Why Albanese’s ‘pretty massive’ Pacific pact will irk Beijing

The Pacific microstate of Tuvalu is on the front line of climate change. “The warming seas are starting to swallow our lands, inch by inch,” said Prime Minister Kausea Natano. “This is how a Pacific atoll dies.”

The world barely knew and hardly cared. Tuvalu’s foreign minister addressed the UN’s Glasgow climate conference from a lectern thigh-deep in seawater to get attention: “We are sinking.”

Tuvalu Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Kofe addresses COP26 standing in seawater that threatens his island nation.Credit: AFP

That was two years ago. It got attention, all right. But changed nothing. In August Tuvalu turned to Australia for help. On Friday the two nations’ leaders announced the result, a three-part treaty. It makes history by setting up the orderly evacuation of an entire nation under threat of destruction by climate change. “Migration with dignity” is the preferred Pacific phrase.

All Tuvaluans are to be entitled to permanent residency in Australia, if the treaty is ratified. It’s a tiny population, about 11,200. And it’s carefully phased, with an initial limit of just 280 Tuvaluans per year, chosen by ballot, accepted as permanent immigrants.

Natano explained that this was important to prevent a “brain drain” from his country. The number can be changed by mutual agreement in future years.

Within an overall annual immigration intake of more than 250,000, this number is disappearingly small for Australia. Yet it is transformative for Tuvalu. Over four years, it would allow a 10th of the population to relocate to Australia.

“Tuvalu doesn’t have a strong link to any of the big metropolitan countries so it’s a bit of an orphan,” explains Stephen Howes, director of ANU’s Development Policy Centre. “It doesn’t have enough migration opportunities.” This treaty seeks to solve both those problems.

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

“It’s an admission that Pacific Island countries are highly vulnerable to climate change and Australia has a special responsibility as the first responder in the region,” says Meg Keen, director of the Lowy Institute Pacific Islands Program. “It sets an important mechanism in place. It’s something unique that only Australia and New Zealand can do.”

New Zealand already allows 150 Tuvaluans a year to immigrate under its Pacific Access Category.

And Keen, a former intelligence analyst, poses a key question: “Does this have wider applicability? It will set in play expectations among other islands, Kiribati, for instance, which has a population of 100,000 but is also climate-vulnerable.”

Credit: Jim Pavlidis

Anthony Albanese has said only that Australia will respond in goodwill to any future requests depending on countries’ unique needs. Natano described the Falepili, or good neighbours, treaty as “a beacon of hope” for the people of Tuvalu, one that “has touched our hearts profoundly”.

When an anxious people looks to the future, it will look like Australia, a continent-sized liferaft for an English-speaking, overwhelmingly Christian population that has inhabited the nine tiny islands of Tuvalu for some six centuries. But the treaty is more than simply an evacuation avenue from a country whose average elevation is 1.8 metres above sea level. It includes two other critical elements.

One, Australia commits to helping Tuvalu defend itself against the rising Pacific, with land reclamation works that would elevate and add 6 per cent to the land area of the main island, which is home to half the population. So this seeks to preserve the option of living in Tuvalu, not just leaving it.

Two, it is a security pact. Australia promises to help Tuvalu in case of a major natural disaster, a health emergency or foreign military aggression. And, as Albanese put it: “To allow for effective operation of Australia’s security guarantee, both countries commit to mutually agree any partnership, arrangement or engagement with any other state or entity on security and defence-related matters in Tuvalu.”

Illustration by John ShakepeareCredit: John Shakepeare

In plain English, this amounts to an Australian veto over any future security deal between Tuvalu and another state. China, for instance. As the leaders’ joint statement says: “The Falepili concept recognises the importance of collective sovereignty.”

In sum, Tuvalu is set to become an Australian protectorate. Peter Dean, a professor of history and the lead author of Australia’s Defence Strategic Review, describes the pact as “pretty massive – even better that they came to us as their security partner of choice”.

“Australia’s number one strategic objective since Federation has been to ensure that no major power with interests not aligned to ours establishes a strong foothold in the region.”

But, of course, that’s exactly what Beijing has been working towards for years. China’s security agreement with Solomon Islands shocked Australia last year, a signal failure of Australian defence policy and a strategic coup for Beijing.

Currently, China’s nearest military base is 6000 kilometres from our shores. Beijing’s deal with Solomons opened the potential for it to build one within 1500 kilometres.

Although Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare says that no Chinese base is in prospect, he has continued to cultivate Xi Jinping while berating Australia and the US at every opportunity.

The Solomons deal rocked the Morrison government last year. Foreign policy rarely decides election outcomes in any country, but it does stand as a marker of competence. The Solomons shock exposed the Morrison crew as incompetent.

The Tuvalu treaty adds to the mounting foreign policy evidence that the Albanese government is competent, partly due to the tireless Penny Wong.

In an earlier time, Tuvalu might have met a more desultory response from Canberra. But as Stephen Howes says: “Whether it’s explicit or implicit, China is a major factor” in the treaty. “The idea is that these integration initiatives bind the Pacific island states more closely to Australia.”

Before Albanese and Natano announced the treaty, the two prime ministers took their agreement to the other leaders at the Pacific Islands Forum, the 18-nation political and diplomatic hub of the region. The treaty was on the forum agenda and was canvassed in a number of conversations between various leaders before its announcement. It’s important for Australia to be seen to be working with the forum rather than against it.

“One of the masterstrokes of Australian diplomacy has been the activation of regional multilateralism,” says Peter Dean, also director of foreign policy and defence at the US Studies Centre. “We know that’s not the way China likes to work. They prefer to separate individual countries away from the region,” as with Solomon Islands.

But what does this matter in practical terms to the daily lives of Australians?

The opposition likes to taunt Albanese for spending too much time outside the country. After just two trips, the Coalition started calling him Airbus Albo. Even on Friday, Peter Dutton accused Albanese of failing to understand the cost pressures on ordinary households “because he is never here”.

Never mind that Scott Morrison travelled overseas more in his first year than Albanese has, as my colleague Tony Wright pointed out last week. Or the simple fact that it’s an essential part of the prime ministership. Facts are irrelevant in juvenile political jibes.

But one fact of this week was the disruptive failure of the Optus telecommunications system. And a fact of Albanese’s international agenda is that, almost entirely unnoticed, he struck a deal last week to work with the US to build two more undersea cables to power internet access to at least eight Pacific Ocean nations.

Australia will pay $US50 million and the US will pay $US15 million for Google to extend submarine fibre-optic cables to link Micronesia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu and Vanuatu with Australia and the US. Significantly, this is to shut out China’s Huawei.

“It’s scary how dependent Australia is on seabed cables,” says Dean. “Ninety-eight per cent of all our digital stuff goes through those cables. All it takes is for one of those cables to be cut and the whole country could be like the Optus outage and it could go on for days.”

Adding security and redundancy to Australia’s undersea cable connections seems pretty useful for Australians’ daily lives. “In a weird way, it may take something like that [a cable outage] to wake the country up,” adds Dean. But not necessarily the opposition.

In explaining the China problem to Americans, two senior US officials, Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan wrote that American co-existence with China “means accepting competition as a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved”.

Australian Pacific policy shows some serious signs that, although its China problem is not about to be solved, Australia is managing the competition better.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.