Labor raises stakes on China’s Pacific push

Labor will vow to push back against Chinese influence in the Pacific by ‘substantially’ increasing aid, boosting defence ties and doubling surveillance flights to detect ­illegal fishers.

Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong says Labor will ‘substantially ­increase official development ­assistance to the Pacific’. Picture: Tim Hunter.

Labor will vow to push back against Chinese influence in the Pacific by “substantially” increasing regional aid, boosting defence ties with island nations and doubling surveillance flights to detect ­illegal fishers.

The Opposition’s foreign aid pledge will be unveiled on Tuesday, in an election campaign that has become dominated by regional security concerns following Beijing’s security agreement with the Solomon Islands.

A day after Defence Minister Peter Dutton warned Australians to “prepare for war” amid escalating Chinese influence in the ­region, Labor will pledge to strengthen the nation’s cultural, economic and security ties with the Pacific to “restore Australia’s place as first partner of choice for our Pacific family”.

Labor says an Albanese government would pump Australian news coverage into the region, and reform Pacific labour schemes to prevent guest workers being ­exploited.

Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong said Labor would “substantially ­increase official development ­assistance to the Pacific” – which is already on target to hit a record $1.85bn in 2022-23 – if it won the election. But she said Australia could not out-spend China, and needed to rely on longstanding relationships across the region, and its proximity to Pacific neighbours.

Peter Dutton.

Under the plan, a new Australia-Pacific Defence School would be established to train Pacific ­island nations’ defence and security personnel, to build “deeper institutional links between the ADF and its regional counterparts”.

Labor would also double funding for the $12m-a-year Pacific Maritime Security Program, to help regional neighbours recoup at least $210m-a-year stolen by ­illegal fishers, including China’s massive unregulated trawler fleet.

Senator Wong said an Albanese government would lever off the close cultural ties with Pacific nations with an $8m-a-year boost to the ABC’s international program, to expand its broadcasting into the region. It would also look at renewing Australian short-wave broadcasting in the Pacific, and increase the amount of Australian commercial TV content transmitted into the region.

The policy would boost funding to climate-proof Pacific infrastructure, and attempt to counter ­Chinese efforts to co-opt Pacific politicians by restoring parliamentary study trips, to encourage the region’s MPs to visit Australia rather than China.

Senator Wong said the ­Coalition had “dropped the ball in the Pacific” and as a result Australia was less secure. “Labor’s plan will restore Australia’s place as first partner of choice for our Pacific family,” she said. “The vacuum Scott Morrison has created is being filled by others – who do not share our interests and values.”

The Labor policy announcement on Tuesday comes as the ­Coalition continues to talk up the security threats the nation faces, while denying Australia has become less safe “on its watch”.

In a dramatic escalation of the government’s rhetoric, Mr Dutton said it was important to “be frank” about escalating threats in the region, and that autocratic murderers like Hitler were not “consigned to history”.

Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, said the government’s failure to prevent the Solomon Islands security agreement with China – which Australia and the US fear could open the way to a Chinese military base less than 2000km from Cairns – “says everything about the failure of Scott Morrison in his managing of the relationships in the Pacific”.

“Words are one thing; action is another,” Mr Marles said.

“This is a government which beats its chest, but when it comes to actually delivering and doing what needs to be done, this is a government which repeatedly fails. Because of Scott Morrison‘s failures, Australians are less safe.”

Overall funding to the Pacific has risen under the Coalition to $1.85bn, compared with $1.5bn under Labor in 2013. But direct support for the Solomon Islands was, on average, 28 per cent higher each year under Labor, amid a surge in support for the country at the time under the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands.

Scott Morrison said his government had increased investment across the Pacific and highlighted Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare’s assurances he would not allow China to establish a military base in his territory.

“The correspondence that I‘ve had with Manasseh Sogavare has always been deeply grateful … for the extensive economic and law and order support we have provided to Solomon Islands,” the Prime Minister said. “And in fact, he was very clear in his latest communication with me not that long ago, that he has no intention of putting a naval base there on the Solomon Islands.”

Earlier this week, Mr Morrison said any Chinese military presence in Solomon Islands would be a “red line” for Australia. The warning followed that of US Indo-Pacific tsar Kurt Campbell, who told Mr Sogavare in Honiara last week that closer military ties with China would carry serious consequences.

“If steps are taken to establish a de facto permanent military presence, power-projection capabilities, or a military installation, the delegation noted that the United States would then have significant concerns and respond accordingly,” Mr Campbell said.

Australia consistently out-spends Beijing in the Pacific, including in the Solomon Islands where the nations’s aid outstrips China’s at least 3 to 1. But Beijing has undermined Australia’s influence on the ground in the country through big-ticket projects and opaque funding programs controlled by Mr Sogavare.