Melanesia on Australia’s radar
AUSTRALIAN prime minister Kevin Rudd wants a new beginning with the South Pacific, especially with Melanesia.
While in Papua New Guinea earlier this month, Rudd issued his Port Moresby Declaration, which promised more aid and a new era. A couple of days ago, the the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) issued two new papers on the policy in the region.
The focus, both in government and think tanks, is Melanesia rather than Polynesia.
There are three reasons for this:
* Melanesia is closer to Australia than Polynesia;
* Melanesia is in worse crisis than Polynesia; and
* New Zealand tends to take the lead in Polynesia.
The four big nations of Melanesia – PNG, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji – are each in a version of their own long-running crisis.
Rudd and his team believe they have a chance just now to make a difference in Melanesia. This is partly simply because they are a new government. A harsh hostility had arisen between PNG Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare and his then counterpart, John Howard.
This was not a result of any particular mismanagement by Howard but because Sir Michael was opposed to the Enhanced Co-operation Programme through which Australia inserted personnel into PNG to try to improve the delivery of basic services and to bring some control to the endemic corruption.
As was evident in his effusive welcome, Sir Michael does not have the same hostility towards Rudd. But whether the new goodwill amounts to anything, with Canberra’s efforts to make aid to PNG accountable and to limit corruption, remains to be seen.
As with Australia, there is a new government in the Solomons. The old government of Manasseh Sogavare was opposed to the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (Ramsi) and gave shelter to the fugitive Julian Moti.
The new government reversed both those positions. Both Canberra and Honiara now want the emphasis of Ramsi to shift from security to nation-building.
The government is also alive to any possibility of a little movement with Fiji, an indication that the elections will be held on time, a chance perhaps to resume some greater level of contact.
This would be very well advised. Fiji’s economy is suffering.
Everyone, certainly Australia, has made their opposition to the coup in Fiji clear. Now is the time to draw Fiji back into dialogue and co-operation, not to impose any additional pressure that could exacerbate internal tensions.
Rudd’s speeches and press conferences in PNG and the Solomons were important and under-reported. They followed his policy in Opposition and begin the process of giving greater flesh to the Pacific Partnerships for Development that his government will construct with the South Pacific nations.
These are ambitious and promise more aid and improvement across all sectors of Pacific society.
Rudd was naturally up-beat in his speeches, but he did acknowledge the scale of the problems. For example, he spoke of the HIV/ AIDS problem in PNG, noting that there are 40,000 to 60,000 sufferers in the country.
With a business-as-usual approach, Rudd said, this number would swell to half a million by 2025. This would be catastrophic for PNG and Australia.
Rudd deserves praise for recognising the urgency of the problem and giving it priority when no other part of Australian civil society is really doing likewise.
However, there is scant prospect of Australian success in Melanesia. This is not because of any particular weakness in the Rudd government but because of the sheer intractability of the problems.
Australian policy towards the South Pacific is like an old-fashioned upright clock. The hands are ever in motion, yet they pass through familiar positions in an endless cycle.
First we emphasise our small neighbours’ sovereignty and give them some aid; that is no good, so then we intervene a little in an emergency; then we intervene a lot; then that causes resentment and we retrench, and on it goes.
Meanwhile, the overall social and political indicators just get worse and worse.
The two new ASPI documents on the South Pacific are both very good: thoughtful, practical, modest, sensible. Two big ideas animate them.
The first is that we need to integrate South Pacific, especially Melanesian, economies into our own.
Second, to do this, we must open our labour market to Melanesian guest workers.
The first idea is plainly right. The second is less clear.
There are more than seven million people in Melanesia and only 21million Australians. It is hard to see labour mobility operating on a big enough scale to make a fundamental difference.
Nonetheless it is true that Polynesians, many of whom live in New Zealand, have more opportunity to work abroad, and this benefits their homelands in many ways.
First, they can send back remittances, which are a vital, non-bureaucratic and precisely targeted de facto aid flow.
But also, their exposure to foreign ways and foreign standards gradually helps them have higher expectations of their own societies.
The government is continuing to give this matter serious thought.
Anyone entering Australia to work ought to have a pathway to citizenship.
It certainly would be a great mistake for the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to recruit Melanesians as soldiers without citizenship.
(One of the APSI studies suggested that islanders could also be recruited to serve in the ADF.)
More basically, we need to understand our commitment to Melanesia is long term and therefore, to train a permanent cadre of language and regional culture specialists throughout our military, diplomatic service, aid agencies and the bureaucracy generally.
Australia is poor at language training (something Rudd knows all too well) and our bureaucracies have a bias against regional specialists, and no one these days wants to specialise in Melanesia. But if we are actually going to make a difference there we need a core of long-term Australian Melanesianists.
Training such people is a long-term investment but an essential prerequisite for all our ambition. – The Australian
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