The Albanese Government appears to want to force Pacific countries into choices they do not want to make.

Irrespective of the logistics that delayed inking a new defence treaty with Papua New Guinea last week, the entire exercise reveals enduring problems for Australian diplomacy.

There is, again, little public explanation from the Australian Government about the need for this upgrade in defence relations with its near neighbour.

There is the assumption that Pacific neighbours view the “China threat” in precisely the same terms as hawks in Canberra.

And there is the failure to think about the sensitivities of locking Papua New Guinea into Australia’s strategic sphere of influence at the very moment the nation celebrates 50 years of independence from its former colonial master.

The process has also allowed senior PNG figures to hold up a mirror to Australian policymakers.

Jerry Singirok, formerly a PNG military commander, said, “Any treaty that forces another state to take into the ‘order of battle’ the forces of another state is violating the constitution and the sovereignty of an independent state.” PNG’s opposition leader made similar points.

Australia might have become conditioned over the past 60 years to “interoperability” between respective military forces, in Canberra’s case with America, but there is clearly no consensus in Papua New Guinea on the same prospect.

Singirok raises the very questions about sovereignty and independent decision-making that Australian Governments of both political stripes are yet to answer about AUKUS. Indeed, it would not be unfair to stress that PNG has more of a sense of its own agency than Australia does.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should never have been put in this position. He can feel justifiably let down by both the  Defence Minister Richard Marles and his Minister for Defence Industries, Senator Pat Conroy. Their public braggadocio hardly helped.

Now the delay is inevitably interpreted by hyperventilating commentators here as a “setback”, a “humiliation”, a “defeat” for Australia and a “win for China” in the Pacific “knife fight” with Beijing. Once more, the macho beat hairy chests and pound the zero-sum drum. They talk of bolting “front doors” and “back doors”, of gaping holes being left in Australia’s own “first island chain”.

The language is so dramatic, the assumption being that so long as the tripwire is set and the sabre rattled, China will back off.

As Lowy Interpreter editor Dan Flitton told this column, “The drive for treaties across the Pacific looks like panic. China can put an oil drum and a soldier somewhere and our system freaks out about prospective bases. It’s cheap for Beijing but costly for Canberra.”

Washington, too, is watching closely, especially given its newly named Department of War has a defence co-operation agreement with Papua New Guinea that is legally binding. US officials have already raised the possibility of rotating US forces there in future.

Australia appears to want to force Pacific countries into choices they do not want to make. The tragedy is that diplomatic haste and allowing fear to unbalance informed calculation render modernisation and development a distant second.

But this is not the first time that a perception lingers of Australia rushing to get what it wants from  the relationship with PNG, regardless of local voices.

As Stuart Ward and I explained in our book, The Unknown Nation: Australia after Empire (2010), the granting of independence in 1975 was, rightly, almost wholly motivated by the need to relieve Australia of the “colonialist taint”. This imperative was detected as early as 1961, when rapid progress towards decolonisation in Africa alerted the Department of External Affairs to the need, in the words of diplomat Mick Shann, “to do some solid pressure-cooking of technically and administratively competent Papuans”.

Papua New Guinea, with its myriad internal ethnic and social divisions, had none of the makings of a unitary state, and many islanders looked to the Australian administration for protection from internal rivalries.

Some went so far as to reject Gough Whitlam’s offer of self-determination outright, such as the Karkar islanders who appealed directly to the prime minister in 1973: “Mipela pipel bilong Karkar ino bin laikim or askim long long kwik political Independence, olsem mipela pilim mipela ino redi gut yet” (the people of Karkar do not want nor have we asked for early political independence, which we consider highly premature).

They suggested, and not without justification, that the issue was being driven by the ambitions of the Australian Government rather than the needs of the New Guineans.

But the Whitlam Government was undeterred, and found ways around the problem of internal disunity, to the point of inventing the symbolic trappings of a unitary nationalism in the form of a new anthem and flag as a parting gift. The anthem, “O Arise all you sons”, was written by an Australian soldier, Tom Shacklady. The flag was designed by an indigenous school student, Susan Karike Huhume, in response to a nationwide competition run by the Australian administration in 1971. And this, of course, as Canberra was trying to fashion its own national symbols in the aftermath of empire.

It was an unusual double act, perhaps unique in the history of European colonialism: a colonial master devising emblems of independence for its colonial territory and itself at the same time.

We are in a new era, but these historical echoes are still heard loud enough.

Republished from Australian Financial Review, 21 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.