Climate change lifeline to Tuvalu restores Pacific trust in Australia

The Albanese government’s offer of a lifeline to Tuvalu citizens threatened by climate change enhances Australia’s position as a trusted principled regional power while astutely countering China’s moves to wield major influence in the Pacific.

The government of Tuvalu had been asking Australia to resettle citizens since 2001. On Friday, after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, the world’s first bilateral agreement on climate mobility, the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union treaty, was announced at the Pacific Islands Forum by prime ministers Anthony Albanese and Kausea Natano.

Anthony Albanese and Tuvalu Prime Minister Kausea Natano on One Foot Island.Credit: AAP

“This is a groundbreaking agreement,” Albanese said. “The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union will be regarded as a significant day in which Australia acknowledged that we are part of the Pacific family.”

Under the Falepili agreement, all 11,200 Tuvaluans will be entitled to permanent residency in Australia. Initially, a special pathway will be created for 280 citizens to come annually. Under the proposed visa, they will have permission to study, work or live in Australia. As part of the treaty, Australia will provide security assistance to Tuvalu in response to major natural disasters, health pandemics and in the event of security threats.

Until now, most Pacific visa programs in Australia (and the region) have been tied to labour arrangements. New Zealand and the US have migration treaties. However, the climate migration agreement could not come at a more felicitous time for Tuvalu. A recent NASA study found much of Tuvalu’s land area, along with critical infrastructure, will be below the high tide mark by 2050, should climate change continued as projected. Tuvalu was among island groups named likely to disappear in the 21st century by the United Nations in 1989. In the subsequent debate about climate change, Australia, as one of the world’s highest per capita producers of greenhouse gases, had a difficult time explaining our stand to people on the threatened Pacific nations. The low point perhaps came at the 2019 Pacific Islands Forum when the then-prime minister, Scott Morrison, refused repeated calls to act on climate change. Unimpressed, the then-prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, said Morrison was trying to save his economy, but he was trying to save his people.

Australia was caught napping in early 2022 when the Solomon Islands announced that it had signed a security agreement with China. Since the federal election later that year Foreign Minister Penny Wong has assiduously visited all 18 Pacific Islands Forum nations to rebuild relationships.

Australia respected the post-war drive by Melanesian and Polynesian populations for independence and has poured billions of dollars in aid money into the region to help the new nations develop. But denying the Pacific to others has been a historic fact of life since Europeans started arriving in the 1500s and realised its potential.

China’s recent sallies into the Pacific are a concern for Australia and the region. Beijing is investing heavily in defence relations with the Pacific and promoting a different model of governance based on an authoritarian set of values, at the same time duchessing potential partners with financial deals and enticements to local Big Men.

That is not going to happen under the proposed Falepili agreement. As the Herald’s political and international editor Peter Hartcher noted, it effectively makes Tuvalu an Australian protectorate and gives Canberra veto over any future deal between Tuvalu and another state.

After years of neglect of the neighbourhood, the offer of climate migration is expected to have the most immediate and tangible impact. It has the potential to transform Australia’s relationships with other small Pacific nations and the region as a whole.