The very islands that a hostile Imperial Japanese Army occupied to cut off Australia’s economic and military lifelines in WWII were falling under the influence of China.
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing in 2023.Credit: AP
It took a vast and bloody effort by the US, Australia, New Zealand and the UK to dislodge the Japanese from the Solomons in the battle for the island of Guadalcanal. That campaign cost the allies 29 ships sunk, 615 aircraft destroyed and more than 7000 troops killed.
By the time in 2022 that Canberra was shocked out of its complacency, Beijing had not only signed a security pact with the Solomons. Its agents had been offering bags of cash to Solomons’ politicians to look more favourably on China.
How do we know? Because the then-deputy leader of the opposition, Peter Kenilorea Jr, said publicly that China offered MPs the equivalent of between about $300,000 and $900,000 to lend their support to Beijing. The premier of Malaita Province, Daniel Suidani, said he’d been offered the equivalent of around $150,000.
There are some bidding wars that Australia cannot win. To this day, despite Australia’s new attentiveness and new prime ministers in both countries, the Solomons is considered one of the Pacific nations least simpatico with Australia.
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Kiribati and Vanuatu are other Pacific states considered to be more sympathetic to Beijing’s interests. The biggest of the Pasifika nations, Papua New Guinea and Fiji, are considered solidly aligned with Australia.
We’ll learn more about the PNG relationship when Albanese travels there next week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence from Australia. The two nations’ prime ministers are set to reveal a defence agreement that Canberra believes to be highly consequential.
But this is a daily contest in a permanent struggle across a vast expanse of what the regional nations call the Blue Pacific Continent. China is intent on establishing military bases in the Pacific and will not rest until it succeeds. If it does, will the US under Donald Trump be prepared to help dislodge them next time?
It’s obvious that Australia needs to do more to protect itself in its own near approaches. “There will be lots of ups and downs, and Australia has to continue playing Whac-A-Mole and doing everything it’s doing now,” says the director of research at the Lowy Institute, Herve Lemahieu.
Antony Albanese will soon travel to Papua New Guinea to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence from Australia. Credit: Alamy
But he has a big idea for transforming the contest, the region and Australia’s future: “Implementing a credible, deep and wide integration project would be the single most consequential project for this generation in Australia’s foreign policy,” he tells me.
If that sounds too abstract, think EU. Applied to the Pacific, the concept would be a Pacific Union, with the ambition to gradually ease barriers to free movement of data, capital and people across the region, including, of course Australia and NZ, but excluding China and the US.
It would be attractive for the peoples of the Pacific, says Lemahieu. He offers the case study of comparing Poland and Ukraine in 1989 when the Cold War ended, when both were similarly poor and hapless. One joined the EU and became one of the richest and most successful nations in the world. The other is a second-rate nation fighting a war of survival against Russia.
“The enlargement of the EU,” argues Lemahieu, “has been the single most effective policy against Putin’s designs to make Eastern Europe a Russian sphere”. A Pacific Union “would make many Pacific countries resistant to top-down elite capture” by China, while making support for integration a popular bottom-up pan-Pacific project. Pacific leaders who wanted to opt out of the union and enrich themselves by selling out their people would have a harder time.
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“Our island continent is surrounded by friends and fish,” says Lemahieu. “Sustaining and nurturing that protective membrane, regardless of what Trump and Xi do, is our first principle and should be our guiding star.”
The region that Australia long thought was the least important is now accepted as the most important. As Pat Conroy has been heard telling Australian diplomats, don’t go chasing postings in traditional glamour cities – what you do in the Pacific is what matters most.
Peter Hartcher is international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.
