Why Does Australia Spend So Much on the Pacific? [S3-07]

Show Notes

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Music: “Insurrection”
Written by Pierre Chrétien
Performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra
Courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Transcript

link to podcast

7 October 2026

Glenn
Welcome to another episode of Why Can’t They Just, a podcast about politics, policy and getting stuff done. I’m Glenn Davidson and I’m a member of the Labor Party.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. I’m a former diplomat and a climate, environment and anti-racism activist.

Luke
I’m Luke Robertson, a member of the Labor Party, as well as a conservation biology and environmental policy student.

Janaline
Before we start, I‘d like to acknowledge that we are all recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia. Recognising that sovereignty was never ceded, we pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and we extend those respects to any First Nations listeners that we have today.

Glenn
Today we’re talking about the Pacific region, the Pacific Islands Forum, and Australia’s foreign aid to the region.

Now for most Australians, at least those who do not have Pacific Island heritage, the Pacific Islands are somewhere they fly over to get to North America or South America, or they may visit on a tropical island holiday; go to one of the resorts in Fiji or Vanuatu. I suspect few would know that the Pacific Island Forum consists of 18 nations and the region covers 46 million people, although that does include the 27 million people in Australia, ten and a half million in Papua New Guinea and 5.3 million in New Zealand. Of the remainder there is Niue with around 2000 people, which is roughly the size of a small country town like Braidwood, through Tuvalu, Nauru, Cook Islands and Palau, which each have somewhere between 12 and 18,000 people, which is roughly the size of a small to mid-sized Canberra suburb. Then you’ve got the larger countries, the Marshall Islands, Tonga, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Samoa, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Fiji, which range anywhere from 42,000 up to 940,000, which is really the equivalent of a large country town at the lower end and through roughly one federal electorate through the middle to about double the size of Canberra in the case of Fiji.

Janaline, given these numbers, why does the Pacific Islands region matter strategically to Australia and what is the value of having the Australian Prime Minister attend the Pacific Island Forum with the leaders of such small countries and economies?

Janaline
I guess the first answer to that is that: these are our neighbours and geography is important for national security, for economic security. And, just for example, in the Second World War, two of the biggest Australian engagements in the war were in the Pacific: so there was Papua New Guinea, and Australians will be familiar with the Kokoda Track, with the battles in Rabaul; and there was the Solomon Islands and people again have probably heard of the Battle of Guadalcanal. So the Pacific has loomed pretty large in Australian security in the past.

Now obviously in the era of intercontinental ballistic missiles, you know, who your neighbours are is maybe a bit less important. But there’s a lot of infrastructure that goes through the Pacific: we have undersea cables, intercontinental cables. And the Pacific is also important for law enforcement. There’s a lot of drug routes that have come through the island countries as well, which threatens their security as well as ours.

And I would say, also, Australia has long ties with the peoples of the Pacific. Australia actually administered Papua New Guinea until 1976 and Australia’s had very long relationships in the region. Disgracefully, in the earlier part of the 20th century and the late 19th century, we actually had bonded labourers come from the Pacific, some of them kidnapped, which a less polite person might describe as slavery.

We have a long and complicated, and deep relationship with the island countries. And I think it is entirely to Australia’s credit that the Australian Prime Minister has very rarely missed a Pacific Islands Forum. It is very much prioritised in terms of our foreign policy engagement at the highest levels and so it should be. This is not about, you know, who’s in government at the time: all Australian governments, since the creation of the Pacific Islands Forum in the 1960s, have prioritised those relationships.

Glenn
Yes, and that’s all very important, Janaline. It’s not about the size, it’s really about the substance of the relationships. And it’s very easy to just lump all of the Pacific Island countries in as one group, but they are quite distinct. They’ve got their own histories and their own cultural and, and ethnic makeup. So can you take us through, really, what the difference is between, you know, some of those major countries in the Pacific? What’s the diversity in that region? And why do we need to be conscious of that?

Janaline
The island countries do not all have the same international status: so most of them are fully independent; New Caledonia and French Polynesia are both French territories; Niue and the Cook Islands have ceded their foreign policy and defence administration to New Zealand; the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands are what are called US Compact States, which means that they have an agreement with the United States, which is a little bit similar to the agreement that Niue and Cook Islands have with New Zealand; and then there are the US territories of Guam and American Samoa.

The ethnic makeup of the islands is broadly: the Melanesian countries, the Polynesians and the Micronesians. So they have different cultural backgrounds. So it’s a very diverse region. It’s a region that also has a very diverse colonial history: so Tonga has never been colonised; many of the Pacific island states were colonised by the British; some were colonised by the French; and Papua New Guinea was administered by Australia.

So the Pacific Island Forum really came about in that wave of decolonization after the Second World War and, essentially, as the various island states became independent, they joined what was then the South Pacific Forum. It was renamed in 1999 to recognise the fact that quite a lot of the island countries, particularly in Micronesia, are in fact in the northern Pacific.

Glenn
Yeah, so there’s a lot of diversity in the Pacific region. I think where we are now did not just come from nowhere; it’s come from the history. So you started to have British and French explorers claiming these various territories, and Australia was also part of that. There are a lot of workers who were involuntarily put to work in the Queensland sugar industry. So there’s a colonial history there.

So do you want to step us through a little bit of that sort of colonial history and how that has set the tone for the way a lot of those Pacific island nations see the big players like Australia and the US and China and others?

Janaline
Look, I mean, these islands are very small and they’re very, very far apart from each other. Funafuti Atoll, which is the capital of Tuvalu, is so small that when you land on a plane, by the time you can see the atoll, you can actually see every single house on it.

The colonial experience in the Pacific was a bit different because of that. And, you say ‘workers who were sent involuntarily to Queensland’ is a very gentle way of saying slavery. The slave trade in the Pacific was of a much, much smaller scale than the transatlantic slave trade, but it still existed and I think it is a stain on our history that we should not forget.

Another feature of decolonisation in the Pacific, is that it was largely peaceful. We didn’t have the violent revolutions that preceded decolonisation in much of the rest of the world. And I think what it has meant is that the Pacific Island governments that took power after decolonization did so with a lot more, I guess, cooperation from their former colonial masters. And so I think they ended up with more robust and better organised institutions than many other former colonies. I think the island countries have defined their rights in a way that has probably not been quite as adversarial as the way in which some other former colonies in the world have felt they needed to assert their rights on independence.

So the South Pacific Forum was established in the 1960s to provide a political forum for the island countries to discuss political issues, not just development cooperation. And one of the early institutions that was established was the Forum Fisheries Agency.

Fisheries is the main economic resource for a lot of these countries. Because they are very tiny island countries that are very, very far apart from other countries, they all have colossal exclusive economic zones, because the Law of the Sea Convention defines an exclusive economic zone as 200 nautical miles from your coast. And if you are made up of a lot of very tiny islands that are spread out over a very vast ocean, like Kiribati, you end up with an absolutely colossal exclusive economic zone. And that has been a terrific resource because they have licensed distant water fishing nations to come and fish in their waters, and to get a revenue stream from that activity.

Another very important institution that was set up was the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme. Pretty early on, the Pacific Island countries were focused on the need to protect their natural environment. The Pacific Island countries have also been at the absolute forefront of international action on climate change because for them it is absolutely an existential issue.

Glenn
It’s an interesting picture, isn’t it, that their main resource is fisheries and their geostrategic location and the opportunities for tourism.

Now that brings us to the foreign aid dimension of our discussion.

The Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, frequently talks about our Pacific family and has been a regular visitor to the region since the election of the Albanese government in 2022.

Janaline, you spoke about the strategic significance of the region to Australian interests, and touch on some of the dimensions to our relationship with these nations. One of the most significant dimensions to this engagement is Australian foreign aid. Currently we allocate about $2.2 billion per year to the region in aid, which makes Australia the region’s largest development partner. So that accounts for around about 42% of all Australian aid spending, out of a total budget of about $5.1 billion.

This spending in the Pacific ranges across health and education, climate adaption and disaster resilience, infrastructure such as telecommunications, and a range of budget, labour and security initiatives. Like almost all government policy, this is a contested space and there is not unanimous agreement about the value of this aid spending.

However, what’s striking about Australia’s Pacific aid programme is that most critics aren’t calling for it to end. They’re arguing instead about why we give it, how we spend it, and whose interest it ultimately serves. For some, it’s too strategic; for others it’s not strategic enough. And for many Pacific voices, the real question is whether Australia is genuinely responding to Pacific priorities or simply pursuing its own.

Janaline, which is it?

Janaline
Can I say all of the above? Before I talk specifically about Australia’s development aid to the Pacific, I just want to put in a pitch for foreign aid. I have done this in a previous podcast episode when I was talking about the absolute destruction of USAID, which I think has actually been catastrophic for US interests.

So my pitch for why developed countries should be giving aid to developing countries is because it is in nobody’s interests to have extreme poverty and the instability and insecurity that that generates anywhere in the world, but particularly not in your near geographic region. I think there is a very cold-eyed transactional national interest case for foreign aid generally, but for Australia’s foreign aid to the Pacific in particular. And also because for many, many years Australia was one of a very small number of developed countries that provided significant aid to the Pacific. Most of the European countries were not that interested: they don’t have particular ties; they’re very far away - obvious exception is France. Foreign aid started in the wake of decolonisation as a form of reparations for the colonial period, right? So mostly you’ll find that the biggest aid donors to most developing countries are the countries that had previously colonised them.

I think it is entirely in Australia’s national interest to have a prosperous and well-functioning and economically successful Pacific islands region. In the scheme of things, a few billion dollars a year in foreign aid is actually not that massive. If we look at the fact that $11 billion of the federal budget every year goes in fuel tax credits; that is twice as much as the development aid budget. I don’t think you should look at aid as a gift. I think you should look at aid as an investment. And it’s an investment in global stability and security and it’s an investment in global prosperity and therefore in the prosperity of the donor nation as well as the recipient.

Glenn
Yes, all very important. It’s an interesting juxtaposition you made there; $11 billion or thereabouts in fuel credits to the wealthiest mining companies being double the amount of aid that’s given to the Pacific and our region there.

But just on that spending on foreign aid versus the argument about we should be spending it on needy areas here, in Australia, what’s your response to that?

Janaline
Well, I think we should be doing both. Australia puts a lot of money into public education and public health, and we’ve done recent episodes on both of those subjects, and they’re important and they need to be done.

I think it’s very ironic that a lot of the people who are saying we should stop migration into Australia, or radically reduce it, are the same ones who are saying we should stop foreign aid because one of the biggest drivers of migration is economic deprivation at home. People by and large do not want to leave their homes. They like to be where they grew up, where their families are, where they have heritage and family history. I mean, it takes quite a lot to push people to migrate.

There is a very small number of people in the world who will migrate because they’re just super ambitious and they want to see something new and they want to do something new. Most people in the world don’t want to do that. And so when you have these big migration movements, it is often because they are driven by poverty, deprivation, crop failures, water shortages. So if you want to have a stable region where people feel that they can actually stay at home, then it makes sense to invest in the prosperity of that region. And that doesn’t have to come at the expense of Australians in Australia.

Glenn
Right. That’s a very good articulation of what’s in it for Australia in having a region that is both prosperous and economically successful and stable. But what about this argument about Australia’s spending being directed at meeting Australia priorities versus the Pacific priorities? Where’s the happy place in between those two things? Because they’re not necessarily going to be the same thing.

Janaline
No, and one of my major issues with the way in which development aid is dispersed around the world is that it is far too colonial still, even decades after decolonisation. There’s always been a tension between doing the things that the recipients want and doing the things that the donors think they can sell as good use of their taxpayers’ money.

When I was in Papua New Guinea on my first posting in the 1990s, we were giving the PNG government 300 million Australian dollars a year as cash. We called it budget support. There was a huge backlash in Australia over that because, remember in the early 90s, it was just after the recession we had to have, people were making exactly that argument: people are hurting in Australia; why are we giving $300 million a year to Papua New Guinea? And of course $300 million in 1990 was a lot more in terms of purchasing power than it is now.

So then we moved to a thing that we called program aid, because of course you can’t construct a whole lot of projects to absorb that amount of money. And one of the problems that big aid programmes have is that the administrative cost of doing those tiny projects that make the most difference in villages is so high, that it actually makes it quite hard for the donors to disperse the money. So there are all sorts of technical impediments to the way in which aid is delivered.

But I think there is a very fundamental problem in donor countries that they just don’t ask the recipients often enough what they actually need. A guy called William Easterly, who’s an American who used to work for USAID, and I think he worked for the World Bank, wrote a book called The White Man’s Burden, which of course harks back to a Kipling era concept that looking after ‘the natives’, in scare quotes, is the white man’s burden. It’s the burden of the colonists to look after these savages.

Easterly argued, I thought very convincingly, that this attitude hung over for decades into the way in which development aid was dispersed. And so people were getting projects that the donors thought were fantastic and the local people realised were not workable. For example, a water supply project in a village in Africa where the women of the village had previously gathered by the well every day to collect water. And the donor thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great if they could all get piped water on tap into their home?’ So they spent millions of dollars giving them piped water and the women still went to the well.

Why? Because that was their social time. Because that was the time in which they went and communicated with each other, and built their community, and discussed important issues ,and resolved problems. Nobody used the taps.

There were donors planting cash crops that failed because they were completely inappropriate to the local geography, and also the local people were not used to doing what needed to be done. Their methods of agriculture were completely different.

I think the lesson of all of that is: listen to the people who are going to receive this and see what they actually need.

Two development economists did these little experiments with unconditional cash transfers versus traditional bossy aid projects and found that - perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised - that the cash transfers actually led to better outcomes in terms of people’s incomes, in terms of their enterprise, in terms of their agency, in actually deciding what to do with the money.

One of my colleagues in Papua New Guinea said we should just set up a dispensing machine in every single village with 100 kina notes and just let people take the cash. And some of them are going to spend it on alcohol and waste it. And a lot of them are actually going to take that money and spend it on education, and invest in little businesses, and buy chickens so that they can make an income.

One of the very famous aid experiments in Bangladesh, which got its founder a Nobel Prize, was Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank, which was micro loans to village women. And again, the focus on women because it was the women who were managing micro level family finances. And these micro loans worked really well in these communities because they built trust. They were designed in a way where the women administered the loans and so they had a very high repayment rate. They led to the start of a lot of little enterprises that got more successful.

Now there was, at that time, you know, this sort of great rush, ‘oh, let’s do micro loan projects everywhere’. And of course, they didn’t work everywhere, because not every community works in the same way and those solutions don’t always work.

But I guess what I’m trying to do is make a case that development aid actually works best when you go to the people who are actually receiving it.

Now the big challenge when you’re dealing with a government to government system is that some of the developing country governments frankly are corrupt and frankly are not particularly close to what people need in the villages. I think we still struggle to find that, as you say, happy pathway that delivers aid in the quantities that people can absorb and with the full empowerment and agency of the people who are actually going to receive it - so the people in the villages as opposed to the governments - without having a massive administrative burden.

Now of course there are things you need to do with governments as well. You need to be supporting government institutions. Some of our most important projects in Papua New Guinea, was human rights training for law enforcement. We supported the courts, we supported the national statistical agency. I mean, these are all really, really important things that also need to be done at a government level. But again, I think the key is to actually listen to people.

When budget support turned into program aid, I remember one of my contacts in the Department of Finance in Papua New Guinea said to me, ‘yeah, what is really awesome about this is that now we can all have our own consultant’. So essentially what had happened was $300 million in cash that the Papua New Guinea government could then just distribute through its budget, became $300 million, a hundred million of which was sucked up employing consultants to help them do their jobs.

Go figure. Is that good value for money? Hmm, don’t know.

Glenn
Thankfully, Janaline, we’ve moved on a little bit in terms of how we engage with the labour force in the Pacific. So we now have a program that employs Pacific Island workers to feed money back into their economies. Do you want to just talk us through how that works to help build both the human and the economic capital of those countries?

Janaline
I mean, migrant workers are a really important part of Pacific economies. Coming from a tiny island country, the economic opportunities onshore are quite limited. So the Pacific relies very heavily on the remittances of workers overseas. And I think the specific visa classes that allow Pacific Islanders to come to Australia and work here are very important to their economies.

And they’re also very important to our economies because one of the things that the agricultural sector will tell you is that without those workers they would not have a harvest, particularly in fruit. The really important thing that this government is starting to do, and still has a lot of work to do on, is to ensure that the conditions of those workers are guaranteed: that they are paid properly; and that their visas are structured in a way that they do not rely on staying with their employer in order to stay in Australia.

But yes, the migrant worker visas are extremely important to both Australia’s economy and to the economy of Pacific Island countries.

Glenn
We haven’t heard from Luke for a little while. Did you have something on this, Luke?

Luke
Given that there’s been that blitz in the previous, I think, two years of all the treaties that Australia struck with our various neighbours like the Vuvale Union, the Nakamal Treaty and the Falepili Union, a lot of that has very large amounts of aid attached to it. My question is, given the sort of geopolitical backdrop with the competition for the region with China, how much of that aid that we give them is contingent on us getting, like we have in many of those treaties I just mentioned, veto power over their defence arrangements? Is there too much of an interest in our end in controlling their affairs when we give them that aid, or is more of it just about maintaining that relationship?

Janaline
Well, the first thing I’d say is that those treaties are bilateral treaties, which means that both governments have to agree to them. And one of the features of some of them is that they’ve taken quite a long time to negotiate and they have been quite contentious in those countries. And different political parties in those countries, because they all have democratic systems, have taken different views. So for example, in Tuvalu, the Falepili Treaty was an election issue.

So much as some Australian governments have liked to think that they can just push the Pacific islands around, I think the reality has always been, and certainly in the 35 years since I started taking an interest in Pacific island affairs, island governments have not held back on their views.

I think the idea that Australia can just muscle in and say, ‘well, we’ve got all this money and if you do these things and you can have this money’; there have been numerous occasions where Australian governments have tried to do that in more or less subtle ways. And Pacific island governments have been quite happy to say, ‘yeah, well, you can stick your money, like we don’t need it that badly and we have other options’. I think one of the really important things that anybody who is talking about the Pacific needs to bear in mind is that all of these island governments are full of very smart people with a very clear sense of their own national interest. And a lot of them have been educated in Australia and New Zealand because one of the significant things that we have been offering them in terms of development aid has been education.

I mean, a lot of these countries do suffer from the fact that they do have tiny populations. There was one point where, I think, the entire Samoan foreign ministry had less than 10 staff. That’s a very small number of people to deal with a very, very big agenda.

But I really push back on the idea that Australia can just boss island countries around, because that has certainly not been my experience. Now you’ll get a lot of Pacific Island politicians complain from time to time about the colonial attitudes of Australian governments, officials and ministers, but I think it would be a mistake to think that those people are not perfectly capable of pushing back, identifying and defending their own national interests.

Glenn
Now, where the rubber is really starting to hit the road now is the geostrategic challenges and tensions and competition between some of the biggest players in the world.

The policy settings that we see today have been shaped by a rapidly changing strategic environment, and they reflect the Albanese Labor government’s current priorities. Over the past decade or so, the Pacific has become one of the most important regions in international affairs. When you consider China’s growing interest and engagement, the fluctuating levels of interest by the United States, and increased activities by countries such as Japan, India, and France, you see why the region’s geopolitical significance has increased. For Australia, this has meant a shift from seeing the Pacific primarily as a development challenge or opportunity, to viewing it as a much more of a geostrategic priority.

And as Janaline, you just said, increasingly Pacific leaders are asserting their own priorities through the Pacific Islands Forum and the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. They want genuine partnerships, respect for Pacific agency, and action on the issues that matter most to them. And they won’t be pushed around. And that’s where some of the biggest challenges emerge.

So Janaline, what will success look like for Australia in the Pacific? Can the so-called Pacific family navigate these geopolitical tensions and imperatives in a way that works for all the members of this family? And if they can, what comes next?

Janaline
I think I come back to the agency of Pacific Island countries. I’m very uncomfortable with the foreign policy theories around great power relations running the world: people who say it’s all about competition between China and the US in the Pacific, and Australia needs to muscle in to make sure that they keep China out so that the Pacific remains friendly to US interests and Australian interests. Pacific island countries make their own decisions. They decide whether they’re going to recognise China or whether they’re going to recognise Taiwan. And a number of Pacific island countries do recognise Taiwan. They will decide whether they want to have security agreements with China, whether they want to have Chinese infrastructure projects and Chinese technology. And they will decide whether they would rather have Australian technology and Australian infrastructure.

What has been very smart of the Albanese government is not to take a dismissive attitude towards that. The first thing that Penny Wong did when she became foreign minister in 2022 was hop on a plane the following week and do a tour of the Pacific. And I think that was incredibly important because it said to the region, you are our first priority. We are sending our new foreign minister as a new government, newly elected. I think that was a really, really good message.

And what they’ve done by negotiating these agreements is make it very, very clear that they see Australia’s security and Australia’s prosperity as intimately linked with the security and prosperity of the Pacific Islands. And that they absolutely respect the agency of the Pacific island countries to make their own decisions and to conclude treaties in their own interests. And what Australia has to do is persuade them that making this treaty with us is going to be more beneficial to them than making it with someone else. Compared to previous governments that made jokes about people being swamped by sea level rise and thinking that was funny, this government has actually made serious efforts to help island countries reduce their dependence on imported diesel, for example. It has taken very seriously the need for undersea cables.

When I went to my first Forum fisheries meeting in Tuvalu in the late 1990s, I had to send my report back to Canberra on a fax that was reliant on a very unreliable satellite connection and it kept dropping out. They now have an undersea cable and high-speed internet. I think underlying that is the absolute need for countries of the region and beyond the region who come and want to engage in the Pacific to treat them with the kind of respect that they deserve. Because if you don’t, they are going to claim that respect.

Luke wants to say something.

Luke
So much of this aid, like you say, is about respect. A big part of these aid packages, particularly the Falepili Union with Tuvalu, was funding for climate adaptation. Is there a tension in our diplomatic relations with the Pacific that exists between our support for climate action whilst also continuing to export fossil fuels? How is that tension felt in that region?

Janaline
Well, I think it depends on whether you think that Australia’s stopping its exports of fossil fuels is actually going to deal with climate change. And my view is that Australia unilaterally stopping fossil fuel exports or even phasing them out is not actually going to do anything. And what we really need to do, as we discussed in our last episode, is to have a global commitment to decarbonisation, because it’s only when you stop burning fossil fuels that you deal with climate change.

This government has been demonstrating to the Pacific island countries that they have been trying to shift Australia’s export base from fossil fuels to clean energy. And that is, again, what a Future Made in Australia is literally all about.

Luke
So do you reckon that those conversations are winning in their hearts and minds? That they do appreciate the demand side changes that are being talked about and made? Is that, you know, enough for them?

I feel like it’s hard for me to understand what it would be like as an individual living in the Pacific when climate change is obviously a lot more prevalent. One of my favourite quotes, I don’t know who said it, but that ‘climate change is a series of events that appear on your phone and on the news, closer and closer until they appear in front of you’.

I hope that those conversations are convincing them, because I imagine that you wouldn’t want to get that wrong, for their sake.

Janaline
Yeah. I mean, look, those conversations are definitely happening and I think there is an appreciation in the Pacific islands, and certainly amongst Pacific Island governments, that this Australian government is trying to deal with climate change. What I see in terms of the outcomes that this government has achieved, with respect to those agreements, suggests to me that the relationships are pretty good.

So is it enough? Is it convincing? It’s clearly been enough to convince at least some of those governments that it is worth making these pretty ambitious agreements with the Australian government.

Luke
Yeah, evidently. I mean that’s true. There’s been so many that have been signed.

Glenn
So that’s a fascinating discussion about policy and relationships and so on, but I’d sort of just like to come back a little bit to the human dimension, the personal relationships.

Now, Janaline, you mentioned some of the comments that were made and behaviours of the previous government, which didn’t really resonate all that well. And you mentioned that Foreign Minister Penny Wong went off to the Pacific at the earliest opportunity that she had, which I think is significant, because: one, she is the foreign minister, not a junior minister with responsibility for the Pacific as we had previously; she is one of the most senior and powerful people in the government; she is very close to the Prime Minister, so there is nobody better that could have gone.

But I’m interested in your take on how she engaged with them at a human level that makes her more effective than some of her predecessors.

Janaline
I mean, you’re right, Glenn, the human level is really important, but underlying that is the fact that the people within this government who are dealing with their counterparts in the Pacific do feel at a very profound level that they’re dealing with equals. And that shows.

Glenn
As always happens, our time is coming to an end, so can we get some final thoughts, first from you Luke?

Luke
I read this piece a while ago that said ‘whatever mistakes the Prime Minister is guilty of neglecting the Pacific is not one of them’. I think the overarching strategy which I’ve observed is that it’s not so much Australia as a big power stepping into the region and trying to take control, but Australia doing its job as part of the Pacific area as a friend. I’m glad that our relationships have improved because that has all sorts of implications. On top of it just being the right thing to do in the first place.

Glenn
And from you, Janaline?

Janaline
Yeah, really well said, Luke.

And I’ve got to say, I mean, we are lucky that we have such friendly neighbours, right? I mean, not every country in the world has super friendly neighbours: look at Ukraine; look at India and Pakistan.

But I agree. I think, as I said at the beginning, geography is important and I think our security and the security of the region is best assured if we can all treat each other with respect, if we can all recognise each other’s important national interests and if we can all act accordingly.

I’m just going to do another plug for the importance of Australia investing in the Pacific and investing in Pacific human capital, in Pacific infrastructure and in Pacific economic development, because I really think Australia’s prosperity is intimately connected with the prosperity of the region.

And they might be tiny island countries, they might be scattered very widely across this massive ocean, they might have quite small populations, but they are our neighbours and they are very, very important to us. And I think it is just so important that we continue to keep that front of mind, and that the Pacific island region stays a very high Australian foreign policy priority.

Glenn
That was another episode of Why Can’t They Just? The theme music that we use for this podcast is a piece called Insurrection by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Janaline
You can also hear us on Canberra community radio, 2XX FM 98.3, on Tuesdays between 6 and 7, or via 2XXfm.org.au. If you like our work, consider supporting us on Patreon, via our website whycanttheyjust.com.au.

Glenn
I’m Glenn Davidson.

Luke
I’m Luke Robertson.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?