Amidst great diplomatic pomp, Australia signed two new treaties with Fiji in July, known as the Ocean of Peace Alliance and the Vuvale Union. Together, they commit the two countries to jointly meet any security threat faced by either party, and announce their hostility to any unnamed “third parties” establishing a military presence in the Pacific. This makes Fiji just the fourth country with which Australia has concluded a formal military alliance, along with the United States, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.
The Fiji treaties represent the latest victory for Australia in a diplomatic offensive going back several years. Since 2024, Australia has also concluded security agreements of varying form with Tuvalu, Naoero (Nauru), Vanuatu and PNG. Negotiations with the Solomons Islands over a new security treaty are ongoing.
Reading through the treaties, you will find many rhetorical flourishes about mutual respect and shared values. But the single most important word for understanding Australia’s diplomatic agenda does not appear at all. That word is “China”. These new treaties are aimed squarely at maintaining Australia’s dominant position as a neo-colonial power in the south-west Pacific, blocking China from establishing its own security relationships with Pacific island nations.
Australia: neocolonial power in the south-west Pacific
The treaties run on a spectrum of deference towards Australia, depending on the relative strength or weakness of the Pacific state concerned. At one extreme, the Fiji treaties commit the two countries to mutual defence, with no further concessions to Australian interests. Fiji has largely avoided the financial problems afflicting many Pacific states and has an established military of its own.
At the other end of the spectrum are smaller countries that are financially dependent on Australia, and for which the terms of the security treaties are far from equal. Notably, Australia now has veto power over Naoero or Tuvalu establishing a security partnership with any other country. What’s more, Australia now also has the right to block third parties becoming involved in so-called critical infrastructure in the island nations. These are assets that are primarily civil in nature rather than military, but which have security applications, including ports, aviation, telecommunications, banking and energy—in short, the basis for any sort of modern economic activity. Although maintaining their formal independence, these countries are one step away from becoming Australian protectorates. Vanuatu’s position is slightly stronger, and it has to consult Australia only on third-party involvement in critical infrastructure.
It remains to be seen what terms Australia can extract from the Solomon Islands. Former Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare at times tried to play China and Australia off against each other to extract concessions. In 2022, he signed a deal with China to provide training and equipment for local police, precisely the kind of involvement Australia wants to preclude. But China’s involvement in the country has been contentious in domestic Solomon Islands politics, and current Prime Minister Mathew Wale is more inclined to look to Australia for support.
From Australia’s perspective, though, the most important security relationship in the Pacific is with PNG. The lessons of World War Two, when Japan advanced across the island of New Guinea before being halted, have deeply ingrained themselves within Australian military thinking. To the generals and strategic analysts, PNG represents a kind of defensive rampart for the Australian mainland. Anything other than a strong Australian grasp on this territory is therefore unthinkable.
The Mutual Defence Treaty signed in 2025 formalises this thinking. It declares that an armed attack on either party is considered a collective security threat and entrenches already close defence ties between the countries. This includes intelligence sharing, aligning logistics and defence industries, and developing shared bases, such as at the Lombrum naval base at Manus Island, which is currently being expanded at a cost of half a billion dollars. The established practice of embedding Australian personnel within the PNG military will continue.
In addition, the treaty now provides for the recruitment of PNG citizens directly into the Australian armed forces. This offers Australia a way to boost the size of its military, which for decades has lagged behind recruitment targets. Moreover, it means Australian military units would have a built-in reserve of local knowledge in the event that they are needed to deploy in PNG itself.
Occupying the Pacific’s empty space
Australia can extract such concessionary agreements from the Pacific nations because of its relative economic strength. Australia is among the top trade partners for most Pacific nations. Australian aid to the region totalled more than $1.5 billion in 2024, dwarfing any other country’s. Australia is now also the leading source of development loans in the region.
Australian largesse does not result from humanitarian concern. It is a tool in what Foreign Minister Penny Wong has called “a state of permanent contest in the Pacific”. Having accused the previous Liberal government of slacking off and allowing China to build its influence in the region, Labor has made it a priority to reinforce Australian pre-eminence.
Access to the Australian labour market for Pacific workers is another point of leverage, with remittances an important source of income for many Pacific nations. These workers then provide cheap labour for Australian agriculture in particular.
Yet it is striking how little the new treaties relate to gaining economic advantage for Australia. With the exception of mining interests in PNG, Australian investment in the region is minimal. PNG is ranked 24th on the list of Australia’s most important export destinations, and 20th as a foreign investment location. Other Pacific states barely rate at all. In recent years, the Australian government has had to persuade Australian banks to maintain operations in the region and has subsidised Telstra’s presence in the Solomon Islands.
The Pacific, then, is not a place with much positive purpose from the point of view of Australian capitalism. At best, places like Naoero are a black hole into which refugees can be dumped, out of sight and out of mind. But mostly, capitalists view the Pacific as a series of problems in need of solutions. It is seen as a region of corrupt or incompetent governments, failed economic development and ethnic conflict. All of these must be managed by the Australian state lest “instability” offer a rival power the chance to establish a foothold in the region.
In the 1870s, the Melbourne Daily Telegraph wrote of the prospects of colonising New Guinea: “[T]hough we do not want the island ourselves, we do want very much that no one else shall have it”. A similar attitude continues to prevail today.
Above all, the Pacific is viewed by Australia as a kind of empty space. Like any vacuum, it will inevitably be filled by one imperial power or another. Australia is determined to get in first. In 1999, Australia sent troops to Timor-Leste to ensure an orderly transition to independence after Indonesian occupation. Since then, Australian police or soldiers have been deployed to the Solomon Islands (twice), PNG, Naoero, Tonga and Timor-Leste (again).
Australian imperialism in the post-liberal world order
Based on Australia’s frenetic manoeuvring in the Pacific, you would be forgiven for thinking China poses an imminent threat. But China lacks either motivation or means to mount any kind of invasion of the Australian continent.
Australia’s imperial ambitions, however, go well beyond the defence of the mainland. The 2026 National Defence Strategy aims at denying hostile powers the ability to operate in what it calls “our primary area of military interest—the immediate region encompassing the Northeast Indian Ocean through maritime Southeast Asia into the Pacific. This region includes Australia, its populated offshore territories and its northern approaches”.
The need to exclude other powers from this enormous swathe of territory continues a longstanding preoccupation of Australian strategic thinking. With its origins as an offshoot of the British Empire and surrounded by (presumed hostile) Asian peoples, Australia has depended economically and militarily on long and exposed seaborne trade routes. If China were to succeed in establishing a permanent military presence anywhere in the south-west Pacific, protecting these trade routes would become more difficult. It would also expose Australia to what is termed “coercion”: threats and intimidation that fall short of an outright declaration of war, but which can be used to gain leverage over a weaker state.
Australian fears have only been fuelled by the decline of the liberal, rules-based international order. For decades, that order provided Australia with a benign security environment underpinned by the United States’ military power, along with expanding trade with economically dynamic East Asian states. Now, international relations are entering an era of “might makes right”, in which diplomacy and free trade agreements take a back seat to the harsh realities of military power.
In a world ruled by naked force, the Australian ruling class has no intention of being reduced to a third-rate power in China’s orbit. It fears an Asia-Pacific region dominated by the Chinese military would result in Australia’s trade, economic development and diplomatic relations being conducted on terms laid down by Beijing.
One response to this threat is the AUKUS pact, which will provide Australia (in theory at least) with nuclear-powered attack submarines that can engage Chinese forces far from Australian shores. It also further integrates Australia with the US military machine, making it virtually inevitable that Australia would be drawn into any major US-China conflict. For this reason, criticism of AUKUS from within mainstream politics revolves around the idea that Australia is too subservient to the United States. The Greens, for example, call for an end to AUKUS and for “regional defence agreements [which] support an independent and peaceful role for Australia in the region”.
But Australia’s relations with the Pacific island nations reveal that Australia is a strong, imperialist power in its own right. The new security treaties are in no way dictated by the alliance with the United States. On the contrary, in the south-west Pacific, Australia leads and others follow. The problem is not that the Australian state lacks independence. It is that, whether through AUKUS or through contestation with China in the Pacific, Australia is throwing fuel on the fire of imperialist competition.
When the United States, Australia and Japan last battled for supremacy in the Pacific, the conflict tore through Timor, PNG and the Solomon Islands. The exact death toll among Pacific islanders is unknown. No-one even bothered to count how many “natives” were killed. Then, as now, such details were unimportant for the generals and politicians of the imperialist powers. Far from providing “security”, Australia’s regional posture is making the world a more dangerous place for all of us.
