Bob Sercombe (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Overseas Aid and Pacific Island Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Australia’s most fundamental interest in the Pacific is reflected in names like Kokoda, Milne Bay, Buna and Gona in Papua New Guinea, and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, and a very considerable warmth continues to resonate in the Australian community towards Pacific islanders for the support offered to our troops and our allies’ troops during the Second World War. Australia, however, has other very basic interests in the region. We have asymmetric threats in our part of the world. We have health issues. There are issues in relation to transnational crime on which we need to work in close partnership with the governments of the region. The issues of crime were illustrated recently when six foreign nationals were charged in Guam with smuggling $1.2 million worth of arms. We have very significant economic interests in the region. Investment, especially in the resources sector, is highlighted by the forthcoming PNG mining and petroleum conference to be held in Sydney, which will be attended by four Papua New Guinean ministers—unless they have their travel restricted by the government. The point remains that PNG, in particular, and other places in the Pacific are of very great economic importance to Australia.

There are very substantial people-to-people links. Tens of thousands of Australians visit the region on an annual basis or live in the region. We have made a huge investment to date in partnerships in the region, such as RAMSI. Our global partners clearly look to Australia to provide some sort of lead in the region, and they frankly must be awfully bewildered at the moment by the downward spiral of relationships in the region. We also have a close interest in closer integration of the region through the Pacific Plan and other initiatives, but this government simply cannot get a balanced policy. This government is unable to strike an appropriate balance in its approach to the region. It is either hands-off or it is heavy-handed.

When we look at the hands-off approach of the government, we see the Prime Minister’s failure often to attend meetings of forum leaders in the region. We see the failure, perhaps on a lesser scale, of any ministers from this government to attend important business forums such as the PNG business forum earlier this year where a delegation of four PNG ministers, led by their then Deputy Prime Minister, was in attendance. Just last week there was the Fiji forum, led by the Prime Minister of Fiji and attended by a number of ministers, but no Australian minister deigned to go to it. I have to concede that the Parliamentary Secretary (Foreign Affairs) came but, with the greatest respect to the parliamentary secretary, she is hardly an appropriate measure diplomatically to the Prime Minister of Fiji.

However, the granddaddy of them all is the hands-off approach that the Minister for Foreign Affairs took up until 2003 in relation to the Solomon Islands and the repeated requests from the Solomon Islands for intervention. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, who is at the table, was saying right up until only months before the RAMSI intervention:

An intervention would be widely resented in the Pacific region. It would be difficult to justify to Australian taxpayers.

He went on:

The real showstopper is that it would not work, no matter how dressed up it is.

So much for the minister’s judgement about the necessity and the success of intervention in the Solomon Islands.

Then we oscillate to the heavy-handed approach of the government, and we see that in full force at the moment where we see headlines in the Herald Sun such as ‘PM: we will dictate terms’. We have seen the contemptuous comments over recent times by the foreign minister in particular in terms of the Pacific where he said things like, ‘RAMSI stands between Solomon Islands politicians and the honey pot,’ or when talking about the restrictions he said—and now he is grinning—

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