Australia hard pushed to fulfil pledge to assist Pacific
Updated
Australia's newest defence white paper promises to continue Australia's role in assisting Pacific states that are hit by instability and crisis, but there may not be enough Australian personnel to fulfil the pledge. And there's a reluctance to move on ideas for a regional response body because of concerns about militarising the region.
Presenter: Linda Mottram, Canberra correspondent
Speakers: Professor Hugh White, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University; Dr Benjamin Reilly, Centre for Democratic Institutions, Australian National University; Fergus Hanson, research fellow, Lowy Institute for International Policy
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MOTTRAM: Australia's new defence white paper outlines the country's strategic challenges, responses, and capabilities to the year 2030. Its top priority is defence of the homeland. Second is ensuring stability in the region, including a continued commitment to stabilisation, peacekeeping and humanitarian roles.
But in the ongoing dissection of the white paper, Professor Hugh White, head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, says Australia has too few soldiers to fulfil the regional promise.
WHITE: When we first went into East Timor in 1999, nobody dreamed that in 2009, ten years later, we'd still have six or seven hundred Australian soldiers stationed in Dili, trying to keep the peace in an independent East Timor, with no particular prospect for when we're going to get them home.
MOTTRAM: Australia also has 140 soldiers in Solomon Islands as part of the Regional Assistance Mission, RAMSI, and will shortly have 1,500 soldiers in Afghanistan on an open ended deployment there. Despite the growing number of such deployments in recent decades, the white paper does not promise more soldiers. And speaking to Australia's Public Affairs Channel, Professor White says that's a failure.
WHITE: Australia would not have sufficient forces to be able to use our military to help stabilise a country like Papua New Guinea, for example, if it had a serious breakdown of law and order, even just in Port Moresby, or Lae, in the bigger centres. And that's not a hypothetical situation, that's the sort of thing that I think most people recognise could happen fairly easily.
MOTTRAM: There have been suggestions for a Pacific battalion or regiment, possibly with Pacific islanders given training in the Australian military, to form a regional ready reaction force. But there has been little progress. Dr Benjamin Reilly, director of the Centre for Democratic Institutions at the ANU in Canberra, says this means that responsibility will naturally fall to Australia and New Zealand - in the absence of any other major military actors.
REILLY: The point I would make, though, is that Australia is very unlikely to do any serious military intervention in the Pacific by itself. If you look at the experience of RAMSI, or the East Timor intervention, Australia normally tries to get a grouping of like minded countries together.
MOTTRAM: Multinational ventures contribute to legitimacy and therefore success. But Dr Reilly says building any additional military capacity in Pacific states raises another issue.
REILLY: The most recent coup in Fiji has just illustrated again what a number of Pacific countries know already, which is that you have to be very careful in having your own military. I mean, there are only three Pacific countries that have a standing military - Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Tonga - and in two of those countries, Fiji and Tonga, you can see examples of the military actually being used as agents not just of defending the country but of also stymying democracy, oppressing the people.
MOTTRAM: Six years ago, the Lowy Institute's Fergus Hanson authored the idea of a Pacific Peace Maintenance Group. He says the structure of RAMSI picks up the recommendation for a regional identity in such operations. He also warns against militarising the Pacific, but says there is still an argument for a more permanent regional response group.
HANSON: In the RAMSI model, for example, we've seen the use of regional police forces and every country needs policing forces and a lot of the work involved in these types of operations is general policing duties and seeing a regional police force that people can trust.
