australia’s strategic role:

There was a time not so long ago when sensitivities about alleged ‘neo-colonialism’ perhaps caused Australia to err on the side of passivity in our approach. Those days are behind us as we work constructively with others to address the challenges faced by our immediate neighbourhood … Australia has a particular responsibility to help those countries struggling to secure the basic requirements of law and order. In this context, the RAMSI mission in the Solomons serves an important demonstration—both to those who value peace and order and to those who might seek to undermine our efforts.

On 30 June 2017, RAMSI completed its work in Solomon Islands after 14 years.

Australia had filled the post of special coordinator throughout and paid most of its $3 billion cost. The final RAMSI coordinator, Quinton Devlin, told ASPI the mission was a ‘genuine success’ because of the size of the political and community disaster Solomon Islands had avoided.

RAMSI, he said, ‘put an end to a dire humanitarian situation on Australia’s doorstep and reversed the decline of a disintegrating nation that threatened security and stability in the broader Pacific region. RAMSI halted Solomon Islands’ descent into lawlessness and towards economic collapse and state failure.’

The criticisms of RAMSI were often as big as its claimed achievements. The intervention was attacked as an ‘emerging parallel state’, for encroaching on Solomon Islands’ sovereignty, for heavy-handedness and ‘mission creep’.

Devlin’s response was that frequently ‘criticisms came from the political class in Solomon Islands, which in some quarters resisted RAMSI’s suggested good governance and financial reforms, and in others, weren’t happy that RAMSI was involved in the investigation and arrests of MPs’.

The foreign intervention had enjoyed remarkable support: surveys conducted from 2006 to 2013 showed that popular backing for RAMSI never dropped below 85%.

The cost and the long stay reflected the scope of the original mandate agreed by Solomon Islands and the forum, Devlin said, calling for state building, not just stabilisation.

Devlin said RAMSI’s 14-year trek proved that ‘even with all the resources and good will in the world, there are limitations on what states can do to help other states address the causes of their insecurity, even while restoring that security’. He said RAMSI showed that state-building interventions must be:

• welcomed by the host government and public
• viewed as providing the nation the time and breathing space to recover the lost ground and address the underlying causes of the conflict, rather than as a panacea for all ills
• drawn from and endorsed by the region
• deployed and operated under a clear legal framework
• commenced with large numbers and superior firepower if restoring law and order
• not persuaded to draw down quickly or look for an early exit strategy
• conscious that it could be an extended commitment of up to 15 years.

RAMSI saved the Solomons from crocodiles. That’s more than a figurative boast. The destruction of all guns and the disarmament of local police meant that only RAMSI was legally allowed to possess or use guns.

A crocodile cull was part of what RAMSI did to make Solomon Islands safer.

Drawn from the book on the institute’s first 20 years: An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021.

Good foreign policy and diplomacy and sound national security in the Pacific islands doesn’t just require solid ideas and good plans. It needs robust evidence of what works and a level of informed public debate on what options to pursue. These are often not available in the Pacific islands.

Advancing policy thinking in these areas sometimes requires questioning policy orthodoxies on regional diplomacy and security, and understanding the complexities around which public policies are developed in the islands.

Given all that has happened in the past two years, and the heightened geopolitical interest in the region, it’s time to establish an independent think tank in the Pacific on security and diplomacy to produce better quality foreign policy and security options for Pacific island governments. A Pacific think tank would assist in shaping creative new policy thinking in foreign policy and security to the benefit all island states.

In many parts of the world, think tanks play important roles in developing evidence and ideas for foreign and security policy and in offering a public space for the debate of crucial challenges in diplomacy and national security. They assist diplomats and policymakers with solid and original research as a foundation for making policy judgements.

For example, ASPI has been providing independent, high-level advice to the Australian government as a leading defence and strategic policy think tank since its establishment in 2001. It’s become a trusted source of counsel for Australian leaders and the general public. It leads national debates on defence spending, China, countering covert influence, foreign investment and the machinery of national security decision-making, among other issues.

It’s time that the Pacific island countries progress their foreign policy and national security decision-making with input from a regional think tank to promote informed debate on the crucial security and foreign policy challenges the region faces, including climate change, natural resource management, oceans governance and organised crime.

A regional think tank would offer ‘thinking space’ for island governments to interpret the geopolitical situation in the Pacific. Over time, a Pacific think tank would become the intellectual hub for the region, as well as an informal tool of regional diplomacy, by convening dialogues and workshops on foreign and security policy.

It would inform and lead the regional debate in these areas and ensure that international actors leverage key expertise in the islands. It would make an enormous contribution to the quality of debate among island leaders.

At the moment, the range of alternative views on which island governments can draw for foreign policy and security policy isn’t well developed.

The Australian-funded Pacific Security College is an educational body set up in the Australian National University and is trying to develop as a network. But some in the region view it as very Australian and ANU-centric. The new Pacific Fusion Centre to be opened in Vanuatu later this year should help in providing some longer-range assessments on regional security, and of course the Pacific Islands Forum can be commissioned to produce papers.

Regional and national universities in the Pacific are now mired in governance problems. More broadly, universities aren’t well placed to engage on the practicalities of public policy: they don’t have a sharp focus on better public policy, especially in areas that relate to foreign policy and security.

To be credible, a new Pacific think tank would need to be independent, with a governing board that shouldn’t be able to influence its policy recommendations. Short-term funding would undercut any new think tank’s independence. It would need to be resourced for at least 10 years to build an accepted place in the regional landscape.

Funding of around A$3 million (US$2.3 million ) a year over 10 years would set up a sustainable think tank with a critical mass. But it should also be required to grow its funding base through its own efforts. Possible funders might include Japan and the EU as well as private philanthropists. A new think tank might have a small physical presence but would have virtual links in many of the islands.

The think tank must be something that belongs to the Pacific. It couldn’t be seen as being led by external powers, although they might have a role in it. But a staff of non-islanders telling island states what their foreign policy and security problems are, as well as the solutions, wouldn’t be effective. It would risk being seen as a sort of ‘security colonialism’.

In sum, a new Pacific think tank would inform better quality national security policy options for island governments and offer alternative views to the islands’ own government departments.

A new think tank would help support debate and understanding in the islands on foreign policy and security matters. It would be long-term investment in Pacific islands security.

The US Congress has before it three pieces of legislation that have the potential to significantly alter the depth of US engagement with the Pacific island countries: the Boosting Long-term US Engagement in the Pacific Act, or BLUE Pacific Act; the Honoring Our Commitment to Elevate America’s Neighbor Islands and Allies Act, or Honoring OCEANIA Act; and the Strategic Competition Act. None have yet become law but taken together mark a significant shift in how Congress views Pacific island countries.

The BLUE Pacific Act was first introduced into the House of Representatives by Ed Case (a Democrat) and Ted Yoho (a Republican), both members of the newly established Pacific Islands Caucus. A new version was introduced in May. The proposed act focuses on expanding the US’s diplomatic and development presence in the Pacific islands. It increases US cooperation and assistance to address regional maritime security, transnational crime and law-enforcement issues, including illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. It also promotes trade and investment, and expands support for public health, education, infrastructure, and climate change resilience and adaptation. Finally, the bill strengthens people-to-people relationships and civil society organisations.

The Honoring Oceania Act similarly has bipartisan support. Like the BLUE Pacific Act, it is intended to elevate Oceania in US national security and economic policy decisions. This includes working with allies in addressing regional issues, like maritime security; illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; environmental protection; and disaster preparedness. The bill also requires the inclusion of all developing countries of Oceania in existing strategic planning and program evaluation undertaken by the State Department. The CEO of the US International Development Finance Corporation will be required to produce a strategy for increasing development finance assistance to Oceania countries.

The bill’s other requirements include strengthening disaster risk reduction and resilience, developing a plan to protect critical infrastructure against climate threats and other hazards to the islands, promoting public health capacity, and establishing a restoration and hazard-removal program that supports the surveying, isolation and clearing of buried, abandoned and unexploded World War II ordnance and submerged vessels that pose a risk to the marine environment. To combat corruption, the bill proposes providing assistance to civil society and governments in Oceania, as well as using the Global Magnitsky Act to identify and sanction foreign individuals engaged in corrupt practices in Oceania that threaten economic and democratic progress.

Unlike the other two pieces of legislation, the Strategic Competition Act is focused on China. It originated in the Senate and has bipartisan support. The focus on the bill is on strengthening the US’s diplomatic and economic strategy in countering China. Additional features of the proposed legislation include a Quad intra-parliamentary working group, bringing together legislators from Australia, India, Japan and the US. It also promotes a deeper defence relationship between Japan and Australia that includes supporting reciprocal access agreements and trilateral United States–Japan–Australia intelligence sharing.

With regard to the Pacific islands, the bill specifically calls for drawing on Australian, New Zealand and Japanese expertise in the Pacific to assist in development of the region. The State Department is to create a strategic roadmap for Oceania that includes an analysis of opportunities to cooperate with Australia, New Zealand and Japan in addressing shared concerns and promoting shared goals in pursuit of security and resilience in Oceania.

While bipartisanship alone doesn’t guarantee passage, the fact that Democrats and Republicans can work together on the Pacific islands is noteworthy. The glue that binds the two sides together is competition with China, but the net result can be better and deeper US engagement in the region. In terms of development outcomes, this must surely be a plus.

A second notable thing about these bills concerns congressional efficiency. Unlike its parliamentary cousins, the US Congress, guided by American pluralism, is inefficient at converting proposed legislation into law. Only 2% of the legislation introduced in the 116th Congress became law. There’s no reason to believe the 117th will be any better. Where interests align, like over strategic competition with China, the probability of successful passage increases significantly. The very inefficiency of Congress means that when something does become law, it typically stays that way for a long time. Putting strategic competition into law underscores the view that the US sees this competition as long-term.

The proposed bills’ recognition, as a matter of law, of US allies and partners is also significant. Australia, Japan and New Zealand are named in the legislation. The Honoring Oceania Act and the Strategic Competition Act explicitly instruct the US secretary of state to work with these three countries in developing plans for engaging the Pacific islands.

Australia has played a helpful role in the writing these bills. Congressional staffers see Australia as a go-to resource when it comes to the Pacific island countries. The Australian embassy in Washington has played an important role in supporting the education of congressional members and their staff on Pacific island matters. For example, Australia helped develop the itinerary for congressional staff visiting Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands in 2019. Australia has acted as a channel or mediator for congressional staff and the island states. A senior Capitol Hill staffer commented that Australia had been ‘extremely helpful in connecting us [Congress] with all the right players at the various organizations and embassies’. At some point, a congressional delegation may again make its way to the islands, and when that happens look for Australia and New Zealand to offer a helping hand.

Of course, some in the Pacific may view Australia’s interventions as unwanted. A not unreasonable view is that a regional organisation like the Pacific Islands Forum could easily take on this role instead. Experience has shown, however, that the forum has not delivered on this front. According to one congressional staff member, when offered the opportunity to meet Pacific Island Caucus members in 2019, the islands at first agreed to do so, but then inexplicably pulled out at the last minute. This was a missed opportunity. From the congressional point of view, the Australians and New Zealanders are both accessible and keen to help.

Over the next few months, some language from all three bills will likely end up in one final piece of legislation. That legislation will, in all probability, be some version of the Strategic Competition Act. In practical terms, the US will have committed itself, by an act of Congress, to a deeper and more robust engagement in the Pacific. This will be significant for Washington. For Canberra, the added significance will be the fact that Australia will have used the legislative process to further its own interests of maintaining influence and a voice in US policy and legislative circles.