How anxieties about national security could shape the election outcome

With Australian voters facing an increasingly dangerous and uncertain world, both Labor and the Coalition are trying to burnish their national security credentials.

As election day looms, the main debate has been around who is prepared to spend more (and more wisely) on new missiles, ships and jets which can keep Australians safe.

But military hardware is only part of the story. National security is also underpinned by diplomacy, and there is also a contest underway over which major party is better placed to build and protect Australia’s critical relationships — particularly in the Pacific.

Penny Wong and other government frontbenchers have ramped up their attacks on the Coalition’s record on this front, accusing Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton of leaving a yawning “vacuum” in the Pacific which China gleefully filled.

The Coalition, in response, has accused Labor of deliberately distorting history, while arguing the ALP’s record in this region is a bit shabbier than it might seem at first glance.

The Pacific and China might not loom quite as large over the coming vote as they did in 2022, when China signed a security pact with Solomon Islands and delivered a heavy blow to the Coalition’s defence credentials.

This time around it was Moscow — rather than Beijing — which delivered the major mid-campaign national security jolt.

But the “permanent contest” with China in the Pacific will still linger in the back of some voters’ mind, particularly as Donald Trump up-ends the global order and in the wake of the unprecedented circumnavigation of Australia by China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy.

And in this climate, simmering anxieties about national security will shape the way voters decide who is best to navigate Australia’s place in an increasingly unstable world.

Labor sets a frenetic pace

The Albanese government has set a frenetic pace in the Pacific since taking office, racking up landmark agreements with Nauru and Tuvalu, striking a defence pact and a historic NRL agreement with PNG, bolstering Pacific banking, establishing a major new regional policing initiative, handing Solomon Islands national security support and setting up a new visa for Pacific Islanders.

It’s a long roll-call of achievements, even if the implementation has been (inevitably) imperfect, and questions persist over whether some of Labor’s more ambitious strategic gambits will hold up over time.

At its heart is an undeclared policy of strategic denial: ensuring that China, or any potentially hostile power, is prevented from gaining a security foothold near Australia.

It’s hard to score something as complex and shifting as this strategy (particularly when there has been plenty of action out of public view) but many independent observers agree the Albanese government deserves high marks for its ambition and energy.

Unsurprisingly the ALP is now trying to cash in with voters, arguing that these achievements have resuscitated Australia’s reputation across the Pacific, restored our strategic position and reinforced our national security by blunting China’s influence.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has also portrayed the Coalition’s Pacific record as something between a catastrophe and a disaster, warning that Peter Dutton’s climate policies are poisonous to the region, and suggesting China will once again make rapid inroads if he takes the Lodge.

“We know what [Dutton’s] reputation in the Pacific is like,” she said.

“We had to repair those relationships, and that goes towards Australia’s stability and security.”

There’s certainly evidence that at least some Pacific leaders would prefer to see Labor returned on May 3 — not least because they’ve said so themselves.

This campaign has seen two rare but deliberate interventions from the region, with Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr taking a thinly veiled swipe at Peter Dutton over climate policy, and PNG’s foreign minister saying he’d “personally” like to see Labor regain power.

So how widespread is this sentiment across the Pacific?

Just how solid is Labor’s own record?

And would the Coalition really crater Australia’s relationships with Pacific nations if it takes office?

A climate of resentment

Of all Labor’s arguments on the Pacific, their most persuasive is on climate policy.

Pacific nations remain deeply frustrated that the Albanese government continues to expand gas and coal fuel expansion, but they also publicly acknowledge — and seem to believe — that it’s making a serious effort to drive down Australia’s own emissions.

As one Pacific official put it, not long after Anthony Albanese took office: “we want[ed] to give credit where it’s due, and also save our efforts for [future] fights to come.”

As a result, very few Pacific leaders have heaped public pressure on Australia over climate policy over the last three years.

In contrast, Peter Dutton’s vow to unwind subsidies for electric vehicles and home electrification, his nuclear energy announcement, and his attacks on Labor’s “renewables only” policies all reinforce Pacific anxieties that Australia simply isn’t serious about urgently cutting emissions.

This risks kickstarting another public brawl with the Pacific over climate policy.

Even if you view the issue through a purely strategic lens, it also risks undermining Australia’s standing and position in the region.

Of course it’s naive to claim that sharper climate action will somehow “keep China at bay”.

Beijing’s record as the world’s largest emitter hasn’t stopped Pacific nations from drawing closer to China — something that often frustrates Australian politicians.

You could also argue that with Donald Trump taking a wrecking ball to the international consensus on climate, the Pacific has far more pressing climate worries than Peter Dutton.

“We are not the main game when it comes to international climate policy and pretending that we are ignores the real question of what China and India are doing, and doesn’t actually help the Pacific,” says one Coalition source.

Fair enough.

But the reality is that Pacific nations will always hold Australia to a higher standard than the great powers.

First because they have more leverage in Canberra than they do in Washington or Beijing.

And second because successive Australian governments have claimed direct kinship and privileges by proclaiming themselves part of the “Pacific family” — which invites closer scrutiny and accountability.

Penny Wong and Pat Conroy claim that multiple Pacific leaders (and not just Surangel Whipps) continue to privately raise Mr Dutton’s hot mic moment from 2015, when he was caught joking about water lapping at the doors of Pacific nations.

Opposition MPs grind their teeth at Labor’s constant focus on a single “thoughtless throwaway joke”, made more than a decade ago, for which the Opposition Leader has already apologised.

But the problem for Mr Dutton is that it fell on such fertile ground, seeming to confirm the worst caricatures of Australian indifference to the Pacific’s very real fears of obliteration.

The opposition leader risked doing the same during this election campaign when he said Labor’s bid to join with the Pacific to co-host a Conference of the Parties (COP) UN climate change meeting was “madness.”

Mr Dutton isn’t the only politician to question the relevance of COP (Papua New Guinea is already threatening to boycott the meetings out of sheer frustration at slow progress) but framing it purely as a slug on Australian taxpayers will invite Pacific derision.

When Scott Morrison was in office, disagreements over climate policy soaked up so much bandwidth and energy in the Pacific that the government sometimes struggled to find clean air.

Pacific officials still talk about the Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in 2019 in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, where Mr Morrison spent hours locked in a sometimes acrimonious debate on climate.

If the Coalition does win on Saturday, there is a risk history will repeat itself.

Mr Dutton will have to do a mountain of work to convince regional leaders he takes their fears seriously, and to stop climate policy emerging — once again — as the lacuna in Australia’s Pacific strategy.

The Solomons question

Beyond climate, the Albanese government is keen to highlight it has landed far more Pacific pacts and achievements in three years than the Coalition managed in nine.

As Labor portrays it, the Coalition’s incompetence in the Pacific reached a disastrous crescendo just as Scott Morrison was voted out, with China landing a prized security cooperation agreement with Solomon Islands during the 2022 election campaign.

At the time, Penny Wong called it “the worst Australian foreign policy blunder in the Pacific since the end of World War II.”

She’s been more diplomatic since then, but Labor is still keen to hang this particular Pacific albatross around the Liberal Party’s neck.

The ALP is particularly savage about how the Morrison government handled the hopeless, slightly surreal endgame in the weeks between the agreement being leaked and signed — particularly its decision to send then-Pacific minister Zed Seselja to Honiara during the election campaign in a forlorn attempt to stop Solomon Islands putting pen to paper.

Occasionally government MPs still wheel out the line mocking the Coalition for dispatching “some bloke called Zed” to save the day, instead of foreign minister Marise Payne.

It’s not the most convincing argument.

It ignores the fact that Australian officials advised it would probably be better to quietly send Senator Seselja rather than dispatching Marise Payne and risking a high profile, high-stakes confrontation with the combustible Manasseh Sogavare.

Maybe it was the wrong call, but it wasn’t a sign of criminal indifference from the Morrison government.

It’s fair to call the deal a strategic disaster for Australia. It is absolutely fair to ask why the Coalition failed to stop it from happening.

But it’s also worth remembering just how quickly the relationship between Honiara and Beijing swelled from 2020, how persistently China cultivated influence among political elites in the country, how deep Mr Sogavare’s resentments towards Australia ran, and how determined the prime minister was to seek new security partners in the wake of the devastating riots of November 2021.

As one Coalition politician said: “If you truly believe that we could have persuaded Solomon Islands not to sign this deal by ratcheting up foreign aid in the region or saying the right things on climate change, I have a nice bridge across Sydney Harbour which I’d like to sell you.”

It’s possible a Labor government might have found a way to deploy more adroit and active diplomacy to stave off the security deal in 2022.

But it is far from certain.

Vacuum, what vacuum?

It’s also far from certain that Australia lost, as the foreign minister has put it, the “opportunity to remain the sole partner of choice for the Pacific” because of Coalition incompetence under Abbott, Morrison and Turnbull.

Put simply: Australia probably never had that opportunity. And if it did, it was probably lost well before the Coalition took office in 2014.

China is a determined, persistent and extremely well-resourced emerging global power with deep commercial equities and sprawling interests throughout the Pacific.

Most Pacific nations have made it clear they want Chinese investments and development assistance, most are very keen to expand trade ties with Beijing, and some (not all) are open to cooperating in more fraught spaces like policing and critical infrastructure.

They don’t want Australia to be their “sole partner of choice.” In fact, some Pacific governments in the region quite like keeping Australia off balance, playing powers against each other to extract maximum benefit.

It’s true that by any objective measure, the Albanese government has put in the hard yards, ploughing more time into Pacific visits than the Morrison government did.

Senator Wong has notched up 21 visits to 16 Pacific nations in less than three years, well above the 12 visits by Marise Payne across nearly four years.

The Pacific Minister Pat Conroy has also kept up a relentless pace of travel, and nobody could question his work ethic or ambitions.

But counting trip numbers is only part of the story, and the portrait of neglect and drift painted by the foreign minister ignores the fact that the Turnbull and Morrison governments also ploughed considerable time and effort into the region from 2017 onwards.

Some of these foundation stones buttress Labor’s achievements today.

After all, the Coalition kickstarted the Pacific Step Up, opened new diplomatic missions across the region, established the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific (AIFFP), funded the Coral Sea Cable, expanded Pacific labour schemes and deployed a major Australian security force to Solomon Islands to help restore order.

You could argue this was all too little, too late, too lackadaisical or too piecemeal. Or that the response didn’t come close to meeting the magnitude of the challenge. Or that it was fundamentally undermined by the Morrison government’s stubbornness on climate change.

But declaring the Coalition left behind a “vacuum” feels like a stretch.

Two can play that game

It’s not just Labor which has been keen to pounce on Pacific failures, both real and imagined.

Perhaps stung by the government’s furious criticism, the Coalition has also been keen to run a ruler over the Albanese government’s record in the region.

Shadow Foreign Minister David Coleman has used more tempered language than Penny Wong, but he’s suggested the wins notched by the government during this term shouldn’t obscure its failures.

“While Australia has concluded some agreements in recent years, there have been more occasions where nations have chosen a different path,” he told the Sydney Institute last month.

“In the past three years China has extended its position in the region, with policing arrangements with Vanuatu and Kiribati, and a strategic partnership agreement with the Cook Islands, signed just last month.”

The Coalition was also quick to pounce on recent comments from Timor-Leste’s President Jose Ramos Horta, who said he’d be open to joint military exercises with China, saying Labor had been caught “flat-footed.”

These are not minor setbacks, but they’re also not catastrophic.

Australian officials are closely watching the policing “arrangements” with Vanuatu and Kiribati, which have seen China conduct small scale training and donate equipment in both Pacific nations.

But neither have the scope, consequence or weight of the formal security pact with Solomon Islands, where China has now established a permanent rotational policing presence.

Meanwhile, the debate on the Cook Islands China agreement is both complex and opaque, but if there’s any blame to be sheeted home, it should land with a thump in Wellington rather than Canberra.

Still even this relatively mild criticism from David Coleman has drawn a furious response from government MPs, who accuse the Coalition of jaw-dropping hypocrisy.

As one Labor campaigner put it, with full-force incredulity: “These guys made an absolutely disastrous mess of our strategy in the Pacific which we then turn around and clean it up, and then they’ve got the hide to accuse us of dropping the ball?!”

It’s an understandable analogy, but not a useful one.

The “permanent contest” in the Pacific is certainly not a short-term game, and it’s going to span multiple Australian governments over many years.

A measure of bipartisanship will be critical, but the “contest” needs to play out in our own politics as well, with failures debated, examined and held up to the light.

Both sides will need to learn quickly from each other’s successes and failures, and adapt as quickly as possible.

Keeping a tight focus on what Australia can and cannot control will be key.

So will developing a deeper understanding of what is truly critical for both Australia and the Pacific — and not just what matters to Canberra.