Tag Archive for: Pacific Islands

Kangaroo step-up and Kiwi reset in the South Pacific

Australia and New Zealand are reaching for fresh thoughts about the South Pacific.

Canberra offers the Islands economic and security ‘integration’ and a ‘step-up’ in engagement. The new government in Wellington promises to ‘shift the dial’ to get a ‘reset of New Zealand’s foreign policy direction in the Pacific’.

It was striking but appropriate that New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, flew to Sydney to deliver his Pacific ‘reset’ speech.

Australia and New Zealand understand the demand to do more—and do some things differently. And the need to do it together. That was the closing note of Peters’ Sydney speech: ‘There has never been a time since 1945 when Australia and New Zealand need to work together more closely in the Pacific.’

Even the traditional elbow jab in any Kiwi speech about Oz was more appeal than shove:

It is not a matter of the country cousin or the senior soldier anymore. We are in a serious struggle to get on top of the problem we have in the Pacific, and we need best efforts from both of our countries.

Along with the ‘dizzying array’ of economic, social and environmental challenges facing the Islands, Peters noted, the region is attracting more external actors and interests. ‘So much is changing in the Pacific, and sometimes it is not for the best. Need and temptation often leads to greater risk than prudence would suggest.’

In its budget this month, New Zealand put money into its reset, lifting aid funding by 30% (an extra NZ$714.22 million over the four-year budget cycle). Most of the aid will go to the South Pacific, which Peters described as ‘an increasingly contested strategic space’.

Australia’s May budget also announced more aid for the Islands—at $1.3 billion, ‘our highest ever contribution to the region’—even while squeezing development assistance elsewhere. As the previous column noted, Oz aid policy is now the South Pacific.

Australia’s view of its Indo-Pacific future was symbolically expressed via the announcement of two new diplomatic posts: a consulate-general in Kolkata, India (population: 15 million), and our 14th post in the South Pacific, a High Commission in the micro-state of Tuvalu (population: 11,277).

Another bit of symbolic substance was the promise to increase ‘berthing infrastructure in Sydney’ to send even more cruise liners into the South Pacific (an industry worth $2.7 billion to the Australian economy and plenty to the Islands).

As an expression of strategic intent and economic contest, Australia elbowed aside China to build an undersea telecommunications cable with Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. In budget-speak with a strategic flavour, the cable project will create ‘a secure communication asset’. Get that emphasis: communication (tick), secure (tick).

Promising to step up ‘our support for a more secure and prosperous Pacific’, the aid budget showcased Australia’s plans to:

  • offer economic opportunities for Pacific workers in Oz with expanded labour mobility
  • establish an Australia Pacific Security College for leadership training in security and law enforcement
  • begin the pilot phase of the Australia-Pacific BRIDGE School Partnerships Program, starting with schools in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Nauru, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.

The Foreign Policy White Paper in November announced the integration policy: ‘helping to integrate Pacific countries into the Australian and New Zealand economies and our security institutions’.

The aid program puts together the parts, stating:

Given the immutable issues of small size, dispersed populations and fragile economies, the approach of the Australian aid program in the Pacific is to expand opportunities for our neighbours through greater integration. Our Pacific development program is working to enable economic cooperation, including through labour mobility, tackling security challenges, and strengthening people-to-people links.

Australia can draw on a lot of history and its central role in the region to imagine a most ambitious integrated future. Integration must be a discussion about what the Islands want, but also about how Canberra orders its priorities. As Nic Maclellan points out, there’s lots of potential clash between Australia’s global strategic interests and our regional obligations.

Enter New Zealand. Australia is the absent-minded Islands hegemon that isn’t always benign—we have form as a selfish bully. When the Kangaroo is hopping away or going too hard, it’s always useful to have the Kiwi working the other side of the street.

The ‘come together’ call for the South Pacific will have several dimensions. Not least will be what Canberra and Wellington can agree on and then deliver. This should be the easy bit; it seldom is. There’s always a bit of elbow in the Kangaroo–Kiwi hug and huddle.

Then there’s the complex interactions with a range of extraordinarily diverse South Pacific states, from the relative giant in Papua New Guinea to the minnow-sized Tuvalu.

Add in a vital dimension that’s central, especially to Australia’s integration proposal. The Islands have to reach a minimum level of agreement among themselves. If Canberra–Wellington consensus is harder than it should be, real agreement among the Islands to make real change is rare.

One of the biggest integration questions is how much the Islands are prepared to integrate with each other. What will the Islands give up or share with neighbours to change the terms of the catch‑22 of their slow development? And what agreement can the Islands reach on the ‘increasingly contested strategic space’ described by Winston Peters.

The Kangaroo and Kiwi need to agree. Just as importantly, the Islands need to decide and choose.

Uniting nations: developing maritime domain awareness for the ‘Blue Pacific’

Pacific island states face a pressing need to understand more about what’s happening in the waters that surround them and to work more closely to deal with threats and crises.

Maritime security-related issues represent some of the most valuable areas for cooperation in identifying and countering behaviour ranging from the trafficking of people, drugs, small arms and other illicit goods; illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing; and other environmental crimes.

As well, the safety of ferries and inter-island shipping are key issues in a region dependent on maritime transport, so safety of navigation and effective search and rescue are essential. And protecting marine ecosystems and resources is vital to food security, human health and economic well-being.

This means it’s crucial to share information on marine incidents, oil spill responses, management and conservation of fisheries resources, marine pollution and coastal management.

A key to addressing these challenges regionally and nationally is maritime domain awareness (MDA)—understanding what happens at sea. Information sharing, fusion and joint analysis allow countries to react faster to incidents and set regional priorities.

The communique of the 2017 Pacific Island Forum acknowledged ‘the need to strengthen cooperation and information sharing in maritime domain awareness’. In 2017, Forum leaders endorsed the ‘Blue Pacific’ identity to re-capture the potential of the region’s shared stewardship of the Pacific Ocean.

How will the region realise MDA?

The Pacific is more advanced than many other regions that have initiated MDA, but national capacities are still very weak. To date there’s little evidence that much information has been shared between regional bodies responsible for maritime security, shipping, and maritime safety and protecting the marine environment.

An important future building block will be the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) surveillance centre in Honiara. It holds a maritime operational picture based on data provided through member states’ vessel monitoring systems, some high seas data from the Western Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, as well as ships’ automatic identification systems and long-range tracking and identification systems. There’s considerable capacity for operational information management and analysis at FFA’s surveillance centre.

Many forums and bodies together have large sets of complementary data and experience.  These include mechanisms under the Nuie Treaty, the FFA, the Pacific Transnational Crime Coordination Centre, customs automated systems and partnerships, as well as forums like the Pacific Immigration Directors Conference and the Pacific Islands Chiefs of Police. Many of these groupings have demonstrated what can be gained from information sharing.

So where from here for regional MDA? What instruments will succeed? We make six suggestions.

A useful first step will be to agree on a single point of contact (SPOC) for maritime security in each country. SPOCs are a very cost effective solution to disseminate and share information, discuss challenges and develop consent proposals for how to proceed in advancing other instruments.

Identifying the right SPOC in each country will not be easy: it implies that one agency will be the lead. The right SPOC needs to be able to transmit information at the national level and ensure that it receives the required attention.

The SPOC system forms the basis for a second measure that can be implemented with low cost and with few administrative, legal or diplomatic hurdles. Regular dialogues of the SPOCs and other maritime actors on MDA will assist in developing a shared understanding of priorities.

Such dialogues enable pragmatic forms of operational cooperation and provide the basis for social bonds and trust. They provide transparency to planned activities, such as operations or capacity building. This model has been used successfully outside the Pacific. Examples include meetings addressing human trafficking in the Mediterranean, piracy off Somalia and the monthly awareness meetings of Singapore’s Information Fusion Centre.

In the Pacific such meetings will be more difficult to organise and more costly considering the region’s size. But such costs can be reduced if meetings are held back-to-back with other events and maximum use is made of video and voice conferencing.

A third measure for effective MDA would be more formal agreements that clarify expectations and provide basic operating procedures, possibly through memoranda of understanding. More structured instruments are codes of conduct, like the Djibouti Code of Conduct in the western Indian Ocean. When accompanied by action plans and activities, these are important regional frameworks.

A fourth step for effective regional MDA is institutional arrangements for sharing and analysing information and organising responses.

One model for such a regional centre is the Information Fusion Centre (IFC) based in Singapore. The IFC provides the maritime domain picture for the ASEAN countries and to all its other participating countries (maritime accidents as well as illegal activities) and services such as newsletters and advice to the shipping industry.

The IFC includes international liaison officers seconded by interested states. These allow joint interpretation of the situation, as well rapid distribution to national authorities.

While the ideas behind the IFC are relevant, it’s a costly undertaking. Arguably the Pacific would do better to take smaller steps and seek something on a lower scale developed out of the FFA’s surveillance operations centre. (One possible model for a regional maritime coordination centre, building on FFA’s surveillance centre, has been set out in ASPI’s special report, Australia and the South Pacific: rising to the challenge.)

A fifth requirement is to embed activities in a broader maritime security framework, ideally through national and regional maritime security strategies. These have been successful in Europe and in Africa, ensuring the buy-in of political and other stakeholders. A strategy doesn’t necessarily have to be developed first, but should be progressed with any MDA structures.

The sixth component for effective Pacific MDA is support from donors. In funding MDA, donors will, however, bring their own agendas, priorities and preferences for systems or structures. Australia will certainly be a pivotal partner working through the Pacific Maritime Security Program providing new patrol craft to many island states, and new commitments to provide regional aerial surveillance.

France and non-regional donors such as the EU, Japan, Singapore, the UK and the US should also be involved in advancing regional maritime security arrangements.  Each has made commitments and related initiatives that can be built upon.

In working with donors, it’s essential that the island states start with their own vision, and develop their own strategy and priorities. The closer the Pacific countries can work together, the more they’ll be able to avoid duplication of effort or gaps in areas of least attraction for funding by donors.

In developing the MDA architecture, the region needs to take an incremental approach that pursues realistic goals and ensures ownership and sustainability. Any architecture shouldn’t focus just on threats or crime. It should also ensure that measures benefit the larger blue economy and regional ocean governance.

As we stress above, existing agreements and arrangements should be built upon wherever possible. There’s also a need to advance coordination of regional and/or sub-regional capacity-building exercises and training related to maritime security information sharing.

If China builds a military base in Vanuatu, what are the implications for Australia’s defence planning?

The revelation by the Fairfax Press—which hasn’t been confirmed by any other source—that China may be interested in building a military base in Vanuatu has raised a storm of negative commentary. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull expressed ‘grave concern’ for Australia’s interests that the South Pacific not be militarised in this way.

Here are some of the reasons why such a development—were it to occur—would be a serious worry for our defence planning. As Penny Wong has stated, it would be a game changer. Thirty years ago, the 1987 Defence White Paper observed that countries in the South-West Pacific region lie across important trade routes and approaches to Australia’s east coast, where most of our major population centres are located.

It went on to say that ‘an unfriendly maritime power’ in the area could inhibit our freedom of movement through these approaches and place in doubt the security of Australia’s supply of military equipment and other strategic materiel from the United States.

In the Cold War, the activities of the Soviet Union came under scrutiny because a number of developments affecting the South Pacific had increased the region’s potential to pose strategic problems for Australia. Among these developments were the establishment of links between some regional states and external powers ‘with strategic interests potentially inimical to Australia’s’. In particular, the Soviet Union had fisheries agreements with Kiribati and Vanuatu. We knew that Soviet fisheries vessels, mother ships and so-called hydrography research ships had intelligence collection tasks.

The 1987 white paper proclaimed that further access by the Soviet Union, ‘especially the establishment of a presence ashore’, would be an unwelcome development because of its potential to enhance Soviet influence in the region. Although Soviet involvement in the region in fact remained at a relatively low level, there was continuing concern that ‘the fragile and narrowly based economies’ of the South Pacific would continue to present opportunities for exploitation by external powers.

As a result, a program of Australian P3C Orion long-range maritime patrol deployments was commenced in 1983, and RAN ship visits to the South Pacific were increased. The latter was a policy decision taken to emphasise the South Pacific at the expense of some of our more distant deployments, reflecting how important it was.

By the mid-1980s, Canberra was acutely concerned by the fact that the Soviet Union had established a major naval base—the largest outside of the Warsaw Pact area—at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. This base hosted Soviet warships and submarines, bombers and an advanced signals intelligence facility. Throughout the 1980s, it was a prime target for Australian covert submarine operations and P3C Orion activities. The US Vice President, Dick Cheney, told me in the White House in 2002 just how important our submarine operations were against the Soviet Navy at that time.

All that was a long time ago. But the historical record shows how seriously Australia has reacted to potential adverse military developments in our neighbourhood.

For the future, in the most drastic of circumstances, Australia might have to contend with a major-power adversary operating in our approaches, including as a consequence of wider conflict in the Asia–Pacific region. Were such an adversary to have access to a major military base, Australia would need maritime strike forces giving us an acceptable margin of confidence that hostile military operations in our region of primary military concern could be contested effectively and substantial costs imposed.

China claims it has no overseas military bases, although it’s constructing what it calls an ‘overseas logistics base’ in Djibouti and is actively looking in such places as Pakistan and Sri Lanka for other bases in the Indian Ocean. Were China to acquire a military base in the South Pacific or the Southeast Asian archipelago (for example in East Timor, which is only 400 kilometres from Australian territory), the strategic consequences for us would be serious.

We have long acknowledged in our defence planning that if a potentially hostile power were to secure a military base in our neighbourhood that would greatly improve the capacity of such a power to use military force against us. If Australian intelligence were to detect the development of such a military base by China, it would be vital that we possessed the military capability—if required—to deny it.

All of this isn’t to treat China as our inevitable adversary. But neither should we pretend that our strategic circumstances wouldn’t change dramatically if China established a military base in Vanuatu. Such a base would be evidence that China aims to use its military power to expand its strategic space at very considerable distance from its homeland in an area of little strategic concern to it.

The fact is that attacks on Australia of an intensity and duration sufficient to be a serious threat to our national way of life would be possible only by forces with access to bases and facilities in our immediate neighbourhood. A sharp lift in our strike capabilities would be essential in those circumstances.