China security pact, an unwise move

Does Papua New Guinea need a senior United States (US) State Department official to urge it to turn down China’s offer of a potential security pact?
Does it require Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to remind it that Australia is a security partner of choice for PNG and not China?
It was reported last week by Reuters news agency that Papua New Guinea Foreign Minister Justin Tkachenko was in early talks on a potential security deal.
China has offered to assist PNG’s police force with training, equipment and surveillance technology, according to Tkachenko.
It is terrible and immature diplomacy to suggest or even consider such a pact in the first place and certainly not publicly and in the media.
PNG and the US concluded a Defence Cooperation Agreement and an Agreement Concerning Counter Illicit Transnational Maritime Activity Operations in May 2023. Last December Prime Ministers Marape and Albanese signed a Bilateral Security Treaty setting all security aspects of PNG and Australia under the one umbrella.
It is common knowledge that Australia, together with its partner US, are involved in a regional tussle for influence and control with China over the Indo-Pacific region.
The US and Australia for decades have seen the Pacific as their sphere of influence, and are seeking to deter the island nations from forming security ties with China, after Beijing signed a security pact with Solomon Islands in 2022.
This slight by PNG is not going be taken lightly by either Australia or the US.
More especially, it is a thoughtless curtain raiser to an unprecedented address by a Prime Minister of PNG to the Australian Parliament which falls today.
Marape has already flown for the engagement.
While it is a reciprocation of Marape’s invitation to his Australian counterpart to address the PNG Parliament, it is still a very special occasion.
The unnecessary hassle does place the prime minister in a rather awkward position where he must apologise for his foreign affairs minister’s announcement of a position that is not government policy or if it is policy then he must back paddle to safer ground.
Our bet is that he will make a wide skirt around it and that is the subject that most of his audience might be keen to hear of from him.
However it turns out, it is imperative that our Foreign Affairs Minister gives thought in future to the consequences of his public utterances before he voices them.
This, after all, is not the first time he has created a public stir when he speaks to the foreign media.
The last interview got him sidelined as minister and he was just brought back into the ministry a fortnight back.
But there is another, perhaps far more important reason, for Tkatchenko to be extremely cautious and for PNG to rethink security assistance and training from China and other countries with whom PNG does not share the same or similar legal, judicial and law enforcement systems.
While an economic agreement with Beijing might give PNG an advantage as China is one of the biggest consumers of PNG raw materials, it is a totally different proposition when it comes to security and law and order.
The reason is quite simple. PNG operates a constitutional democracy while China runs a communist one party government system.
The laws in place in China and PNG might appear similar from the outside but they are not practiced the same.
The justice and court systems in operation in the two jurisdictions would likewise not be similar.
Matters of training, of arrest practices and procedures, of prosecution and court procedures would also be different again.
These are matters that PNG would do well to think through carefully before it makes commitments.