Pacific nations gather for forum, PM arrives tomorrow
Anthony Albanese visits Australia's biggest trade partner in China, some of our closest neighbours are gathering for the Pacific forum.
Transcript
00:00 I think there will be a couple of major priorities.
00:03 The first will be to try and convince Pacific Island nations that Australia does take them
00:08 seriously on climate change, despite the fact that there's still a wide gulf between what
00:13 Pacific Island nations want from Australia on climate change and what Australia is willing
00:18 to do.
00:19 So we expect Australia to make some announcements over the next few days, pouring substantial
00:24 amounts of money into multilateral funds which are used to help Pacific nations deal with
00:29 the impacts of climate change.
00:32 Australia and the Pacific will also discuss Australia's plan to co-host a COP, a UN conference
00:37 of the parties, in the Pacific and Australia around 2026.
00:42 Now all of these commitments I think will be welcomed by Pacific Island leaders, particularly
00:47 the new money into things like the green, into those multilateral funds.
00:54 But in the end I think there is still going to be a bit of pressure put on Australia over
00:58 what it's doing on its own emissions and in particular some Pacific leaders say while
01:03 Australia continues to expand both its coal and its gas industries at a time of escalating
01:10 global warming and climate crisis, well they argue that as long as Australia does that,
01:15 all of its other commitments are really just window dressing.
01:19 And so they want to see greater action from Australia when it comes to those tough questions
01:24 around its emissions.
01:26 The United States and China have been ramping up efforts in the Pacific.
01:30 Will they also be there?
01:34 They will but perhaps intelligently the Pacific Islands Forum has decided to put what they
01:39 call the Dialogue Partners event right at the end of the week, so on Friday local time.
01:44 That's after the main leaders retreat which will happen on Thursday local time here, which
01:50 is Friday in Australia.
01:52 Now that's been done quite deliberately.
01:55 There's a feeling in the Pacific that some of this increasing geo-strategic competition
01:59 we're seeing in the region with both the United States and China really trying to ramp up
02:03 efforts to cement themselves as major players in the Pacific brings risks as well as benefits.
02:09 The Pacific likes the attention and the money that it can bring but they're also wary of
02:13 the way that that competition can actually distract them from their core priorities and
02:18 in some cases actually deepen existing divisions in the Pacific.
02:23 So by moving the meeting late towards the week they're hoping to avoid some of that
02:27 brewing competition from sidelining their key priorities.
02:31 As for Australia, I think one of the main things that Australia will want out of this
02:34 is a really clear statement from the Forum again that there should be what it calls a
02:39 family first approach to Pacific security.
02:43 In other words, they want the Pacific Islands Forum and leaders here to say that countries
02:47 like China should not be the first port of call for Pacific countries who want security
02:52 assistance and of course that's done very much with Solomon Islands in mind and the
02:57 very contentious security and policing pacts that Solomon Islands has struck with China.
03:03 That's not something that Australia wants to see repeated throughout the Pacific and
03:06 so by getting the Pacific Islands Forum to make a statement about that family first principle
03:13 it hopes to head off that possibility.
03:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]