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PM reveals radical plan for Pacific Source:
Australian Financial Review http://afr.com/articles/2003/07/22/1058853070535.html
Prime Minister John Howard signalled yesterday
that He said the federal government would push for "pooled regional
governance" among the 16 members of the Pacific Islands Forum - many of
which he described as "too small to be viable" - at the PIF's annual meeting in Auckland next month. The shift in Australia's approach to dealing with the so-called "arc
of instability" emerged as Mr Howard announced
that federal cabinet's national security committee had endorsed a commitment
to help the Solomon Islands restore law and order, expected to cost $200
million to $300 million in its first year. The arc of instability is seen to extend from |
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Mr Howard said it was "just not possible, if
you've got an island state of fewer than 100,000 people, to expect to have all
of the sophisticated arms of government".
Eight of the PIF countries have populations of this size, and the population
of the
The Prime Minister suggested that existing plans to try to pool police
resources and airlines could be much more broadly applied in the South Pacific.
He said the new policy did not necessarily imply any additional spending by
"This is not something that I would see as in any way automatically
leading to increased assistance from
While
"It's not something that we're going to seek in any way to impose, but
part of our responsibility, particularly as we are being asked to be heavily
involved in this co-operative intervention, particularly because we provide a
lot of aid, is to provide ideas and to provide some kind of leadership about
how you deal in a practical, commonsense way with a self-evident problem."
Reaction from the region was muted yesterday because the exact nature of Mr Howard's plans was not immediately clear.
But most analysts saw it as an extension of early discussions at last year's
Pacific Islands Forum.
They pointed out that these had not always led to clear outcomes - with the
difficulties of creating a regional airline, instead of four separate ones,
cited as an example.
Asked whether the government had developed a policy to deal with the arc of
instability, or would look at failed, or failing, nations in the region on a
case-by-case basis, Mr Howard said: "Every case
is different and you of course can't normally act unless you're asked,
particularly as the countries aren't posing any particular immediate threat.
"But when we decided earlier this year to respond differently to the
Mr Howard said the government had "already
begun a recognition of the need to change when at the
last Pacific Islands Forum meeting we began to talk a lot more about the need
to try and deal with some governance issues and governance capacity on a
regional basis".
"For example, the proposal that we trained police in
Mr Howard said that the reality was that
"with the greatest goodwill in the world, many of these countries are too
small to be viable in the normal understanding of that expression and we really
have to develop an approach that I could loosely call pooled regional
governance".
"It applies with airlines, it applies with policing, it
applies with a whole lot of other things. But it's just not possible if you've
got an island state of fewer than 100,000 people to expect [it] to have all of
the sophisticated arms of government."
Mr Howard said questions of whether
"countries should have been given independence" or "the question
of the adequacy or other of former colonial powers" were a "very
interesting academic, historical exercise".
"But the government has got to deal with current-day reality and one of
the first things we should be doing, I believe, is to encourage as many
opportunities as we can for countries in the region to actually pool what they
need to do and what meagre resources they have."
He dismissed suggestions small countries might see the approach as a new
form of colonialism.
"It's got a lot to do with commonsense."