Perhaps Penny Wong should have a crack at energy. While Bovver Bowen and Mad King dawdle, Wong appears to be such a livewire across the Pacific that we could just plug her into the grid.
This is making the Morrison Government look absolutely useless. The excellent if sometimes all woked up, Saturday Paper:
“The first thing I wanted to do after being sworn in, is to share a few thoughts with our Pacific family,” said Penny Wong with a wry smile in her first public statements as Australia’s 40th minister for Foreign Affairs.
Within minutes of assuming her new role, Wong made it clear that the perceived inattention towards the Pacific under the former government was over. Australia promised to listen, Wong said, in a pitch that opened a frantic first fortnight on the world stage. After an extraordinary election campaign in which, unusually, foreign policy challenges were front and centre, the government needed to hit the ground running.
Within two weeks of taking office, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong will have held direct, in-person talks with seven nations, with the foreign minister also delivering a keynote address to the Pacific Islands Forum, the key multilateral body in the Pacific. The pace reflects a genuine urgency within the Albanese government to recast Australia’s global reputation, and an awareness of the activist foreign policy role Australia now has to take in order to manage increasingly fraught international and regional dynamics.
“So we will take climate action seriously, and we will deliver on our commitments, which will go a long way to repairing our relationship with our Pacific family.”
The new government’s Pacific focus is no accident. During the campaign, Albanese argued that the Morrison government’s lack of regard for Pacific concerns had undermined Australia’s standing in the region and potentially led to Beijing’s increasing engagement. This week, concerns about China’s role in the Pacific reached new heights as the nation’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, embarked on a 10-day, eight-nation sweep of the Pacific Islands. Starting with the signing of a controversial security pact with Solomon Islands, Wang subsequently stitched up bilateral deals with Samoa, Fiji, Niue and Tonga.Most controversially, the Chinese foreign minister had sought to sign a region-wide deal covering issues as diverse as economic engagement, fisheries management, policing and IT support. The deal, which was leaked to Reuters by a disgruntled Pacific government, was ultimately knocked back. But its ambition represented a marked shift in China’s approach to the Pacific, causing even more anxiety to security officials in Canberra who had already been caught off guard by Solomon Islands’ increasing embrace of Beijing.
Our Penny appears to have not just skittled the region but China within it.
Some of this is certainly good timing given Chinese overreach:
Wang had attempted to woo leaders by telling them China would treat them as equals. He said that Beijing did not have any political objectives and that all it wanted was “win-win co-operation”.
“The South Pacific region should be a stage for co-operation, rather than an arena for vicious competition,” he said in Honiara. “China has no intention of competing with anyone, let alone engaging in geopolitical competition, and has never established a so-called sphere of influence.”
Wang first got Pacific Island nations offside by attempting to go around the Pacific Islands Forum in Suva. Instead of going through the historic and occasionally chaotic secretariat, China chaired its own meeting, pulling a dozen countries into its orbit rather than engaging with theirs.
Then it attempted to ram through a 10-country proposal in a matter of days, misjudging the careful and patient diplomacy required to navigate an area that spans three million kilometres, 13 million people and hundreds of distinct cultures.
“It was too big a fruit, too quickly pursued,” says Dr Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “The international hurdles and the local domestic complications are more severe than they realised.”
However, let’s not underestimate the Wong Doctrine either. She has unleashed a tsunami of soft power charm in record time that is sewing all kinds of seeds for the great Australian comeback.
I don’t know if it will work but it sure sounds like it could and if it does then Honiara will be exposed as having overreached as well.
Washington will be pleased. In fact, Washington has rolled out some serious hardware:
How were Australia’s Pacific neighbours diverted from China’s cash-splash crusade? An evidence-based alliance against illegal fishing may have had something to do with it.
The leaders of the Quad – an informal alliance between Australia, India, Japan and the United States – last week announced a joint project targeted at a key Pacific Islands concern: “dark ships” looting their territorial waters.
Called the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), it’s essentially a promise to establish a network of satellites and other surveillance systems to track and monitor illegal fishing vessels.
The Quad didn’t mention China by name. But Beijing’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his 20-strong delegation had to contend with a reputation for disregarding exclusive economic zones (EEZs).
Which may be why Beijing was not pleased.
On the day of the Quad leader’s Tokyo meeting, China teamed with Russia to express their displeasure by flying six strategic bombers with support aircraft around Japan.
Bravo. Perhaps Australia’s future and first UN Secretary-General is born.
P.S. Get used to this:
The interception by a Chinese J-16 fighter aircraft of an Australian surveillance plane in the South China Sea was aggressive, reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, gratuitous and illegal. In other words, it was a typical act of Beijing policy in the Indo-Pacific.
It gives the lie to the so-called charm offensive being waged by China’s ambassador in Canberra.
It also helps explain the unmistakeable urgency of the Albanese government’s regional diplomatic agenda, in the South Pacific and in Southeast Asia.
All we need to ensure is that it keeps happening in the South China Sea, not in the Coral Sea.
