by Steve Sharp
Not long after the new Australian Government launched its shuttle diplomacy with PIF member nations, a contest emerged about how it should see its regional obligations in a fast-changing strategic environment after the Pacific Step-up policy rollout, the acrimony in Tuvalu three years ago over climate policy, and the Solomon Islands signing of a security deal with China just before the change of government.
One body giving advice to the new government is the Climate Council, an Australian non-government organisation, which has tried to set the tone and boundaries for acceptable debate on climate change and what it means for regional security: ‘[W]hile Australia worries about China, most Pacific nations are more worried about climate change on their doorstep.’
The link between climate change and security is entirely valid. More and more, climate issues will be seen through the lens of climate security. At an official level, this is because forum members, Australia included, collectively acknowledge non-traditional security threats such as climate-related insecurity and transnational crime. Like national defence capability, these non-traditional factors are deeply entangled with geopolitical competition.
So, it makes no sense to pit an ecological process (climate change) against a geopolitical player (China). It is not a zero-sum game. Climate activists have shaped their campaigns in ways that hide these entanglements in order to hammer the point that climate change is ‘the greatest single threat’. Or ‘my security threat is bigger than yours’.
This simplistic but effective messaging makes it more difficult to talk sensibly about the complexity of threats and how they interact with one another. It also has the potential to misrepresent Pacific opinion and insult the intelligence of Pacific Islanders who, like anyone else, are capable of holding more than one idea in their heads at the same time.
Nations don’t always think with one mind. Might it be possible for those who populate ‘most Pacific nations’ to worry about climate change and China at the same time? Or for Australians to worry about both China and climate change? To frame Pacific anxiety as more preoccupied with climate change ‘on their doorstep’ is to wrongly portray geostrategic threats as somehow distant and not yet landed on Pacific shores.
At the 2019 PIF meeting in Tuvalu, the Fiji PM did imply a link between Australia’s position on climate policy and island states wanting closer ties with Beijing. This has been picked up by some Australian media and re-cast as meaning that Australian climate policies are pushing Pacific Island states into the arms of China. So, how does a Bainimarama sound bite reappear as a foreign policy insight? It is kept afloat by the common cause of Fiji-led climate activism targeting Australia and Australian climate lobbyists like the Climate Council.
Australian energy policies can be accused of many things but not pushing the Pacific Islands to embrace the PRC. Is a false narrative that refuses to die.
Firstly, why would Australia’s ‘climate inaction’ push Pacific states into a diplomatic embrace with the world’s largest emitter of CO2? Australia’s emission targets and the PRC’s diplomatic successes in the Pacific are unrelated. But the fallacy continues to be rolled out by politicians and academics alike, often unchallenged.
It is also historically ignorant. In the case of Fiji, the closer ties with China have been incremental as exemplified by the ‘Look North’ policy which predates Bainimarama and his climate activism by at least 12 years.
It matters because it misrepresents the regional dynamics that forum member countries are now grappling with in their efforts to strengthen their political community which is revealing faultlines that have the potential to widen.