When Papua New Guinea became independent on 16 September 1975, Australia departed with high hopes and quiet fears. After a colonial/protectorate/trusteeship role of nearly seventy years, Australia left questioning how well it had done and what might go wrong. Would chaos follow calm separation?
Worst fears were realised. Mayhem arrived only weeks after the Australian flag was lowered in Port Moresby.
The eruption, though, was in Canberra. On 11 November, PNG’s new prime minister, Michael Somare, sat in Port Moresby listening to radio accounts of “Kerr’s coup” — the governor-general’s dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government. Marvelling at the most extraordinary day ever in Australian politics, Somare jested to aides: “We’ve only just cut them free and already they’ve stuffed it up!”
The “stuff-up” potential always lurks between Australia and PNG. These two vastly different societies have deep links of history and geography, yet the long intimacy is defined by contrasts. Related, yes, but never a marriage of minds. The distinction between Australia’s influence and its power in PNG is more than diplomatic nicety.
Port Moresby can deal with Canberra using the same tribal war techniques of the PNG Highlands. That observation was given to me by the Australian diplomat David Irvine when he was serving as ambassador in Port Moresby, 1996–99: “They stand on the other side of the valley and scream abuse for several hours to soften you up before coming down to start the real battle or negotiations.” Two robust nations play their politics as hard as their football. That’s why the cautious dance towards a full Australian defence alliance with PNG took five decades.
The alliance moment was supposed to happen in Port Moresby last month during the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Prime minister Anthony Albanese was there to sign the Pukpuk treaty with PNG, Australia’s first formal alliance since the creation of ANZUS with the United States in 1951. Instead, it became another stuff-up moment. PNG’s cabinet failed to reach a quorum; no signature was possible. It wasn’t so much robust politics as lots of PNG politicians out and about across the country for the fiftieth birthday.
Now prime minister James Marape has got his cabinet together and gained approval for the treaty to elevate the “foundational” relationship to “its highest level in history.” He is due in Australia at the weekend for the rugby grand final, so the treaty can go from missed goal in Port Moresby to converted try in Sydney. (This allows me to run one of my old jokes: only two states in the world are strange enough to make rugby league their state religion: PNG because league is slightly less brutal than tribal warfare, and Queensland just because it’s Queensland.)
As Marape and Albanese said in their communiqué in Port Moresby after the signature stuff-up: “The signing of the Papua New Guinea–Australia Mutual Defence Treaty — the Pukpuk Treaty — will elevate the defence relationship between Papua New Guinea and Australia to an Alliance.”
With PNG so vital to Australia’s strategic understanding, it’s surprising, perhaps, that it was up to Port Moresby to suggest the treaty. As the communique noted: “Papua New Guinea proposed this Alliance in its 50th year of independence. Australia was honoured to agree.”
Its core principles will include:
- A mutual defence alliance which recognises that “an armed attack on Australia or Papua New Guinea would be a danger to the peace and security of both countries.”
- A recruitment pathway for Papua New Guinea citizens into the Australian Defence Force. Marape says as many as 10,000 Papua New Guineans could serve with the ADF under “dual arrangements.”
- Efforts to ensure that “any activities, agreements or arrangements with third parties would not compromise the ability of either of the Parties to implement the Treaty.”
The “third party” element in the alliance is the China veto clause. Canberra has replicated recent security agreements with Nauru and Tuvalu that give Australia veto rights over security partnerships with other countries. (Read: China!) The response to claims of paternalism or colonialism is that Australia holds up island states by holding them close.
Next, Canberra wants to get the China veto into a security deal with Vanuatu. Port Vila won’t give the mutual-alliance assurances promised by PNG, but if it signs it will get many alliance-level benefits from Australia.
In what foreign minister Penny Wong calls the “permanent contest” with China in the Pacific, Australia has the huge advantage of being in and of the region. China reminds Australia of what we should be doing anyway. When Australia speaks of being the region’s partner of choice — economically, politically and strategically — it defines a lesser role for China.
The China contest changes the way Canberra thinks about its trilateral dynamic with PNG and Indonesia. In the cautious fifty-year defence dance with PNG, Australia hedged its military pledge for decades because of our fear of “moral hazard” — that giving PNG a guarantee would embolden it to wage a border war with Indonesia. Australia feared having to fight Indonesia because of PNG’s actions.
With the focus now on China, there’s no such fear.
It’s hard to believe these days, but Australia used to be shy about giving a defence or security guarantee to PNG. In the 1970s and 1980s, a gap opened between our secret defence guidance about Australia’s resolve to fight for the island arc to the north and what Canberra actually said to the new nations of the South Pacific. Well into the 1990s, Canberra promised to do its bit so South Pacific states could “look after their own strategic interests.” In a crisis, the focus of Australia’s military would be “evacuation of Australian citizens.”
No longer the colonial master, Australia was discovering how to deal with an independent neighbour, just as it had to build understandings with other newly independent island states. Slowly, the secretive habits of Australia’s defence department shifted: some core interests are so important they need to be publicly stated.
To see how this once operated, come to a meeting in 1985 between Indonesia’s defence minister, General Benny Murdani, and his Australian counterpart, Kim Beazley. Murdani asked the extent of Australia’s military commitment to PNG. Beazley replied: “First, you need to understand that we would fight for PNG to the last Australian soldier. We have done it before. Second, we would never be as emphatic in our expression of that to the PNG government in case they decided to test it.”
Beazley was making clear to Murdani that Australia would go to war to defend PNG’s border against Indonesian incursion. That danger was real because the rebel Free Papua Movement was using bases in PNG to operate in Irian Jaya.
Angered at Port Moresby’s “connivance,” Jakarta made military plans to cross the PNG border in force to destroy rebel camps. The secret version of Canberra’s 1986 Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities feared Indonesian troops would stay in PNG permanently to “occupy the border region to some depth.”
Beazley later said the Indonesia border issue was one reason Australia needed to formalise the PNG defence relationship within a broader 1987 agreement: “The purpose in part was to discourage Indonesia from doing anything in PNG and in part for us to get a handle on what the PNG government was doing.”
Beazley had a fight in cabinet with foreign minister Bill Hayden, who argued against any increase in the security promise beyond a statement that the two countries would consult about matters of common security. Hayden’s “moral hazard” argument was that PNG could blunder into a serious military confrontation with Indonesia and Australia would be forced to do the fighting.
Beazley gained a partial win over Hayden, getting wording that fell short of an ANZUS-style pledge but gave PNG a promise equal to what Australia offered Singapore and Malaysia under the Five Power Defence Arrangements.
The 1987 joint declaration of principles on Australia–PNG relations gave no automatic commitment to PNG. Australia could decide on diplomatic rather than military measures if PNG got into a fight with Indonesia. And the declaration specified external armed attack threatening national security, so it could not be invoked for internal conflict in what became the Bougainville war.
Australia’s 1987 promise to PNG didn’t have any ANZUS-style reservations (“acting in accordance with its constitutional principles”). Yet the guarantee had to be part of a general declaration of principles because Canberra and Port Moresby couldn’t agree on the terms of a separate defence treaty. A certain vagueness was retained.
A decade later, in 1997, the Howard government’s strategic policy described Australia’s “compelling” interests in PNG and readiness “to commit forces to resist external aggression.” For the first time, the unclassified document expanded the PNG guarantee to make it a Melanesian pledge, with the “same considerations that apply to PNG” also covering Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
Having given a PNG-level promise to Melanesia, the 1997 statement then embraced the whole of the Pacific Islands Forum, recognising that “any attack on them — or penetration by a potentially hostile power — would be serious for our security and that, as with PNG, we would very likely provide substantial support in the unlikely event that any of them faced aggression from outside the region.”
What Australia could hardly say officially to PNG in the 1980s it was now affirming to the whole of the South Pacific a decade later. Timor-Leste was soon added.
Canberra’s mindset changed. No more moral hazard. The focus in PNG became China, not Indonesia. Now the fear was that PNG and the South Pacific would take the security guarantee for granted — as a mere statement of Australian interests — and that it wouldn’t carry enough weight in their choices.
Over the past decade, the military element of the permanent contest has been the dread of China getting a naval base in PNG, Vanuatu or Solomon Islands. Australia’s first new alliance in seventy-four years is a decisive step in facing the China challenge. PNG’s pledge is to join the scrum and do its share of tackling. •
