Pacific training is good security

The increased presence of the Australian Federal Police in the Pacific is visible proof of the complex challenge of responding to Beijing’s ambitions to spread the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in our region. The most recent example is an AFP program to train Pacific Island police to become UN peacekeepers. As chief international correspondent Cameron Stewart reports on Saturday, the AFP is hosting the world’s first UN Police Peacekeeping Training course tailored specifically for the Pacific region in Brisbane. The course brings together 100 police officers from across the Pacific and East Timor and aims to build a deployable, Pacific-led UN peacekeeping capability.

The aim is to reinforce Australia’s role as a preferred partner of choice in the Pacific for sustained peace, security and prosperity. The not-so-subtle subtext is that Australia is ramping up its involvement in regional policing and security to head off a similar push by China. Australia’s increased presence has not gone unnoticed in Beijing.

The state-owned Global Times has gone so far as to say Pacific security engagement has an “impure motive” and is designed to “prioritise US strategic blueprint while bringing limited, if any, benefits to Australia or Pacific Island Countries (PIC) needs”. This gives away the CCP’s ambitions to extend its reach and to disrupt the longstanding US presence in our region.

As foreign editor Greg Sheridan writes on  Saturday in Inquirer, this strategic competition exists not only in our Pacific neighbourhood but at home as well. The conduct and results of the May 3 federal election demonstrate the lengths to which the CCP is prepared to go to involve itself through social media links to the Chinese diaspora. At its simplest, Sheridan says, the CCP in Beijing wants the Liberal-National Coalition to lose elections and Labor to win. It takes extensive clandestine action to effect this. At the same time, the Coalition has decisively lost the vote of ethnic Chinese Australians.

The bottom line is that Beijing’s influence makes it nearly impossible for Australian politics to consider openly the strategic dangers posed by Beijing. Anthony Albanese has been adept at not offending Beijing and has been rewarded by the CCP with praise and a reduction in trade tensions. Beijing has seized every opportunity to use Donald Trump’s trade gymnastics to extend its diplomatic reach. While we have been quick to respond to the dangers of what is happening in the Pacific, we must not lose sight of what is happening right under our nose.