Cover Story
Australia Rethinks the Pacific
Regional Instability, Frustrations Challenge Canberra
Australia has been the Asia-Pacific’s marsupial tiger for the last dozen years, growing faster economically than the rest of the region except China. Yet at the millennium, Australia gave the impression that it felt it had outgrown the Pacific Islands, which form its natural sphere of influence, literally over-looking them as it enmeshed itself with its big Asian neighbors, which have become major sources of migrants, tourists, customers, students and investment.
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Australia has suffered, as its best-known historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has written, from a “tyranny of distance” from the major metropolitan centers. But it also suffers sometimes from a tyranny of size—a feeling of insecurity in relating to its more populous Asian partners—and the opposite anxiety, about being perceived as a “Big Brother” by its Island neighbors.
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The latter perception made the Australian security establishment, for instance, reluctant to commit forces to the region without a clear-cut exit strategy and date—even when invited to deploy a unit, as it was by Solomon Islands Prime Minister Bart Ulufaalu in early 2000, a few months before he was removed by a coup. One of the most influential advisers to Australian governments on security issues, Hugh White, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, strongly rejects this cautious approach. “We can’t exit our own neighborhood,” he says.
He believes that the time has come for Australia to re-engage, in a hands-on way, in the Islands region—since previous post-colonial strategies appear to have failed in the biggest countries, which are also those closest to Australia: Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, today 164th and 147th respectively on the United Nations Human Development listing, with Vanuatu not much better, at 140th.
Historically, Australia was a reluctant colonizer of PNG and, for a shorter period, of Nauru. But during this experience, which lasted through most of the first three quarters of the 20th century, and then during the exciting 15-year period of rapid decolonisation in the Pacific, for which it had a ringside seat, it developed a substantial interest and expertise in the Islands.
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The dominant Island trading “octopuses” —Burns, Philp, Steamships and Carpenters—were listed on the Australian stock exchange and many of the business managers and other professionals in the region were Australian during colonial and early post-colonial times. Most Island imports still derive from Australia and the emerging Pacific elites were educated or sent their children to be educated there. And its academic research expertise on the Pacific is rivaled only by the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center in Honolulu.
Since the era of decolonisation supposedly ended about 20 years ago, however, many of these links have grown rusty or been severed and Pacific expertise depleted.
But there is now a sense of urgency about rebuilding Australia’s connections with the region. There are three reasons for this.
First, the instability represented by the Fiji and Solomon Island coups, the East Timor massacres, then the near-failure of the mid-2002 PNG national election have all made engagement in the Islands a higher priority. PNG’s most populous Highlands region—the Southern Highlands—is the country’s oil- and gas-rich, Texas-sized region that is bigger than most Island countries and remains unrepresented in the PNG Parliament. It is effectively ruled by tribal warlords and this anarchy has led the neighborhood to be seen in Australia as part of the “arc of instability” running from Fiji through the Solomons and into PNG. The result is that fears are surging in Australia about the impact of spillovers of illegal drugs, money laundering, people smuggling, HIV/AIDS, and diseases of plants or livestock.
Second, Australia fears is might be judged by its Pacific Rim peers, in part, according to its capacity to “manage” its Island neighbors, just as Caribbean catastrophes inevitably reflect poorly on the USA. Most of those peers—with the exceptions of Japan and the European Union, which maintain aid programs, and China and Taiwan, which vie for Island diplomatic recognition—severely scaled down their Pacific operations after the end of the Cold War 14 years ago.
Third, altruism. Australians who understand the plight of much of Melanesia—often church people—are beginning to lobby for more effective Australian involvement. The conservative government led by John Howard has been criticized for focusing its regional efforts around its “Pacific Solution” to unwanted asylum-seekers: sending them to camps on PNG’s Manus Islands and on Nauru to be assessed. In early 2003, though, the camps were winding down as the inmates were finding homes elsewhere, especially in New Zealand.
The 14 Island states within the Pacific Island Forum agreed in 2002 to form a free trade area. But World Bank research showed that the annual welfare gains to the Islands would reach $A 205 million if the area were extended to include Australia and New Zealand (which are also members of the Pacific Islands Forum, but are kept out of the trade agreement at this stage). This compares with an estimated $A5 million gain from the present arrangement.
The sense of frustration felt in Australia about the capacity of Island leaders to take and implement realistic, as opposed to populist, development decisions is leading the Australian government to propose Greg Urwin (a well-regarded former Australian senior diplomat who is married to a Samoan and recently retired to Apia) as the next Secretary-General of the Forum. But the initial Island response was cool, since the convention has been that the Forum’s chief be an Islander.
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Diplomatically, the major recent shift has been to incorporate Indonesia in Pacific regional organizations. The republic attended its first Forum leaders’ meeting in 2002 as a dialogue partner, before establishing an embassy in Suva. And Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia itself and East Timor have held the first meeting of a new West Pacific Forum—initiated by former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid. Indonesia’s principal goal is to head off regional support for independence for its largely Melanesian resource-rich province of Papua, a goal with which Canberra concurs. Yet Australian domestic support for Papua grows, springing from the same lobby groups that campaigned for East Timor’s bloody road to independence from Indonesia.
On February 12, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Trade Minister Mark Vaile launched a new white paper on foreign affairs and trade—only Australia's second ever such paper. The new paper devotes one of its 12 chapters to "Helping Our Pacific Neighbours Consolidate Their Future." It warns: "For the foreseeable future, instability will be a feature of our immediate region affecting our ability to protect large and significant approaches to Australia." But it says: "Australia cannot presume to fix the problems of the South Pacific countries. Australia is not a neo-colonial power. When problems are so tightly bound to complex cultural traditions and ethnic loyalties, only local communities can find workable solutions."
While Downer has been burdened by great global issues this decade, he has also maintained a routine of visits to the Islands. In December he traveled to Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Samoa—the latter which he held out as something of a model for regional governance. In November, he led a delegation of six Ministers to Port Moresby for the annual joint ministerial forum with PNG. The new Government there of Sir Michael Somare—struggling to fund its 2003 budget—asked for the rescheduling of a $A133 million loan due for repayment in 2003, but Canberra declined.
Downer also held annual talks with his New Zealand counterpart, Phil Goff, in Wellington in December. While Pacific Island leaders claim to discern significant areas of competitiveness between these two Western nations within the region, with New Zealand tending to be viewed as more empathetic to the Islands.
Australia’s aid program continues to be focused substantially on the Pacific, with $A352 million going to PNG in the financial year to June 30, 2003, and $A165 million to the rest of the region. The total aid budget comprised $1.82 billion, of which about 28 per cent goes to the Pacific.
Australia’s relationship to Pacific Island countries is very much a work in progress. While a sideshow from the war on terror, in which Australia is busily engaged alongside its major global partner the USA, the failure of major Pacific states to address growing internal problems is causing the region to take a higher profile and to become a higher priority for Australian policymakers.
Rowan Callick is Asia-Pacific editor of The Australian Financial Review and a member of Australia’s Foreign Affairs Council
