PAUL KELLY | The Australian | Extract
SYDNEY -Can you name the global region where Australia’s influence is greatest? Can you identify the region now falling behind Africa in social and economic progress? Can you locate the blind spot in our national security policy that guarantees future crisis?
The answer in each case is the Pacific.
It hardly rates a mention in parliament, in foreign policy debates or in the public interest. There is no public recognition of the geostrategic realities: that Australia is the developed nation most surrounded by poor, struggling, developing countries and that our friends and allies will judge Australia by its leadership performance in its neighbourhood.
How else should one of the globe’s richest nations be judged? In the Pacific, the US expects Australia to lead. The Pacific Island Forum states expect us to lead. The international community assumes Australia will shoulder responsibility as Pacific states succumb to multiple and systemic debilitation.
China’s penetration of the Pacific states has been highlighted in this newspaper in recent days. Earlier this month the Minister for International Development and the Pacific, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, provoked Beijing’s anger by attacking its legacy of “white elephant” debt-heavy projects in Pacific nations, forcing Foreign Minister Julie Bishop into a diplomatic corrective statement.
Analysis by the Lowy Institute shows China’s aid agenda in the Pacific is opaque in the extreme but has grown substantially and now exceeds US$1.7 billion ($2.1bn) to eight countries while traditional aid over the same period was more than US$9bn with Australia the main contributor.
China, of course, provides aid with the strategic purpose of building its influence in an area where Australia, in co-operation with New Zealand, should operate as the main regional power. And Australia cannot critique China for exploitative loans leaving countries with a heavy debt obligation to Beijing without also criticising the Pacific Island governments and leaders.
The most salient recent warning about Australia’s deficiencies in the Pacific came from Labor defence spokesman Richard Marles in his Lowy Institute address late last year and in an interview with The Australian this week.
“These countries in the Pacific have a choice,” Marles says. “Australia has got to earn the relationships it has in the Pacific region. Our failure to embrace our leadership role in the Pacific is the biggest blind spot in Australia’s national security policy.
“Why don’t we eagerly lead where we are expected to lead?
“There are 10 countries whose principal relationship in the world is with Australia. For those of us who are interested in the national security and foreign policy space, why can’t we name those countries as a matter of reflex?
“The Pacific is that part of the world in which our influence matters the greatest. What we say and do in the Pacific carries enormous weight.
“The countries of the Pacific expect us to lead. They supported us fully when we sought a seat on the UN Security Council. The expectations of the Pacific Island countries for us to lead is matched by the expectations of the world. In one area, the US unambiguously follows us: the Pacific.”
Australia’s contribution, as Marles says, is significant in aid, investment, defence, policing and development.
His central claim is more serious and sophisticated — that Australia is devoid of any “strategy or guiding philosophy” other than a “general sense of obligation” in its approach to a neighbourhood of vital national security interest.
Yet these countries are facing a developmental crisis. The region has the worst performance against the Millennium Development Goals. The recent foreign affairs white paper alluded to the problems: small economies, fast rising populations, high costs, the burden of distance, transactional crime, the threat of climate change, outbreaks of infectious disease — and security threats.
It is no surprise that offers from China, dubious or worthwhile, are so potent.
Papua New Guinea is a nation of eight million people expected to be 18 million by 2050, literally on our doorstep, sharing a war history and facing an accumulation of internal pressures that on the balance of probability will erupt at some point into a full security crisis. It is the largest recipient of Australian official support, currently running at $550 million annually.
The white paper addressed the strategic competition for economic opportunity and influence under way in PNG, East Timor and a range of Pacific nations. It made a critical pledge that has got almost no attention — that Australia “will engage with the Pacific with greater intensity and ambition”, including more integrated policy and longer-run investments.
Marles is unconvinced. He tells this newspaper: “The question from the white paper is: does this amount to a change of approach? Does it offer an Australian vision for the Pacific? It’s not clear to me that it does.
“My thesis for a long time is that we are in a holding pattern in the Pacific and that’s not enough.”
He attacked the neo-colonial psychological shadow that still impedes Australia’s role in the region: “The Pacific, whether we understand it or not, is our global calling card. And, rightly, we will be judged for good or ill based on what we do or do not do in the Pacific. I often feel there is an instinct not to act in the manner of an overbearing colonial power, to proceed on the basis of a light touch.
“This sentiment is well motivated but it is wrong.
“Far from being concerned that Australia might be overbearing, what the Pacific Island nations fear most is a lack of attention from Australia. The appetite and desire for Australia to play its role — with empathy and intelligence — is manifest.”
There is an incongruity between our interests and our attention. As my colleague Greg Sheridan said on this page yesterday, the South Pacific has gone out of fashion in Australia.
It has become a place of confronting difficulties with few victories to be put up in lights. In relative terms the career prospects for visiting Australians aren’t as great as they once were, and there is declining incentive for MPs to get involved.
While our politicians naturally prefer the bigger, global stage on which Australia must commit, there have been major security achievements close to home over the past generation — witness the 1999 Australian-led, UN sanctioned force into East Timor securing the independence vote, and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands.
The reality, however, as the white paper concedes, is that Australia must devote greater resources to the Pacific.
Australia should not forget. History has a habit of turning the most unlikely places into areas of sudden and imperative national-interest significance.