{"id":64767,"date":"2021-05-29T06:00:23","date_gmt":"2021-05-28T20:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=64767"},"modified":"2021-05-29T08:41:09","modified_gmt":"2021-05-28T22:41:09","slug":"ardern-morrison-meeting-about-the-pacific-not-china-policy-shenanigans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/ardern-morrison-meeting-about-the-pacific-not-china-policy-shenanigans\/","title":{"rendered":"Ardern\u2013Morrison meeting about the Pacific, not China policy shenanigans"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Scott Morrison and Jacinda Ardern will prove the Australia\u2013New Zealand travel bubble works when they meet<\/a> in Queenstown next week. Breathless commentary suggests it\u2019s going to be a difficult meeting over China policy, but that\u2019s unlikely. Instead, the two leaders will almost certainly spend the time accelerating a critical agenda for our two nations with our Pacific partners.<\/p>\n

New Zealand and Australia have deeply complementary strengths and interests, and there\u2019s real work to do in three areas: vaccine distribution to underpin a travel bubble, Pacific media, and getting our big banks to reverse their quiet retreat from a decent physical retail bank presence.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an urgent need for Australia and New Zealand to run an accelerated Covid-19 vaccine distribution campaign in the South Pacific. As we\u2019re seeing in Victoria<\/a>, even nations with closed borders and tight quarantine approaches are vulnerable, particularly to more virulent strains of Covid. Safety comes from vaccination combined with these other policy measures.<\/p>\n

South Pacific economies are deeply tourism-dependent and New Zealand and Australia provide the bulk of their visitors, which benefits us all. Restarting the tourist flow is the best structural economic assistance we can provide. But South Pacific nations won\u2019t\u2014and shouldn\u2019t\u2014let travellers arrive until they\u2019re able to manage the risks. Along with other measures and safeguards, that means having their own populations protected through vaccination and having arriving Australians and New Zealanders vaccinated too.<\/p>\n

By 26 May<\/a>, South Pacific states had 43,441 recorded Covid cases and 453 deaths, with 42,366 of these cases in Papua New Guinea, the two French territories and Guam. A travel bubble with these jurisdictions is a way off.<\/p>\n

The population of the remaining 15 Pacific states<\/a> including Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Vanuatu and Tonga is about 1.6 million<\/a> people. So, it\u2019s absolutely possible to get their entire populations vaccinated rapidly. But that will only happen if we accelerate vaccine access and distribution alongside the slower moving but invaluable international COVAX program for the Western Pacific<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That can happen if Morrison and Ardern push our governments and private deliverers of health services (think Aspen Medical) to undertake a joint vaccination campaign at scale and speed across the Pacific over the next three months.<\/p>\n

Australia has available stocks of locally made Astra Zeneca vaccines because of the own goal<\/a> we\u2019ve scored in over-emphasising the vanishingly small risk of serious side effects. We\u2019ve ordered some 50 million<\/a> doses from CSL, which is apparently making about a million doses a week.<\/p>\n

That means two doses for 1.6 million South Pacific islanders is just over three weeks\u2019 production. So, let\u2019s turn our own goal to the advantage of our Pacific neighbours. Like me, they can be vaccinated ahead of people waiting on slower offshore vaccine production.<\/p>\n

An emergency mass vaccination program was delivered in 2019 by Australia and New Zealand in Samoa<\/a>\u2014for measles, not Covid. We have the experience and capability to do this fast. Either we do so, or we leave South Pacific states waiting for COVAX to deliver and living with risk, or turning to costly, less-well-documented vaccines from China and Russia. Let\u2019s not let that happen.<\/p>\n

The second key agenda item is Pacific media content, and funding and access to it.<\/p>\n

The Pacific information environment is in a state of disruption and change<\/a>, with some new actors, including Chinese state media, growing in influence. As with their broader economies, Pacific media outfits have taken a financial hammering from the pandemic. That\u2019s compounded existing challenges from the rise of digital media and the migration of advertising revenue.<\/p>\n

ASPI\u2019s written<\/a> about the need for Australia to get back into the game in South Pacific media through funding co-created content by Australian and South Pacific journalists using radio, TV and digital platforms. So far, Australia\u2019s failed to do this, with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade\u2019s soft-power review folding and no money in the budget for anything along these lines. It\u2019s a missing step in the prime minister\u2019s step-up<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New Zealand is well ahead of Australia here, with a vibrant Pacific Media Network<\/a> that\u2019s bringing Pacific voices into New Zealand while providing quality New Zealand news across the Pacific. There\u2019s room for Australia to magnify this good work and bring more diverse voices and content into the Pacific, and into our own domestic debates.<\/p>\n

As with vaccines, nature abhors a vacuum, so if Australia fails to step up here, the rising tide of Chinese state media content and assistance to struggling national and independent news outfits in Pacific states will reshape the information environment in ways that won\u2019t work well for our neighbours or for us.<\/p>\n

The third agenda item should seek ways to reverse our big banks\u2019 shrinking presence in the Pacific. Late last year, Westpac sold its extensive bank operations in PNG and Fiji, having already left smaller Pacific states. ANZ has also decided to sell its retail operations in PNG.<\/p>\n

As my colleague, Anthony Bergin, wrote<\/a> with Jeff Wall back in January, \u2018the departure of Westpac and the scaling back of ANZ leave a gaping hole in Australia\u2019s presence at a critical time\u2019. These banks have provided important support for Australian and New Zealand businesses in the South Pacific and their retail presence is a key element of deepening economic relations at the population level.<\/p>\n

Nothing happens without finance so, as with media, banking presence is vital if Australia\u2019s step-up and New Zealand\u2019s \u2018reset<\/a>\u2019 are to succeed.<\/p>\n

That brings us to the topic that has dominated commentary leading up to the meeting: China policy.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no doubt that current New Zealand policy settings<\/a> and public diplomacy look outdated to deal with Xi Jinping\u2019s China. They\u2019re very much the policy settings Australia and others had on China before Xi\u2014mutual economic engagement as the huge limb to the relationship, with security and strategic-interest differences in the background.<\/p>\n

But the assertive and coercive China that New Zealand and many other nations are experiencing now is a different beast to the \u2018responsible stakeholder\u2019 many hoped China might become in the 2010s.<\/p>\n

Quiet backroom diplomacy on issues like mass-scale human-rights abuses or coercive trade actions, combined with a reluctance to be seen to part of growing international approaches to manage China\u2019s aggression is not sustainable policy given New Zealand\u2019s interests and values.<\/p>\n

That approach fitted that earlier time and will almost certainly not work other than as a way to go through the motions on policy differences while avoiding trouble.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the prospect that New Zealand clearly distinguishing itself on China policy from like-minded partners\u2014the other four democracies in the Five Eyes intelligence partnership come to mind\u2014won\u2019t create space for it. Instead, it will bring more pressure and attention from Beijing as it seeks to widen the gap between New Zealand and its closest security partners. Splitting opposition and reducing cohesion is a well-worn path of the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n

But NZ leaders and agencies are well aware of these issues and risks. They don\u2019t need a visiting Australian prime minister to tell them that it\u2019s smart to start diversifying their economy away from the mainline dependency that New Zealand, Australia and many other nations blindly created as we rushed towards the riches of the China market.<\/p>\n

New Zealand will experience the China challenge as multiple other nations are beginning to. The arc of New Zealand\u2019s policy will converge with that we see in the G7<\/a>, the European Commission<\/a> and the series of Quad<\/a> and two-nation<\/a> leader-level meetings<\/a> over just this first half of 2021.<\/p>\n

So, expectations of fireworks and angst in Queenstown are misplaced. We should instead measure the meeting\u2019s success by its shared, urgent agenda\u2014focused on the wellbeing, prosperity and security of Australia, New Zealand and our Pacific family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott Morrison and Jacinda Ardern will prove the Australia\u2013New Zealand travel bubble works when they meet in Queenstown next week. Breathless commentary suggests it\u2019s going to be a difficult meeting over China policy, but that\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":766,"featured_media":64771,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,52,73,99],"class_list":["post-64767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australia","tag-china","tag-new-zealand","tag-south-pacific"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nArdern\u2013Morrison meeting about the Pacific, not China policy shenanigans | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/ardern-morrison-meeting-about-the-pacific-not-china-policy-shenanigans\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ardern\u2013Morrison meeting about the Pacific, not China policy shenanigans | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Scott Morrison and Jacinda Ardern will prove the Australia\u2013New Zealand travel bubble works when they meet in Queenstown next week. 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