During the Pacific Island Forum (PIF) in Tonga, August 26-30, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and United States Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell were caught out by a New Zealand journalist’s “hot mic” joking about Australia’s new deal to meddle in the police forces of Pacific Island states.
Anyone watching this saw the PM arrogantly acting as an imperial deputy sheriff to the US.
Albanese told Campbell it was “so important” and “It’ll make such a difference”. The US official replied that the US had been considering a similar move until Kevin Rudd, Australia’s ambassador to the US, asked it not to.
He then joked with Campbell that he could “go halvies [sic] on the cost if you like”, followed by them both breaking into laughter.
Earlier, Vanuatu PM Charlot Salwai had tagged the program as a possible Australian-US “strategic denial” move against China.
“We’ve given you the lane, so take the lane!” Campbell told Albanese, who looked like a poodle that had been given a treat.
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Epeli Lesuma, Nuclear Justice Campaigner with the Fiji-based Pacific Network on Globalisation, who observed the forum, along with other civil society activists, told Green Left how people of the region saw the exchange.
“An incident like this reinforces the fact that there is a member of the [Pacific] family who has a stick held over our heads, ready to smack us.
“This member of the family gets Australia to get us all into line with what they are now calling a ‘free and fair Indo-Pacific’,” Lesuma said.
Australia had the biggest delegation — about 70 people — at the PIF, he said. Many Tongans he spoke to joked about Australia’s over-the-top efforts to have a bigger delegation than China.
But is there a serious problem of China asserting its power in the Pacific?
“I don’t think it is as much of a problem as some people say,” Lesuma replied. “If you are talking to people in Tonga and Fiji, they see that what the Australians and the Americans say that China is doing in the Pacific is what they are doing as well.
“So, for Pacific states, the challenge becomes: who can they get the most out of to benefit our people?”
Around Tonga there are small villages which have signs declaring “sister relationships” with Chinese villages that have helped them build footpaths and community halls, he said. “But you don’t see similar signs with the kangaroo emblem”.
“Tonga now has a big, brand new and state-of-the-art stadium … built by the Chinese, not the Australians.”
Australia has pressured Pacific Island states to give its police a greater role in their police forces.
While Pacific people have strong links with Australia and the US, Lesuma said “it’s China that seems to be coming through for [Pacific people]”.
He added that there was great concern in the Pacific about Australia’s AUKUS deal with the British and the US to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
“It is a slap in our face. We have the Treaty of Raratonga [the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty] in place and Australia is a signatory… It cannot say to us ‘You don’t need to know’ about these submarines.
“This treaty was birthed out of the trauma and legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific by Britain, France and the US,” Lesuma said.
“We would never want the Pacific to be a waterway for nuclear weapons or nuclear-powered submarines”.
“France’s last nuclear test in the Pacific was in 1996. I was three years old then. There are many young people, like me, who were born when the last nuclear tests were still being done in our sacred Pacific blue ocean.
“Australia’s sneaky AUKUS deal makes us question if they are really our vuvale which, in Fijian, means ‘family’.
“Vuvale is a word that runs really deep for Fijians. And there are words in other Pacific languages that have the same meaning.”
The Australian delegation to the PIF also pushed hard for Pacific states to back Australia’s bid to host the COP31 climate summit in 2026, but this was met with a polite but critical response.
“The message was: You can’t host COP and rubber stamp it as ‘a Pacific COP’ if Australia is not prepared to translate that into action. Any country that truly stands with the Pacific Islanders [needs to recognise that] climate change really is the greatest threat in the region and that, in solidarity, you have to take a strong stance against fossil fuels…
“They can’t just use the Pacific, put on some flowers, wear a couple of leis and bula shirts while [not taking] the hard, but moral, decision to halt any future expansion of fossil fuels exploration, extraction and use.”
The Aotearoa/New Zealand government announced, during the forum, that it was lifting a ban on offshore gas exploration that Labour had been put in place.
Eight years ago, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton (then immigration minister) was caught with Scott Morrison and then Coalition PM Tony Abbott on another “hot mic” mocking the impact of climate change on Pacific islanders with the jibe: “Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.”
If New Zealand and Australia really want to be friends of the Pacific, Lesuma said, they need to act against the real security threat to the region — the climate emergency.
“I don’t think our [Pacific island] leaders came out as strong as they should have been at the forum,” Lesuma said.
“While we acknowledge that larger countries like Australia and the US provide us with a lot of aid money, we should not let them off the hook so easily.
“The communiqué from the PIF leaders’ meeting had only one line about the Treaty of Raratonga, only noted the update [on the climate crisis] by the UN Secretary General and, I think, also only noted the Australian update on AUKUS. It is not good enough just to note these things.
“I don’t recall seeing the Fukushima nuclear waste dumping even getting a mention in the communiqué.
“Civil society in the Pacific has to work harder to hold our leaders to account.”
The PIF communiqué only noted, in passing, the struggles for self-determination in West Papua and Kanaky/New Caledonia. However, it said that forum states are participating in a “high-level Forum Troika Plus Mission to New Caledonia” to work towards a “long-lasting resolution to the ongoing political situation”.
Meanwhile, a parallel gathering of Pacific activist groups devoted a full day, in a “Civil Society Village”, to discussing the struggles in West Papua and Kanaky and were unanimous in their support for decolonisation and self-determination.
Lesuma said that in the lead up to next year’s PIF in the Solomon Islands, activists from these groups will be working hard to ensure that the real threats to the region — climate change and advancing the struggle for a truly nuclear-free and independent Pacific — are front and centre of the discussions.