Tag Archive for: Vanuatu

Leadership change creates new opportunities for Vanuatu–Australia security relationship

On Monday, Sato Kilman was voted in as prime minister of Vanuatu for the fifth time, after the country’s Supreme Court upheld a vote of no confidence against former PM Ishmael Kalsakau. Having been in this position before, Kilman wasted no time in outlining the new government’s vision, with effective foreign policy being identified as a priority.

In an interview with the ABC’s Pacific Beat, Kilman said that he wants to ‘revisit’ the security pact with Australia that was signed by his predecessor. Kilman said that Vanuatu’s parliament would be unlikely to ratify the agreement in its current form and that he felt Kalsakau hadn’t consulted adequately with the council of ministers prior to signing it.

The revelation that the security agreement wouldn’t get ratified won’t have come as a shock to Australia. Potential challenges have been evident for months. In May, then opposition leader, now deputy prime minister, Bob Loughman claimed the agreement undermined the country’s independence and listed its signing as one of the many reasons to remove Kalsakau from power.

Vanuatu is also not the only country in the Pacific that wants to take more time to review its security partnership with Australia. On 1 June, Prime Minister James Marape announced that Papua New Guinea wasn’t ready to sign the bilateral security treaty it has been working on with Australia, citing concerns that the wording encroached on PNG’s sovereignty.

My ASPI colleague Lucy Albiston and I have previously noted the importance of building and nurturing Pacific treaties with care. Kilman’s upfront admission that he was ‘not sure’ whether the pact was ‘in the best interests of Vanuatu’ shouldn’t be considered narrowly as an unrecoverable setback in Australia’s security relations with the country. It’s an opportunity to do better.

Although negotiations for the security agreement with Vanuatu began in 2018, not enough was done to explain the agreement’s benefits to both the Vanuatu government and the nation’s people. Vanuatu has a free media that is eager to understand more about security and geopolitics in the region and would relish the opportunity to report more information on the true benefits that come from agreements like this.

It’s also an opportunity for Australia to demonstrate how a stronger formalised bilateral security agreement can help Vanuatu meet its identified security needs. Australia’s support to Vanuatu in developing its national security strategy was welcomed, and the proposed agreement aimed to address a number of priorities, particularly in humanitarian aid and disaster relief, cybersecurity, maritime security and policing.

Kilman has reiterated that community policing in remote areas is a priority for the government. A new Vanuatu Police Force structure was launched at the beginning of this month that caters for substantial growth in the force to over 1,500 members and aims to ensure that every island has a police outpost. This is a great new starting point for Australia to be highlighting the value of its assistance and how Vanuatu’s ambitions can be better supported through a refined security agreement.

Australia has demonstrated that it wants to find a way to better support its Pacific partners. In July, when Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, fresh from a trip to Beijing, announced his intent to establish a military in his country, Canberra was quick to respond. Defence Minister Richard Marles stated that, while this was a sovereign decision for Solomon Islands, Australia would be ‘very keen’ to provide support if asked. Marles also acknowledged that ‘Vanuatu is also thinking about moving down this path as well’.

Although progression towards militarisation has likely slowed or temporarily halted in Vanuatu with a change in government, if the topic is raised again, Australia should echo and improve upon the response given to Honiara.

If Vanuatu were to decide to establish a military—most likely by separating the Vanuatu Mobile Force and Police Maritime Wing from the Vanuatu Police Force—it would require significant legislative and ministerial changes. In the years that it would take to effect the separation, there would undoubtedly be political challenges against the ruling party that threatened to reverse the decisions. That is simply part of Pacific democracy.

Australia must not be daunted by Vanuatu exercising its democracy and right to sovereign decision-making. In fact, such actions must be encouraged. Decisions should not be made by a single leader; they should be made by elected governments that reflect the will of the people, and when those governments change, so too can the needs. Australia must be ready to go back to negotiations, to share experiences and stories with the people of Vanuatu, and to work together to find the best partnership for our two countries.

If this is done correctly and time is taken to engage all components of Vanuatu’s government, as well as key cultural leadership groups such as the Malvatumauri council of chiefs, churches and women’s councils, it’s more likely an agreement will be reached that lasts longer than any one leader.

Taking the time to do things right is one of the many things that sets Australia apart from other countries, such as China, that are seeking to build partnerships in the region. Last year, Vanuatu was one of 10 Pacific island countries included in Beijing’s proposed regional security agreement, which immediately fell flat because Pacific leaders had not been properly consulted. While Australia’s approach is miles ahead, there’s always room for improvement.

As Australia continues to engage with Vanuatu on the security proposal, and any other matters of importance between our two countries, it must resist the urge to view decisions only through the lens of geostrategic competition. Kilman was right to rebut claims that he was leading a ‘pro-China’ bloc against a ‘pro-West’ Kalsakau government. Such labels, often created from viewing isolated incidents, are useless if Australia wants to better understand the priorities and objectives of its partners.

In reality, Vanuatu’s government is pro-Vanuatu and is proud of its non-aligned status. Kalsakau welcomed Chinese police experts into the country in August and received policing supplies, including uniforms and handcuffs. He wasn’t picking sides. He was accepting support for the betterment of his nation’s security forces.

Being asked to renegotiate the security agreement does not mean Australia is losing ground in the region. But it is a call to do better. Australia now has an opportunity to approach the issue of security with a broader lens that includes more groups in Vanuatu through greater transparency and engagement.

The pressures on South Pacific journalism

Journalism has always been a tough trade in the South Pacific. Living and working in island communities exposes editors and reporters to unusual political, personal and professional pressures.

A statement warning about ‘growing threats to media freedom’ from the Melanesia Media Freedom Forum, representing journalists from Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and West Papua, has been underlined by Vanuatu’s expulsion of a long-serving editor.

Kiribati chucking out a visiting Australian TV crew also says something about media problems.

One change these days is that Pacific journalists can’t rely as they once could on the coverage and support of Australian media and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

An irony of Australia’s policy ‘step-up’ in the South Pacific is how much Oz media has stepped down. As the ABC marks the 80th birthday of its international service, Radio Australia, a celebration footnote is that it seems Australia’s mothballed shortwave-radio site is in the process of being sold.

The Vanuatu story illustrates the forces confronting Pacific journalists. In a ‘dark day for media freedom’, the media director and publisher of Vanuatu’s Daily Post, Dan McGarry, had to leave the country where he’s lived for 16 years. As McGarry writes, ‘I believe the government refused my application to renew my work visa to silence me and warn other journalists in the country not to speak out.’

Like much else in the South Pacific, there’s a China dimension. McGarry says the prime minister’s office warned him about ‘negative’ coverage in July:

The Daily Post had just published a series of articles relating to how the government had detained six Chinese nationals—four of whom had Vanuatu citizenship—without trial or access to legal counsel. They were stripped of their citizenship and placed on a plane to China. We don’t know what happened to them after that …

There’s no evidence to suggest that China has asked for or even wanted my removal. But it seems clear that political pressures exerted on senior bureaucrats have resulted in this attempt to stifle the media.

Kiribati detaining and expelling the Channel 9’s TV crew certainly added drama to the ‘trouble in paradise’ story on 60 Minutes, and played to its report about ‘sinister’ Chinese activities. Watching the segment, though, it seemed more the usual island play of political personalities and power, with extra pressure stirred in by Kiribati’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China.

Vanuatu and Kiribati join Papua New Guinea and Fiji on the dishonor roll of island governments that have expelled journos. In heaving hacks, governments always talk tough about asserting sovereignty, but it’s always a bad look. Why so sensitive? What’s to hide? This assertion of power makes a government look weak, not strong.

As Jemima Garrett writes, there’s no doubt that, for Australia, China’s growing influence is the story of the decade. But, with so few Australian journalists based in the region, even significant developments in the China story are going unreported:

The level of understanding and knowledge in Australia about the Pacific is staggeringly low. While there has been a significant uptick in Australian media interest in the region recently, its almost single-minded focus on China is not helping improve that understanding and is aggravating Pacific leaders who want to see Pacific voices and a wider agenda make more of an impact in Australia.

The Melanesia media statement said the ‘global decline of democracy is making it easier for our governments to silence the media’; misinformation, propaganda and fake news are growing problems; and social media is an ‘existential threat’, undermining the budget and role of Melanesian media companies.

The forum called for a better understanding of the role of journalism in the functioning and accountability of Melanesian democracies:

The range of threats to media freedom is increasing. These include restrictive legislation, intimidation, political threats, legal threats and prosecutions, assaults and police and military brutality, illegal detention, online abuse, racism between ethnic groups and the ever-present threats facing particularly younger and female reporters who may face violence both on the job and within their own homes.

Since the ABC closed its shortwave service in January 2017, half of the Pacific Islands Forum countries now hear nothing from Radio Australia.

Killing shortwave disenfranchised an unknown number of listeners. As broadcasting policy, it was highly questionable. As strategy, it was dumb—a distressing example of Oz amnesia about its South Pacific role and the role of free media in the islands.

The quietly released report of the review of Australia’s media reach in the Asia–Pacific didn’t advocate restoring shortwave, but nor did it endorse ABC dumbness. The recommendation was to think harder: Australia must identify its ‘strategic policy objectives’ and clarify the role of broadcasting.

Geoff Heriot is properly scathing about the review’s fuzzy geographic frame, and the way it calculates the benefits of shortwave only in economic terms.

Yet even on the money, the report found that in the decade before closure, Australia had ‘derived $40.3 million of net benefits from its shortwave broadcasts to the Asia Pacific region’.

So, ending shortwave hurt the national pocket as well as foreign policy.

As Australia ponders its interests, influence and values in the South Pacific, it must look anew at the central role of media.

Is China changing the ‘rules’ in the Pacific Islands?

The report this week that China is in talks to build a military base in Vanuatu has generated consternation in Australia, with Malcolm Turnbull expressing his ‘great concern’ about the potential militarisation of the Pacific Islands.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has since stated that she has no knowledge of such talks, Vanuatu’s Foreign Minister Ralph Regenvanu has both denied and criticised the report, and the Chinese government has described the report as ‘ridiculous’.

These denials raise questions about who was the source of the report and why the claim was made now. Certainly, there’s a degree of frustration among Pacific Islands watchers in Canberra regarding the Australian government’s approach to the region.

Regardless of whether the report was accurate, it’s undeniable that China has significantly increased its aid to, and engagement with, the Pacific Islands. Alongside the growing presence of powers such as Russia, India and Japan, as well as traditional powers Australia, New Zealand, France and the United States, the geopolitics of the region are crowded and complex.

Penny Wong is right to declare that any move by China to establish a military presence in Vanuatu or elsewhere in the Pacific Islands would be a ‘potential game changer’ for Australia. Australia has two primary strategic interests in the Pacific islands. The first is to ensure ‘security, stability and cohesion’ in the region. The second is to ensure that no power hostile to Western interests establishes a strategic foothold in the region from which it could launch attacks on Australia or threaten allied access to our maritime approaches. While neither China nor any other power presently poses an overt threat to Australia, strategic planners also need to be concerned about this emerging as a plausible potential threat.

Yet Australia’s ability to exercise its influence in pursuit of these strategic interests has never been absolute and is now declining. Yesterday’s report highlights the strategic importance of the Pacific Islands to Australia and provides an opportunity to debate the vital question: is Australia’s approach to the region likely to enhance our influence and serve our interests?

Australia remains the Pacific Islands’ major aid donor, as Bishop reminded our neighbours during her March 2018 visit to Papua New Guinea and Tonga. Australia is also the major trading partner and source of foreign investment for most regional states, as well as the state (alongside New Zealand) most likely to respond in the event of a crisis or natural disaster.

The 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper outlined some useful proposals to boost people-to-people links, but ultimately outlined a business-as-usual approach, including a continued relatively narrow emphasis on promoting economic growth.

Australia needs to rethink its diplomacy in the region, as well as broader questions about its defence and foreign policies. Both the foreign policy white paper and the 2016 Defence White Paper emphasised the importance of the ‘rules-based international order’. The phrase has been generally read to mean the ‘Western’ rules and principles established by the United States and its allies after World War II and bolstered by the brief period of American unipolarity following the Cold War.

While the foreign policy white paper recognises that some reform of these rules will be necessary to reflect the rise of non-Western powers, it shows little enthusiasm for changes that undermine the ‘liberal’—more specifically, economically neoliberal—character of the existing order.

Bishop’s visit to Vanuatu with Prince Charles over the weekend was reportedly intended to demonstrate the merits of a ‘free and open system of international rules’. This exhibits remarkably little critical reflection about whether the dominant rules-based international order serves the best interests of Pacific Island states, and whether Australia’s behaviour supports its claim to value these rules.

Several aspects of the dominant rules-based international order have been important for Pacific Island states, particularly the principle of the sovereign equality of states, which has largely protected them from foreign incursion and operated as a valuable diplomatic bargaining chip. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has recognised and protected (at least in law) their massive maritime exclusive economic zones.

The value of other aspects of the dominant order are more questionable, as is Australia’s adherence to them. For example, Australia promotes trade liberalisation, but overlooks the fact that it can have mixed outcomes for Pacific Island states, particularly as the rules applied to them are often deeply inequitable. For example, when Tonga acceded to the WTO, it did so on almost the worst terms of any member state.

Both Papua New Guinea and Fiji (and now potentially Tonga) have declined to join the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER) Plus trade agreement between Pacific Island states, Australia and New Zealand out of concern that it might be economically disadvantageous. Across the region there’s resentment that Australia purports to promote trade liberalisation, yet refuses to substantively liberalise its labour market, which would offer the most developmental benefit to Pacific Island states.

Similarly, Australia reiterated in the foreign policy white paper that it’s ‘committed to advancing human rights globally’, yet holds children in immigration detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, where they are subject to abuse. The negative effect of these centres on the local Manus Island and Nauru populations, as well as on democracy and the rule of law in both countries—liberal principles Australia purports to promote—exacerbates the damage to our reputation in the region.

Climate change is another example where the dominant rules-based international order is proving inadequate for Pacific Island states, particularly as some of the main proponents of that order, such as the United States, are now actively seeking to undermine the rules established in the Paris Agreement. The fact that several prominent members of the Australian government continue to advocate for coal-based electricity generation isn’t lost on Pacific Islanders.

While yesterday’s report wasn’t a cause for panic, it should serve as another reminder of the strategic import of the region to Australia and of the need for Australia to rethink its approach if it’s going to have a chance of exercising sufficient influence to pursue its strategic interests in the future.

Critically examining whether the same business-as-usual approach based on promoting the largely neoliberal rules-based international order would be a good place to start. If we don’t do this, then we may find that alternative partners such as China—countries that increasingly play by their own rules and promote their own approaches to international order—change the rules in the Pacific Islands in ways we find difficult to live with.