Bullies, never able to hit upwards, always kick down. The United States beats their vassals in the Indo-Pacific and Europe with vulgar presumption. Their vassals kick down to their own appointees, expecting compliance and respect to various degrees. Australia, long known as Washington’s regional deputy sheriff, looks down on its Pacific Island neighbours as basket cases for charity, potential enclaves for terrorism, and vulnerable to the temptation of rival powers. The language of a relationship falsely described as friendship is better seen as one of financial asymmetry, strategic use and a mockery trapped in the formaldehyde of colonialism. Australians are both confused tourists and mercenaries in the region – and it shows.
On the sidelines of the 54th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Honiara in the Solomon Islands, Australian officials had made it clear that all Pacific Island media would have no role in covering the September 10 press conference with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, held, with boisterous irony, at a sports facility funded by the People’s Republic of China. Papua New Guinea’s National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) was told that “the presser was only for Australian journalists.”
When he was asked by an Australian journalist, Stefan Armbruster, about the bar on Pacific journalists attending the press gathering, the words, delivered with snotty indifference were: “I don’t know what you are talking about mate.” Armbruster expressed his dissatisfaction with the whole matter, insisting that this had “to stop and Pacific journalists treated with respect.”
The Fijian Prime Minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, tried to soften matters by assuming that this was an entirely Australian matter, and therefore something for the Australian Prime Minister and his coddling minders. Landlords, it would seem, must have their day, while native scribblers should repair elsewhere. “The press conference was his so his press people would have made that arrangement, and they might have restricted access to it, and it’s got nothing to do with the Pacific Island Forum.” The Fiji Sun was less accommodating, complaining that “the exclusion was both confusing and detrimental to the representation of regional media.” The decision threatened “to reinforce a narrative that Australia is more focused on controlling its own story than on being a responsible regional partner to Pacific communities.” Rarely has a paper been so relevantly sharp.
On September 12, the Pacific Freedom Forum released a message condemning the exclusion. “This ‘shameful’ act represents a direct assault on press freedom and democratic principles within our Pacific region,” complained the PFF chair from the Solomon Islands, Robert Iroga. “You cannot claim to be part of the Pacific family while silencing Pacific voices. You cannot talk about partnership while blocking journalists from doing their jobs. This cannot happen in our region, at our own forum.” He went on to fume that, “The decision to restrict media access exclusively to Australian outlets while excluding regional journalists demonstrates a troubling disregard for transparency and democratic accountability.”
Appositely enough, these complaints mirror a state of constrictive circumstances that affect Australia’s own relationship with the United States, the paternal bully and Freudian Daddy Canberra struggles to do without. Australian officials do little to enlighten the press corps in their country about what, exactly, is going on with such momentous agreements as AUKUS, or the next security bash with America’s uniformed finest. Canberra’s near-criminal expenditure on nuclear-powered submarines that Australia will never have with any degree of autonomy, in exchange for bolstering US naval shipyards and creating imperial naval hubs in Australia for deployments against China, is something that the Albanese government remains silent about. Their preference is to do things in plain sight.
Better information, without exception, is always to be found in the US State Department and the Pentagon. The US intelligence facility in Pine Gap in the Northern Territory, ostensibly described as a jointly run outfit with Australian personnel, does nothing to inform the residents of the territory, or of Australia, about its role in maintaining US hegemony. Guest lists to events on the base rarely feature locals, and certainly not the local political representative. The facilities have, with little doubt, been used for such unsavoury acts as directing drone strikes against areas of the world most Americans, or Australians, would be unable to locate, spells of strategic bombing, and sharing intelligence with allies no Australian journalist would ever be allowed to officially confirm.
It may well be that the Albanese government’s inexorable gravitation to secrecy is starting to look, rather disconcertingly, like that of his pathologically clandestine predecessor, Scott Morrison. Exuding the confidence that comes from a heaving electoral majority, and the concern that his policies might be subjected to greater scrutiny than he would wish, Albanese is embracing the dark magic of the controlled narrative, the heavily curated truth. If so, such moves are cloddish, insensitive and foolish to the vulnerable island states whose support he so desperately needs. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” suggests Dan McGarry of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, “but if Australia wants the Pacific to choose it over China, maybe it should make the differences easier, not harder to see.”
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
