Labor’s grand plan to outsmart China in the Pacific is simplistic and highly political.
The claim from Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong that climate change is the “number one” issue for Pacific Islanders is rubbish.
Just like Australians, the number one issue in the Pacific is economic security – secure jobs, reliable energy and internet connection, putting food on the table and housing.
Combating family violence, better hygiene, improving education outcomes and access to basic health services to treat preventable diseases and extend the average life of Islanders are also top priorities.
Climate change is a significant concern for small island states, particularly low-lying atoll nations like Kiribati and Tuvalu, who have learned to live with storm surges and flooding.
Many of those climate change exposed countries have signed-up with China. Kiribati last year agreed to a Beijing-funded airstrip upgrade.
China is the world’s biggest polluter and refuses to meet demands from advanced nations to scale-back its coal-fired generation.
Under no circumstances will China and India agree to be competitively disadvantaged and put at-risk millions who have been pulled out of poverty.
Solomon Islands, Kiribati and other Pacific governments are not signing-up to Xi Jinping’s global agenda because of climate change. Political corruption is rife across the region and MPs have been bedazzled by cash incentives and shoddy projects.
Labor says it wants Australia to host a UN climate change conference “with our Pacific nations”, ignoring the repeated failures of previous COP summits. Despite fierce lobbying, the UK and US walked away red-faced from last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow.
Albanese and his senior shadow cabinet members are weaponising the security situation to land climate change blows on the Coalition and win domestic points ahead of the May 21 election.
The march of China in our region is well-advanced. There is no quick fix to reverse it.
The blame is not only shared by successive Coalition and Labor governments but also the US, Britain and France who dropped the ball and are only now stepping-up their efforts.
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