The Pacific comes to Mr Albanese

The second half of 2025 was not Prime Minister Albanese’s best year in the Pacific. With considerable fanfare, Albanese visited Port Vila and Port Moresby expecting to sign security agreements that would impose tight strictures on China’s ability to establish military bases in either Vanuatu or Papua New Guinea.

Both agreements fell into a heap. Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Jotham Napat hadn’t secured the agreement of his Ministers, and Papua New Guinea’s Cabinet had dispersed before Prime Minister Marape could secure its support. It was hardly Australian Pacific diplomacy at its best.

The Australia-Papua New Guinea agreement on a framework for closer security relations, the Pukpuk Defence Treaty, limped across the line in October 2025. A fortnight after Albanese’s abortive visit to Port Moresby, Marape visited Canberra to sign up for Papua New Guinea’s first alliance with an international partner, and Australia’s first alliance in seventy years. Quite what the PNG Defence Force will bring to Australia’s defence is unclear, though expectations within the PNGDF that there will be a measure of Defence Minister Marles’s “interchangeability” on offer are running high.

The new agreement with Vanuatu, signed some ten months after Napat pulled out of the signing ceremony in Port Vila, is of an altogether different character. Gone are Australia’s aspirations for an effective veto over Vanuatu’s agreement to possible Chinese offers of military infrastructure and police training.

Instead, Vanuatu has undertaken not to “permit its territory to be used for any foreign military base of infrastructure” and to “prioritise any policing request to Pacific Islands Forum members”. Vanuatu also agreed that its critical infrastructure shall remain “free from militarisation, any form of foreign interference or unauthorised access”, and that it would “consult Australia on proposed third party engagement in Vanuatu’s critical infrastructure”.

These are not onerous undertakings and are capable of much interpretation. And in the bidding war tradition of Pacific diplomacy, Australia will pay quite a lot for the agreement – $500 million over a decade or more.

China is evidently the target of Australia’s security concerns in the Pacific. China is perfectly capable of playing the financial ping-pong that has long distinguished power competition in the region.

Australia’s security policy in the Pacific is highly defensive, built around a “deterrence by denial” strategy that seeks to constrain and contain China by limiting its military and security options as it builds its economic relationships with the Pacific nations. The problem with a denial strategy, of course, is that it focuses its energy on the adversary and the adversary’s interests rather than the realisation of our own national interests and those of our partners. At best, it is a zero-sum game strategy that is inconsistent with a win-win strategy that plays to our natural strengths.

Happily, both agreements offer glimmers of hope. There is a clear though somewhat ill-defined recognition of deep cultural connections, the potential for economic transformation, enhanced workforce access to the Australian labour market, cooperation on climate change adaptation and mitigation and agreed procedures and structures for humanitarian assistance in the face of natural disasters.

Australian policy-makers need to recognise that security in all its forms – human security, community security and national security – is a consequence of confident, cooperative and integrated policy-making rather than a causal factor driving competitive bidding for influence.

Our Pacific diplomacy is a work in progress.