Australia casts a big shadow on the Pacific

By HELEN TUNNAH deputy political editor


John Howard could not say it often enough.

"We're here as a friend. We're not here to throw our weight around."

Mind you, the neighbourliness might have been more convincing if Australia's Prime Minister hadn't been quite so bothered by domestic, election-year issues.

"I just have something to say at the beginning, which is directed to the Australian media - other people can report it if they want to."

Well, thanks, and standing under a coconut tree on Samoa's west coast with its warm airs and beautiful seas and surrounded by the Pacific's media, Mr Howard began:

"I just want to say on behalf of the Government that the industrial relations policy released yesterday by the Labor Party is every bit as bad as I expected it to be."

He might not have realised where he was, but everyone else was at the Pacific Islands Forum ... in Samoa, not Canberra.

After tut-tutting about the pre-Olympics breakdown of an Aussie athlete and some apparent alcohol-related antics by a VIP at the wedding of one of Tasmania's daughters to a Scandinavian Prince, Mr Howard came back on song.

There was money for the Niue Trust Fund, where for once Australia's $4 million contribution failed to better New Zealand's $5 million, and more money for another transport study.

The Aussies are also apparently going to fund a project to make sure mobile phones work across all the Pacific, and that can't be a bad thing.

But therein lies the Pacific dilemma. In drafting its Pacific Plan, there is no getting around Australia's utter dominance of the region.

And no matter how uncomfortable that makes the smaller states feel, unless they hitch their futures to another region, such as Asia, there is virtually nothing they can do about it.

A year ago, in Auckland, the 16 Pacific Island Forum leaders announced the setting up of an eminent persons' group to work out how the region should co-operate.

It came amid the chaos of the Solomon Islands, and as Australia - and to a lesser extent New Zealand - poured troops and police in there to restore law and order. It also came post the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed more than 200 people, including scores of Australians, and left Mr Howard's Government fearful of a terrorist attack on its soil.

Talk at the forum now has an air of worry hanging over it.

The Pacific Plan, for which there remain surprisingly few details but lofty goals, is couched around terms of "good" governance, security and economic development.

Cook Islands Premier Dr Robert Woonton rightly pointed out that "Australia doesn't have the same concerns" as other Pacific states.

But, with Nauru and Papua New Guinea on the brink of economic crises, and Fiji still battling internal race demons, it was clearly time to set up another round of talks.

And that is what this forum achieved. It set up a taskforce. It will over the next year or so draw up a plan on how the region should work more closely together to catch struggling states before they become failing states. Which is what was being talked about a year ago.

The taskforce is expected to have "concrete" plans by next year's forum, hosted by Papua New Guinea.

The region's second most populous country, behind Australia, will celebrate 30 years of independence in bleak fashion - in economic disarray, with its resources dwindling and with an exploding Aids problem.

And it will be up to Big Brother Australia to step in and prevent a collapse into a failed state.