Australia is now pursuing a security pact with Fiji after Chinese pressure helped unwind a similar agreement Canberra had negotiated with Vanuatu. The Vanuatu deal had been the centrepiece of the Albanese government’s Pacific strategy: a comprehensive defence and policing arrangement that would have given Australian forces preferential access and would have, at least in theory, foreclosed the kind of security agreement Beijing signed with the Solomon Islands in 2022. Beijing’s response — diplomatic, economic, infrastructural — appears to have worked. Fiji, with a larger economy and a more confident foreign-policy class, is now Plan B. The episode is being reported in Australia as a setback. It is more accurately a clarification: the Pacific is no longer the strategic backwater Australian governments treated it as for thirty years, and the price of that long inattention is being charged at compound interest.
The received wisdom
The mainstream framing in Australian and allied capitals is that Canberra is doing roughly the right things, just not fast enough. Foreign Minister Penny Wong has logged more hours in Pacific capitals than any of her predecessors; aid budgets have been redirected; the step-up of recent years has produced real results, including the Tuvalu treaty and improved policing cooperation across Melanesia. The Vanuatu reversal, on this account, is a regrettable episode of Chinese interference — possibly involving inducements to senior Vanuatu officials — that ought to be answered by faster, larger, and more visible Australian engagement. Add a development bank, deepen the labour mobility scheme, swallow the inflationary effect on Australian wages, and the Pacific will, in time, settle back into a friendly orbit. Domestic critics from the climate movement add that nothing the Australian state offers will outweigh the islands’ fundamental vulnerability to climate change, and that real partnership requires Canberra to commit to climate targets that match Pacific demands.
A different read
This narrative is less wrong than incomplete, and it tends to flatter the policy class that has been managing Pacific affairs in Canberra for the last decade. The actual situation is closer to this: Australia is a regional power that, for thirty years after the end of the Cold War, treated the Pacific as a problem of aid administration rather than a problem of strategy. Aid was front-loaded into governance reform and climate programmes; defence presence was minimised on the assumption that nobody else wanted the islands; and political relationships were managed by foreign ministry staff who rotated every three years and did not always speak the relevant languages or understand the relevant kinship politics. China, by contrast, treated the Pacific as a long-game strategic opportunity from at least 2013 onward, deploying patient infrastructure investment, ministerial visits at frequencies the West would consider excessive, and the kind of personal loyalty-building that small-island politics rewards.
The historical parallel that ought to concentrate Canberra’s mind is British Singapore in the 1930s. London built the great naval base at Sembawang, declared it the linchpin of imperial security east of Suez, and then quietly disinvested from the supporting infrastructure required to make the base usable in a contested environment. The Royal Navy’s “Force Z” in 1941 had no air cover, inadequate maintenance, and no plausible plan for resupply under contested conditions; the strategic posture was a Potemkin posture. The cost was paid in February 1942 with the largest surrender in British military history. The lesson is not that Australia is heading for a Singapore-scale catastrophe; it is that strategic investments require continuous tending, and that the gap between announced doctrine and actual capacity becomes lethally visible only at moments of test. Vanuatu was a small test, and the announced doctrine — that Australia is the partner of choice in Melanesia — has been quietly invalidated.
A right-of-centre reading also has to be honest about what the alternative looks like. Treating the Pacific as a serious strategic theatre means accepting things the Australian centre-left has been reluctant to accept. It means a defence budget meaningfully above two per cent of GDP and a willingness to forward-deploy assets that current policy treats as politically combustible. It means accepting that regional partners will sometimes choose Beijing for transactional reasons that climate diplomacy cannot offset, and being willing to live with that without offering subsidies that make the islands functionally Australian dependencies. It means, above all, abandoning the comforting fiction that “step-up” rhetoric and goodwill aid were ever a substitute for the unglamorous business of military presence, intelligence work, and patient elite-relationship management.
The Fiji pivot is the right next move. Suva has the economic weight and the diplomatic confidence to sign a deal Beijing cannot easily unwind, and a successful Fiji agreement would re-establish the principle that Australia is the regional security guarantor of last resort. But Canberra should be clear-eyed: the Vanuatu loss is not merely a diplomatic setback to be repaired. It is data — about how much capital China is now willing to deploy, about which Pacific elites are receptive to Chinese terms, and about how thin Australia’s three-decade default position has worn. The Howard government understood, after the 2003 Solomon Islands intervention, that strategic primacy in the South Pacific is bought daily and lost in inches. That instinct has atrophied. It needs rebuilding before the next Vanuatu happens somewhere it matters more.
What to watch
Three things will tell us whether Canberra has actually learned the lesson. First, watch the timeline on the Fiji pact: anything beyond six months suggests Suva is letting Australian negotiators sweat for better terms, and that Beijing is being given time to apply counter-pressure. Second, watch defence procurement — a quiet acceleration of maritime patrol and Pacific basing investments would suggest the strategic posture is being rebuilt, while any further delay to the AUKUS submarine timeline would suggest it is not. Third, watch what happens in Papua New Guinea, the regional country whose allegiance matters most and whose internal politics are the most volatile; a single major Chinese infrastructure win there would change the regional balance in a way Fiji cannot offset.
— J