Albanese was chasing a big announcement. He got a reality check instead

To misquote Oscar Wilde: to fall short on one Pacific treaty may look like misfortune, but to fall short on two looks like carelessness.

Last week, Anthony Albanese left Vanuatu without finalising a landmark security pact; this week, he departed Papua New Guinea without striking a sweeping defence treaty. The plan was for both to be signed during Albanese’s visits, but neither Vanuatu nor PNG were able to close out deals that had been framed as faits accomplis.

Something has clearly gone wrong behind the scenes on planning and communications for Albanese’s latest Pacific trips, raising expectations of imminent foreign policy triumphs that failed to materialise.

It’s a sobering – indeed, galling – reality check for Australia on the difficulties of Pacific diplomacy in an era of fierce geostrategic competition.

The prime minister can travel across the region and build relationships with his counterparts. He can pursue bold agreements and offer Australia’s economically challenged neighbours buckets of cash. That doesn’t mean he will be able to seal the deal.

The government’s previous efforts to deepen Australia’s influence in the Pacific and curtail China’s clout in the region have undoubtedly been a major foreign policy success. Since coming to office, Albanese has struck innovative agreements with Tuvalu and Nauru that offer financial and migration support in exchange for locking China out of a security role.

He has spearheaded a Pacific-wide policing initiative aimed at excluding Beijing, and championed PNG’s entry into the National Rugby League.

Locked in what government officials describe as a daily “knife fight” against China in the Pacific, Australia has managed to inflict plenty of wounds on its opponent. That run of victories has now stalled.

The Morrison government was criticised for a lack of energy and commitment to the Pacific, allowing China to swoop in and strike a security pact with Solomon Islands in 2022. That’s not the problem here. If anything, the Albanese government has rushed to reach ambitious agreements that would usually take much longer to achieve. The effort has been there, but not the execution.

According to Defence Minister Richard Marles, the seeds for the Australia-PNG defence treaty were sown in January during discussions about updating existing security agreements with his counterpart, Billy Joseph. The two countries set the goal of signing a deal during PNG’s 50th anniversary celebrations in September.

This was a rapid time frame for a historic elevation of the countries’ relationship that would see them integrate their defence forces, commit to come to each other’s aid if under attack, and allow Australia unimpeded access to designated military facilities in PNG.

An alliance agreement of this magnitude would usually take years, not months, to reach.

And there was always something jarring about the idea of announcing the integration of the two nations’ militaries just as PNG was marking its independence from Australia. The colonial overtones were unavoidable, even if it was PNG that sought the agreement in the first place.

In the end, with PNG’s politicians scattered throughout the country for independence celebrations, Prime Minister James Marape could not assemble a quorum of cabinet ministers to meet in Port Moresby to approve the pact. This raises the question: if the treaty is so important for PNG and so popular within the government, why didn’t Marape schedule a cabinet meeting at an appropriate time to sign off on it?

Australians dubious about the merit of handing billions of dollars to PNG to establish a rugby league team and upgrade its military will not be impressed by the chain of events. And Beijing now has time to try to stir up opposition to the deal within PNG, just as it did in Vanuatu.

The defence treaty would put Australia’s relationship with PNG on par with that of the United States and New Zealand. Yet, the process has been carried out in secret with little public debate about its pros and cons, or transparency about the cost to Australian taxpayers.

Joanne Wallis, a Pacific expert at the University of Adelaide, has been a rare sceptical voice raising questions about the implications of the pact. Could it draw Australia into a conflict with Indonesia, which shares a border with PNG? Could it drag PNG into a war with China over Taiwan, via the US and Australia? These are weighty questions that merit vigorous discussion.

If the PNG agreement is struck next month, as Albanese predicts, then this week’s episode will look like a mere hiccup. A deal with Vanuatu looks more difficult because of substantive concerns about its impact on Chinese infrastructure investment.

Either way, the diplomatic knife fight in the Pacific carries on. As necessary as they are, ambition and effort are no guarantee of triumph.

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