SYDNEY, 15 August 2003 — Islanders were not the only ones surprised by the recent switch in Australia’s dealings with the South Pacific from sublime inertia to eager intervention.
Australians were surprised too.
Why, it was only in January that Foreign Minister Alexander Downer defended a 30-year policy of leaving the locals to govern themselves.
Downer even expressly ruled out sending Australian troops to haul Solomon Islands back from the abyss.
“Sending in Australian troops to occupy the Solomon Islands would be folly in the extreme,” Downer said. “The fundamental problem is that foreigners do not have answers for the deep-seated problems affecting the Solomon Islands.”
Eight months on and the answers to the South Pacific’s problems tumble out of Canberra think tanks as fast as troops wade ashore at Honiara’s historic Red Beach.
The solutions offered range from adopting the Aussie dollar as the single currency for the region to a European Union-style free trade area with a single airline to a single police force.
Already Prime Minister John Howard has changed the rubric and tied foreign aid to success in rooting out corruption.
His reasoning for the about face and the embrace of what some have called neo-colonialism is that desperate situations require desperate remedies.
“We’re in an era now where these countries are just going to disappear in chaos and ill-governance if we don’t intervene,” Howard said. “And we’re doing it with their approval, at their request, with the full support of our neighbors, with the endorsement of the United Nations and the overwhelming support of the Australian people.”
It’s true that the Solomons Parliament asked Howard to put together a coalition of the willing to sort out the affairs of the floundering former British colony.
It’s also true that all 16 members of the Pacific Forum grouping ticked an operation that will go on for years and involve thousands of foreign troops, police and administrators. Again, Australia has the support of the UN for its about-face from hands-off to have-a-go.
But whether Australians are overwhelmed with the wisdom of the Solomons expedition is at least debatable.
Peter Urban, a former chief economist at the Foreign Affairs Department in Canberra, predicted that Australia’s shock and awe campaign in the Solomons could whip up resentment among other islanders who see their turn coming.
Urban also warned that after the intervention force leaves, a slide back into corruption and lawlessness is on the cards. He points to the example of Papua New Guinea, which had a long period of tutoring in the lead up to independence — and has had a swift decline into mendicancy since.
The next likely recipient of tough love is Papua New Guinea, the South Pacific’s biggest country and potentially its key economy.
During the past 30 years the region has soaked up $11 billion in Australian aid. The biggest recipient of Canberra’s largesse has been PNG, a country blessed with oil, gold, diamonds, copper, timber, rich fisheries and fertile soils. By any measure, PNG is a failing state. Its five million people are generally accepted to be worse off than they were at independence in 1975.
Corruption, according to former Prime Minister Sir Mekere Morauta is both “systemic and systematic”. Debt-free at independence, the government has borrowed so furiously that what it owes is now the equivalent of 70 percent of its Gross National Product.
Susan Windybank from the Center for Independent Studies in Canberra warned that PNG “shows every sign of following its Melanesian neighbor, the Solomon Islands, down the path to economic paralysis, government collapse and social despair”.
The trick for Australia will be avoiding the moniker “neocolonialist” while dragooning the failing states of the region into putting their affairs in order.
Just how difficult the job will be is illustrated by a comment from Vinci Clodumar, Nauru’s former finance minister. He urged Howard not to “upset the Pacific way of doing business”. Yet that is exactly what Howard intends to do.
