It’s time to prioritise the Pacific rather than Palestine, PM
The refusal of the PNG cabinet to endorse the military alliance treaty Canberra had negotiated with Port Moresby is another Albanese government failure in the Pacific, a serious setback for Australia and a big win for Beijing.
Albanese says the treaty will be signed within a couple of weeks. Well, who knows? His government’s Pacific policy resembles its defence policy – lots of self-congratulatory announcements of things that don’t end up happening.
The failure in Port Moresby is an indictment of Australia’s poor practice and poor policy in the Pacific. What was our high commission doing?
This is meant to be our area of core expertise and core influence.
In the next week or two Albanese will make high-blown speeches about Palestine and climate change. The difference between Palestine and climate change on one hand and PNG on the other is that nothing of consequence will be affected by whatever silly attitudes Australia takes on the former, but our policy on PNG matters like hell.
All of the mostly fraudulent increase in defence spending announced this week, and the military treaty signing with PNG – which didn’t happen – is meant to influence Albanese’s upcoming meeting with Donald Trump. The US President said this meeting would take place in an absurd over-reaction to perfectly legitimate questions asked by the ABC’s John Lyons.
Albanese is trying to create a sense of martial purpose and strategic effectiveness before he meets Trump. The string of failures in the Pacific doesn’t bolster that image.
Former US deputy secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, told the National Press Club this week that China would seek to sabotage all Australia’s initiatives in the Pacific, especially those like the defence treaty with PNG.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape says Beijing had no role in the failure by his cabinet to endorse the treaty. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?
It looks like an initiative that has been mishandled all along the line by Canberra. Why try to slip this in like a sideshow entertainment at the independence anniversary celebrations?
A full-blown mutual military alliance is a huge thing in the life of any nation.
It’s a big deal for Australia as well as PNG. Albanese should have made a dedicated, bilateral visit for this treaty, as he surely would have done had Canberra negotiated such a treaty with any developed nation.
It may also be that the Australian insistence on keeping the contents of the treaty secret until the last minute, part of Canberra’s increasing hostility to transparency and openness, backfired badly.
The two governments failed to socialise the mutual defence treaty provisions among senior PNG military, strategic and political figures. There’s heavy irony in all this. Mutual defence arrangements between Australia and PNG used to be for the benefit of PNG in the event of troubles over the border with Indonesia. That border has been secure for decades. The military threat now, not made explicit but characterising every word of this agreement, is from China.
The proposed treaty is pitched as strongly as the wording of the ANZUS alliance, a little below a formal NATO security guarantee but an agreement that each nation would help the other in conflict.
How could this be operationalised? There are two ways. If Australia, with the US, were involved in conflict with China the Australian Defence Force would want to operate through PNG territory just as US forces now operate from and through Australian territory.
The Americans no doubt have similar thoughts of their own.
Some in PNG are thinking: so what might this alliance let us in for? The small military facility Australia has built on Manus Island could easily be expanded and is effectively the back door to American forces in Guam, which would certainly be subject to severe attack by Beijing’s forces in the event of hostilities.
This important mutual defence treaty should have been subject to much wider discussion and socialisation in both PNG and Australia.
Instead, following the government’s playbook, it developed in secret, was announced in great fanfare and so far has failed to land.
This has been a messy process. If it is signed and ratified in the next few weeks, it will be a big step forward. But at this stage, let’s hold the champagne.
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If the Albanese government would spend less time on Palestine and more time on the Pacific, it might avoid serial humiliations like its failure to land long-announced security agreements first with Vanuatu, and now, much more seriously, with Papua New Guinea.