Tag Archive for: Pacific Islands

Recruiting Pacific islanders into the ADF requires a change in policy, not law

In a recent article in The Australian, I argued that the next step in our Pacific step-up should be recruiting Pacific islanders into the ADF. The measure fits with the ‘Pacific family’ idea, as it’s really all about defending the family.

Pacific recruitment sits comfortably with the goal set out in our latest foreign policy white paper of security and economic integration with Australia over time and at a pace and scale that’s welcomed by Pacific island countries. Military service is a unique offer we can make that countries such as China can’t and won’t.

It would be an active addition to Australia’s own security by increasing our defence capability. The defence organisation is having trouble keeping personnel numbers stable, let alone meeting the relatively modest 8% increase set by the 2016 defence white paper.

Here I’d like to respond to two objections I received to my idea. The first was that the Australian Defence Force cannot consider enlisting or appointing people who aren’t Australian citizens.

But if we look at the Defence Department’s website, it makes it clear that a person who isn’t an Australian citizen, under current legislation, can be a member of the ADF.

It states:

Options for non-citizens

In exceptional circumstances, if a position cannot be filled by an Australian citizen the citizenship requirement may be waived and applications may be accepted from:
– Permanent residents who can prove they have applied for citizenship
– Permanent residents who are prepared to apply for citizenship after they have completed 90 days of relevant Defence (effective) service [emphasis added]
– Overseas applicants with relevant military experience …

It’s true that successive Australian governments have maintained the view that all members of the ADF are Australian citizens. But as Defence’s own website shows, this is a matter of policy, not law. There’s no requirement in the Defence Act 1903 that mandates this, as opposed to a policy decision to require citizenship.

The most straightforward way of showing that you can be a member of the ADF without citizenship is to go to section 23 of the Australian Citizenship Act 2007, which sets out the amount of time a person must be a permanent resident in order to apply for citizenship (the other provisions for becoming a citizen are listed in section 21).

It makes clear that a person who has completed ‘relevant defence service’ (at least 90 days), or a member of the family unit of such a person, can apply for citizenship.

There is also a 1940s case of a Greek national being conscripted into the ADF when he wasn’t a citizen (at that time, not a British subject). Back then, all that was required for conscription was living in Australia for six months. Speros Polites challenged that as unconstitutional. But the High Court said that it’s possible for the Commonwealth to do that (even if it’s a bad policy idea since it may mean that Australians overseas might have the same thing done to them).

In short, the law shows that you can be a permanent resident without citizenship serving in the ADF. My suggestion on Pacific recruitment for the ADF could be played out in that context. Indeed, in my article I suggested that ADF enlistment should enable Pacific islanders who might be recruited to become Australian citizens.

The other objection I received was that we shouldn’t need to recruit from the Pacific islands when there are already Pacific islanders living in Australia who could provide a source of recruitment. I am not overlooking these people: Pacific islanders who are here and are not yet citizens could be eligible for recruitment if there were a change of policy.

But what I am advocating is that Pacific islanders who aren’t residents be able to apply to join up and come to Australia on the basis of enlisting.

It was also raised with me that the New Zealand Defence Force gets its Pacific personnel from New Zealand’s own population. But many Pacific islanders in New Zealand have a special status under law that doesn’t apply to Australia’s relations with islanders from former colonies.

In summary, my proposal should not be rejected because it’s a change in policy; after all, the whole point is that this would be a new initiative.

Solomon Islands and Kiribati switching sides isn’t just about Taiwan

Kiribati and Solomon Islands switching diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China is about more than the Chinese Communist Party’s relentless campaign to isolate Taiwan. Certainly, it’s important to PRC President Xi Jinping to undercut the 24-million-strong democracy that is Taiwan—because it represents a vibrant alternative model of governing the 1.4 billion people under CCP rule, and because further isolating Taiwan from the international community is part of his own ‘maximum pressure’ campaign that he mistakenly seems to believe will push the people of Taiwan towards merging with mainland China.

But we’ve put too much attention on the tussle for diplomatic recognition in the South Pacific and not enough on understanding Xi’s other motivations for spending $730 million on buying the Solomons’ change of mind and promising a sum to Kiribati that’s icing on this eyewatering amount.

What else is Xi buying with his money and promises of mutual respect? Here’s the iceberg of interests behind the cash and the flag-recognition switch.

Xi’s China Dream is about remaking China’s place in the world, and that means changing the system of international governance to be more accepting of his authoritarian model of rule (as the European Commission noticed in March this year when it stated that the Chinese state posed a systemic risk to the liberal democratic system of governance operated by the EU and by the broad set of international institutions).

Collecting more UN votes from small island governments supping on loose Chinese money helps here—and it’s pretty cheap buying. It means more chances to frustrate others’ agendas at the UN, more supportive voices for Chinese initiatives, and a greater ability to vote down unpleasant reporting or resolutions critical of the one-party state.

This can help across a range of issues that the Solomons and Kiribati are probably not at the front of mind on—like cyber norms and space treaty proposals. Fortunately, the leaders of Kiribati and the Solomons are representatives of their societies, so they are almost certainly not about to join in various nonsensically supportive statements about how well Xi’s security apparatus is treating the 13 million citizens in Xinjiang as it engages in cultural genocide there.

The switch of allegiance and the money also buy symbolism and provide opportunities for military engagement and presence. They send a message about rising and falling influence beyond the Taipei–Beijing tango. They say Australia’s Pacific step-up hasn’t yet stepped up enough—Beijing is still acting to increase its influence. All the diplomatic noises from Canberra about this being a sovereign matter for Honiara and Tarawa can’t hide the fact that it’s a loss for Canberra in the region as well as for its Taiwanese friend and partner.

For the United States, the reversal is bad news too, given the pressure no doubt also on the Marshall Islands and Palau, both of which still recognise Taiwan. As the RAND Corporation has noted, these states and their maritime territories are ‘a power projection superhighway running through the heart of the North Pacific into Asia [that] effectively connects US military forces in Hawaii to those in theater, particularly to forward operating positions on the US territory of Guam’.

The biggest issue, though, is below the surface—literally. Xi’s cash splash is about what the South Pacific has in abundance and what his China Dream is demanding: resources. Australia has been slow to wake up to more than the Chinese state’s broad influence-building in our near region. We’ve taken far too long to realise what Beijing already has. The massive exclusive economic zones of states like the Solomons and Kiribati are increasingly valuable sources of all kinds of resources, not just fish, but all the other plant and animal life in the water column, and all the natural resources on the sea floor and under the sea. There’s copper, gold, zinc, nickel, cobalt and magnesium, to give you the idea.

Small Pacific island states are future ‘blue economy’ resource-owning superpowers, and, as the recent Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ communiqué shows in its many references to the ‘Blue Pacific Continent’, they know it.

Beijing wants to be first in the queue for exploiting these riches to feed its growing economy, and it will want to shape South Pacific states’ underdeveloped frameworks for doing so. The risk is that Beijing’s interests in getting hold of these resources over the next decades will outweigh its desire to help South Pacific states manage them as responsible stewards. Think, for example, how Beijing prioritised building military facilities on reefs in the South China Sea over the cost of the mass destruction of marine ecosystems caused by China’s dredging and crushing of coral reefs as part of the bases’ construction.

The blue economy is the South Pacific’s path to prosperity and independence from foreign donors. But that prosperity will be short-lived if the water column and undersea riches are overexploited because those with the ability to access and harvest them prioritise their own consumption over the responsible management of fragile ecosystems.

So, what should Australian policymakers be thinking about when they look back over the past week or so?

On Taiwan, the lesson is that Beijing is working as hard and fast as it can to change the status quo, making it time for Australia and other international partners to reassess and deepen our own engagement with Taiwan. Given Xi’s actions, what do we want to change in the status quo?

Our interests with Taiwan include supporting it with its continuing Pacific island partners like Nauru, Palau and the Marshall Islands. But Taiwan is becoming much more valuable beyond this too—as a government and community on China’s doorstep that, like the people of Hong Kong, are on the front line in the global contest between digital authoritarians and democracies; as a high technology partner for Australia and the US in that contest; and as the owner of a large piece of strategic geography that complicates China’s projection of military power through the ‘first island chain’.

Australia needn’t change its formal policy on Taiwan to do a whole lot more. Canberra could simply take a leaf out of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s book. He didn’t change the overarching constitution to grow his ability to use the Japanese military; he just reinterpreted it and so changed policy underneath it.

One example is establishing direct working contacts between Australian and Taiwanese defence and national security agency officials. This makes sense for Australia now in the new environment of strategic competition between the US and the Chinese state because our Taiwanese colleagues know things about the Chinese state that we don’t, and we have insights for them too.

On a planet where all kinds of natural resources are under pressure from population growth and the effects of climate change and overexploitation, Australia needs to look way beyond its long-term focus on maritime surveillance and fisheries protection in our security, research and institutional engagement with our Pacific family on the blue economy.

Continued focus on fisheries, as ministers Marise Payne and Alex Hawke have shown recently, is essential. But it’s insufficient. Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama is ahead of the curve here and has proposed a 10-year moratorium on seabed mining in the South Pacific. He should have our support, but it will take much more than that.

Can you step up underwater?

The Oz Pacific policy that can’t be named

Australia has a Voldemort problem. Our big new ambition for the South Pacific—economic and security integration—has become the policy that can’t be named.

Australia’s policy is integration, and we’re working to make it happen. We just don’t use the i-word.

Canberra talks constantly of the Pacific step-up, and lots of new steps are being made. Step-up is policy in action.

But there’s a Voldemort-style caution about naming integration as the ultimate step at the top of the ladder. We’re happy to talk about all the steps, just not the aim—proud of the process, shy about the point.

Integration was one of the top priorities unveiled in the 2017 foreign policy white paper:

The Government is delivering a step-change in our engagement with Pacific island countries. This new approach recognises that more ambitious engagement by Australia, including helping to integrate Pacific countries into the Australian and New Zealand economies and our security institutions, is essential to the long-term stability and economic prospects of the Pacific. Our partnership with New Zealand will be central to advancing this agenda.

The white paper referred to the integrate/integration vision six times. In lauding the integration ambition as a new ideal—not just neighbours, but joined—I described it as a complex task for Australia and New Zealand and an important offer that the South Pacific would embrace cautiously. Integration would be soft and slow, evolving over decades. The softness, though, has faded to silence.

While Australia is saying important things about the region, look in vain for the i-word in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s significant Pacific speech (‘Australia and the Pacific: a new chapter’)or from Foreign Minister Marise Payne (State of the Pacific 2018 conference or Fiji Press Club).

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Secretary Frances Adamson seemed to offer i-word gold at the 2019 Australasian Aid Conference: ‘No one ever said integration was easy, or complete!’

But it was a false sighting. She was talking about the integration of AusAID into DFAT.

When the i-word does appear, it’s confined to the economic side, not security.

DFAT’s head of the Office of the Pacific, Ewen McDonald, gave the best example in a speech last month at the Australian National University, titled ‘Realising the Pacific’s vision for stability, security and prosperity’:

At a time when uncertainty permeates the global economy, we are also committed to better integrating Australian and Pacific island economies. This will improve regional prosperity. The Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations Plus—or PACER Plus trade and development agreement—will be the first reciprocal regional trade agreement in the Pacific, and is expected to enter into force in late 2019. The agreement will open up new markets and opportunities for Australian and Pacific businesses.

The tortuous PACER Plus negotiations (2009–2017) certainly showed that integration is tough; and after all that effort, Papua New Guinea and Fiji didn’t sign.

DFAT’s description of the step-up points to integration only once, also in talking about PACER Plus. The department says Australia is offering ‘a more ambitious and intensified engagement in the Pacific to support a more resilient region’.

Why does Australia have a policy that can’t be named? Several factors combine to make integration a tough topic to talk about:

  • climate change—as Jenny Hayward-Jones argues, ‘Australia is the principal aid donor and security partner in the region of the world most vulnerable to climate change, but has not exercised leadership on climate change in its diplomatic, aid or security planning’
  • the islands’ pride in their own sovereignty and identity
  • the old ‘neo’ fears—colonialist and/or imperialist—about Australian dominance
  • lack of confidence and trust in Australia on the part of island states, including a perception that Canberra’s just panicking about China.

Australia faces the same problems that confronted the Pacific plan for ‘regional cooperation and integration’, proclaimed by the Pacific Islands Forum in 2005 and 2007. Matthew Dornan noted that the plan had ‘limited impact’ and failed to drive the ‘integration agenda’.

The Voldemort problem shows Australia’s struggle with a blunt question from the South Pacific: ‘Why should we integrate with you?’

Australia wants to get closer at a time when its influence is challenged.

In a fine essay for Australian Foreign Affairs, Hayward-Jones describes the state of play:

[O]ver the last five years, as perceptions of Australia’s influence have changed, as China’s visibility has grown, as the climate change threat has worsened and as Pacific island leaders have become more assertive on the public stage, Australia has found its assumptions about the region challenged. For the nation, this marks a new—and more difficult—era of Pacific diplomacy.

A ‘vuvale’ partnership for the Pacific islands?

During ASPI’s recent panel discussion on the Pacific, Graeme Dobell referred to the Fiji–Australia Vuvale Partnership as an important pointer to Australia’s future ‘step-up’ relations with the Pacific islands region.

He had written earlier this year of the positive and intimate ‘family’ (vuvale) relationship conveyed by the January 2019 agreement between Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe ‘Frank’ Bainimarama and Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

While the inclusiveness of the family concept might play well at a rhetorical level, there are risks in taking the bilateral rapprochement to the regional level, both in philosophy and in historical experience.

Philosophically, the content of ‘family values’ is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Frequently eulogised by parties of the right for the presumed stability and conservative bias of these values, families are rarely democratic structures.

Family values are inherited rather than constructed. They are passed on from generation to generation by socialising new members into the standards expected of them in ways that are rarely consensual or negotiated.

Thus, as Stephanie Copus-Campbell indicated in the panel discussion, it can carry a possible taint of paternalism (who is/are the parent/s in the family?)—particularly if it is perceived as being unilaterally declared by Australia.

Beyond the initial rhetorical benefits of a new more intimate inclusiveness, the idea of a family with shared values will be a slippery and downward slope if unwisely used in negotiations on anything of regional substance.

Whose norms are to prevail as the Pacific family’s values? Will it be the more hierarchically structured values of the Polynesian extended family, the more egalitarian but more fractured social values of Melanesia, or the liberal democratic ideals of Australia?

As noted during the panel discussion, the shared family values even between states as close as Australia and New Zealand don’t always produce harmony.

Remember how the Kiwis felt over the underarm bowling incident or, more seriously, the sense of betrayal Wellington felt when Canberra chose ANZUS over the ANZAC family tie in the USS Buchanan affair?

In the early days of Pacific Islands Forum, there was fairly regular and friendly banter among the mainly Polynesian leaders about who was the younger brother or the uncle within their ‘family’ of shared ethnicity and values.

Fijian statesman Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara built on this relational sense of common identity to assert the family values that he encapsulated in the phrase ‘the Pacific Way’. However, as the centre of the forum shifted away from Polynesia, the phrase fell out of use.

Melanesians had a different sense of how to resolve family differences. Indeed, they went so far as to formalise their deeper sense of family values in the Melanesian Spearhead Group.

The cultural differences among the three broad ethno-geographic groups in the region, much less their individual national interests, can never be dismissed too lightly whenever significant matters are addressed regionally.

Building a role in the Pacific islands as part of a ‘community’ that shares aspirations, responsibilities and common purpose has been a more solid footing of relationships than confected ‘family ties’.

Ratu Mara and Albert Henry, the first premier of the Cook Islands, did Australia and New Zealand a great honour by inviting us into the Pacific Islands Forum from the outset and including us in this community as of right. No other extra-regional country has been so honoured since. (Significantly if this is viewed as a family affair, then it was they who adopted us not we them!)

A few years ago, Bainimarama tried to undo this ‘mistake’. The creation of the Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF) was intended to be a banishment for not properly sharing the values of the regional community.

Fortunately for Australia, the PIDF has not quite enjoyed the regional support Bainimarama hoped for, but it still stands as a message not entirely dispelled by the vuvale reunion.

Indeed, for example, the fact that we have not joined our region in the UN groupings is still cited as a sign that our vanua (land/people) is still European and not part of the family of Pacific islanders.

Honorary ‘family’ status is an important indicator of special intimacy that should not be minimised. The implied warmth and inclusiveness should be valued. But care should be taken against accepting it and the obligations of family literally.

In practical terms, close friends frequently share more of our hopes and our secrets than do members of our own families. The obligations of friendship (or perhaps mateship) are real and often better understood.

To take one example from the panel discussion, will Australia embrace a huge wave of economic refugees from Melanesia (especially Papua New Guinea) should the demographic bulge of young people there burst the capacity of these states to deliver on their aspirations?

Will they be treated as ‘family’ entitled to come ‘home’? (This was not the message at federation in the 1890s.)

Over time, immigration and mutual interdependent development may well lead Australia to the sort of blended family ties that New Zealand enjoys with the Pacific islands. In the interim, a close and genuine sense of community is a more practical aspiration.

Pacific infrastructure development: stepping up without stamping out

Last week I spoke at a workshop sponsored by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre and the National Security College at the ANU on the topic ‘How does the “Pacific” fit into the “Indo-Pacific”? The changing geopolitics of the Pacific islands’.

I was asked to address the question of how Australia can ensure that its ‘Pacific step-up’ advances our strategic interests in the region. I argued that the step-up needs to improve collaboration between government and the Australian business sector, drawing on the vast experience with and expertise on the region which resides in our membership in the Australia–Pacific Islands Business Council.

I co-authored an ASPI report on this theme last year. In January 2019, not long after the report was published, Prime Minister Scott Morrison visited Vanuatu and Fiji. Earlier this month, the prime minister went to Solomon Islands on his first overseas visit since being elected in May. These visits were in many ways historic: it’s rare for Australian prime ministers to make bilateral visits to the Pacific, as opposed to attending multilateral gatherings like the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meetings.

But in my view the prime minister missed the opportunity to invite Australian business participation in the visits. He was accompanied by all the heavyweights of the Pacific security and policy apparatus in Canberra. But no business representatives were included: no one with interests outside the infamous ‘Canberra bubble’.

It’s useful that the government is setting up the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific and providing an extra $1 billion for the Export Finance Insurance Corporation to help support Australian involvement in the region.

These initiatives are designed to seek out new opportunities and avenues for commercial cooperation, as well as improve leveraging of commercial funds. But it’s going to require working with the Australia–Pacific Islands Business Council based in Brisbane and the Australia–Fiji and Australia–Papua New Guinea Business Councils.

Our three Pacific business councils are also working with the Pacific Islands Forum to foster a regional financing facility, which aims to create more commercial partnerships and assets, not debt. The facility is designed leverage contributions from the steadily growing funds in the island countries and Australia.

When it comes to strengthening our commercial ties with the Pacific, it’s not as though we’ve got out of the game. We remain the top source of imports to PNG, well ahead of China, and to Fiji we are just behind Singapore and New Zealand, again in front of China. We’re number one in imports to Kiribati, and second in Vanuatu.

Some of Australia’s larger law firms, accountants and advisories are running profitable regional operations. There remain many Australians operating in the construction industry in the Pacific. We should be enlisting those in Australian business who understand the islands region.

The Australian’s long-time Pacific observer Rowan Callick has rightly argued that the areas that require engagement with island communities should be among those in which Australian firms can lead the way, such as the huge gas production industry in PNG, which requires large-scale, patient negotiations with landowners. This has been driven by Australians—with the ASX-listed Oil Search Foundation playing a prominent role.

The most eye-catching of the proposals is the PNG electrification project, which aims to provide power for 70% of the country by 2030. To get more Australian involvement in such ambitious projects, the Australian government can most usefully play a role by providing a flow of information about commercial opportunities in the Pacific to the private sector.

The new $2 billion infrastructure fund is a positive step (although not all agree), but, as usual, the devil is in the detail. We should welcome increased Australian business activity, but this may have downsides for some island states that have successfully fostered local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), particularly in the area of renewable energy.

Having more Australian businesses with financial assistance from the Australian government won’t make the lives of those local businesses any easier. While the end result might be better infrastructure built more quickly, the crowding out of local businesses might take some of the shine off this initiative.

The successful growth of SMEs in the Pacific has long been an aspiration for the island countries and donors alike. Crowding the existing SME market might not be the best outcome. Perhaps we should be concentrating on infrastructure in places where there’s limited local capability.

The administration of the fund should ensure that project contractors are required to engage effectively with local contracting and subcontracting entities to build capacity and grow the SME sectors in the Pacific islands economies. As Richard Herr recently argued in his ASPI study of China’s soft power in the region, we should include significant skills-training and administrative-mentoring components into projects. The funding for those components should be made available to Australian firms competing privately for infrastructure projects in the region, ‘so that they don’t lose any competitive advantage when tendering by including such skills-transfer elements’.

At last week’s ANU workshop, I also offered three thoughts on strengthening the people-to-people side of our Pacific step-up. First, I suggested that the Pacific Labour Scheme visa class be extended to skilled positions: Pacific island apprentices and tradespeople working in Australian jobs would take home knowledge of quality systems, supervision, safe work practices and maintenance philosophies.

Second, I raised the idea that Pacific island placements in Australian agencies would provide junior bureaucrats and administrators with skills in recordkeeping, planning and management that could lead to improved prospects for future business linkages.

Finally, I argued that Australia’s standing in the Pacific would benefit from a bulked-up version of some of our existing volunteer schemes—a program where young Australians get Pacific island experience through placements in Pacific island government agencies.

This could become a professional career development component within certain streams of the Australian public service. We seem to be able to convince teachers and doctors to work in rural communities, so why not broaden the concept?

The real dividend here would be greater respect and empathy for Pacific islanders that young Australian professionals would potentially bring to future roles in our aid, commercial and security relationships.

Big yellow taxi departs South Pacific

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone 

— Joni Mitchell, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’

The international system is having a Big Yellow Taxi moment, as so elegantly described by Joni Mitchell.

We’re confronting what’s gone and what’s coming instead. In the South Pacific, that covers everything from climate change to regional order.

Professor Joni’s strategic insight was my metaphor for the panel discussing three ASPI reports: on Papua New Guinea, China’s soft power in the islands, and Australia’s Pacific pivot.

Stephanie Copus-Campbell spoke first on the PNG–Australia development partnership, calling for a rethink and a redesign. This was policy meets lived experience, delivered with vivid energy: ‘Papua New Guinea is a fascinating, beautiful country with so many incredible people. It’s one of only a small number of countries which has transitioned from being colonised to independence peacefully and with a democracy intact.’

It’s natural to go vivid when talking about PNG.

But the development indicators Copus-Campbell lists for PNG are also vivid in worrying ways. Time for transformation that shifts beyond aid projects to partnership: ‘I dislike the word “aid”. It sets up a power dynamic between a donor and recipient and can rob one actor in this dynamic of a voice and lead to misinformed approaches and poor ownership of outcomes.’

The partnership must align Australia’s abiding interests in the region with what PNG needs and decides. As Copus-Campbell concludes:

Imagine if 80% of the Australian population woke up to no electricity, no running water, no health or education services, and not even a grocery store to buy food. How long would we last? Not long. The people of PNG are incredibly resilient and have a pretty good sense of what they want for their future. That’s a good starting point for all development.

Professor Richard Herr then gave a typically thoughtful account of his study of the yin and yang of Chinese influence in the South Pacific, and China’s emergence as ‘the most prominent new star’ in island affairs.

Herr argues that China’s influence is more about economic clout than soft power: ‘The admiration that Pacific Island states feel for China is genuine. However, on balance, China’s current regional soft power lacks breadth and depth, although it’s still evolving.’

In responding to the China challenge in the region, Australia needs to know the dragon’s limits as well as its capabilities.

And Herr says Australia shouldn’t indulge in too much of a lament about losing regional influence: ‘The argument that Australia somehow neglected the Pacific Islands and allowed Chinese soft-power influence to grow is faulty. It denies the undeniability of China’s increase in power and influence globally over recent decades. This debate has already inflicted some harm on Australia’s soft power in the region by reviving colonialist imagery of possession and dominance.’

The possession/dominance point matters in this complicated discussion of Australia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and the islands—not just a yellow taxi lament about what’s lost but defining the best vehicles for getting to what’s next.

In the gig on my Pacific pivot paper I argued that the yellow cab ain’t taking us back to versions of Oz paternalism/colonialism/imperialism. Nor is this all about competition with China, based on Australia’s abiding strategic denial instinct in the islands.

The strands of destiny, duty, denial and desire mean that Australia’s Pacific conversation is also about ourselves and where we live.

The biggest arguments I’ve had over my paper haven’t been about China’s growing role, but rather the terms of Canberra’s offer to the South Pacific of economic and security integration with Australia and New Zealand.

The New Zealand perspective seems to be that the integration strategy in Australia’s 2017 foreign policy white paper doesn’t show enough understanding of the sovereignty and identity of the islands.

During the Q and A, I had fun arguing that this is a classic kiwi effort at walking both sides of the street. New Zealand identifies as a South Pacific state while also drawing all the benefits of being Australia’s de facto seventh state.

Being integrated with Australia does no harm to New Zealand’s admirable sense of self. The kiwi example, I argue, shows the South Pacific how much more can be achieved through integration.

Another of my comments that got attention is that Prime Minister Scott Morrison is a genius—at least in his embrace and expression of the idea of Australia as part of the ‘Pacific family’. Integration is difficult and detailed policy; family is warm and embracing. Masterful!

Even Australia’s great foe in the South Pacific over the past decade, Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, is happy to embrace Morrison and family, a development that’s as promising as it’s surprising.

One of the great Oz correspondents in the South Pacific, Mary-Louise O’Callaghan, offers an excellent analysis of how religion has linked the Morrison family to the islands:

Veterans over the past couple of decades of many church-related trips to the Pacific (mostly Fiji), the Morrisons, frequently privileged to be house guests of their Pacific Island hosts, are more than familiar with the legendary and very genuine warmth of island hospitality. Such intimate exposure to the ebb and flow of ordinary Pacific life over nearly half a lifetime, also renders Australia’s 30th Prime Minister somewhat unique … Morrison is likely the first prime minister since Federation to bring to the office such personal insight and real affinity for our island neighbours. When Scott Morrison speaks of the Pacific being family he actually means it.

The family imagining offers much for the journey Australia and islands must do together.

Remembering, of course, Professor Joni’s warning in one of her seminal songs of grand strategy:

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Washington’s Pacific islands strategy shouldn’t focus solely on China

China’s influence in the Pacific creates a paradox for the formation of US policy towards Pacific island nations. If Washington focuses only on China’s involvement in the Pacific, it risks alienating the islands. Yet without mention of China, many US policymakers will remain uninformed and uninterested. The challenge the US faces is to develop a Pacific islands policy aimed at checking Chinese influence, while not making that the obvious and exclusive goal.

The solution is to address the needs of Pacific island states, advancing both their interests and those of the US and its allies.

China’s involvement in the Pacific has nudged Washington to pay closer attention. It has also created a problem for the US, reflected in House resolution 1157 (2018), with the long-winded title ‘Reaffirming the strong commitment of the United States to the countries and territories of the Pacific islands region’. It gives voice to the longstanding and deep link between Pacific islanders and the US, and echoes the 2018 Boe Declaration on climate change and human security.

The resolution, however, goes on to express concerns over China’s increased influence in the Pacific region, the threat of expanded Chinese military involvement and the placement of acoustic sensors on the ocean bottom near Guam and Yap. Australian and New Zealand diplomats, in keeping with their countries’ ‘step-up’ and ‘reset’ programs, worked to ensure that the resolution didn’t focus exclusively China. They succeeded in having language inserted that reflected the broader regional concerns of climate change and human security.

These same tensions were echoed at the recent Pacific Islands Roundtable, hosted by Georgetown University’s Center for Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Studies.

The US hasn’t been indifferent to the needs of Pacific island nations, but its attention has been episodic at best. Since 2017 there has been an uptick of interest. In April 2017, early in the Trump administration, Vice President Mike Pence stopped in American Samoa after his visit to Asia and Australia. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke attended the 2018 Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting.

Then, at the November 2018 APEC leaders’ meeting in Port Moresby, the US, Japan, Australia and New Zealand agreed to collaborate on a project to provide electricity to 70% of Papua New Guinea. The US, PNG and Australia also announced that they’d upgrade the naval base on Manus Island. In the same month, the US National Security Council created the role of director of Oceania and Indo-Pacific security; in years past, the Pacific had been folded into the Asia directorship.

History has in some ways complicated US relations in the Pacific. Hawaii and the territories of Guam and American Samoa came under US control well before World War II, whereas the Northern Marianas Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau trace their US connections to the post-war era. Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau are ‘freely associated states’ that were part of the Pacific trust territory governed by the US after World War II.

Three federal departments (State, Defense and Interior) share primary responsibility for the Pacific territories and freely associated states. In addition, the lion’s share of US aid in the Pacific goes to the freely associated states. Even with these deep links, the US nevertheless has trouble focusing on the Pacific islands. A former US official who covered the Asia–Pacific cynically observed that, in an average work week, they got attention late on Friday afternoons.

Australia and New Zealand have both taken steps to elevate Washington’s consideration of the Pacific islands. Australia has a diplomat as lead on the islands at its embassy in Washington. In December 2018 New Zealand’s foreign minister, Winston Peters, gave a speech in Washington urging the US to do more in the region.

The Pacific islands diplomatic community is small and not well resourced to undertake the heavy lifting required in Washington. Many of the diplomatic missions reside in New York and are jointly accredited to both the UN and Washington. Nonetheless, some representatives have had very long service. Palau’s ambassador, Hersey Kyota, for example, has been in Washington since 1997. So, while not having large outposts in the US, some of these diplomats have a deep understanding of the ways of Washington.

Diplomats from nations throughout the Pacific ask that the US not see the islands as a bulwark against China, but rather as partners in addressing the needs of the people of the Pacific.

As one Pacific diplomat observed, ‘We’re not just flyover states, there are people living there.’

The Blue Pacific and the legacies of nuclear testing

States in the Pacific islands are small in landmass and population. Their limited terrestrial resources and lack of comparative advantage are compounded by their remoteness from global centres of commerce. This obviously has impacts on the costs of doing business and integration into global trade relations. Their invisibility in international relations means that small states must creatively frame their presence in the global community.

It’s against this backdrop that the ‘Blue Pacific’, which is touted as an empowering worldview, should be understood. The core principles of the Blue Pacific must be read together with recent developments in the region. In 2017, Pacific Islands Forum leaders endorsed the concept as a ‘driving force’ connecting Pacific peoples ‘with their natural resources, environment, culture and livelihoods’. The Boe Declaration of 2018 formally recognised Pacific islanders’ stewardship over the Pacific Ocean.

While big states such as the US and China are competing for influence in the region, the Boe Declaration makes a case for prioritising the concerns of Pacific island communities. The strategic confrontations of big powers do not feature in the daily lives of Pacific peoples. What’s important to the survival of island states is their environment and the capacity of their resources to meet present needs and the needs of future generations. This logic is seen with the proposed Pacific Resilience Facility, which is a regional pool of resources to manage or mitigate the adverse effects of environmental challenges in the region.

The Boe Declaration and the Blue Pacific concept demonstrate that the geographical fragmentation of small states in the Pacific shouldn’t constrain their contributions to global areas of cooperation. Pacific island states have some of the world’s largest exclusive economic zones. The EEZs are the true measure of the islands’ potential wealth and size.

The renewed emphasis on the Pacific Ocean as a medium connecting the common destinies of Pacific communities has its merits. Collective diplomacy, and especially the use of multilateralism to advance collective outcomes, is the main beneficiary. The Blue Pacific celebrates success stories of Pacific regionalism, but it’s also a rethinking of strategies for collectively dealing with current challenges, both man-made and natural.

But for all its high-minded idealism, the Blue Pacific must also embrace uncomfortable realities. Pacific islanders can be modest. Confrontation is often shunned as uncouth behaviour. Islanders have long used consensus as a means of resolving complicated regional matters. Such approaches might not be appropriate when trying to get powerful states to participate in dealing with pressing regional problems.

One example of a sticky issue in the region is the potential effects of nuclear contamination of the Pacific Ocean. The legacies of nuclear tests in the Pacific islands include highly radioactive waste materials stored on vulnerable atolls.

In the 1950s, the Pacific Ocean was considered an empty space by the Euro-American powers. With the onset of the arms race during the Cold War, some of the colonial powers used the Pacific as a testing ground for their nuclear weapons. More than 300 nuclear tests were conducted in the Pacific Ocean. Atolls in the Marshall Islands, Johnston Island, Christmas Island and French Polynesia were used as nuclear test sites, casting long shadows into the present.

On one low-lying Pacific island atoll, the toxic legacy of the nuclear tests remains. In 2017, Mark Willacy from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation investigated the nuclear-waste storage facility on the remote atoll of Enewetak in the Marshall Islands. It was there that the US conducted its series of tests of nuclear weapons, including the first full-scale hydrogen bomb. Before it abandoned its nuclear testing program in the 1970s, the US buried contaminated material on Runit Island.

An estimated 85,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste is buried on Runit Island, including some of the world’s most toxic materials. It will take more than 24,000 years for the waste to disintegrate. It’s buried in porous coral and sand and capped by a concrete dome. Marshallese and international non-government organisations are concerned that sea-level rise and major typhoons will destroy the dome, resulting in the contamination of not only the Marshall Islands but the wider Pacific Ocean. Since the sea is a free-flowing matrix of currents and borderless movements of water, a Pacific-wide disaster is a plausible scenario.

To provide some context for the potential impact of a radioactive spill on the livelihoods of Pacific islanders, consider the effect it would have on the fisheries sector, which is worth about US$3 billion annually to island economies. In around 2006, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community initiated a project that involved catching, tagging and releasing tuna to monitor the migratory patterns of tuna stocks and their sustainable harvesting. The study showed that skipjack tuna tagged and released in the Bismarck Sea in PNG migrate beyond it into the EEZ of the Marshall Islands.

Data from the tracking of tuna demonstrates the interconnections of marine resources through the oceanic environment. Contamination of the fisheries resources of the Pacific islands from the leaking of radioactive materials into the ocean should be a compelling reason for a regional response. The problem with nuclear-waste sites on islands such as Runit is not a domestic one for the Marshall Islands alone. Countries such as PNG are in the vicinity of the major fisheries food chain, and the health of the ocean is of paramount importance to long-term food security and the wealth to be gained from marine-based commodities. To focus attention on the problem and initiate a regional clean-up effort, states in the Pacific islands need to apply pressure through multilateral platforms and collective diplomacy.

The Pacific island states have an illustrious record in employing collective diplomacy to tackle difficult issues. Since the 1980s, the high-water marks of collective diplomacy have been the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982, the 1985 Rarotonga Treaty and the global moratorium on drift-net fishing. Currently, small states in the Pacific islands are actively engaged in framing the narrative on global cooperation to deal with climate change challenges.

The Blue Pacific is a timely framework, emphasising a Pacific islands worldview, and is an alternative to the zero-sum confrontations of big powers in the region. More importantly, it stresses the importance of cooperation on Pacific terms in dealing with transnational challenges. The various major powers embroiled in their great-power confrontations in the Pacific ought to be educated about the significance of the Blue Pacific and their participation in advancing the goals of that paradigm. After all, the Pacific Ocean connects all the large landmasses on the Pacific Rim. The state of affairs in the islands is a microcosm of the planet’s chances of surviving global environmental challenges.

Businesses can help Australia’s step-up in the Pacific

As part of the Australian government’s Pacific push, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced an Australian infrastructure financing facility to support essential infrastructure development in the region.

The move echoes earlier calls from the Labor Party; shadow foreign minister Penny Wong first raised the issue in July and Labor leader Bill Shorten committed a future Labor government to establishing a government-backed infrastructure investment bank in the Pacific in October.

But our commendable bipartisan Pacific step-up has so far neglected the key role that Australia’s business sector can play in developing relations with our Pacific neighbours. It’s the missing link in our Pacific policy.

If we’re to achieve the foreign policy white paper’s ambition to ‘integrate Pacific countries into the Australian and New Zealand economies and our security institutions’, businesses need to be incorporated into our foreign policy approach with our near abroad. The private sector is estimated to generate 90% of jobs in the developing world, fund 60% of all investments and provide more than 80% of government revenues.

In a new ASPI Strategic Insights report, we examine the current Australian business relationship with the Pacific and its potential for growth.

While a large number of Australian medium-sized companies operate successfully in the Pacific, we’re squandering opportunities to strengthen the role of our business and investment community in our relationships with our Pacific island neighbours.

Within the Australian institutional superannuation market, the pool of private-sector capital able to invest in infrastructure is around $2.5 trillion. But no large Australian superannuation institution is looking to the Pacific for infrastructure opportunities.

The paper looks at the barriers preventing increased private-sector engagement and makes recommendations for government and business to help create stronger, lasting business engagement in the Pacific.

Australian aid and defence relationships with the Pacific islands are already well developed. But the business relationship is the wobbliest leg on our Pacific engagement table. Australian banks are slowly withdrawing from the region. Trade with the region equates to only 1.3% of Australia’s total trade (of which Papua New Guinea makes up more than half). Our investment in the region is even smaller.

Some significant barriers and challenges may play a role in preventing Australian businesses from stepping up their engagement in the Pacific. At times, there’s a regional perception that Australia is talking down to island leaders when it comes to the role of business. A lack of equivalent government representation on the Australian side at many formal Pacific conferences and events also creates a perception that Australia flies over the Pacific on its way to other markets.

On the business side, many leaders of Australian firms believe that investing in the Pacific islands is risky, as companies may be exposed to currency, credit and sovereign risks simultaneously.

Many barriers can be attributed to a lack of experience and knowledge of the Pacific among Australian businesses, combined with a lack of information-sharing between the public and private sectors about the business environment and opportunities in the region.

There’s lots of potential to forge stronger commercial relationships in a range of different sectors. Australian businesses can capitalise on the great demand for renewable energy in the Pacific, driven by the existential risk of climate change and the islands’ excessive reliance on fossil fuels.

Agriculture is the biggest employer in the region and a large source of untapped potential for Australian commercial engagement. Alongside government, Australian businesses can become more involved in disaster response. The recent commitment from Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the US to help provide power to 70% of PNG by 2030 will require massive private-sector support.

The government should consider the following recommendations:

  • Australia should share specific state and local government expertise by increasing sister-state relationships. Queensland, for example, has experience in mining, cyclone response and agriculture.
  • Relationships between high-level economic officials in the Australian and Pacific island governments should be strengthened to create a more business-friendly environment in the region.
  • DFAT, with its Pacific counterparts, should create a robust flow of information by organising regular tours for Australian investors of the main infrastructure projects in the Pacific.
  • Select private-sector executives should be endorsed by the government as ‘trade advisers’ to provide advice to government officials and represent the private sector at Pacific ministerial conferences.
  • Austrade’s Pacific operations should be reviewed. Currently, it has no representative in the area between Port Moresby and Auckland.
  • The Australian government should create an insurance institution specifically designed to alleviate risk for Australian businesses that want to engage in the Pacific. It would insure against sovereign and liquidity risks rather than normal business risks.

We also set out a number of recommendations for the Australian business community. These include engaging more with our aid program, leveraging soft power through business groups like Rotary International, and establishing a new economic dialogue with Pacific business organisations and the Australian government in order to engage Pacific economic ministers and CEOs.

We’re not suggesting we adopt an ‘Australia Inc.’ approach to the region. But now is the time to build a more deliberate and far-reaching partnership between government and business to further Australia’s interests in the Pacific.

Hard power, soft power and the stickiness of kowtow diplomacy

President Xi Jinping’s attendance at the recent APEC summit in Port Moresby was meant to be the cap on a soft-power charm offensive validating Chinese influence in the Pacific. In the event, it has been widely regarded by non-Chinese media and commentators as a diplomatic bust for Xi.

That APEC was a failure seemed clear enough to virtually all observers.

The meeting ended without an agreed communiqué for the first time in its history. Xi’s central role in the forum was gazumped by the buzz about the pre-summit announcements of increased Australian aid to the region and the funding of a major electrification project by a consortium of Western allies, and by the American declaration at the summit that it would partner with Australia and PNG in reviving the Manus Island naval base.

While it would be difficult to portray the APEC summit as an unmitigated success for China, it may not have been quite the disaster implied by most reports, at least from Xi’s perspective.

The Western imagery is that somehow China had lost the plot in Port Moresby and been reduced to ‘tantrum diplomacy’ to compensate for its lack of success. Certainly, there was ample evidence for this assessment, if China had been using the Joseph Nye soft-power playbook.

The local and non-Chinese international media were excluded from a working dinner that Xi hosted for the leaders of the eight Pacific island nations which recognise the PRC. Highlighting China’s severe media censorship, a PNG journalist responded, ‘We have press freedom in this country.’

Another significant instance of Chinese arrogance and disrespect for the host government occurred when a number of Chinese officials reportedly tried to force their way into the office of Rimbink Pato, PNG’s foreign minister, to demand changes to the draft final communiqué.

Incidents such as these run counter to Western notions of soft power and could be expected to undermine the positive images that the Chinese state has been pursuing through its huge soft-power budget over the past decade.

However, there’s an argument that Xi’s soft-power playbook doesn’t have the same roles or objectives as those in the Nye playbook. Basically, it’s claimed that Xi has been using public diplomacy abroad to cement his power with the party at home. In short, the Chinese Communist Party ‘is far more concerned about its soft power within China than it is with its influence outside’.

That helps to explain why Xi may have felt it was more important to stage a ‘show’ for his domestic audience than to worry about the optics of excluding foreign journalists from his dinner with island leaders.

Indeed, Xi’s ‘China Dream’ has some of the same elements in terms of his political base as does Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ for his. He wants to show his base, the CCP, that he is securing international respect for China, its culture and its people.

Xi’s dream is akin to the 21st-century restoration of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ in global affairs. This has resulted in a studied thin skin with regard to perceived affronts which China deems to have impugned its dignity in any way.

Rather than tantrum diplomacy, China’s behaviour in Port Moresby could be seen as an extension of kowtow diplomacy—that is, using the machinery of the state to demand that foreigners show deference to Chinese sensibilities.

There’s a building body of evidence for this assessment in any number of disparate arenas, from tourists in Sweden and the identification of Qantas destinations, to being denied speaking rights at the Pacific Islands Forum summit in Nauru.

It is worthwhile looking back at APEC from the two perspectives that haven’t been well canvassed in the commentary to date: the Pacific island nations and Beijing. While the Chinese actions at APEC may have looked counterproductive to Western observers, it’s not clear that those negativities have carried through to the Pacific islands.

The eight regional states that were invited to Xi’s pre-summit private meeting were clearly pleased to be singled out to enjoy a privileged position in Port Moresby. Moreover, the embarrassing contretemps involving China appears not to have been widely reported in the regional media. But they did cover Xi’s comments on South–South cooperation and the regional leaders’ responses.

For its part, Beijing will have observed that it received much credit for the Western, especially Australian, commitments made in the lead-up to, and at, APEC. These initiatives have been regularly attributed to China’s increased role in the Pacific islands region.

Of course, we don’t know what pre-APEC benchmarks Beijing might have set for success at the summit. Nonetheless, it did walk away with two more Pacific island partners—Tonga and Vanuatu—for its Belt and Road Initiative. And it did prevent condemnation of its trade practices in the final communiqué that never was.

Given the absence of new Chinese proposals for the summit, perhaps these were enough.

For all its arrogance and brusqueness, the key to the effectiveness of kowtow diplomacy remains as it has been for more than two decades. This is what Walter Russell Mead has called ‘sticky power’, or the political consequences for smaller states when they get entangled dependently with a larger economy.

Former prime minister Malcom Turnbull noted the challenges of Chinese sticky power for Australia’s other interests when he observed, ‘This is the first time in our history that our dominant trading partner is not also our dominant security partner.’

Just as Australia struggles with sticky power, so too do our Pacific island neighbours. China has emerged as a key aid, investment and trade partner for most states in the South Pacific over the past two decades. China ranks first in trade across the region and second in both investment and aid.

If Xi banked on Chinese sticky power trumping any soft-power deficit resulting from kowtow diplomacy at APEC, he has yet to be proved wrong.