Australia Lends a Fist

New Zealand International Review,
Vol. 28, No. 6, November/December 2003, Wellington

Last July, Australia responded to an appeal for assistance from the Solomon Islands by leading a cadre of some 2,000 police officers and military personnel to the capital city of Honiara. Their immediate mission was to restore order ruptured by armed insurgents, then help rebuild the economy and state institutions. Canberra’s attentions are not confined to the Solomon Islands: Plans are underway to deploy more than 200 Australian police officers and civil servants to Papua New Guinea this year.

These actions evince Australia’s new assertive approach toward the island states of the southwest Pacific. They have been largely left to control their own economic and political affairs since their independence, from Fiji’s in 1970 to Vanuatu’s in 1980. Australia has provided substantial amounts of development assistance while remaining sensitive to charges of neocolonialism. However, political instability, economic mismanagement, and disorder in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, combined with the patently limited impact of Australian aid, are arousing growing concern in Canberra. To some, such conditions indicate an expanding "arc of instability" beyond Australia’s shores. Having aligned itself closely with the Bush administration over the war on terror, Canberra is acutely sensitive to security threats posed by unstable states in its own backyard.

In June 2003, about six weeks before the Solomon Islands intervention, the government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) published an influential report titled Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of Solomon Islands. The report articulates the link between regional instability and the broader security agenda of the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing." The report also connects the security threat presented by the failing state of the Solomon Islands to a growing risk of infiltration by organized crime and terrorist groups that would directly threaten Australian interests. Notably, the report recommended that Australia establish a "sustained and comprehensive multinational effort" to rehabilitate the troubled nation, with the consent of the Solomon Islands government.

Binoy Kampmark, a scholar in residence at the University of Queensland, questions the rationale underlying the report and Canberra’s approach in the region in a recent article in the New Zealand International Review, the bimonthly magazine of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. In Kampmark’s view, Canberra is simply appropriating Washington’s model for preemptive action. He criticizes the ASPI report for mingling the issues of instability, rogue states, and potential terrorist infiltration. "A state’s stability, not its sovereignty, is the criteria for determining Canberra’s views in the region," he writes.

Kampmark’s charges are hard to sustain; after all, it was the Solomon Islands that approached Canberra for assistance. A more pertinent question is why Australia took so long to respond to repeated requests for help from Honiara, which date back to early 2000.

The more substantive criticism of Australia’s interventionism relates to the perceived risk of terrorism in countries such as the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Such a risk remains, at best, remote. More urgent threats, particularly in the Melanesian states, include poverty, rapid population growth, limited economic opportunities, HIV/AIDS, ineffectual and unstable governments, corruption, and, in some places, violent crime. It would be unfortunate if such pressing domestic issues were neglected due to an externally driven security agenda focusing on, as yet, relatively obscure threats.

Canberra’s stridency worries some Pacific leaders. The old hands-off approach suited many, but did little to halt or reverse the downward spiral evident in some countries. Although the efforts remain recent, remarkable progress has already been made in the Solomon Islands toward restoring security and the rule of law. The larger task of reform and reconstruction still looms, but is more likely to succeed if Canberra maintains this reinvigorated engagement in a region that it has neglected for too long.