 To help guide us on our journey, today's panel starts from relatively familiar shores. We're looking at an Australian perspective on the South Pacific. The organisers have put together a very distinguished panel. They'll each speak for 15 minutes and I'll put a little knock with about two minutes to go so they know when to wrap up. Hopefully we'll conclude with a few questions and answers by 11 o'clock. If we don't get time for all the questions you'd like to ask, all the panelists will be around for morning tea so you'll be able to save your questions for then. I'm going to introduce them now all and get out of the way so we can get on to the interesting speakers. Our first speaker is Dr. Stuart Perth, a name well known to many of you and a visiting fellow here at ANU and the State Society and Governance in Melanesia Program. He's probably also responsible for educating most Australian undergraduate students about Australian foreign policy and therefore their first introduction to the South Pacific in many cases. He'll be followed by America's Professor Paul Deeb, former head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency and Deputy Secretary in the Defence Department. Mr Graham Dopelle will follow who's a journalistic fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, formerly of the Lowe Institute and Associate Editor for the Radio Australia's Asia Pacific Program. And to conclude our session today, Dr. Quinton Hanich, who's a fish and ewe's governance program leader at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security. Can I ask you all to thank our panel and I invite Stuart to the podium. Thanks very much Andrew. I've been asked to talk about history and the Pacific context. So I'm not really addressing present policy issues at all but just looking at the past and to try and see where we came from. Now Australia, as Defence White Papers never failed to remind us, has an important strategic interest in the security, stability and cohesion of our immediate neighbourhood, much of which is the South Pacific. And that Pacific part of the neighbourhood consists of small new states, some so small as to be ongoing experiments in sovereignty. And the Australian strategic calculation is that Australia should do all it can to enhance the development and economic growth of Pacific island countries and in this way ensure they are politically stable and friendly to us. In this way, OSA, which has expanded a Pacific enormously in the last decade, is a security instrument for Australian governments. We assume then that aid will produce development and development will produce stability. Military coups in Fiji, the tensions in Solomon's, 1998 to 2003 and highly uneven development in Papua New Guinea, although I have to quickly add to that that Papua New Guinea has far and away the highest growth rate of its economy in the Pacific at the moment, have all confirmed the view that in Canberra that more aid and necessary intervention to create ordered conditions is needed to create stability. Trouble in the Pacific has had the effect of generating more aid from Australia. But when we think about the Pacific, we think aid historically. Above all, we think aid historically about the state, state building and governance. And we think, let me just point out what I mean, we have to remember how unprecedented in the history of the state is our kind of state, the kind we have in Australia or Western Europe or North America, how unprecedented it is in its wealth, reach, bureaucratic sophistication and comprehensive delivery of services to its citizens. In most times and most places states have offered little more than an elementary level of order and left the population to look after itself. In other words, when we think about our kind of state, we're setting a rather high bar for what a state ought to be. And because of all this, we tend to not appreciate what a large project it is and how long a project it will be for the people of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, for example, to build what we would regard as an effective state. I'll focus on Melanesia because that is where Australian policy encounters its greatest challenges. Let's consider colonial administration in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and by way of contrast in Fiji, in PNG from the mid-1880s, in Solomon's from the late-1890s and in Fiji from the mid-1870s. Colonial rule, we have to remember, was a state-making exercise. But the barriers to building effective states in Melanesia outside Fiji were considerable right up to independence. They were less considerable, those barriers, in other parts of the Pacific where hierarchical systems of government had given rise to chieftains and nascent states where people were already accustomed to the idea of centralized authority. So Tonga, for example, had its own constitution, a modern constitution, by 1875. The recently amended constitution of Tonga is the one they themselves wrote in the 1870s. And of course Tonga, a hierarchical Polynesian society, had at various times, we think, going back as far as the 14th century, been a unified state, at least chiefdom, maybe not state in our sense. The same is true of Fiji. Fiji was never a unified chiefdom in pre-colonial times, but there were large chiefdoms. So that, for example, when the British arrived in the 1870s, there was a Tongan called Mahafu who exercised authority over about half of Fiji. This is a very different situation from the one you find in Melanesia outside Fiji. And let's just call that Melanesia for a moment. In Melanesia, the colonizers encountered populations speaking hundreds of languages, living as hundreds of distinct peoples, and treating the outsiders as enemies, temporary allies, masters or friends, as circumstances dictated. However the Europeans were received by villages in one place, they could be sure that their reception a few kilometres away would be different, and that no local person could take responsibility for the difference. This is very different from the situation in Polynesia or Fiji. The result was that the Europeans and their Melanesian allies of the moment inched forward on the frontier of control, while Melanesians yielded their independence slowly, village by village rather than region by region, and then not fully. District officers in Australian New Guinea in the 1930s distinguished between five different levels of control. There were areas under control, under partial control, under government influence, penetrated by patrols and unknown. Now what you can say is the last four categories didn't really amount to much government, and most of colonial New Guinea at that time was in those four categories. Colonial New Guinea in 1914 or 1940 was a weak state. So was colonial Papua, and so were the Solomons in Vanuatu. But what is surprising and forgotten is that these were weak states even when they gained independence in the 1970s and early 1980s. The Highland peoples of New Guinea for example did not experience government authority of any consequence until after World War II. I remember when I was in New Guinea in the late 1960s talking to people who were patrol officers who told me about first encounters with people from the southern Highlands in the late 1950s. So in other words, those people from the southern Highlands, their experience of Australian colonial centralised administration lasted from let's say 1958 to 1935 and then there was independence. That was the colonial period. And let's remember the Highlands are a large slice of the Papua New Guinea population. So a large proportion of Papua New Guineans really hardly experienced colonial rules a kind of moment before independence came. The contrast with VG is instructive, contrast with VG both with Solomons and with Papua New Guinea. VG, I might say, might not be a democratic state today but it's an effective state. I lived there for seven years. Let me illustrate what I mean. When I left I had to get a tax clearance. I went to Internal Revenue, went to the desk, someone said, yes, what's your name? pressed a button, up came my tax returns for previous seven years. It's inconceivable in Port Moresby. Now, let's consider the contrast with VG. Solomons was neglected by the British as a colonial territory. At independence in 1978, after more than eight decades of colonial rule, the modern economy and the modern bureaucracy were still under construction. Things were different in VG. The British by and large, the British by and large admired the Fijians and admired Fijian chiefs in society and they therefore entrusted Fijians with considerable responsibility in the modern system of government. In fact, it was the British who suggested to the Fijians that they should have a great council of chiefs which met for the first time in 1876 and you can go back and you can read the minutes of those meetings of the Fijian chiefs in 1876, 1877. I mean, this is inconceivable in Solomons at the beginning. As far as the British were concerned, Fiji inspired a philosophy of colonisation and development. The Solomons, a small and remote Melanesian protectorate, largely without hereditary chieftainship did not. Fiji was a crown colony which means it had a legislative council and the Fijians sat on the legislative council from 1904 onwards. Now, Solomons didn't really participate in the government of the Solomons until the 1960s, maybe. And so we had Fijians exerting influence on policy and in fact through one of the great chiefs, Ratu Salala Sekuna, coming up with solutions on policy on land, for example, in the 1930s. So there's a genuine extension of government responsibility by the British and the Fijians. Whereas Solomons took no real part in modern government and really Papua New Guinea didn't either until quite late in the colonial period, Fiji also attracted able governors. The Solomons got second-rate high commissioners. So when Fiji gained independence in 1970, a Fijian and Indian elite existed with experience of the Westminster system going back most of the century. When Solomons gained independence in 1978, the legislative assembly had come into existence only four years previously. This is as if the British went to the Solomons in 1974 and said, oh, by the way, you're going to have a Westminster system. What's that? Colonial development and welfare projects and direct grants in aid arrived only in the last 25 years of colonial administration. In other words, they really only got aid with Solomons in the 1960s and 70s. Secondary education was still a rare thing for children in Solomons in the 1960s. Genuine localisation of the public service did not really start until the 1970s. So this leisurely pace of development points to the central theme in British colonial rule there from the start, neglect, and the consequence was an independent state radically under the propeller for independence. Now, we weren't all that much better in part of the beginning. In the late 1950s, I can remember reading something written by Sir John Kerr who was then involved in a SOPA, the Australian School of Pacific Administration, 1958, I think it was. It was widely believed in the Australian government that time that Australia would be in part of the beginning for the next 500 years. What was the hurry? So, Paul Haslick, the Minister for Territories, said, well, let's concentrate on primary schools. I think in the 1950s, I think I'm right in saying in part of the beginning, there were three government high schools, there was a sudden speed up, of course, in the 1960s, but it was very late in the day. Now, so, when we're considering the weakness or the relative lack of effectiveness of the modern state in P&G and Solomon's or even Vanuatu, we have to consider our leisurely approach as Australians, neglect by the British and relatively neglect by the French and the British in Vanuatu. But, of course, we also have to remember that, culturally, these are territorial and cultural mosaics of people extraordinarily difficult to organise as affected by the state. Now, let's consider, you know, what form did the Australian Colonial Administration actually take in part beginning for most of the colonial period? Well, the answer is, of course, the patrol officer. He'd been through a sober, maybe, for a year. Probably, you know, 22, 23, he had police with him who would go from village to village. But let us remember how dispersed, geographically, the villages of Papua New Guinea are and remember that this system of patrolling, which actually many Papua New Guineans put back on with some fondness these days, at least the government did turn up, but even then, the government didn't turn up all that often. In the 1950s and 60s, there would be many parts of Papua New Guinea that wouldn't be visited by a patrol for years. You know, five years. So, I mean, I heard a paper given, I think it was last year by someone on finding they went somewhere near Moorsby on a health patrol and found that in the central district, the village higher than mountains, they hadn't seen the government for ten years. You seem to think, isn't this a terrible thing? Yes, it's a terrible thing, but it wasn't all that different in the Australian period. You know, you have to fly over to Papua New Guinea to realise what a huge challenge it is to deliver services to that country. People don't live together. They live in little ridges and little villages all over the place. Okay, so two things. What I'm saying, you know, here's another one of the typical doll-officer. Put out the table. How many births have there been? How many deaths? Anyone want to sign up for the plantations? And so on. I suggest that you do sign up for the plantations. So, two things about Papua New Guinea and Solomons should not surprise us. That these, the first one is, and there's one, to remind us of the extraordinary spine of mountains down the middle. If you stand in Port Moresby looking north in a clear morning, you can see mountains going up like this. It's not surprising that the Japanese had so much trouble coming along that they could curve a track. Solomons. Not as difficult, but difficult in many ways. So, two things about P&G and Solomons should not surprise us. It shouldn't surprise us that they remain weak states with the deficit of the effective government authority that is so central to our traditions and so foreign to theirs. Nor should we be surprised that Melanesians have adapted the Westminster system of governments to Melanesian ways of doing things with political leaders having little loyalty to ideologies or parties and much loyalty to kin and extended family. If you knew nothing about New Canaan as a Martian, that's what you'd expect to find. The Westminster system applied there in Melanesia. Oh, sorry. So, let me just finish on this point. The Vaberian, let me just put it this way in rather theoretical terms, the Vaberian state with its reach, efficiency, impersonality and neutrality is a product of Western cultural forms and long Western history and cannot be implanted in its entirety or with the same outcomes in other cultural contexts, especially Melanesian ones. I must say when my colleague, John Wallace suggested I might take part in this volume and this conference I had reservations, as others do. And that's because I felt I would be the odd man out and I think the volume, by the way, demonstrates that and you'll probably feel by the end of my 15 minutes that I'm still the odd man out. We are now entering the new strategic era. It's the post-Afghanistan, post-East Timor, post-Solomon's strategic era. What will defence strategy now focus on? The answer is as follows and mark my words, this is most likely what you'll see in the next Defence White paper. We will refocus on the defence of Australia and that includes the vulnerability of the north and northwest of the continent where there's over $500 billion worth of investments in offshore oil and iron and so on. Secondly, we will undoubtedly refocus on Timor-Leste and the South Pacific. We'll say what's new but what's new is we will in addition focus very heavily on South East Asia and especially Indonesia and that's because in the new emerging balance of power we'll need to see a stable, independent, non-aligned South East Asia which will act as a stable target to our vulnerable northern approaches and I will come back to Indonesia. But the basic fact is the abiding nature of our geography as Peter Lay has said determines that the inner arc will always be important to our defence planning. Apart from continental drift the geography don't change. As Sir Arthur Tang, the most famous secretary and the most powerful secretary we've ever had of the Department of Defence said to me once the most important documentation of any defence planner is a map of one's own country. Couple of introductory points my definition of the inner arc in my article which I'm pretty sure you've all read is it is not just Timor-Leste and the South Pacific it is especially there but it is centrally in terms of defence planning in Indonesia. Indonesia because of its size proximity will always be at issue for careful and steady assessment in Australian strategic planning. So my article extends from Indonesia across Timor-Leste, Patanigini Bougainville, Solomon Islands Badoatu, New Caledonia and includes our friend and ally New Zealand. So that's different from many other definitions but let me say that's our defence plans. Now I'm used to having slogans hung around my neck. The arc of instability is obviously one and I'll come back to that. The other infamous one I had was when I wrote my book in this university in the 1986 for the Soviet Union the incompletes of the power the academic of its studies specialist even worse the director of CIA of some sort of crypto communist trap. So why in 1999 did I talk about an arc of instability? My good friend in 2004 said probably that phrase began as a polite way of talking about Indonesia and there was truth in that but he also said in my quote it is a pacific part of the arc which has really been living up to its name and can I just paint a picture of what it's like to be a deputy secretary of defence sitting in the chiefs of staff committee in the late 80s and feeling actually what it's like to manage crises and in this respect I differ absolutely from his excellency the High Commissioner in the beginning. He and I have different points of view because we have different jobs. So in 1987 there was the military coup in Fiji I was director of defence intelligence I had the first piece of information showing that Ram Booker had committed the coup I went to see my minister Kim Beasley and within 10 minutes I was in Bob Hawke's office and within an hour I'm in the cabinet room with the prime minister Kim Beasley the foreign minister Garrett Evans and Andy Nass for my opinion in the late 80s as deputy secretary of defence we had the following succession of crises and don't tell me this isn't an arc of instability from our point of view the Ron Mays here Ron remind me of the year when there was the drunken riot between the PNG defence force and the police was it 88 on a Saturday night Bob Hawke is run by Randy Namalio the prime minister of part New Guinea is invoking the statement of principals I want you to intervene militarily we sit in the chiefs of staff and we consider under what rules of engagement very sensitive would you put an Australian force in to defend the democracy of part New Guinea and under what conditions would you press the trigger for the non-consequential decisions in my words then we had Bougainville and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army again sitting in chiefs of staff committing and considering would we intervene under what conditions of course we decided not to that a while too and I forgot the name of the particular politician in the late 80s there was writing down the main street in New Zealand the problem was that New Zealand was no longer in the inner allied intelligence club and therefore there was certain information we couldn't share with them and that in terms of military planning was going to complicate things now later in the 90s of course we had the Sandline Affair and that was indeed an issue of high instability in part New Guinea and corruption and as Peter Label told you consideration of intervention went on and of course it cumulated in 1999 when I coined the phrase with intervention in the largest military intervention we've done since yet now in East Timor 5,000 troops and Admiral Chris Barriott former chief of defence forces in this audience will tell you he advised the Howard Cabinet as Peter Crossgrove went in if this goes wrong we'll be at war with Indonesia and that was not an exception we were prepared for that so from 87 to 99 my experience was this was an arc of instability for which I make no apologies the paper I've written has a sort of chronological approach and it traces how Australian defence thinking developed from the 1950s right through to the present in both declassified strategic thinking some of which I had a hand in including the issues of East Timor in 75 and then I look forward to 2030 one of the reviewers said that a chronological approach from the appropriate I should do a country by country well you know you make your mind up on that I wanted you guys to understand from a chronological approach how like water dripping on a stone strategic thinking of Australia for over half a century has focused obsessively on all the time on Indonesia and after that frankly Papua New Guinea and the Papua New Guinea border with Indonesia a non-trivial issue by the way again if you want an example 1978 we had impeccable intelligence but Indonesia was going to cross the Papua New Guinea border and once and for all fix up the OPM and sanitise the border and I had confirmation from that from General Benny Madani former Chief of the Defence Force and Governor of Indonesia and Minister of Defence some years later the other issue of course is and I know it's not central to this conference the issue of New Zealand and how we've varied between optimism and pessimism about that country to our East again when I wrote The Ark of Instability the formal strategic description of New Zealand was that it was a strategic liability a strategic liability because it pulled out of the American Alliance and it was our experience in some of our operations in the South Pacific and I stand corrected on this that they sent their soldiers as good as they undoubtedly were and are with inadequate and poor equipment which often broke down and either we had to fix up or we had to take over the logistics of support and that was the mission I won't go over what I say in the paper about how the situation has developed in three or four phases over the last half century except to say through the 60s and 70s and indeed the 80s it was Indonesia Indonesia and Indonesia and all our defence exercises in the Kangaroo series had a focus on that sort of issue but as I just said at some length from the late 80s to the next decade we had whatever you want to call The Ark of Instability you're welcome to your own phrase since the turn of the century however I think security in the region has in some important respects improved we have no significant defence tension from mistrust in Indonesia and non are in prospect just the opposite we are going to move to a strategic partnership with Indonesia an Indonesia that by 2030 will have 300 million people and according to some straight line extrapolations will be the world's fourth largest economy that is a first order priority for us and that quite frankly in national security planning terms will be more important in other parts of the world it is a tectonic shift for us I think the security situation in East Timor has settled down since the events of 2006 and the presidential and general elections in 2012 occurred peacefully enough i.e. on behalf of foreign affairs led the team into East Timor in July last year to be the regional forum Australian delegation supervising monitoring the elections in Timor last year and we were fundamentally impressed that was not just my view as a non-expert on that country I had with me the senior officer from the New South Wales Commonwealth electoral office who had been to several elections in Papua New Guinea and said to me Paul there is no comparison in Papua New Guinea and I stand corrected by my good colleague Ron May on this is still a serious worry the domestic security situation political governments continue to be highly volatile and unpredictable with potential for large scale disorder and we still have large numbers of Australians I forget the number 30,000 or whatever in Papua New Guinea and if something serious happened we would have to get them out and I worry about the border with Papua and the view in Jakarta amongst certain of the Indonesian military still that after East Timor plot in Canberra is to detach Papua from Indonesia and if you think that is a non-trivial issue let me assure you it is serious I think the situations in the Solomon Islands very much in Fiji remain actually unpredictable and defence relations and security in Papua New Guinea significantly improved let me turn now to some other issues what about China in the South Pacific Joanne quoted correctly my concern about would China create a military base in the region I don't think they will they have no military bases overseas unlike the former Soviet Union we are going to see more Chinese we are seeing it economic and other power in Port Morsby and Honiara and elsewhere and you have seen some of the riots that have occurred in reaction to that we should not think of China as the next Soviet Union you can ask me questions about the US Pacific to our region and what it means for the Pacific final observations where I still find myself as odd man out regarding the conclusions in this volume is I don't agree with suggestions that we should shift our focus from a state-centric approach to the region to a human security people-centered approach that is more concerned with individual and societal security my training, my background is obviously different that is not how defence and national security works in the real world of how you formulate policy whether you like that or not national security strategy that was released on the 23rd of last month says the following two themes one, our principal national security focus will be on our own region two, in an era in which the behaviour of states not state actors will be the most important driver and shaper of Australia's national security thinking that is not to exclude terrorism but it is to say our focus will be more on state-to-state issues of course we must do more in the South Pacific in team honesty with our economic and societal development seeking to resolve low economic growth high birth rates, high unemployment gender imbalances and concerns about the potential impact of rising sea levels but, as a former defence planner I can tell you that the bottom line for any Australian government is preparing for a range of credible contingencies in the South Pacific in team honesty that range from humanitarian disaster relief aid to the civil power peacekeeping and peace enforcement and in extremis and if invited military intervention in this regard Australia will continue to play a central security role in the region and most likely will remain the security partner of choice by the region in what I expect to be our new pacific strategy capital P capital S in this new strategic era but it will be an order of priority by definition lesser than our new relationship with Indonesia and Southeast Asia if it is not to dismiss the region if it is just to say that some things are changing there is a new re-focusing thank you Ladies and gentlemen, I am a journalist and I am here to help you it's funny how that gets a lot from this it doesn't get much easier really I think you have just been treated by two presentations by two world class intellects quite frankly at the top of their game you have been privileged to be here you have been first doing heavy lifting so for a jobbing hack that's great, they have done the hard yards and in fact I can even say as a jobbing hack that I have already fired so it's great to quote the current phrase going into the Australian language this is something I prepared earlier so arc of responsibility and in my discussion I think comes very naturally, particularly after Peter Lay and Paul Dipet so after what Stuart was telling you first I will say about this idea of arc of responsibility that it is not a prescription it's not it is not a proposal I would say to you that this idea of arc of responsibility is no more than a description that it is a description of an abiding Australian perspective unevenly applied but nevertheless an abiding Australian way of thinking about the region and I think that you can see really four pillars that support this two of the pillars I think really very strong very clear in view one is the role of Australia as the aid superpower been rather his phrase the aid superpower role secondly as the security guarantor and the piece talks about the security guarantor role and how Australia has been ad hoc but it has been creative and it has been committed and very creative if you look at the the unarmed peacekeeping role in Bowbingville much credit to the New Zealanders for actually magicing that up and thinking about things in ways that the Australian military had a lot of trouble getting the head around but making it work a lot of credit to the Kiwis for that so sometimes that Kiwi perspective is important and I do think that one of the things that Australia sometimes does need to do is listen to the Kiwis much as though that that occasionally offends one of the lovely stories the Kiwis tell that when the Australians talk over in the second rotation in Bowbingville the Kiwis commanded the first rotation in Bowbingville and the Kiwis commander said to the Australians good luck guys you know here's all the stuff, happy to help and records in the report back to Wellington that the Australians looked at him for a moment and said piss off Kiwi, we're in charge so the two pillars that I think we do make it work, the aid superpower and the security guarantor and very creative unarmed piss keepers in Bowbingville, the military intervention and its team under the UN and again very creative the police led military intervention in Salmon Islands under the umbrella of the four, now this is creative stuff it's ad hoc but it's made to work and I think those are elements of our security approach which are valuable and which will continue to feed through for all the problems the AFP the Australian Federal Police is having with its overseas employment responsibility you can see that the AFP on its good days is the AFP the Australian Federal and Pacific Police and that's an important point we've finally got a tool where all deal or whoever is the depth set doesn't have to front up and say well their only option is a military option, we do have other options and that is creativity so what are the other two pillars if the two pillars that are substantial the AFP and security guarantor what are the other two pillars well the other two pillars are regionalism and diplomacy and they are our role as the economic guarantor and economic integration and I want to come to those other two pillars in a moment one of the points that I want to have a bit of fun with just for a moment is that one of the reviewers of my piece it's fun having academic reviewers my game editors stomp around to your desk and in days gone by tip, tour, copy and print all over your head and took you to the pub but now they actually give you very gentle and wonderful, I mean I wonder why can't you enjoy it a lot except there's someone said to me except for the many meetings one of them said they didn't really get the head around this idea I've put in there of the fundamental strategic denial instinct which is at the very basis of the way Australia thinks about the region and I think we have another go at it I'll put a little bit more in but I think it's just and Stuart has driven a lot of my thinking on this it's just so fundamental to an understanding the way Australia thinks and it looks out and that's the point about archer of responsibility you can't have an archer of responsibility or an archer of instability without the idea of Australia at the very centre it's an Australian perspective and you see that really right through the 19th century a bunch of six Australian colonies agreeing on something I mean the state still can't agree on anything much like giving up power but six Australian colonies agree that they need to create a nation and one of the big things driving it of course is this fear of the French and the Germans and the Russians and so in the constitution there is a reference to external affairs which essentially is about the British they took out the reference to external affairs and treaty the responsibilities to the Brits who then will go after our treaties but beneath that there is a specific reference in the constitution to relations with the islands of the Pacific so at the very foundation they knew what it was about and that instinct really runs right through leaders as diverse as Billy Hughes at Versailles Grabbing Point New Guinea it runs through John Curtin sending Nashos who were only supposed to fight in Australia to the island arguing to the Labor changing Labor policy because they were Australian troops fighting in Australian territory if they couldn't fight in the arc they weren't really defending Australia and it runs through Hughes, Curtin and John Howard talking about Australia's back yard it's an extraordinarily uniform instinct so what I say description not a description now and I also think too that the strategic denial instinct runs very deeply through a country that actually manages to occupy a whole continent I mean this is strategic denial on steroids we've got a continent already and we want to actually extend that feeling of security even further and of course one of the problems is we can never do strategic denial in the island arc so there's a certain frustration there anyway but I think Peter Lay's point beautifully expressed control of the shoulders and approaches to Australia from or through that military perspective and of course 1941-42 that era of strategic affairs that forms Australia to the state so given those sort of fundamental interests why is Australia's role in the region so uneven so episodic why are we so often subject to long bouts of amnesia I would say one of the reasons is just a straight political bureaucratic reason that you can only ever have so many lights on the Christmas tree but political leaders and bureaucratic leaders only give so much attention for so many hours in the day and so while I think Australia does have these interests our engagement is perpetually responding to events much of our policymaking is ad hoc and there's always a gap in this town between declared policy and real policy declared policy in the Pacific is about bilateral relations between equal states and respect for sovereignty and the central role of the forum and all of those declared policies often real policy running underneath is very different and what happens is that eventually real policy and declared policy run into each other and declared policy has to change actually better reflect reality and so on that analysis there's a great emphasis on the reactive nature of Australian policy that declared principles are not necessarily what really drives us I mean James Batley was interesting that he accurately describes what his people are trying to do in Canberra now they are at this effect over the last 15 years to really have a more integrated whole of government approach but when you listen to James talk like that listen to the message beneath the message beneath is about the fact that for so long our policy hasn't been that way for so long it hasn't been about depth and complexity for a long time right up into the 90s Australian policy in the south Pacific was aid policy was Pacific policy and the corollary of that was that the Pacific was foaming obviously Australian aid policy was foaming and that sense of failure has actually had a very pernicious effect on the way Australia has thought about the Pacific and of course the other point about the Australian perspective the Australia always looks at the Pacific through Papua and Guinea Papua and Guinea is the the lanes from which Australia will always regard the Pacific so looking at the rest of the Pacific through Papua and Guinea sometimes you're actually they're very dark glasses that actually don't reflect a reality that what Stuart was talking about I'd refer you very quickly to a thesis, a few pieces that's now up on the Melbourne Uni website by Jonathan Shorts which is called overseeing and overlooking which reflects I think a little bit of the title of what we're going to hear today this idea that we oversee, we seek to oversee but often we overlook and that reflects the dichotomy between instances of active even overbearing engagement by Australia and periods of indifference and relative inattention and Jonathan I think is smart enough to quote me a couple of times but his analysis is actually quite good and he traces a little bit of prices then invigorating engagement then disillusion and then finally stagnation and his key point is that the problem for Australia and the Pacific is that we have very weak institutional lines of engagement there is not an institutional structure there that really drives this relationship and so what happens is that ministers finally get around to focusing on the region Jesus Christ what are we going to do and then three weeks later another crisis comes along they're often the next the next exciting so let me finish by very quickly going to the two pillars that are the weak pillars which is the regional diplomacy pillar there's a little bit in the paper about that I would only say about that is that our problem in the Pacific is to try and get instruments of regional diplomacy and regionalism that can actually deliver the attempt to rethink the Pacific plan is important our efforts to prop up or strengthen the forum are important but underneath that of course is the fact that we are now for the first time in the region dealing with a revisionist power that we have been very fortunate in the Pacific that we have been dealing essentially with governments which were conservative, Christian pro-market, pro-western we have now a revisionist power in Fiji that doesn't like the existing system for a range of essentially self-centered reasons which is surprising because I always argued in the ABC that you'd never have a Pacific correspondent based in Fiji because they could never think about anything other than Fiji because Suva never thinks about anything other than Fiji and what we are seeing in the Pacific is a revisionist power that doesn't really know its own mind and its own interests what does Bani Marama think about when he's shading or playing video games up the barracks which is what he does a lot of the time these are big questions and they are deeply damaging to the forum and our interest has always been the forum first I think in this Fiji second that is one real political reason driving our engagement with Bani Marama but finally let me take you on to what I think is the pillar where we have done least and where we have the most to do and it is of course the issue of economic integration and the economic future this is what happens at the conferences everyone gives you a great long list of what the problems is and then at the end they say well what's the answer and everyone's got these questions there economic integration the economic relationship between the region and Australia is where the answer is going to have to be and I was groping towards that in this piece talking about Pacer Plus and about the importance of the guest worker scheme as finally getting some Pacific people into Australian Pacific policy and this strange dichotomy in Australian policy that there are more Polynesians living in Australia than non-nesians very strange the point I'd like to give you to think about and I haven't really developed this idea but I think it is the way we're going to have to go is we have to realise that the Pacer Plus negotiations between Australia and New Zealand before we essentially started those because the Europeans had done we are essentially doing a regional free trade negotiation not because we wanted to do it in that format but that's because what the Europeans wanted and because they started it we decided we better be in it too and the problem with that is that the Europeans know a lot of things that they know stuff all about the city and so the European negotiations have been going for 10 years and have got bugger all and in fact it's actually come in very damaging it's really tearing it the foreign leaders have become so frustrated that they are looking at taking the economic the free trade negotiations with the Europeans away from the forum and setting up a new institution to try and make it work what I think we need to focus on with the Pacer Plus approach is that we need to start thinking about it as a Pacific negotiation not a quasi-European negotiation with super national institutions which ain't what we're talking about we need to focus on the reality that as Simon Crane said when we launched this back in August 2009 there is great potential to develop a region-wide labour mobility and skills development program for the Pacific and that phrase labour mobility is an absolute bomb because we can give labour mobility to care of us but we can't give it the time to begin with and that is why 4 years into the negotiations we're going nowhere so my very simple solution Ho Ho is that this is the 30th year of close economic relations between Australia and New Zealand which has been a huge success and has been incredibly influential and important in New Zealand and quite useful for Australia and even means that we've now got a dairy industry that can compete which nobody could even at the time what I think we need to think about with CER is we need to use it as a model and a structure and we need to turn around to the forum and say look we don't think a one size fits or free trade agreement is going to work between care of us and partner union it just doesn't work that's why the European games gone for 10 years that's why our games gone for 4 years we want a different picture and what I would suggest is that we take the CER model which is an incredibly detailed model of integration between Australia and New Zealand going down to quite my new levels of detail of integration you look at say the 1988 review services, protocols quarantine, technical barriers business law accreditation and quality rules of origin and new issues like telecommunications and even you can even throw in issues that aren't there such as adoption of the Australian dollar but use that as a structure and turn it into a very detailed ladder and say to each of the island states you can start anywhere you want on the ladder and some of them will zoom into it and some of them might not want to know about it at all but it's an answer for the forum because it means the forum ceases to be a negotiating institution which it's lousy at and it goes back to its real role of coordination, technical assistance and you can even see the Pacific community in the forum actually being able to do something together which would be revolutionary but I think what that does and this is my final point it starts to think creatively about it meeting individual island economic needs it offers a ladder of economic integration but it means they choose it at their own pace and one of the points I've always made about the Pacific one of the things I love about the Pacific is that you put one island into a room with three or four Australians and the island will work out with both their shoes and their belts I have no problems embedding that in any of those sort of interactions the islands are usually going to win because they know us a hell of a lot better than that and they have a much clearer idea of what actually works for them so I think that on this 30th anniversary of CBR we think about what we've learned in Australia and New Zealand we open it up for the islands on a voluntary graduated basis and that I think actually starts to answer the real question of how do you get some institutional links that keep ticking over day after day so that it isn't just about the age superpowers and just about the security going to talk but we start to move towards the economic going to role the economic provided role where the islands start to actually make the thing work for them thank you very much and thank you to the conference organisers I wanted to actually be following off with some great speakers I really enjoyed that session I'm not a security expert I'm not too sure exactly what I am but it's not a security expert and I'm just a little bit afraid to face that because I'm going to be talking about maritime security but not in that traditional context that most people think of so I'm going to be taking you out to the left field after I've been following the previous three presentations I'd also just like to start with a bit of a commentary on the morning so far I find the title for the conference interesting but I disagree that there is some sort of choice or balance required between security and development I don't really work in security I tend to work in development and governors but to me security and development go hand in hand they're not something that you simply choose for you prioritise your assets on one side or the other it's something that flows between both I agree with what James Batley was saying this morning Australia already has a very strong focus on development in the region I think we have a political and a perception problem perhaps when we view our region like of instability or the famous Alexander Downer bust of our states to me they represent expressions of frustration I don't actually think that they represent something that truly reflects the region to put it bluntly I think that these prisms do not allow for long-term development or actual independence but they're limiting therefore they do not actually allow for stability they restrict you to that current context that frustration exists it reflects us and them type approaches I would argue that a more collaborative and equal viewpoint is required if you want to actually move beyond those frustrations such a viewpoint engages both partners in development and through development builds true security so in that kind of context I'm going to talk very briefly on maritime security with a strong focus on development interests I work in a whole range of different things I work largely in regionalism I attend millions and gazillions of Fisheries International Treaty meetings I sit on various delegations but most recently I've been largely sitting on Kiribati's delegations working with Kiribati's governments sometimes I'm embedded inside the Kiribati's government sometimes that's resented so I guess to best explain me I probably straddle the fence a fair bit anyway I'll work with that so as we go up to left field the Pacific Island region includes some of the world's biggest countries is what I'm going to be talking about there's a lot of money just swimming around illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is one of the key maritime security threats the responses I'm going to be talking about are monitoring control and surveillance it's sort of Fisheries Governance 101 I come at it from the regional background because I've mostly worked in regional and that teaches you that national is critical because nothing actually happens unless it gets implemented nationally the regional aspirations are simply aspirations unless things actually get done on the ground for those who don't have any maritime background there's just one important thing that I'll quickly go and give you a bit of background on outside your land you have a lot of ocean you have something called an exclusive economic zone it stretches out to about 200 nautical miles about 360 kilometres from your land and you have sovereign rights over that area there's a whole bunch of other complications but we'll just keep it simple and flat at the moment under the United Nations Law of the Sea there are a whole bunch of parties to that it's a very very large treaty and that articulates a whole range of broad principles on marine conservation and exploitation so basically what it means is that coastal states have much larger exclusive economic zones than the actual coastal state in many respects and those rights come with responsibilities obligations sovereign rights and a whole bunch of other things and this is where it gets really interesting for the Pacific Island region because if you look at it now for the Pacific Island region what you don't see are tiny little countries what you do see are the world's biggest countries and that's a really important shift in the way that you think about this region it's not poor little small developing countries it's wealthy potentially very rich countries with very small governments and that's a problem so the stereotype that we all talk about in the Arch of Instability is that the Pacific Island region includes some of the world's smallest countries and we all know that it's made up of tiny tiny little landmasses these landmasses are predominantly remote both from one another and from their Pacific Rim neighbors I work a lot in Kiribati so that's where I'll kind of talk about mostly so the total land size for Kiribati is only about 800 square kilometers it's spread across thousands and thousands of kilometers over 33 oz and it has 100,000 people but incredibly few resources minuscule government capacity and heavily dependent upon foreign aid and Australia's the largest aid donor we have a lot of programs working in Kiribati but if you just flip the way you look at it Pacific Island regions include some of the world's largest countries scattered over 165 million square kilometers which encompasses one third of the world's surface their isolation and remoteness now actually generates enormous maritime opportunities with sovereign rights over 30 million square kilometers equivalent to around about 28% of the world's exclusive economic zones additionally, a number of these states are actually now in a position to assert rights over even more areas of continental shelf extending further outwards so seabed mining is now becoming under discussion you're now seeing what I would probably refer to as dodgy Australian mining companies negotiating dodgy joint ventures with Pacific Island countries because they can see how much wealth is out there this region is larger in area than China and Central Asia combined but it's only inhabited by about 10 million people for example again, Kiribati where I tend to work is about 3.5 million square kilometers 12th largest country in the world spread across 5,000 kilometers from east to west populated by only 100,000 people few resources minimal government capacity and now we get to security one Pacific patrol boat decades old no planes no money and heavily dependent upon foreign aid so has this massive asset this massive resource but it's one of the key fundamental differences and I totally agree with what Graham was saying about the Europeans and the Pacific the only people that are worse than the Europeans in the Pacific at the moment are the Americans but anyway, what everyone forgets when they come here from other regions is that this place is different it's not like the Atlantic it's not like the Indian Ocean it's not even like the eastern Pacific Ocean because the South Pacific is largely dominated their sovereign rights control most of the western and central Pacific Ocean the distant water fishing states they come here with their vessels from Spain and from America and everywhere else, keep on forgetting that they like to pretend that the ocean is somehow unowned that it's free and it's not so when we talk about development and development is basically security then we have to talk about tuna because for places like Curavus and 6 or 7 other countries there really isn't much else going your key asset your key resource is fish revenue from tuna fisheries is about 10% of the original GDP and that's significant for 7 countries and about half of the GDP for countries like Curavus and Tobago tuna fisheries provide critical revenue, income and employment the value of the fish taken from these EEZs is about $2.8 billion a year now thanks to some brilliant cooperation by some of these states they've made to increase their share of revenue from that fishery to about 10% so it's now worth about $260 million a year in revenue that's happened in the last few years thanks to a group of Pacific Island states tightening up access really putting in place a cartel type arrangement that basically means that they're leverage they're negotiating capacity is much stronger still not good, but getting better these tuna fisheries are globalised, diversified, moldy species moldy gear, high tech corporate they're basically really hard to break into in that sense of I want to go off and own vessels and own the fishery and own everything well you can't because there's about three multinational companies that are incredibly powerful and they won't let you and they're much better at it than this there's been a number of attempts some funded by Australia, some funded by others to set up Pacific Island fishing companies and they generally fail because the skills and networks that you require are really hard to break into so now we're seeing more innovative approaches to get more value another key issue for this is the food security particularly for places like Kiribati which depend a lot on tuna but also for many other countries that depend on coastal fisheries you're talking about fundamental food security if the tuna fishery were to collapse Kiribati as a nation state would collapse there is nothing to support Kiribati as a nation state and the security would basically fall apart and you would have to import all protein so it's absolutely fundamental for many countries the problem is at the moment that the forecasts aren't particularly good okay so what does this mean for maritime security when I hear many people talk about security they talk about navies and they talk about boats and guns and you know complicated surveillance arrangements and they tend to talk about China they talk about geo-strategic concerns and yeah there are all things that Australia and the US and New Zealand and France and the UK all kind of think about but that's not necessarily what many of the Pacific island countries think about they tend to think about fish because that's the key asset that they've got to protect there are some issues with east west transits of drugs from Mexico and Latin America coming across to Australia and other markets and there are some nifty ideas that they tend to use about dumping drugs on fads and all that kind of stuff and there are significant issues particularly for fish but really the key maritime security concern is illegal un-reported unregulated fishing because that's the thing that impacts on the economies and the opportunities and the aspirations of these countries those impacts include economic losses to the coastal states reductions in food security loss of marine biodiversity and habitat destruction it's also increasingly associated with organised transnational maritime criminal activities including sex slavery people smuggling marine wildlife trafficking drug and arms trafficking as well and this has started to get a lot more focus internationally now with various UN committees that also start to focus on transnational crime okay I come at it from that regional cooperation level and where a lot of the successes have happened in the last 30 years and regional cooperation have actually been in the area of fisheries the forum secretariat's got some history and frustrations particularly when it comes down to trade but in the area of fisheries we've got a lot of successful background that occurs through the Pacific Island Foreign Fisheries Agency again Australia and New Zealand are the two key donors in that area and that's been highly successful a few years ago a group of us got together and did a risk assessment and identified the various risks and most of those risks are really related to fishing given that that was what most Pacific Island states we're going to be focusing on some of the highest risks occurred outside of the Pacific Island region on the boundaries or in the small little areas of high seas in between and non-compliance by licensed vessels was identified as a key risk and that's a bit of a surprise because when people think about illegal fishing and all that kind of stuff they like to think about ghost fleets that just sort of coming over the horizon steal all the fish and disappear because that's kind of, you know, sexier and pirate fishing and all that kind of stuff but the problem is that the reality is that most of the problem is actually by those assistant water fishing fleets that you license to come fish inside your waters that cheat, they commit fraud they rip you off and that was identified as the key problem and also the inadequate reporting which is what you've got to depend on to actually get your revenue they've got to give you a report, you've got to work out how much they catch and then they've got to pay you accordingly so we identified some various risks and long line fleets were worse than other types of fleets Indonesian, Philippine vessels and Papua New Guinea and Palau were a particular concern Latin American vessels and curavisical islands were particular concerns but anyway it came down to fishing was one of those big risks now luckily when you look around the world in the area of fishing it's one of those things where you look at the Pacific islands as the global leader most of the global precedents and fisheries monitoring control and surveillance have come from the Pacific islands they haven't come from the US they certainly haven't come from the Spanish they've come from this region we've got these fantastic organizations, the Pacific islands foreign fisheries agency the secretary of the Pacific community and more recently the parties of the neurogroup the secretary that provide technical advice and support coordinate cooperation and have also enabled the member states themselves to go off and negotiate various minimum terms and conditions for access vessel day schemes that have had tremendous impacts on revenue vessel monitoring schemes that utilize satellite based transceivers and more importantly and recently cooperative agreements to share information and data and this is where Australia has been particularly active with something called the new way treating so what this basically means is that over the last few years we have developed a whole bunch of regional measures and regional arrangements to support monitoring control and surveillance to address our key maritime security risks I'm going to skip through quickly to the last couple of slides they are now starting to set up a lot more regional cooperation we have regional operations Operation Kuru Kuru Big Eye these where a bunch of countries will get together with the quadrilateral partners Australia, New Zealand, France and the US to undertake joint surveillance operations they probably won't necessarily catch more vessels doing things wrong than other times but they are in this building capacity there is a lot of growth happening regionally that really is increasing this and a lot of this comes down to the Pacific Patrol program as well that Australia has been funding for 30 years more recently we developed a monitoring controls and surveillance strategy to provide us with an umbrella an overarching framework for how we would develop this then included risk assessments compliance reviews, IT and information management and analysis very surveillance and assets evaluations and then came up with a cooperative regional strategy about how the Pacific Island region would build its maritime security through the monitoring control and surveillance strategy the reason why I just skipped that is the point I want to make at the end of all of this is that we have had a lot of success with the regional coordination and regional cooperation strategies that we have developed but where it comes down to it ultimately is the national implementation countries are the ones that prosecute vessels countries are the ones that organize their assets countries are the ones that actually control their exclusive economic statements and control these resources and that's where we're starting to see more work as required and again Australia and other countries are starting to support a lot more development and it's the development that occurs within those regions that provides the basis for the security that we have an interest in but more importantly that the countries themselves have an interest in and that's where it comes down to engaging those countries and supporting their ability to develop their economies and also develop this sovereign powers I'll leave it at that given that we're running out of time thank you very much