Captured on camera chatting with American diplomat Kurt Campbell in Tonga last month, Anthony Albanese described Pacific leaders’ support for a new Australian-led policing initiative as a big win.
“We had a cracker today getting the Pacific Policing Initiative through,” Prime Minister Albanese joked, as Campbell replied: “I talked with Kevin [Rudd] about it and so you know, we were going to do something and he asked us not to, so we did not: ‘We’ve given you the lane, so take the lane.’”
Australian officials at August’s Pacific Islands Forum weren’t amused by the release of this footage, with its “deputy sheriff” vibes. But ABC News described the topic of the conversation — the Pacific Policing Initiative, or PPI — as a “strategic victory” for Australia over the People’s Republic of China, which has also offered policing support to Pacific governments.
A more complex reality soon reasserted itself. Within a fortnight of the Forum, Pacific police officers and politicians travelled to China to discuss further policing programs. More importantly, debate continued in the islands about how to better allocate resources to prevent conflict and boost community harmony.
It’s not just police who police, and church, women’s and customary leaders want more resources to tackle the drivers of crime and conflict in their communities. For many, Australia’s proposed multi-million-dollar facility in Brisbane seems marginal to that quest.
The PPI will create a police training and coordination hub in Queensland, four “centres of excellence” in the region (with Papua New Guinea and Marshall Islands both offering to host a training centre), as well as a new Pacific Police Support Group to deploy in response to rioting, natural disasters, transnational crime and protection of major events.
“This is a Pacific-led initiative, very importantly,” Albanese told journalists at the Forum in Nuku’alofa. “This is something that has arisen from the Pacific family to look after the Pacific family.”
In reality, Australia has been driving the proposal. In August 2023, Australian officials tabled plans for the regional training facility and a “multinational deployable police capability” at the annual meeting of the Pacific Islands Chiefs of Police, a multilateral body founded in 1970. After the PNG police commissioner was appointed to chair a design steering group in May 2024, Fiji Police and the Australian Federal Police co-hosted a workshop on the proposal for senior Pacific police officers. A second AFP workshop was held in Brisbane not long before Albanese took the proposal to the Forum leaders’ meeting last month.
The plan certainly has backing from some of Prime Minister Albanese’s Pacific counterparts. “The rest of the world, we believe, is targeting our region,” said Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka, “so it’s our responsibility to develop our own policing initiative.” Endorsing the plan, PNG’s James Marape called the Pacific “the biggest unpoliced space in planet Earth.”
But other leaders are worried that much-needed support for policing is getting entangled with the strategic competition between Washington and Beijing. Vanuatu prime minister Charlot Salwai said the Pacific must “make sure that this PPI is framed to fit our purposes and not developed to suit the geo-strategic interests and geo-strategic denial security postures of our big partners.”
Much of the Australian media coverage of the summit communiqué highlighted that all Forum leaders had endorsed the PPI. Few journalists, however, mentioned the next line in the communiqué, where “leaders also noted the need for further national consultation on how members engage with the PPI.” There’s a way to go yet.
A key objective of Australia’s 2017 foreign policy white paper was “to integrate Pacific countries into the Australian and New Zealand economies and our security institutions.” This desire to be the “security partner of choice” sees Canberra and Wellington coordinating with Washington to extend policing and security agreements with a range of Forum countries.
These negotiations were ramped up after the Solomon Islands signed a security agreement with China in April 2022 , with the Albanese government and Biden administration rushing to finalise long-delayed security pacts with island states. However some countries clearly want to avoid limiting their security partnerships just to Western allies. Less than a fortnight after the PPI was endorsed at the Forum, China’s public security minister Wang Xiaohong hosted delegates from Vanuatu, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Samoa at the third China-Pacific Island police cooperation summit in Fuzhou, co-chaired by his Fijian counterpart Pio Tikoduadua.
Responding to Chinese security initiatives, Australia, United States and other allies are boosting staff and funding for a network of regional intelligence, police and customs systems, including the Oceania Customs Organisation, Pacific Island Chiefs of Police, the Pacific Cyber Security Officials Network, the Pacific Transnational Crime Network and the Pacific Fusion Centre, a regional intelligence analysis centre in Port Vila.
Does all this networking improve security at the grassroots? “The proliferation and profusion of different initiatives can generate a lot of confusion,” says associate professor Sinclair Dinnen of the Australian National University, a leading analyst of security operations in the region. “One of the real difficulties Australia faces currently is a very strong desire to contain China’s growing involvement in policing by developing initiatives at regional level that are going to minimise the space for China’s assistance. This has to be balanced with sensitivities around Australia’s own role.”
Some high-profile projects — such as the Black Rock peacekeeping initiative in Fiji — “haven’t really gone anywhere,” says Dinnen, who co-authored the 2023 book, Policing in the Pacific Islands. “There was a significant investment, there was a lot of noise made about the Fiji centre as something that would bring Pacific police together. But as far as I can make out, the only police forces that have been engaged there have been Fiji, Australia and New Zealand.”
Some of the region’s community groups, meanwhile, are worried that Mr Plod, the benign bobby of Enid Blyton’s stories, has been replaced by Robocop.
Thousands have died during repression of self-determination movements across the Pacific, as militarised policing operations have led to human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings and systemic police violence (from the PNG police violence that led to the 1989–98 war in Bougainville, to contemporary Indonesian crackdowns in West Papua and French policing in New Caledonia).
When Forum leaders met last month in Nuku’alofa, the crisis in New Caledonia was high on the agenda. Since rioting and protests began on 13 May, triggered by proposed reforms to voting rights, France has deployed more than 5000 police and security forces in its South Pacific dependency. Twenty-nine squadrons of gendarmerie are backed by elite paramilitary units, CRS riot squads and anti-terrorist specialists, while a freighter carrying extra armoured cars and trucks for police and military arrived in Nouméa in July.
“We see some of the ways the police deal with people on the street,” says Pastor Billy Wetewea, a member of the Église Protestante de Kanaky Nouvelle-Calédonie, the main Protestant denomination in New Caledonia. “It’s disproportionate how the military are taking action to deal with the people on the streets who are manifesting [protesting] for their rights.”
Wetewea gives the example of an incident at a roadblock in the southern town of Thio. “The police came and wanted to remove the roadblocks — the protestors throw stones to the police and they retaliated with shots. One man was shot in the head, and died. We see this as [a] disproportionate response. Why? Why? This sort of action is not helping the situation to be calm.”
As protestors and police clashed on the barricades, French authorities weakened restrictions on the use of GML2L tear gas grenades. In France, Violences Policières and other human rights groups have documented injuries caused by these grenades, including cases of protestors and passers-by losing a hand or eye. In 2021 France’s interior minister instructed police to only use the grenades with a specific launcher — rather than by hand — but in June this year, the interior ministry quietly lifted that restriction, although only for gendarmes deployed in New Caledonia!
More broadly, do the region’s governments have the balance right between central police operations and empowering other actors?
In 2022, as the Solomon Islands government finalised its security and policing agreement with China, leading scholar Transform Aqorau asked “Is security created through arming the police? Or should we instead focus on an approach to security whereby the community is recognised as a partner in building and maintaining peace?”
Church, women’s and customary leaders question whether police-strengthening projects divert scare resources from local initiatives that tackle the economic, cultural and social drivers of crime and community violence. Riots in urban centres across the region have been driven by ineffective service delivery, inequitable distribution of development benefits, and differences in access to health, education and transport services between rural provinces and the capital.
The fourteen-year Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, known as RAMSI, is as an exemplar of this unequal resourcing. A 2014 Lowy Institute study found that the “law and justice” sector absorbed an estimated 83 per cent (or AUD$2.2 billion (US$1.49 billion) of RAMSI’s total expenditure; even within that category, community leaders argued that too many resources were going to police rather than justice. The community sector, they argued, plays a vital but underfunded role in promoting local harmony, disarmament and reconciliation.
ANU’s Sinclair Dinnen agrees that “if policing is about social order and regulation, most of policing in Papua New Guinea and in many other countries extends well beyond the actors in uniforms to include a number of other organisations and actors who are actively engaging in policing work.”
During RAMSI, he says, “we saw a major focus on the centre, whereas most Solomon Islanders were dealing with disputation and social order issues through a hybrid response, involving churches and community leaders and only a bit of the State, because the police don’t have the reach into the communities where the majority of people live.”
With tough economic times ahead, and widespread youth underemployment, Dinnen anticipates “a lot more disorder, a lot more crime and a lot more demands for really heavy-handed, muscular policing to try and keep the lid on this boiling pot — however, essentially, we need to turn the heat off.” No amount of policing can provide jobs and meaningful economic activities for growing numbers of young people.
Positive examples of community-led policing do exist, Dinnen adds. They include community officers in the Solomon Islands or the village-based members of Bougainville’s Community Auxiliary Police, who cooperate with local leaders and liaise with Bougainville’s official police service.
“Going back to the 2000s,” says Dinnen, “Bougainvillean leaders decided that they really didn’t want to replicate the kind of PNG policing that contributed to the escalation of the Bougainville conflict in the late 1980s. They wanted a different type of policing, more appropriate to the social and historical context.”
Theonila Roka Matbob, Bougainville’s community government minister, agrees that many justice and security issues can best be tackled by empowering local communities and strengthening traditional governance. “Law and order, for me, is an issue that happens when no one knows how to use his or her energy,” she says. “In 2014, one village decided to build their own system of community governance and wealth creation. Ten years after that, you can never find a law-and-order problem in that village. The traditional system that we’re trying to adopt now into our restructure has created space and given purpose to everyone. It is a system where we leave no one behind and everyone is engaged.”
Fiji feminist Sharon Bhagwan Rolls also argues that more resources should be allocated to women’s groups involved in peace-making and conflict prevention. She highlights the important role of female police from the region, who have advantages over many AFP officers in dealing with complex cultural sensitivities around rape, incest and sexual abuse.
“It’s critical to invest in policing, but there needs to be an understanding of what that means,” says Bhagwan Rolls, who co-founded FemLINK Pacific and chairs the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict. “For a number of years, community policing has suffered because of the resourcing of national police forces.”
“This is exactly what the 2018 Boe Declaration [on regional security] is about,” she says. “Community groups are talking more about human security and also want better consultative processes when the Forum Regional Security Committee meets. Ministerial meetings of police and the military must also open up to hear from civil society as well.”
Gathered on the fringes of the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Nuku’alofa, civil society groups called for a renewed focus on conflict and crime prevention. In Bhagwan Rolls’s words, they want “a high-level declaration that reaffirms peacebuilding, and really makes sure that, as a region, we get better at crisis and conflict prevention.”
Even as the Australian-led Pacific Policing Initiative moves forward, one interesting sentence was buried in the 2024 Forum communiqué. In a not-so-subtle jab at regional militarisation by the major powers, leaders noted “the emphasis on increasing the region’s focus on the ‘peace’ element of the ‘peace and security’ efforts.”