Australia's Pacific Mindset: Historical Foundations

Early in the 2022 Australian election campaign, in an address to the Lowy Institute in Sydney, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison went out of his way to characterise Australia's regional neighbourhood as a geo-strategic theatre brimming with threats from a foreign power. He identified China, which had joined Russia in declaring a “no-limits” partnership shortly before the Ukraine invasion two weeks previously, as the key threat to the peaceful status quo in the region. He highlighted Beijing's expanding militarisation, along with “espionage, disinformation, cyber-attacks, foreign interference, and economic coercion.” Morrison said that China was becoming more assertive “in ways that are causing concern to nations across the region” and underlined that Australia's future was “inextricably linked” with those of the Pacific Island countries (PICs) to Australia's north and east.1

The Pacific is not usually an election focus in Australia — the region generally attracts only limited Australian media coverage. But the coalition government's decision to play the national security card, trumpeting its “Pacific step-up” program,2 combined with the subsequent revelation that Solomon Islands had secretly finalised a security agreement with China on the coalition's watch, was to ensure that the Pacific became a battleground in the struggle to win government. The Labor opposition bought into the prevailing national security narrative, seizing on the Government's discomfort over events in Solomon Islands. Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong told the media that “on Scott Morrison's watch, our region has become less secure.”3 Morrison continued to speak about the challenges arising from China's “intense” approaches to the PICs, warning in early April that “these threats still remain.”4 Labor brought forward a substantial new set of Pacific policies mid-campaign, positioning it well for intense, positive diplomatic engagement with the region in the early post-election period, led by Wong as Foreign Minister for the new government.5

The unusual domestic political focus on the Pacific led the mainstream Australian media into unfamiliar territory. With some exceptions, the intensive reporting that ensued in Australian outlets — and much of the accompanying commentary from Australian public figures — reflected little detailed knowledge of the Pacific itself. The region was often made to sound like nothing more than a vacant expanse full of risk, where China was locked in a dangerous contest with the West, led by Australia as its chief representative in the region.6 Little attention was given to the people of the region themselves — the challenges they face, their priorities, and their aspirations.

All this seemed to confirm the sense that Australian public interest in the Pacific is only aroused when other major powers are threatening to move in on our “backyard” — to use a habitual, neo-colonialist term that was redeployed regularly during the campaign. In other words, that strategic denial is the overwhelming motivation or instinct underlying both the Australian Government's approach and the Australian public mindset where the Pacific is concerned. In 2022 this built on a strong sense among Pacific islanders that the Australian Government, like the rest of the international community, had not been taking seriously their own aspirations and overriding preoccupations, particularly their concerns about climate change,7 described by regional leaders in their 2018 Pacific Island Forum (PIF) security declaration as “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and well-being of the peoples of the Pacific.”8

It might be argued that it was natural for Australian public commentary about the Pacific during the 2022 campaign to focus almost exclusively on the “geo-strategic contest” playing out in the region, given the partisan contest that was playing out in Australia about China, and the broader global security context of the time. The Australian media were naturally most interested in the competing national security credentials of the two domestic political sides, and as we will explore later, there are also legitimate reasons for concern about China's approach to the Pacific, many of which are shared by regional leaders. And China's undoubtedly more active posture in the region, combined with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, made the geo-strategic picture an important story of public interest.

But the Australian media narrative also reflects an entrenched Australian cultural view about the Pacific in which our politicians and administrators participate, along with the broader public. There are longstanding historical foundations for the depiction of the Pacific as only a place of threat, rather than collaboration or opportunity, and the near-exclusive accompanying focus on denying strategic space to a foreign power which we believe represent threats to our interests and values. A review of the historical record confirms that these anxious elements had become integral to Australians' thinking about their place in the world by Australia's early post-federation years. In fact, a focus on strategic denial was present from the very beginning of the Australian colonial project, and this was strengthened further through the nineteenth century by the colonies' strong sense of isolation and the repeated foreign threats they experienced — or at least perceived — as manifesting in the Pacific region. Indeed, as we shall see, concerns about foreign threats to the security of Australia's place in the Pacific played an important role in stimulating the very drive towards Australian nationhood.

Denying the Pacific to others can be identified as among the motivations behind the decision to establish the New South Wales colony in the first place. The earliest proponents of the project argued that it would provide a base from which to attack Spanish commerce in the ocean and contribute to the defeat of Spanish America.9 Shaw, Blainey, and others have contended that that the motivations also included a desire to deny French occupation of what was to become Australia.10 In requesting the formal agreement of the East India company to the colony's establishment in 1786, British Home Secretary Lord Sydney noted that Botany Bay was within the company's area of trading monopoly and argued that it would “be a means of preventing the emigration of Our European Neighbours to that Quarter, which might be attended with infinite prejudice to the company's affairs.”11

The first Australian administrators understood that they had been charged by their imperial masters with authority over the Pacific. Governor Arthur Philip's appointment made him “Governor in Chief” of not only the eastern half of the Australian continent, but also “the islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean within the latitudes aforesaid of 10°37′ South, and 43°39′ South,” a vast expanse of ocean radiating out from the eastern coastline between Cape York in the north and the southern tip of Tasmania.12 Here lay the seeds of an attitude of Australian “ownership” towards the Pacific. The Sydney colony conducted expeditions to Norfolk Island under this authority in its earliest years, and New Zealand effectively became a de facto extension of New South Wales in the first decades of the nineteenth century. More than two decades after Philip's arrival one of his successors, Lachlan Macquarie, referenced the terms of the original appointment in asserting his legal authority over far-flung Tahiti, after he had appointed a magistrate there to help maintain law and order.13

The first several decades of the nineteenth century saw the Australian colonies respond with anxiety to a series of strategic threats, real or perceived, from foreign powers in the Pacific. France and Britain had been competitors for regional exploration and new settlement in the late eighteenth century, with numerous French Pacific discoveries claimed through the period. The arrival of La Perouse and his ships in Botany Bay in January 1788, just as Philip was moving the first fleet into Sydney harbour, reflected this pattern of activity. New South Wales was established almost on the eve of the French revolution, and the subsequent prolonged war against Emperor Bonaparte came to be the overriding preoccupation for the British authorities in the early 1800s, as the new colony was finding its feet. Concerns about French interest in Australia drove an expansion of the British colony in this period. French explorers had been encountered in the Pacific. Thus, to secure any strategic locations within the southern station of the Pacific Ocean which might have been of use to France, Governor King dispatched an expedition to settle Van Diemen's Land in 1803.14

In fact, French exploration activity in the Pacific was severely curtailed in the years after the revolution, leaving the field more open to the British. But this period saw France reaffirmed in the public mind as Britain's traditional enemy, and suspicions lingered. Even in 1826, rumours of plans for a French colony in Western Australia drove British authorities to establish their own.15 This concern would not dissipate in the colonies as France moved from the 1840s onwards to establish possessions or protectorates from Tahiti to New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Wallis, and Futuna.

This was the period of the “Great Game” in south and central Asia, when Russian expansion stoked fears for British India; when Moscow consolidated its grip across Siberia and based a substantial Pacific fleet there to service the territory of “Russian America” (now Alaska), and to project its broader territorial designs across the ocean. Russian ships began visiting Sydney from as early as 1807, but it was in the 1830s, when Russian naval visits increased in frequency, when real alarm was first expressed in the colonial press. This intensified from 1854 to 1856 when Russia became a British enemy with the outbreak of the Crimean war, a development that stimulated significant defence activity in the colonies. The passage through nearby waters of a Russian naval squadron in 1854 led to the reorganisation of imperial forces in Australia, including the moving of military headquarters from Sydney to Melbourne and the construction of defensive batteries around Sydney harbour.17

China, had originally been seen more as trading opportunity than threat by the British planners of the Australian settlement, but a sense of danger crystallised in the colonies in the 1850s, when the discovery of gold had brought thousands of Chinese workers to Australia. Their work ethic and social habits were alien to Australian eyes, leading to a well-documented racist backlash. But in the nineteenth century China represented what has been described as a “demographic rather than military threat.”18 The Chinese state — the current Pacific preoccupation for Australian strategic thinkers — was not thought of as a threat in this way. It spent much of the century with Britain and other European powers dictating the terms of its diplomatic and trading position following the successive humiliations of the Opium Wars. Colonial fear of China was real, but it was not really of invading armies or blockading navies; rather it was of teeming millions escaping poverty by swarming down unchecked into an under-populated Australia. As the century progressed, fear of the “Yellow Peril” was to fuse with interpretations of Darwinism, to build a sense of White Australia as the bulwark of a superior civilisation.

The sense of strategic exposure was to grow in the Australian colonies in the latter half of the century, particularly after they assumed responsibility for their own defence following the withdrawal of British regular troops in 1870. These concerns were focused on a range of perceived threats in the Pacific — including, once again, from the French.

From the late 1860s onwards, Australian colonial officials and newspapers expressed strong opposition to the establishment of a French penal colony in New Caledonia. Their objections were framed in security terms — fear of escapees loomed large in the public mind, a risk highlighted by both colonial officials and the press. As others have noted, however, the reaction to this French initiative also revealed anxiety about the Australians' own recent history. Transportation to Australia finally came to an end in 1868, just as the French were commencing their own Pacific version of the scheme. Jill Donohoo argues convincingly that the Australian reaction to the French scheme should be seen as part of a larger story of post-colonial Australian convict shame.19 As the century progressed the activities of French settlers in the New Hebrides (modern-day Vanuatu) also came to be seen as threatening the security of the Melanesian Island chain, which the colonies hoped would in turn provide a bulwark against potential threats from Asia.20

The objections to French activity in the Pacific in this period were important in the development of a more independent external outlook by the Australian colonies through the last quarter of the century. Their views of France as a security threat in the Pacific increasingly differed from the strategic perspective in London, where Britain found itself needing to balance its support for the colonies with the shifting strategic dynamics in Europe. The imperial government was dealing with a rebalancing of relations between the great European powers. British relations with France were entering a new phase amidst the emergence of a united, militarily strong Germany, which was also to become a major focus of colonial concern over time.

German interest in the Pacific first emanated from the traditional Hanseatic trading centre of Hamburg. Companies based there began to develop their trading and plantation interests in Samoa in the late 1850s, spreading to the New Guinea islands in the early 1870s.21 The German government was not at all involved in these early trading ventures. Indeed, they pre-dated the formation of Germany as a unified state in 1871. And for more than a decade after unification, the leadership of the new Germany was firmly opposed to colonialism. Like their counterparts in London, officials in Berlin were focused on the major power dynamics in Europe itself.22 But the growth in German trading activity nonetheless led to a perception in the Australian colonies that Germany was a growing threat to “natural” British dominance in the region, and that New Guinea was where that threat was concentrated. The colonies of New South Wales and Queensland called intermittently on the imperial British authorities from the 1860s onwards to annex the unclaimed portion of the island of New Guinea (eastward from the boundary of the Dutch claim — essentially the territory now called Papua New Guinea). Gold discoveries near Port Moresby prompted heightened fears of foreign intervention, and occasional clashes between German plantation owners and “blackbirding” labour recruiters from Queensland did not help.23

Mutual antagonisms mounted, with German traders growing increasingly concerned about Australian demands for annexation and calling on their own government for action. An article in the German press in November 1882 caused much Australian alarm when it noted that supporters of British annexation saw the annexation of New Guinea as a national “duty,” and ventured that “perhaps we might, with quite the same right, affirm it is the duty of the German nation.”24 This formed part of the context for the decision by the Premier of Queensland — Thomas McIlwraith, a longstanding proponent of annexation — to take matters into his own hands in February of the following year, unilaterally despatching the police magistrate on Thursday Island to Port Moresby to lay claim to the territory on behalf of the empire. Henry Chester made the required declaration before the local inhabitants and bemused missionaries on 4 April 1883.25

Derby went on to comment that a “special difficulty” arose from the perception that part of the motivation for “some persons in Queensland” was to obtain “a large supply of coloured labour for the sugar plantations.”27 The British made it clear that they believed the Australian alarm about German activity in the region was overblown, and that the costs associated with New Guinea's annexation were unjustified. London also had no wish to encourage, through perceived British expansionism, an alliance of continental powers against itself. Anglo-French relations had been warming over time but were under some strain in 1883 following the British occupation of Egypt the previous year.

The convention's “Resolutions relating to the Islands of the Pacific” reflected equal concern about the regional dispositions of both Germany and France. Concerns about German activities to their north led the delegates to call for immediate steps to “secure the incorporation with the British Empire of so much of New Guinea, and the small islands adjacent thereto, as is not claimed by the Government of the Netherlands.”30 While acknowledging that Britain and France had an understanding that the New Hebrides should remain independent, the convention called for “some more definite engagement, which shall secure those islands from falling under any foreign dominion.”31

With these concerns firmly in participants' minds, the convention adopted a draft bill to establish a Federal Council of the Australasian Colonies, and within two years had convinced the imperial government to enact it as the Federal Council of Australasia Act 1885. While New South Wales and New Zealand did not join the council, this was an important step forward for an idea that had been circulating in one form or another in the colonies since the 1840s, and a key milestone on the road to federation.

Resentment over the British failure to back McIlwraith's annexation of New Guinea was not appeased in November 1884 when the British were forced to respond to the declaration of a German protectorate over northeastern New Guinea with its own protectorate over the southeast. (Bismarck had changed his position on colonialism in response to both domestic political and international considerations.) London and Berlin ultimately agreed four years later to proceed with annexation of their respective protectorates, dividing the territory between them.32

Developments continued to strengthen fears that an alien power would come to challenge British supremacy in the Pacific. A further Russian scare arose in 1885 because of a skirmish between Russian and Afghan troops in Central Asia which led in turn to a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Britain over the perceived threat to British India. Fearing that East Asia might become a battlefield in case an Anglo-Russian war broke out, the British government decided to occupy the Komundo islands off the Korean peninsula, which they referred to as Port Hamilton, to improve Britain's strategic foothold in this region.33

These combined threats led to a substantial upgrade of the colonies' own defence posture. The combined strength of permanent and part-time soldiers in the colonial forces grew from 8000 men in 1883 to a combined strength of nearly 22,000 in 1885. This has been described as a more significant event in colonial military history than the more famous decision to despatch an Australian colonial contingent to Sudan in March 1885 as part of the imperial intervention there.34 Interestingly, this contribution was opposed by figures such as Henry Parkes, then in opposition in New South Wales, on the basis that Australians should not blindly support imperial operations when events in New Guinea had shown they were unable to influence the determination of imperial policy.

The defence of the Australian colonies was an important subject for discussion at the First Colonial Conference held in London in 1887. The renewed Russian and British concerns about French designs on Egypt, and Australian worries about the Pacific, led to an agreement between the governments of Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to establish an auxiliary naval squadron in Australian waters. The colonies also found agreement with London that there should be a formal review of the defence capabilities of the Australian colonies — a task undertaken by Major General Bevan Edwards in 1889. Edwards judged that, without unification of Australia's military forces and a major defence upgrade, Australia was vulnerable to attack. He pointed directly to the situation between the great European powers at the time in making his point. During his visit to Sydney Edwards had several discussions with Sir Henry Parkes, now re-elected as premier of New South Wales and increasingly focused on federation as a personal legacy.35

Parkes clearly saw the benefit of Edwards' report to his cause. He drew on it in his famous Tenterfield speech of December 1899 to argue that federation would enable the colonies' militias to unite as a single national army under the command of a single national government.36 The federalist cause gathered momentum, with the Australian federal conference of the following year leading to the ultimately successful referenda held in the last years of the decade, and the declaration of a federated Australia in January 1901.

In a strictly military sense, Asian threats only impinged on Australian consciousness as Japan's militarisation peaked in the 1890s.37 Industrial modernisation had begun with the social reforms associated with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. A large Japanese conscript army was firmly established by the 1880s, and a major multi-year naval expansion began in 1882. In the mid-1890s Japan inflicted its own humiliating defeat over China in the first Sino-Japanese war, establishing Japanese dominance over the Korean peninsula, Manchuria, and the Chinese coastline. It then proceeded to launch an invasion of Taiwan. In the last years of the century, while Australian colonies were debating the constitutional principles to underpin their federal union, it was becoming abundantly clear that the balance of power between China and Japan had shifted substantially in the latter's favour.

Hoskins makes the persuasive point that “if Pacific security created the first fissure in the bedrock of shared Australian and British interest, race created the second.”38 Britain, still mindful of the need to counter Russian expansionism in the East, responded pragmatically to Japan's rise of this new force in the region. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, which came into effect in 1899, established reciprocal rights of entry between Japan and Britain, including its colonies. This principle clashed with the emergent White Australia Policy — the strong colonial view, so clearly expressed by Parkes himself, that they had “sacred obligation” to prevent the “admixture of Asian blood” in Australia. This view was to gain full federal expression in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, and the infamous dictation test established under this act as the Australian way of getting around London's concerns about exclusion based on skin colour — which, among other things, would have breached Britain's treaty commitments to Japan.39

The commercial treaty between Japan and Britain was only the first step towards the formation of a substantial Anglo-Japanese alliance which would be formalised in a defence treaty between the two powers in 1902 and last until after the First World War. The decision of the mother country to align itself with this “Asian threat” was to remain the source of considerable consternation in Australia through the post-federation years.

Press and parliamentary debate from the early post-Federation period confirms that a concern to manage international security threats was by now central to the Australian mindset about the Pacific, almost to the exclusion of any other considerations. Several other characteristics of today's debate about national security were also in place. Even then, arguments in favour of greater national sovereignty in defence jostled with the belief that Australia's security interests were best preserved through alliance with a major power that shared what we would describe today as our values. In the early twentieth century, though, the bonds were characterised in unapologetic, racial terms.

Many of the debates in the early Australian parliaments were devoted to the question of whether and how British Pacific possessions should be transferred under Australian administration. There was some discussion about taking on responsibility for Fiji and Solomon Islands, and Prime Minister Barton even volunteered to parliament that if “steps were taken to acquire New Guinea […] the Government will favour placing of the Solomon Islands under Commonwealth control at the same time.”42 Ultimately, Australia declined the British offer to transfer responsibility for the group, and London was also content to retain direct control of Fiji.

British New Guinea, or Papua, was the clearest-cut case. It was readily enough accepted that the Commonwealth of Australia should take on a colony which some described as essentially an extension of the Australian mainland. There was some reluctance, however, to take on the actual financial responsibility associated with the administration of Papua. Quibbling about the proposed extent of the Australian states' funding contribution moved the Secretary of State for the Colonies to recall pointedly that the annexation of British New Guinea had taken place at the Australians' urging.43 The colonies had been much more enthusiastic, less than twenty years earlier, about denying others access to New Guinea, than they were to accept the administrative burden associated with its colonial management.

Today, strategic commentators express grave concern about China's desire for global projection and note that a Chinese navy capable of projecting serious power across the world would also need to be supported by bases in the Pacific. Vanuatu, formerly New Hebrides, is still commonly identified as having highly suitable locations for any such Pacific naval base and is assessed as being vulnerable to Chinese influence given the extent of its government's financial indebtedness to Beijing.

Referring to the Pacific as Australia's “backyard” was commonplace among Australian politicians and the media until 2022, when senior Pacific leaders such as former Fijian Prime Minister Bainimarama angrily rejected the terminology as betraying a patronising sense of ownership. This underlying attitude was, of course, being expressed without apology in the immediate post-federation era. There were clear calls in the very first federal parliament for an exclusive Australian zone of influence in the Pacific — a concept sometimes described as “an Australian Monroe Doctrine” after the US policy, first espoused in 1823, which opposed further European colonialism in the American hemisphere.

John Curtin's seminal “Look to America” speech, made more than thirty years later following the fall of British Singapore to Japanese forces, is generally regarded as the moment when Australia first signalled an intention to move on from its strategic dependence on Britain, and to seek to preserve its security through alignment with the United States. It is less well remembered today that in 1908, when the Japanese threat was not yet entirely “clear and present,” Prime Minister Deakin invited the US navy to conduct a high-profile visit to Australian ports to send a clear signal to militarised Japan that Australia had powerful friends. Deakin had not consulted London. While the British had granted him power to negotiate commercial treaties at the colonial conference the previous year, his request for greater involvement in the development of imperial foreign policy had been refused, and he was evidently keen to test the boundaries.

The Governor-General wrote to the Secretary of State for Colonies in London that “hundreds of thousands of people lined the shores of Port Jackson” and showed “unbounded enthusiasm” for the fleet's visit. He said that he was “credibly informed that the number of people who took part in the welcome constituted the largest gathering at any time in the history of New South Wales.”50

Leaving aside the obvious changes in language and style (especially the unconstrained expression of racial prejudice), these comments find their reflection today in the views of those Australians who argue for greater strategic autonomy today. This debate re-emerged most recently in February 2023, after the implementation plan was announced for the delivery of nuclear-powered submarine capability to Australia under the Australia-UK-United States (AUKUS) arrangement. Prime Minister Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles were both forced to reject claims by former prime ministers Keating and Turnbull that the plan would undermine the nation's sovereignty. And since the original announcement of the AUKUS pact by the Morrison Government in 2022, Australian defence expert Hugh White has argued that the agreement — and Australia's faith in America's willingness and ability to come to its aid — is encouraging a false sense of security.52

Of course, there is no mention, or even speculation, in the public commentary of the early twentieth century about what the people of the Pacific might have thought about it all. That this would even be a consideration would probably not have occurred to them. The near-absence of Pacific perspectives in the Australian press during the 2022 campaign suggests, worryingly, that our perspective has still not evolved far enough.

By the early 1900s, then, a national way of thinking had become entrenched which saw the Pacific in much the way Scott Morrison depicted it in his March 2022 Lowy speech — a vast, empty, threatening region where the involvement of an alien power, almost by definition, threatened Australian security interests. While we do not intend to consider the events of the intervening twentieth century in any detail, it is worth acknowledging three important developments in our post-federation history which helped shape further, and to some extent refined, the current national mindset.

First, the fears that our first federal leaders held about Japan ultimately came to pass in the 1930s and 1940s, when resource hunger and imperial expansionism combined with other global factors to bring about further Sino-Japanese conflict and then a full-scale Japanese war against the United States and its allies — including Australia. The existential battles fought across the Pacific in the early 1940s played an obvious and important role in shaping Australia's defence posture today — and its misgivings about threats that might manifest themselves in the Pacific.

Second, there has of course been a major shift in regional power dynamics between China and Japan. The communist authorities that took power in China only four years after the total defeat of Japan set their country on an uneven but highly successful road of national economic development, and by the early twenty-first century it had emerged as the second largest economy in the world. China had also become a major international military power, with a blue water navy keen to identify staging ports in the Pacific to support the extension of its global reach. Public surveys indicate that its increasingly aggressive approach in relation to regional security issues such as Taiwan and the South China Sea, and in response to bilateral disputes with Canberra and others, has contributed substantially to an erosion of Australian trust in China in recent years.53 Other surveys indicated that the racism which characterised early reactions to Chinese in Australia continues to linger in our society.54

Japan, by contrast, has come to be seen by Australians as a strong alliance partner, sharing their democratic standards and respect for the rule of law. Bilateral defence collaboration between the two countries is proceeding apace, as is plurilateral cooperation through the Quad alliance with India and the United States. Japan has also come to be recognised as a mature and substantial contributor to development in the Pacific.

Third, Australia's own relationships with the countries of the Pacific evolved very substantially over the century. Australia administered Papua New Guinea and Nauru directly for decades. While criticisms can certainly be made about the quality of the colonial experience there, Australia ultimately respected their drive to independence and joined the rest of the international community in respecting self-determination for other countries of the region. Australia has not always escaped criticism for its subsequent policies towards the region — climate change and labour market access continue to be sore points today. But over time, successive governments in Canberra have worked, in bipartisan spirit, to support PIC national development aspirations through the investment of billions of aid dollars. They have also helped run elections, repeatedly delivered disaster relief, and mounted stabilisation missions in regional hot spots.55

It should also be acknowledged that there has been substantial development in Australian diplomatic capabilities and expertise in relation to the Pacific, and this has been matched over time by improved attitudes and messaging from our politicians. There appears to have been a further step forward in very recent times in this sense, with Australia's current leaders appearing more mindful than their immediate predecessors that they are dealing with a region whose inhabitants have their own views, and their own agency. They have been more careful to project a respectful approach to regional partnerships, consistently emphasising that they want to “listen” to partners' concerns.56 With its somewhat more forward-leaning domestic approach to climate change, the Labor government has also been better positioned to signal that it takes seriously the PICs' concerns about global warming, although there remains some scepticism about Australia's resolve to abandon fossil fuels.57

However, as we have seen, the echoes of our early years still ring in our contemporary public discussion about the Pacific, contributing to an often-insecure, commonly narrow, projection of public views about the region.

This really matters. The resulting sense, that Australians are more interested in excluding others from the Pacific than they are in the region itself, is regrettable because it devalues the collective efforts of generations of Australian diplomats, soldiers, aid specialists, traders and even politicians who have engaged the region in open and positive spirit. It also ignores the thousands of people who are connected through family, cultural and other historic ties with both Australia and the Pacific.

The adverse perception we encourage through our public discourse also risks undermining legitimate Australian diplomatic efforts to build constructive influence in the region and, in the process, to manage the actual detrimental effects of Chinese influence. Showing support for the PICs as they progress their own priorities and aspirations does not require ignoring the risks which, many Pacific leaders agree, come with the expansion of Chinese activity. In some countries of the region, civil society representatives are concerned that Beijing's aggressive public information activities threaten to undermine media freedoms,58 and point to a lack of transparency in the links between Beijing and some leaders in the region.59 Others worry that Chinese training activities for military and police forces in the region will undermine their commitment to respecting freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate.60 Chinese engagement with each of the region's standing military forces — in Fiji, PNG, Tonga, and Vanuatu — has undoubtedly increased, and there is little reason to believe that the assertive maritime strategies that have underpinned China's actions elsewhere are not also guiding Beijing's approach in the Pacific.

The current government's predecessors, stretching back to the early colonial administrators, were not necessarily always wrong in pointing to the potential security threats arising from the activities of non-aligned or hostile powers in the Pacific. Australia's very real war with Japan in the mid-twentieth century, and China's recent aggressive behaviour in the region, should alone encourage us to remain wary about these kinds of risks. But some of our other, earlier fears probably say more about us than they do about the region. In any case, the real failing, then and now, has been to project only these concerns in the way we talk to, and about the Pacific. Even if the aim were only to build our own influence in the region, it is important to recognise the people who live there and to respect their perspective, which prioritises human development and the risks associated with climate change above strategic rivalries among the great and middle powers. It turns out that the Pacific is not a vacant expanse after all.