Image source: retrieved from aspistrategist.org.au
Soon after she became foreign minister in May last year, Penny Wong went on a self-described listening tour of the Pacific.
‘I’m very happy to be here again, to listen … to the new government and to the people about your priorities,’ she said in Port Moresby. ‘Papua New Guinea’s a regional leader and … I think we want something very similar. We want a stable, resilient and prosperous Pacific. We want a region in which sovereignty is respected.’
This week’s budget, with its foreign policy boost to regional capacity building for cyber and policing, represents some practical responses to that listening. Taken together with the recent defence strategic review and the managed leak of the future capability plan for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia is moving the conversation beyond foreign aid.
Rather than providing for the Pacific, we need to be working with them: sharing expertise, learning from each other, and building regional resilience—resilience being equally important for the Pacific island countries as it is to Australia.
With that in mind, the budget contains some careful and canny targeting, with measures that achieve the dual purposes of meeting regional priorities while also, importantly, addressing Australia’s own needs—a neighbourhood which is more stable, more secure and more open.
In parallel, there is an increasing focus on ‘statecraft’, through which we marshal our full national power to strengthen our overseas relationships and contribute to regional stability.