The ability of Australia’s intelligence agencies to make blunder after blunder and not merely never be held accountable but to continue to be held in almost untouchable esteem by politicians and the media is a striking and unusual feature of Australian politics.
The past quarter century has seen a litany of intelligence bungles and scandals that have cost lives, damaged Australia’s interests and harmed other countries as well. In no instance — even in the most scandalous and criminal conduct — has anyone in what is called the “Australian intelligence community” been held to account.
The Solomon Islands’ deal with China is another addition to that storied history of failure, Australia being taken by surprise by the revelation that its government had negotiated an agreement with China involving ship visits, logistical replenishment and other related activities.
Two of Australia’s most senior intelligence officials, director-general of ASIS Paul Symon and long-time Coalition national security apparatchik Andrew Shearer, travelled to the Solomons last week to pressure Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare over the agreement.
But greater pressure will be exerted by the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, veteran Asia-Pacific diplomat Kurt M Campbell, who is travelling to the Solomons this month, according to the Financial Times.
The dispatch of Campbell to clean up Australia’s mess is humiliating for us: the US has relied on Australia to manage the region while it could divert diplomatic and security resources elsewhere. Instead Australia had little warning of a deal giving China access to a Pacific port.
Bearing in mind that — as the Snowden material revealed the priority of international intelligence agencies like ASIS appears to be commercial espionage — there’s a legitimate question as to what exactly ASIS was doing while China and the Sogavare were negotiating a deal.
The failure is of sufficient magnitude — particularly after what is now years of warnings and bellicose rhetoric from the government about the threat posed by China — that it deserves parliamentary scrutiny. As Crikey has noted repeatedly in the past, Australia is the only Five Eyes country without a worthwhile system of parliamentary oversight of intelligence agencies — and certainly nothing to compare with congressional oversight of the US intelligence community.
But it’s worth reflecting on the context of the deal, which supposedly gives China a precious foothold in the region. Why would the Solomon Islands government be happy to embrace China? Chinese aid largely stays in the Solomon Islands, but Australian aid does not.
During the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), about half the aid went towards the salaries of the Australian Federal Police. Some of the remainder went to paying advisers to the public service, employing magistrates and running the country’s prison system. It was a classic form of “boomerang aid” in the region that Australia has long specialised in, since most of the foreign consultants or in-line appointees were Australian anyway. As Aid/Watch, the aid-monitoring group put it, Australia was “the largest direct recipient of its own aid funding”.
Australia has also acted, almost reflexively, as an imperial power in the region. In 2017 the Solomon Islands sought to build an undersea internet cable with funding from the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Australia, the third-biggest ADB shareholder after Japan and the United States, insisted on deciding which company would get the contract. When Sogavare preferred Huawei as the better value-for-money contrast, the ADB withdrew its funding and then-head of ASIS Nick Warner was dispatched in June 2017 to warn Sogavare against choosing Huawei.
After that, rumours about bribery involving Huawei and Sogavare began circulating, before Sogavare was removed from office in a vote of no confidence. The new prime minister locked Huawei out of the project and Australia stepped in to pay for almost the entire project, using the foreign aid budget. Unsurprising, it awarded the contract for the scoping study to an Australian telecommunications firm, Vocus.
When Sogavare returned to power in 2019, he clearly hadn’t forgotten that episode. Worse, Australia has treated the existential threat of global warming and rising sea levels to Pacific Island states as an irrelevance in its headlong quest to exploit its fossil fuel resources as effectively as possible.
Treated with contempt by an imperial power, the Sogavare government has tried to diversify its strategic partnerships.
The failure in the Solomon Islands was not just one of our intelligence agencies, but of our political elite and its fossil fuel controllers as well.
Considering Australia’s sleazy, self-serving and deceptive behaviour in its dealings with other nations, you could be forgiven for thinking that we have the Prime Minister we well and truly deserve.
The person who didn’t apparently speak english said “I don’t think, I know he is a Liar”.
Thank you for that clarification Emmanuel.
Biden went one better “Oh, that fella from down under”.
Translated from the educated American to the Australian vernacular, “I couldn’t give a fig what your name is, because you have publicly humiliated our oldest and closest ally, France”
Also, Australia has long been known as an “Easy lay” in Washington circles (and presumably others as well).
All this is very surprising because, as Scott Morrison keeps telling us, the LNP Coalition government is the only party than can bet trusted on national security.
Yes we do have an attitude of Imperial arrogance from our leaders to our neighbours. They probably don’t know the Pacific Island Labourers Acts OF 1880 – 1892 have been repealed.
Our politicians’ attitude to the Pacific and the various countries that inhabit it is that the Pacific is “our backyard”.
Good work BK.
The contributions of Lord Downer to the continuing disgrace in our relations with our pacific neighbours should not be forgotten.
Australia “the largest direct recipient of its own aid funding”.
That’s the LNP model.
Almost a Ponzi scheme!
Gosh! Where do you begin when responding to an article like this?
Perhaps a good place is to first of all acknowledge the fact that I completely agree with what Bernard and Clinton have written.
Secondly, I must also place on record that I am no expert on the Solomon, or of any other Islands, out there in the South Pacific Ocean. Accordingly, my comments amount to nothing more than pure conjecture.
When I first heard of this ‘deal’ between the Solomon Islands and China I was disappointed but not surprised. Australian Governments seem to take pride in cutting spending on Foreign Aid in their budgets. As far as the governments are concerned, that is being ‘smart’. It helps to keep taxes low; and to help to justify their parsimony, they claim that the needs of the indigent at home are of first priority. It is simply a way of sycophantically ingratiating themselves with equally myopic voters who resolutely refuse to pay anything more than the least amount of taxation possible.
No doubt governments are exhorted by their economic advisors to take this penny-pinching approach. Those ‘economic advisors’ would have been brain-washed and indoctrinated with neo-liberal economic dogma at school and at university. These grubs and maggots (pardon the strong language but I cannot conceal my absolute loathing and contempt for this sub-set of the human race) do not do anything for reasons of altruism, or even in the interests of their country; their only motive is purely personal material gain. This is made patently obvious in this article with references to “boomerang aid” and the remarkably insightful quote coming from Aid/Watch. Perhaps the more money that comes back to Australia, the bigger the bonuses paid to these ‘creative’ aid organizers.
Yet, interestingly, as much as I loath and detest the free-market, at the end of the day, it seems that aspects of it are impossible to avoid. We see that ‘writ large’ here. If Australia is too miserable to assist this small island in any meaningful way, then why not accept aid from China; a country which seems to be offering a better deal. Ahhh, the delights of the ‘Free-Market’. Of course, the ‘Free-Market’ is terrific; the best thing going, when it is seen to be working in your favor, but we immediately cry ‘foul’ when things do not go our way.
The lesson that I take away from this sorry tale is that we need politicians and bureaucrats in our parliament and public service who are capable of taking a long-term view of the needs of our country and our region. We need people in positions of authority who are working in the interests of the country, not highly paid greed merchants and corrupt actors who are only interested in how much money will be in their next bonus.
I lived in the islands for a significant period of my life, as has a friend of mine.
This government has never thought that the locals would be anything but subservient to Australia.
And yet, each leader of each group of islands have given Australia many chances to regain their traditional place within the group.
But no, not after Smirko and Sparrow Hawke’s performance in Tuvalu.Many signed on with China after that demonstration of bad manners and ideology which was Climate change denying, embarrassing and humiliating!
We have never been asked for lots of dollars, we could have been helping with the educational aspirations of the islander’s with teachers, young doctors and nurses, scholarships.
Fiji needs help in may areas and yet, this government gets a kick out of not processing Rambuka’s visa application in over 6 months ensuring that he missed the 50th wedding anniversary of his best friend, how big hearted is that?.
“……. the chickens eventually come home to roost”.
Thanks for those insights ratty, you clearly have much more direct experience with the region that I do.
Robert R…. great summary and comment to media article… exactly my thoughts and assessment of current Solomon islands fiasco!!
And let’s not forget how former Foreign Affairs Minister, Julie Bishop, continues to personally benefit from the “boomerang” aid program she previously presided over. Shortly after retirement from politics she walked onto the board of Palladium, one of the biggest aid contractors involved in syphoning off so much of our ‘foreign’ aid to the pockets of well-off Australian consultants. Needy people just like Julie.
Yep…a very corrupt ‘me!,me!’, politician, all about, gleaning $$$$,for her own vested financial interests. She was apathetic and did nothing for gender equality, whilst a serving Federal MP.