I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. Australia has been everywhere in the Pacific Islands recently, with four security agreements underway and a Prime minister turning up for signings that didn't eventuate or to keep China's military at a distance. At the same time, ORCUS is remaking our defense strategy with eight nuclear powered submarines, expanded facilities for US forces, and plans for a new East Coast submarine base. For some watching on, those two approaches are at odds.
The diplomacy aims to prevent a Chinese foothold, while ORCUS gives them the exact reason why they need one. Today, Director of the International Security Program at the Low Institute, Sam Rogavin on the contradiction at the heart of Australia's Pacific policy and if there's a safer way to defend our region. It's Thursday, September twenty five, So Sam, Australia is currently working on for security arrangements in the Pacific
Islands with different nations. So do you mind just laying out for me what those arrangements are and why it is that we want them.
Yeah, Well, I think the four you're referring to her with Tavalu, Naru, Vanuatu and now Papua New Guinea. It's important to note that for Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea,
those haven't actually been secured yet. There were some slightly embarrassing delays for Prime Minister Albanesi when on both occasions he went to both those countries for signing ceremonies and then the local governments decided at the last minute that they weren't quite ready to agree to the fine printed, so the signing ceremonies have been delayed.
It's the government I hope to emerge from the Pacific over the last two weeks holding aloft two documents or two treaties, one from Vanuatu, the Nakamal Agreement that it hoped to sign last week, and this defense treaty that has been talked about so widely and so broadly for the last three or four weeks in particular, and in the end it's emerging with none.
But nevertheless, the direction of movements pretty clear on all four. And in fact you could go beyond those four and say Australia's struck new agreements with various Pacific island countries and has stepped up its Pacific diplomatic and aid game considerably since twenty eighteen, or maybe even slightly before. And look to my mind as a security expert, what all this effort has in common is a greater sense of
concern about China's position in the Pacific Islands region. And we know that China has been very busy in the region in the last decade. China became the second largest aid donor in the Pacific Islands region, really from out of nowhere. We also know it achieved a security agreement with the Solomon Islands in twenty twenty two, and off the back of that, proposed a region wide security deal with twelve Pacific Island countries, which the Pacific Island countries
thankfully declined to participate in. But nevertheless, when it comes to security, when one side wins, another side tends to lose. Security is zero some So we're really worried about China setting up new security arrangements in the Pacific Islands region and we're trying to counteract that, or in some cases, I think in the case of those four that we mentioned, we're trying to preempt China.
And you mentioned that Not all of these deals are necessarily going smoothly. Some haven't been finalized yet. So what are the sticking points and what role does climate change our response to it play.
Look, climate change plays a part here because while Australia is very much consumed with great power politics and we're seeing the Pacific Islands region as a kind of board for great power politics, the Pacific island countries themselves chafe a little bit at that idea because I think it kind of excludes them, and they think that what it does is it sidelines the very thing that the very security issue that they are most worried about, which is climate change.
Climate change and sea level raise is the single greatest threat facing small island euloping states, including those in the Pacific where Solomon Islands is.
There's no point worrying about great powers jostling over military basing and military influence if your country is itself physically disappearing before your eyes.
It's affecting our communities and it is a very expensive excess for us to keep on rebuilding every year whenever you have saclans.
And I think these kind of security agreements do chafe a little bit against what they consider to be their top priority. And so you can see in some of the language that our leaders use around these agreements that they at the very least acknowledge the fact that, yes, the Pacific Islands countries are worried about climate change. Above all, this government has a claim to being a bit more a bit more sympathetic to those concerns than the previous Liberal National Coalition government.
We are all members of the Pacific family and it's important that we cooperate on economic issues, on national security and in dealing with the challenge of climate chain.
But nevertheless, I'm sure the Pacific Islands countries feel we're not doing enough.
And these arrangements, as you say on Australia's end, are designed to try and limit China's influence in the region for security purposes. So is that working so far?
I think it is. I mean, there is good evidence that in the case of p and G and Vanawatu, that the late in the last decade did make forays, did make entreaties to both of those governments suggesting a permanent Chinese military presence. Those efforts were headed off, partly by Australian diplomatic action. But Australia has some natural advantages here.
First of all, we're really close to the Pacific Islands region physically, so that means if there's either a natural disaster or some kind of political crisis where they need help from the outside, Australia is always going to be there first, as long as we maintain certain basic capabilities. The other thing we have in that advantage is a certain sort of cultural and economic closeness that the Chinese will never have. We're part of the Pacific Islands for
them and China is not. We have a Pacific Island worker scheme and so does New Zealand, which ties us economically to the Pacific in the way that again that China can't match. But I think above all of that, there's an imbalance of resolve in the sense that the Pacific Islands are always going to matter more to us than it will to China. So China has a lot of resources, but at best the Pacific Islands is going to be a second and maybe a third order priority
for China. It's first order for Australian always will be.
So is there anything in Australia's foreign policy then that is getting in the way of that goal to maintain our influence and reduce China's well.
I would argue that ucas in a word, is the thing that's getting in the way. So it kind of incentivizes China to have a greater presence in the region because after all, we are setting up a new submarine base on the west coast.
So crucial Henderson Shipyards in Western Australia will get a twelve billion dollar upgrade.
Early estimates of what Henderson will cost is in the order of twenty five millions.
So this is not the whole.
In future, we will set up a submarine base on the East coast, both for Australia and American and potentially British nuclear powered submarines to use. And the upgrade of an Air Force base at a leaf Tindall just south of Darwin, which is going to be capable of hosting American strategic bombers, long range bombers like the B fifty two. The purpose of all these capabilities is really to face up to China and to operate well north of Australia
in a possible conflict with China. I mean, that's why you get nuclear powered submarines so that you can operate thousands of kilometres north of Australia, potentially off the Chinese coast and maybe even firing missiles onto the Chinese mainland, which the Australian Aucust submarines are going to be capable of. So if the objective is to keep China's military out of the Pacific Islands region, then I would argue UCUST does the opposite.
Job coming up. What would it take for Australia to walk away from Aucust? So sam, this running government is going to pretty big lengths here to try and stop China from having any sort of military base in the Pacific. What would it mean for us as a country if we were to fail on that front and a Pacific island nation decided that they would allow China to set up a base.
Well, one base in the Pacific Islands region would be a squadron of maritime patrol aircraft or potentially a small floatilla with a destroyer and a replenishmentship or something similar. That would be irritating for Australia. But if there were several Chinese military bases in our region, well that's more
than an irritant. That's then a direct threat to Australia because they can be mutually reinforcing, and in wartime they could actually be used to threaten the Australian land mass and the military bases on our soil, so we'd have to beef up our defenses substantially to deal with something
like that, and so on that level. The diplomatic effort that we're making right now is really smart and really good because we're making a relatively small diplomatic investment in trying to prevent something that would be extremely expensive to counteract if we didn't make that diplomatic effort.
Okay, So while we do that, though, we are also, as you say, pursuing ORCAS. You mentioned the submarines and their bases that will come with that agreement. Tell me more about the capacity of those submarines.
At the heart of ORCAS is an agreement to supply Australia with eight nuclear powered submarines. Important distress, nuclear powered, not nuclear armed. Australia is not beging to become a nuclear armed country. But these boats would be powered by nuclear reactors, which means they have basically infinite range and infinite endurance. That's a really potent capability to have if your plan is to operate off the Chinese coast alongside
the US Navy. Right, if you want to simply defend the Australian land mass, you know there's a huge opportunity cost because they're incredibly expensive. So a very potent capability, but a capability that generates interest raises Chinese awareness of us. The time to attack a nuclear powered submarine is before it goes underwater. The time to do that is in port.
And so these facilities, the one we're building in Western Australia and the one we're proposing to build on the East coast, it'll probably be in Port Kembler, those are going to be targets for China.
Right, So you're making the argument that ORCAS ultimately makes us less safe in Australia because it makes us more of a target to China. So what do you think it would take for the Australian government to walk away from the deal?
I think it's possible to imagine a kind of crisis that may have been unimaginable under the previous administration. So when you consider the way that Trump has treated Zelenski, the way he has treated the Canadian government, for instance, the South African government as well India, more recently came in for some really rough treatment from the Trump administration. It's not at all silly to see a crisis occurring in the bilateral relationship that sours Australia on the Orchest deal.
A crisis that could have nothing to do with defense. It could be to do with our pharmaceutical benefit scheme, for instance, or some other economic or trade measure. It could be to do with the sale of iron ore to China. It's easy to imagine various scenarios where the Americans just say no, sorry, We're not going to put up with this anymore. So the scope for a crisis is much wider now than it's ever been under any
previous administration, and that could cause Australia to reconsider. But nevertheless, I think the more likely possibility is that cancelation of at least the American portion of the submarine deal that's initiated by the United States rather than by US. The American shipbuilding enterprise is in a bad way and they are having trouble ramping up their submarine production. They have an ambition to have sixty six submarines of their own by the middle of the century. They're currently behind to
achieve that. So it's a really big question whether they can even meet their own audiobook, never mind adding the three or maybe as many as five submarines for Australia as well.
Yeah, publicly, at least, you only ever hear the Australian government being supportive of the Orcus arrangement. But do you think that there is some disquiet.
Well, there is simply no political motivation or incentive for anyone in the Labor Party to break away at the moment. There is still a fear I think in the Labor Party of looking soft on national security and a kind of a breakaway, a big dramatic break from Orcus, would open up that territory again for the opposition, and I think that scares the.
Government and so in not wanting to appear a week on national security, in your view, we are becoming ultimately weaker.
I'm yet to persuade ministers in the government, but that is certainly my view. Yeah, there are safer and less provocative ways for Australia to defend itself. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called the Ekidne Strategy. You know, the metaphor of the Echidna is that you look safe and unthreatening to those that mean you no harm, but you look prickly and undigestible to those that do. What I'm arguing for is for Australia to adopt a
defense strategy that is purely defensive. So again the ekidna metaphor is useful here because an ekidna doesn't go out looking for enemies. It's not a hunter, but you wouldn't want to mess with it because it can end badly for you if you try to attack it, because it's prickly and it's hard to digest. It's a strategy that makes it extremely painful and costly and difficult for an adversary to operate in the air and maritime approaches around Australia.
But it's not an approach that is any threat to them. And so what that means essentially for Australia is that we need a defense force that is really good at shooting down missiles and aircraft if they ever come at us, and sinking ships if they ever come at us. Now, you need various ways to do all those things, but that is an affordable defense strategy for in Australia. It's even one that we can afford in the event that we don't get as much help from the Americans as
we might currently be relying on. And I think that is a future that we need to plan for.
Well, Sam, thank you so much for your time today.
I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Also in the news today, the ABC has been ordered to pay one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for unlawfully sacking journalist Antonette Latouf after she shared a Human Rights Watch post on Gaza. The penalty has been levied in the Federal court, which found the public broadcaster breached workplace law when it sacked miss Latoufe from her casual role on ABC Radio Sydney's Mornings program in twenty twenty three.
The ABC has twenty eight days to pay the fine, which comes in addition to the seventy thousand dollars in damages she was previously awarded. And the Palestinian Envoy at the United Nations has used his address to the Security Council to plead for humanitarian aid access to Gaza. Riard Mansau told the Council that women and children have been the primary targets of Israeli military action in Gaza and
are the most vulnerable. It comes as one hundred and fifty seven UN member states have recognized the State of Palestine as a sovereign nation.
I'm Ruby Jones.
This is seven am. Thanks for listening.