Whose security counts in the Pacific?

This article appeared in Crikey on October 8 2026.

The Albanese government’s decision to spend around $20 million hosting a pre-COP climate summit in Fiji and Tuvalu has attracted unusually sharp criticism from the Coalition and others. Dan Tehan, the Coalition’s shadow energy spokesman, described the meeting as a “farce” and questioned whether taxpayers are getting value for money. He also criticised the government’s reluctance to provide detailed information about the cost and who’s attending.

Climate change is the number one existential threat identified by Pacific governments, with the Boe Declaration on Regional Security, endorsed in 2018 by the Pacific Islands Forum, stating that it remains “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific”. While the Australian government recognises climate change is the primary security threat to Pacific Island countries, it is clear that its strategic security concern is China’s activities in the region.

Consider the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union treaty, perhaps the clearest example of this asymmetry. In 2024, Australia announced more than $110 million in immediate commitments associated with the relationship. This included a doubling of its existing $19 million commitment to the Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project, $15 million for a new National Security Coordination Centre, and $50 million for Tuvalu’s first undersea telecommunications cable. Australia also committed $10 million in budget support, and promised to fast-track replacement of Tuvalu’s Guardian-class patrol boat.

Although the $50 million telecommunications cable should not simply be labelled “security spending” — it will provide important developmental benefits by improving Tuvalu’s connectivity — it is nevertheless critical infrastructure with an obvious strategic dimension. Furthermore, the $15 million security centre is explicitly security-related, while the patrol boat is intended to strengthen maritime security. Against this, the $19 million top-up to Australia’s existing commitment to the Coastal Adaptation Project is the package’s only dedicated climate adaptation funding.

We can’t say that every dollar spent outside climate adaptation is a dollar spent on security. But based on the spending initiatives this treaty involves, strategic and security considerations seem to be deeply embedded in Australia’s Pacific partnerships, while climate adaptation is only one relatively small component of them.

The provision also reveals an asymmetry in the way security is negotiated between the two countries. Tuvalu is one of the world’s lowest-lying countries, so its national security focuses on an existential vulnerability to rising water levels. From the Australian government’s perspective, however, the bilateral pact with Tuvalu needs to address its own concerns with strategic competition, defence, cybersecurity and the influence of third countries. The Falepili Union treaty is a response to this somewhat competing pair of concerns: Australia assists in addressing the threats Tuvalu identifies, while securing Tuvalu’s agreement to Australia’s oversight of its security and defence-related engagements with other states.

We can see this deal as a form of unequal security reciprocity: Australia’s willingness to provide security is accompanied by expectations about how Tuvalu manages Australia’s strategic concerns. The arrangement does not prevent Tuvalu from conducting diplomatic or development relations with other countries, but Article 4(4) does require the two countries to mutually agree on security- and defence-related partnerships or engagements with other states.

In other words, Australia is responding to Tuvalu’s concern with national insecurity, but it also has considerably greater capacity to define which dimensions of that insecurity receive institutional and financial priority. For this reason, Enele Sopoaga, former prime minister and opposition MP, and Feleti Teo, who became prime minister after the 2024 election, have both expressed concerns about the potential of the treaty to undermine Tuvalu’s sovereignty.

The pattern is even clearer elsewhere. Under the 2024 Nauru-Australia Treaty, Australia made a five-year commitment of $100 million in budget support and a further $40 million in policing and security assistance. The treaty also gives Australia a formal role in consultation over Nauru’s security, banking, telecommunications and other critical infrastructure. Significantly, the treaty itself acknowledges climate change as an “existential threat”, yet its new commitments contain no dedicated financial allocation for climate adaptation or mitigation.

With the 2023 Australia-Papua New Guinea Bilateral Security Agreement, Australia committed $200 million over four years for PNG’s “national security priorities”. The package includes policing, law and justice, cybersecurity and other areas, with climate resilience included among them. Australia subsequently elevated the relationship further through the 2025 Pukpuk Mutual Defence Treaty, which entered into force in July 2026 and created Australia’s first new formal alliance in more than 70 years.

Compared with the deal with Nauru, it’s interesting to note that the 2023 agreement with PNG incorporates climate change into a much broader conception of security, rather than being absent from the security package.

These arrangements seem to reveal something important about the way Australia conceptualises its Pacific interests. The bipartisan Australian approach to the region is not simply about helping vulnerable neighbours cope with climate change. It is also about ensuring that Australia remains the region’s preferred security and development partner at a time of intensifying strategic competition. That competition is increasingly understood in Canberra through the prism of China. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong has said more than once that Australia is in a “state of permanent contest in the Pacific”.

It is according to this logic of competition that Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen defended the spending of $20 million. Rather than addressing the urgent need to help our Pacific neighbours in combating climate change per se, Bowen has argued that we are paying the price of doing diplomacy in the region, and that strengthening Australia’s standing in the Pacific is particularly important in this “geopolitical time”.

The Coalition’s criticism of Labor’s decision to invest $20 million that’s notionally — if somewhat tenuously — related to climate change in the Pacific only highlights the relative absence of similar criticisms of the government’s expensive security agreements and mutual defence treaties, and the broader expansion of Australia’s security relationships across the Pacific. These far more costly commitments seem relatively insulated from the kind of value-for-money attack we see when it’s climate action that’s involved.

The question, then, is not whether $20 million is too much to spend on a pre-COP meeting. It is why this particular form of Pacific engagement is subjected to such intense scrutiny when much larger strategic commitments attract far less political contestation. It seems that climate-related spending is more readily framed in Australian domestic politics as discretionary expenditure, while conventional security and strategic engagement is framed as national-interest spending.

All this leaves us with a larger question: when Australia says that its Pacific engagement is about regional security, whose conception of security matters more — ours or theirs?