What about its commitment to the islands?

Nic Maclellan



 
Australia’s Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance, Bob McMullan, has announced he will retire from Parliament at the next national elections.
  McMullan’s planned departure follows the resignation last October of Duncan Kerr as Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Islands Affairs—and raises questions about the future of the team that links Australia with its island neighbours.
   When it came to office in November 2007, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) government gave immediate priority to improving Australia’s engagement with the Pacific islands.
  Over the last two years Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a former diplomat, has been active in regional foreign policy, supported by Foreign Minister Stephen Smith and two Parliamentary secretaries, Bob McMullan for aid and Duncan Kerr for Pacific Islands Affairs.
  Both Parliamentary secretaries had previously served as senior ministers in the Keating government during the early 1990s. Their resignations come at the end of long political careers, after more than 20 years in Parliament.
  Following McMullan’s resignation, Prime Minister Rudd stated: “Both Duncan Kerr and Bob McMullan have made important contributions to our reinvigorated relationship with the Pacific islands countries.”
  In spite of this, Pacific diplomats in Canberra have expressed concern that the Australian government has failed to replace Kerr in a position designed to assist co-ordination of aid, trade and foreign affairs portfolios in the region.
  At the time of writing, it is unlikely the government will maintain the specific position for Pacific affairs.
 
Aust’s engagement with region
  The 11 years of conservative government under former Prime Minister John Howard left significant regional legacies, including RAMSI, the Pacific Plan and the PICTA-PACER trade process.
  But by the end of the Howard years, relations with key Pacific governments were in tatters.  Ties with the PNG and Solomon Islands governments were soured by the Julian Moti affair and Australian contact with PNG government ministers was banned.
  Fiji’s interim administration was angry over travel bans introduced by Australia and New Zealand, and Howard’s refusal to act on global warming dismayed the small islands states that are already suffering adverse climate impacts.
  As the newly elected prime minister, Rudd travelled to the December 2007 UN climate conference in Bali, to stand alongside PNG leader Sir Michael Somare and announce Australia’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
  Early changes—some symbolic, some substantial—initially improved the atmospherics in the region: promises of increased aid and A$150 million in climate adaptation funds; the announcement of the Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme; the Stolen Generations apology; and closing the “Pacific Solution” refugee detention centres in Nauru. Since then, regular diplomatic visits to the Pacific by Smith, McMullan and Kerr have reinforced key policy decisions by the Rudd Government.
  While Howard’s foreign minister Alexander Downer dominated both the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), the ALP’s Pacific engagement was divided, uneasily, between Foreign Minister Smith and the two Parliamentary Secretaries.
  While active around ministerial meetings on RAMSI and Fiji, Smith has often left regional lobbying to the two parliamentary secretaries and Trade Minister Simon Crean.
 
Focus on social policy
  Over the last two years, the Rudd government has been negotiating a series of Pacific Partnerships for Development—bilateral agreements with islands states that set out a series of requirements for public sector reform, trade liberalisation and improved governance of aid pr
ogrammes (Canberra plans to extend these agreements to cover security issues).
  In spite of continuities with Howard-era policies on trade and aid conditionality, McMullan’s action on development and social policy has won support from many Australian non-government organisations.
  Marc Purcell, Executive Director of the Australian Council for International Development (the umbrella body for non-government aid agencies) told ISLANDS BUSINESS: “Over the last two years, under McMullan’s leadership, we’ve seen a commitment to engaging with civil society in Australia and across the region.
  “There’s also been significant action by AusAID on issues such as disability rights, violence against women, and bilateral aid partnerships.”
  Last year, the Australian government issued a major policy statement on violence against women and children in the Pacific, following the release of the 2008 study Violence against Women in Melanesia and East Timor.
  After decades of lobbying and advocacy by women’s groups, Pacific leaders have also made a formal commitment to act on violence against women and children.
  The Pacific Islands Forum’s commitment to eradicating sexual and gender-based violence, agreed in Cairns last August, is the first policy on the issue from a Forum leaders’ meeting.
  With significant personal support from McMullan, AusAID has also increased its support for disability programmes in the region.
  For the first time ever, a Forum Disability Ministers Meeting was held in Rarotonga in October 2009, to co-ordinate initiatives and endorse a Pacific Regional Strategy on Disability, which will run from 2010 to 2015.
  In spite of this, after more than two years in government, the low hanging fruit has been plucked.
  Australia’s relations with islands nations, especially members of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, are again stretched in many areas.
  There are significant policy tensions over climate change, the suspension of Fiji from the Forum, the process and timing of negotiations for the PACER-Plus regional free trade agreement and maintaining the independence of the Office of the Chief Trade Advisor.
  Other Australian policies, such as the pursuit of former Solomon Islands Attorney General Julian Moti, have also ended in failure.
  Moti, a Fiji-born Australian citizen, was at the centre of tensions between the Howard and Sogavare governments, and was extradited to Australia to face child sex charges after being arrested by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in Solomon Islands.
  But in December 2009, an Australian court threw out the charges against Moti after finding “an abuse of process” in the prosecution case.
  Justice Debbie Mullins criticised AFP conduct, saying this “raises questions about the integrity of the administration of the Australian justice system.”
  The AFP’s payment of A$150,000 living expenses to the alleged victim and her family was “an affront to the public conscience” and “the payments by the AFP to the witnesses who live in Vanuatu bring the administration of justice into disrepute to such an extent that [Moti] must succeed on his claim of abuse of process on that basis.”
 
Domestic priorities
  Since hosting the August 2009 Forum Leaders meeting in Cairns, Rudd has served as Chair of the Pacific Islands Forum. But after Kerr and McMullan’s resignations, the team that supports him on Pacific policy is distracted by a range of domestic challenges.
  Trade Minister Simon Crean has led on Australian policy around PACER-Plus, but has been focused on major trade negotiations with China, Japan and the WTO. Recent media reports suggest that Crean may leave government to take up an ambassadorial post if Rudd reshuffles his cabinet.
  As Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard is responsible for the Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme. But Gillard has a massive workload with domestic reform of education and industrial relations, and little time to monitor a small programme on Pacific labour mobility.
  As ISLANDS BUSINESS reported in January, the lack of progress in the seasonal worker pilot—with only 56 workers coming to Australia in 2009—has raised concern over Australia’s commitment to regional labour mobility for unskilled workers, even though this is a key plank of regional economic integration.
  The long-serving Director General of AusAID, Bruce Davis, was replaced in 2009 after more than a decade as head of the Australian aid programme.

Dumping the Pacific portfolio?
  A senior DFAT official, Peter Baxter, is currently acting in the position, highlighting the way both Australia and New Zealand have moved to integrate AusAID and NZAID into foreign affairs and more closely align their overseas development aid programmes with trade objectives.
  The future of the position of Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Islands Affairs is uncertain. A specific position for regional relations was first created under the Keating ALP government, when Gordon Bilney served as Minister for Development Cooperation and Pacific Island Affairs from 1993 to 1996.
  The position was abolished when John Howard’s Coalition government held office from 1996 until 2007, with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer firmly in control of both DFAT and AusAID.
  Under the Rudd government, Kerr has served in the post for just two years before resigning last October and announcing plans to return to his career as a barrister after the next elections. Today, four months after his resignation, Kerr’s position remains unfilled.
  Foreign Minister Smith has defended the delay, telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “Our enduring commitment to firstly repair and secondly enhance our engagement with the Pacific is not dependent on any one particular individual, whether that’s Duncan Kerr, Bob McMullan or indeed even me.”
  Smith says that the decision on whether to replace Duncan Kerr “is a matter entirely for the prime minister to contemplate.” But the Office of the Prime Minister declined to answer a series of questions from ISLANDS BUSINESS on whether Kerr would be replaced and the position maintained.
  A spokesperson for Rudd simply stated: “No decision has been made on the future of the position.”