Australia pushes for PNG security pact to counter China’s influence in the Pacific
- Australia’s ‘accelerated timeline’ for signing a security pact ‘speaks to the urgency’ it feels about China’s growing influence, observers say
- It came after Papua New Guinea said it would close its trade office in Taiwan, which analysts called ‘a sweetener’ to improve ties with Beijing
It came two days after PNG foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko had said his country’s trade office in Taiwan, established in 2015, would be closed due to “insufficient economic benefit” and the poor behaviour of its representatives based there.
A review of its foreign missions had indicated that the money spent on keeping the Taiwan office open was “not justified”, Tkatchenko said, and Port Moresby was “completely embarrassed and ridiculed by the behaviour of certain officers”. In September last year, a PNG diplomat made headlines after attacking his wife and an employee at a restaurant in Taipei during a drunken rage.
Given the lack of official diplomatic ties between PNG and Taiwan – Port Moresby has recognised Beijing since 1976, a year after gaining independence from Australia – the closure of its Taipei trade office “does not signal a lurch towards [mainland] China so much as a removal of an irritant in relations with Beijing”, said Carlyle Thayer, an emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Canberra.
Yet the “accelerated timeline” of the new security pact – with the details to be finalised by April and the treaty signed before June – “certainly speaks to the urgency which Australia feels” said Maholopa Laveil, a Foundation for Development Cooperation Pacific Fellow at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute.