 Thank you, Michael. It's great to have you here and to hear you reflect on Ramsey, which I have served in, and also to think about the future, and it's the future and its implications that I think are really interesting. For those that are unfamiliar with Michael and I, just a little background, I met Michael when he was at the Office of National Assessments as I came in. He was pretty well walking out. I didn't take it personally, but Michael was working on transnational issues, and predictably I was working on Pacific Island issues. I went off to Ramsey, Michael went off to the ANU, I went back to the ANU, Michael was doing Asia Pacific. I was doing Pacific Islands again. You went off to Melbourne and did International, and I came to Lowy and did Pacific Islands. I'm thrilled that Michael's decided to just spend the last five years of his life researching a book on Solomon Islands and realized that the center of the Indo-Pacific is actually the Pacific Islands. But I think it's interesting, Michael, just to unpack a little bit, how someone who is involved in international relations, India, Southeast Asia, and a little bit, to be fair, on the Pacific Islands. What is it that made you think that this is something you wanted to do, that it was important? We forget a lot of things in history, so Solomon's isn't unique that way. So what drove you to want to write this book and invest that time? So thanks, Meg, and I was reflecting on our long history as well. Look, most of my career I've been fascinated in Australia-Asia relations and have done a lot of thinking about it. But there was always this element in the back of my mind about Australia and the Pacific, because what really does intrigue me about Australia and the Pacific is that the Pacific is the only part of the world in which Australia is a great power. And in fact, there's an old joke that Australia is too powerful for the Pacific and not powerful enough for Asia. And I think that's been the central tension at the heart of Australian foreign policy for a long time. And I think when I first visited Solomon Islands in 2015, I sort of was fascinated by the country, but I thought that the case study of Ramsey was a classic, you know, a classic kind of microcosm of Australia as a great power, trying to achieve something in the Pacific. But facing all of the problems of great powers whenever they try and exercise power. And what really fascinated me and kept me going on the book was, if you like, the micro-politics of power that played out on the ground in Solomon Islands, particularly that difficult period in 2006-2007 when we faced the government of Manasa Salgavare who decided that his way to success was going to be to play the post-colonial card against Australia and basically boot Australia out of Ramsey and out of the Pacific and out of Solomon Islands. And just watching the micro-politics of how that power plays out was utterly fascinating to me as a political scientist. Well, kind of the micro, but I think today as we have announcements of AUKUS and nuclear submarines and our alliance in the region, that middle power, great power, however you want to define Australia comes into play. And I think you said in your book, interventions and alliances can never escape politics. And we are facing politics as we move forward with AUKUS. You have a region that is very wary of anything to do with nuclear, anything. It doesn't want to be militarized. We have AUKUS that we're trying to in a sense push into the Pacific and convince them this is something they want to be part of. Are there lessons from Ramsey and the way we did our interventions then and the way it transformed perhaps over time that might inform us as I think the Prime Minister is about to go to Fiji to talk to the Pacific Island Forum, talk about AUKUS, talk about our role in this region? Well, I guess the thing that became very apparent to me in Solomon Islands and probably a lot of the rest of the Pacific is that politics is very personalized and very de-institutionalized. If you go to a country like Australia or Indonesia or Singapore or whatever, politics is mediated through powerful bureaucratic institutions. And as you know well, bureaucratic institutions in the Pacific are very weak if not non-existent. And so politics is played by personalities and quite often big personalities and it's always personal and it's always for keeps. And so one of the ways that I think Sogavare himself is watching Australia and watching China is how does he use these to external forces to manipulate the very personal politics of Solomon Islands in his favor? How does he keep Australia close but far enough away and at his beck and call? The best way of doing that is to cultivate a very intimate relationship with China. And if we go with that geopolitical It's intense right now in the region and I think what sent a shockwave through the allies was when Solomon Islands last year which Michael mentioned and I think you mentioned in your remarks came up with a security pact with China that would include police capacity building and indeed embed some Chinese trainers within the force itself. And that was after Ramsey, after more than a decade of police capacity building and close interaction with Australia and New Zealand in the rest of the region. So I'm interested how you see that. Was it a failure of Ramsey? We didn't create a strong enough police force. Has it something to do with the nature of policing in the Pacific or perhaps something else because you mentioned Sogavare said that it was a way to stand up to Australia but Sogavare has also said it was filling a gap in the Pacific and he needed to diversify. So how do you see that piece of history given all your study of Ramsey and all that went into police capacity building? Well I mean you could actually bring it back to the politics of Ramsey. Sogavare was always an advocate of a powerful armed police force. He was first prime minister in 2000 after the coup where he significantly ramped up the arming of the police force. Quite often criminal elements from particularly the militant forces went into the police force. He created Starter Vision which had high powered rifles and became part of the criminality that was in Solomon Islands at the time. He became prime minister again in 2006-2007 and once again he wanted to arm Solomon Islands police and Ramsey headed by Australia said no. They were listening to the people of Solomon Islands. The people of Solomon Islands who had been traumatised by armed police, armed criminal police, they said we don't want our police armed and so Ramsey said no to Sogavare and Sogavare actually tried to stitch up a deal with Taiwan at the time to provide armed training to Solomon Islands police. So he felt frustrated by Ramsey and Ramsey dragging its heels on arming Solomon Islands police. So with the benefit of hindsight, this is Sogavare scratching a historical itch but it's the best way to get under Australian skins as well. I mean this is Australia's worst nightmare. He knows that very well and he's manipulating that all the way to the bank. That's true and that is a part of Prime Minister Sogavare but to be fair also there was continually this view about and still is in the Pacific wanting to be heard, wanting to have genuine partnerships and that was a bit of a problem and you raise it in your book early on with the Ramsey intervention. They came in, Australia was clearly in control, they always took the position of the special coordinator that was coordinating it and initially it was sort of Australia having a take it or leave it approach. This is the way we're going to proceed and it is a whole package. You can't cherry pick and say you want the policing but not the governance or the policing but not economic development or whatever. So you had that to begin with. I think it's fair that it got more adaptable, had a better partnership near the end but where do we come into this role of the tensions and this whole problem which you raise about colonialism and not wanting to be a colonial partner but on the other hand paying I think 80% or more and wanting to shape the future of this. Yeah it became a very complex challenge for Australia to negotiate. The fact that once Howard and Downer had made the mental leap of yes we are going to intervene, yes we are going to do a state building intervention, it then became it's our way or the highway and there were repeated attempts by everyone from Kamikaze or Onwards to say why don't you help us with land reform. Can you do a little bit more on rural development and there was very much a fear in Canberra of the mission getting dragged into areas that they didn't want to go into. There was a very clear kind of understanding that Ramsay had to steer clear of politics that it would fall apart if it got caught up in the politics of Solomon Island. So there was this very kind of rigid mindset that no no we came in to do these jobs and we're going to do those jobs and no more and we'll leave once those jobs are done and that became a very complex undertaking for Ramsay to try and negotiate its way through. I'd like to get some more insights that you gain because the unique thing about this book is you got access to government cables, correspondence, meeting notes, things that none of us right now have access to to write this and it must have given you an insight into the way Australians were thinking about it which may not have been in the public domain. The real drivers of why we went in and why we stayed for so long it may not have had a deadline but the idea was never it was going to be more than a decade. So I'm interested as you plow through those cables and all that work what are the new insights you got what were the the understandings of why Australia did what it did why it resisted sometimes why it felt it had to give. So I should reassure the audience that I got access to all of those materials with permission of the microphone. I don't have microfilm kind of stashed away. No I was very grateful Peter Varghese as secretary of DFAT gave me access to the DFAT files and cables which I was able to go through. Look it's very hard to keep that the answer to that question short. I think one of the interesting tensions that came out of the the documents and cables, ministerial letters and all of the interviews that I did was this sort of tension between Australia wanting to construct an Australia-like state in Solomon Islands. This kind of maximalist kind of thing that that we haven't done our job properly unless the Solomon Islands Ministry of Finance looks like a mini version of the Australian Treasury with all of the same systems and all of the same processes going on versus the what you would call the pragmatists who were saying we're never going to construct an Australia-like state. It's always going to be some version of the Australian state and then there was that tension of saying how much of do it going partway along the road to constructing the Australian state is enough to say that we've actually achieved something here and what was really interesting post 2013 as Ramsey was contemplating drawing down was that the number of times that I would go to Solomon Islands and talk to Ramsey officials and quite a few people were using the example of scaffolding that Ramsey was like a scaffolding around a crumbling building and so it had constructed the scaffolding and it had allowed some reconstruction to go ahead but no one really knew when they started taking the scaffolding off whether the building would start to crumble again and that was the art of trying to work out when Ramsey it when it was appropriate for Ramsey to to to kind of withdraw and I think the the real kind of sharp intake of breath occurred about a year after a year and a bit after Ramsey had withdrawn when riots broke out in Honiara again and Australian troops had to go back in and I think there were a number of people in Canberra who thought we took the scaffolding off too quickly and I think that's an ongoing question in in a lot of minds did we do enough and quite interestingly when you talk to Solomon Islanders they also wonder whether Ramsey pulled out too quickly and whether Solomon Islands made enough of Ramsey's presence over those 14 years. And how long do you stay is always the question before you have to go. I think this whole thing of Ramsey going in it was a whole of region effort as you talked about and I think absolutely it built regional solidarity and now we leverage that up we talk about a family first approach to security in the region meaning that we look to the Pacific Island Forum members first obviously that's not China but that's also not United States it's not Japan either in terms of the Pacific Island Forum. So this is actually quite an interesting concept I wanted to talk to you about this this family first is this the right approach it has the advantage of the interoperability leveraging off of what we did achieve with Ramsey but is it as you talked about in your remarks but also in the book is it just this security motif coming around again of strategic denial or a South Pacific Monroe Doctrine doctrine you refer to. So I'm just interested in your reflections as we really push hard on this family first narrative. So the reality that's occurred is that the Pacific itself has changed for a long time Australia was able to assume a leadership role in the region and really foist its own agendas onto the Pacific region. So you know after the Hawk Keating reforms we tried to push a kind of neoliberal agenda onto the region then 9-11 occurred and we tried to push a kind of transnational security agenda onto the region and then climate change became an issue and we didn't want to go down that track so quickly and we tried to drag them towards our climate change agenda. Over time the Pacific got wise to this and it realized that that particularly around the climate change agenda the Pacific has a global stage to act on and somewhere in the midst of Ramsey the Pacific said to Australia we are no longer going to dance to your tune. Climate change is our tune and we're sort of in a situation now where we're trying to kind of convince the Pacific that there is a kind of geopolitics play going on and the Pacific is having none of it. The Pacific in fact is saying bring it on bring the geopolitical competition on. Never have so many countries been so interested in the Pacific. Never have we been given so much access to markets to technology to investment bring it on. We'd like the geopolitical competition. This is a completely new and completely complex game for Australia and we've got to up our game here. Bring it on but they're asking for more control over the security agenda. So we are now doing bilateral security agreements Benawatu, Kiribati and we're currently negotiating one with Papua New Guinea which is going to be a security treaty so one up and so it is about those countries starting to say what's on the agenda when we talk about security as well as being part of the Pacific family. But I thought it was interesting when Prime Minister Marapa of Papua New Guinea talked to Albanese our Prime Minister and said you know what we want a security treaty but we want it broader and if there's one thing that we need to be secure it's economic sovereignty so he's just dragged in trade and investment to unusually a security treaty. And it goes back to Ramsey where we went in and said there's three pillars. There's an economic pillar, a law and order pillar and a governance pillar and we have to balance these out. We had a lot of trouble in Ramsey keeping that balance working and I think we're going to have a bit of trouble with a security treaty that starts to leech into investment, economics, climate change and more traditional security reflective of the boy declaration but nonetheless if you're you're going to try and do this it's quite complex. So you know when you look at Ramsey and that balancing act the three pillars and now you look at the way security is being discussed regionally the boy declaration on regional security it's many different forms of security and the bilateral security agreements that are a little beyond what normally one thinks of. Where do you see this is going to go? I mean it's I mean I think people like James Marape are watching the Solomon Islands very closely of course they do and I would think in his quieter moments he would think it's a master stroke on behalf of Sogavare because it's given him leverage. If I was negotiating the Australian security agreement with Papua New Guinea I would be very worried. What does it mean in relation to Bougainville? What happens if conflict breaks out in Bougainville? What does the security treaty commit Australia to doing in that situation? And of course as you know the long history of the Australian relationship with post-independence Papua New Guinea do we provide them with budget support? Do we provide them with project aid and what are the conditions of that? I think it sounds like Australia is signing a very big open check to Papua New Guinea and it's absolutely in Papua New Guinea's interest to keep this going. Yep doing a good job at the moment. So Michael before we go to questions I wanted you've written a really thorough history of Ramsey with sources that we all hope to get access to one day but maybe not just for a little while yet. There's an old saying and it kept just reiterating in your book that if we don't know our history you're doomed to repeat it. So I just thought in wrapping up you know your reflections on have we learned the lessons the lessons that there are on Ramsey and in future engagements, alliances, interventions would we do something different? So I thought a lot about this and I really can't see and I'd be happy if people would put me right on this. I can't see a reflective process that's occurred within DFAT about what happened in Ramsey. What did we learn? You know it was partly the reason I wanted to do such a thorough job in the book because you know the the the files themselves are not in a terribly good condition. I don't think they're particularly complete. I don't see the process of a thorough kind of post withdrawal review that's happened and the lessons learned. I think the absorption of AusAID by DFAT back in 2014 is a huge mistake. It's lost us an enormous amount of expertise on the Pacific but also on development and I don't see DFAT as having inherited that expertise. So no I don't think we've we've learned the lessons of Ramsey and I would encourage DFAT and other institutions of government to start a process of self-reflection of what's actually happened and to listen to Solomon Islanders. Some of the best interviews I did for the book were Solomon Islanders who had had some really profound reflections on the politics of Ramsey and what had worked and what hadn't. Well I think it's time to do collective reflection with the audience and open it up for the questions that are burning in your mind on this topic of Ramsey. What have we learned and also where are we going. So I'm happy to throw it open to people in the audience for any questions. If you would just identify yourself and your affiliation I think that would be helpful for Michael when he's doing his responses. So do we have any questions right here and then we'll go this way. Yes please. Congratulations. When I visited Ramsey in 2006 one of the civilian experts there I think it was Sue Ingram who's now at the ANU said the problem with trying to rebuild a state is that you're starting you don't have a nation yet to build it on and I just wonder if the Solomon Islands is any more a nation now than it was then with people up north in Sokobari's own province looking at Bougainville and maybe feeling more familiar with them and the people on Malaito that depose Premier running his own foreign policy with Taiwan and talking of a referendum on separation. So that that's a great point that Sue makes. I would go further and I would say that there was no nation in Solomon Islands and there was no state. So the British very much like Australia and Papua New Guinea ruled Solomon Islands between 1893 and 1978 on a very minimalist they didn't want to invest anything and they didn't invest anything and the people of Solomon Islands were basically taxed by the British colonial authorities that provided a minimum amount of you know public order and that was about it very little public health almost no education and then when it was obvious that decolonization was happening in the Pacific they adopted a measure of self-government but it was a pretty poor amount and so basically Solomon Islands was gifted a Westminster system with no history or heritage of understanding how that system quite a complex and I would say socially embedded system worked so the politics were dysfunctional from the start and there was little help in building the institutions of government there was no there was never any provision of public law and order particularly in rural Solomon Islands where most Solomon Islanders live across thousands of islands and so there was no state and the state that did exist was hollowed out and gutted by a series of venal prime ministers and you know the kind of economic interests that came in to exploit Solomon Islands forests as well. Claims for separatism were there at the time of the founding of Solomon Islands so I think it was three of the provinces never even attended Independence Day celebrations and never acknowledged the creation of Solomon Islands so this was never a polity to start with and I think it's one of the challenges we face in the Pacific that the state is an alien form that has been grafted on to these societies and hasn't particularly taken root very well and as I talk about in the book the state is another form of resource extraction that is used by provincial politicians to claim resources and to build their power bases back within their electorates and that was a process that was accelerated during Ramsey so it's a difficult situation. Sogavari himself is a proud nationalist he would love to create a Solomon Islands nation and talks a lot about the nation of Solomon Islands he really believes it. The problem is that the people of Solomon Islands are increasingly divorced from the political class you know the contempt that you hear from ordinary Solomon Islanders for their elected politicians who they see as venal as corrupt and the China factor actually increases the distance between the elected politicians and the people of Solomon Islands. People of Solomon Islands tend to be highly suspicious of China they are opposed to the large relatively large Chinese migration to Solomon Islands that they see as having sort of stitched up the small scale economy there at the expense of ordinary Solomon Islanders and they are also very attentive to China's kind of crackdowns on the Christian church in China itself so this is a complex politics and it's it I think it militates against the creation of a of a viable nation and a viable polity there. We go next to Mihai. Hi Michael my name is Mihai work with Meg in the Pacific Islands program here at Lowy you would have seen Canberra under a lot of pressure over the last year or so with respect to Solomon Islands. Prime Minister Sugavari achieved what arguably previous prime ministers before him have wanted as well which is to put Australia off balance to deliver an asymmetric kind of diplomacy. How can Australia regain its balance in its relationship with Solomon Islands? So it's something I've thought a lot about it's a very very complex game. What I would urge the Australian government to do would be not to compete directly with China. I think there's been too much the Chinese are doing X so we'll do Y to kind of directly counter that. I think Australia needs to be a little bit more confident about its position in Solomon Islands and Pacific more generally. One of the legacies of Ramsey as I said was the building of a an extraordinary relationship of trust and warmth with the people of Solomon Islands and we should we shouldn't be competing to build you know stadiums and roads and things like that. We should be investing heavily in law and order law and order services health and education which is what the people of Solomon Islands really want and what the government of Solomon Islands is not delivering for its own people. That is the big vulnerability that Sugavari and the political class have is the fact that they are not popular with the people of Solomon Islands and it's the vulnerability that was there all the way through the Ramsey operation and it's the vulnerability that still exists. So we need to be clever we need to work with his government obviously as well but we need to realise that we've got an enormous asset in the people of Solomon Islands also but this is this is going to be a long game China is here to stay. So we'll go right to the back and then I'll come forward. Hi Michael my name is Mary I work actually in the private sector with a satellite company but focused on the APAC region and I actually would be interested to know what just with the changing geopolitics in the region we saw Telstra acquire Digicel to combat I guess China's acquisition. So I guess what are your thoughts on the role of the private sector in partnering with government to tackle some of these challenges you mentioned addressing I guess tech and health and education. I think there's a lot of I guess a broader skill base available in the private sector and I guess how would you see that or is that something that could happen with DFAT or Defence or whichever relevant area. Yeah look I think there is a significant role to be played by the private sector. One of the things that Ramsey didn't do was to broaden the Solomon Islands economy away from let's face it basic resource extraction. So there are basically three commodities that Solomon Islands economy is based on logging is one very unsustainable minerals is another and fishing is the third. Ramsey went in with great hopes that are liberalizing that liberalizing the economy selling off public sector assets would bring a much broader economy broader economic base and it really didn't happen when Ramsey left. The base was about as as narrow as it always was. I still think that Australian and other kind of international investors have got a role to play in helping broaden the economy and that would have a major effect on the society of Solomon Islands as well. I mean Solomon Islands has a very young population and a very, very high youth unemployment rate. It's one of the factors that makes the place so volatile. So I do think that there's a major role for the private sector to play particularly around the tech sectors in the Pacific. I think we had a question just in the middle over here. Thank you very much. You mentioned health education law and order just a moment ago and you added climate before that they would all fall into the definition of human security I might suggest. Is one of the failures of Australia's response a lack of appreciation or commitment to human security as opposed to traditional security? Does that help explain the forgetting and might it also explain some of the difficulties we are having in the region at the moment? Yeah well I think it's unarguable that Australia's recent motivations in the Pacific have been very much attuned to traditional security reasons. We're there in such a big way because we want to counter China and let's face it so is New Zealand, so is the United States, so is Japan, so is the UK and others. I think we could benefit from some refocusing. Again I go back to the need for us to rethink not having an independent aid agency, development assistance agency, to recreating that expertise in the Australian government which I think has been fundamentally lost. I think a rebalancing in the way that Australia approaches the Pacific rediscovering some of those older human security impulses that we had through the 1990s in the Pacific would be very much to Australia's benefit both on the human security and the traditional security sides. I think we have time for one last question maybe at the back there. I've got Matt Brown on the news standards editor at the ABC. You mentioned that Howard and Downer decided on the intervention against departmental advice, so where were they getting advice from to do it? Where did that come from? Look again I think it was very much their reading of the politics of the moment and I would really put it down to their sense of Australia as a major strategic actor. Remember this was the period of the deputy sheriff. It was the great state building moment. It was the belief particularly that neo-conservative belief that the George W. Bush administration had that the West was all-powerful, that democracy and capitalism were the natural order of things and that with a little bit of a push and shove developing states could be shown the way towards stability and order and the Western way of the world. I was just saying to Michael and others and Meg and others before we came down that Howard actually made the decision to go against departmental advice in May of 2003 that weekend when he and Jeanette were invited to Crawford Ranch of George W. Bush as the reward for having participated in the invasion of Iraq and it was on the plane flight back that Howard read the memorandum from PM&C that said we don't recommend an intervention, we recommend more of the same arms length aid and advice. Howard sort of resolved to call Downer as soon as the plane landed which he did during that phone call that Howard and Downer decided that Australia would lead an intervention into Solomon Islands. It was one of the most remarkable areas of a Prime Minister and a Foreign Minister deciding that the moment was right to go against what had basically been 20 years of Australian foreign policy orthodoxy and do something completely different. That's great and I think we've come full circle to interventions and alliances never can avoid the politics of the situation and the personalities. So I'd like to thank Michael on behalf of Lowy, Michael fully loving myself for coming, launching your book here for a very stimulating conversation. I believe the book is being sold outside somewhere but thank you, thank you for urging us to keep reflecting, analysing and thinking about the future and what it means. So on behalf of all of us, thank you very much.