Politics
Canberra Set To Be More Pro-Active In Region
It is part of its new long-term engagement
A seismic shift is on the way in Canberra among policy makers and administrators, about how Australia handles its deeply troubled northern neighbours.
South-east Asia’s politicians were competing to win domestic points at the end of 2002 by lambasting remarks by Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard that they interpreted as justifying “pre-emptive strikes” at terrorists in their own countries who were targetting Australia.
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It is more clearly in the islands region, however, that Australia is set to be more pro-active.
The once unthinkable is now being thought and articulated: Canberra should re-engage in a very hands-on manner, sending people into the region not as consultants and short-term advisers but as teachers, doctors, budget drafters, policemen.
If those propelling this case win the day, the new engagement will be long-term, open-ended, and expensive.
This will prompt a frenetic debate within the region and in Australia, with the words “re-colonising” and “neo-colonialist” hurled around.
But “it’s an idea whose time has come,” says one of Australia’s most influential policy thinkers, Hugh White, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, for the simple reason that the programmes put in place since independence have failed Melanesia in particular.
These countries have suffered a slide in living standards. On the United Nations Human Development Indicators listing, Vanuatu now ranks 140th, Solomon Islands 147th and Papua New Guinea 164th.
White lists Australia’s interests in the “arc of instability” that stretches from Aceh in north-west Indonesia right across to Fiji in the east: economic, consular, humanitarian, and non-state threats including transnational crime and terrorism. “Terrorists use weak states. And our capacity to deal with the rulers of our neighbours is a serious issue for continental defence, in order to ensure these islands are not used as bases to attack us."
This case maintains that the strategy of assisting these countries, in a hands-off way, to develop their own security institutions, has not worked.
A prominent Australian company chairman with long and deep connections with Papua New Guinea says he believes the next election there will require Australian police on the ground.
Australia has spent more than $A500 million on the Papua New Guinea Defence Force since its independence in 1975. “I signed some of those cheques,” says White, a former deputy secretary for defence in Canberra.
Yet that force, which successfully mutinied against reform last year, is today viewed as part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The Australian security establishment has been reluctant to make any commitment without a clear exit strategy. But exit strategies are relevant only to second-order problems, says White. “We can’t exit our own neighbourhood.”
His own thinking was transformed by the repercussions of Australia’s refusal, chiefly from exit strategy concerns, to send police to the Solomon Islands when urgently requested by then Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa’alu in early 2000: a coup, and a continuing collapse into a “failed state” into which Canberra has poured millions more than the likely cost of the police deployment.
The virtuous circle of good security and sound education and health leading to economic investment and jobs has shifted, in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere, into reverse gear and is instead a vicious cycle: no security, no jobs and poor health, including an AIDS epidemic.
That negative cycle includes an undermining of parental confidence in the value of schooling, demonstrated by the way the massive school fees subsidy paid in advance by the former Papua New Guinea government of Sir Mekere Morauta, partly to boost its electoral prospects, coincided with record sales of South Pacific beer, while delivering no votes.
White has concluded: “There can be no policy solution without going back to basics, and trying to address the whole circle. This means abandoning deeply held precepts. But it is an idea that is now less unacceptable to the public, to some bureaucrats and to ministers than two or three years ago because it resonates with the global debate about how we deal with weak states.”
This is not, he stresses, a recipe for imposition on unwilling recipients, but for a consensual approach. “It is a recipe for rebuilding familiarity with PNG. This country is important to us. Let’s get to know it again.”
White’s own institute—government funded but established to provide an independent source of advice—is embarking first on a study of Solomon Islands issues, but is then likely to move on to Papua New Guinea.
AusAID is already deeply re-examining how its $A350 million a year aid to Papua New Guinea might be more effectively spent.
The Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies, which hosted a lively discussion on Papua New Guinea early in December, is starting to engage on the issue. So is the Melbourne-based Global Foundation, which includes some of Australia’s most influential businesspeople, organised a recent meeting on Papua New Guinea chaired by New South Wales Governor Marie Bashir.
The Papua New Guinea resources investment conference held in Sydney in early December saw the odds shorten on a go-ahead for the $A6.5 billion gas pipeline from Papua New Guinea’s troubled Southern Highlands down to Brisbane in Australia’s Queensland.
The announcement of the demise of the plan to pipe gas from the Sunrise field off East Timor—Asia’s newest and poorest country, where Australia already has major commitments—to Darwin reinforced the importance of the Papua New Guinea deal. Australian gas retailer AGL, the biggest customer signed up for the pipeline project by December, had given a deadline of the end of 2002 for the project to be given the go-ahead. Otherwise it would, it said, seek gas supply from elsewhere.
The pipeline would insert a long steel pin of mutual dependence in the economic relationship between Australia and Papua New Guinea, bringing them closer than they have been since independence in 1975.
