After 9/11 and the Bali bombings a year later, Australia scared itself with the prospect of Solomons becoming the Pacific’s first failed state, a place “where terrorists could hide and then attack Australia,” says Hameiri. Now, it’s scared of China.
“So it's never really about […] the people of Solomons or anything like that,” according to Hameiri. “It's not even about extracting anything from Solomons in that kind of clichéd form of colonialism. It's about maintaining Solomons as a place that is not a threat to Australia.”
Aid as leverage
Australia has been the largest donor to Solomon Islands since the 1970s. It is also the Pacific’s largest aid donor, accounting for nearly half of the $22.7bn in aid spent on the region since 2009. Last year, Australia spent a record $1.3bn in development assistance in the South Pacific.
But to what end?
Many say that Solomon Islands remains a part of MIRAB, says Hameiri, in reference to the acronym coined in the early 1980s to describe the unenviable growth model for Pacific island countries: migration, remittances, aid and bureaucracy. Most people in Solomons still live on subsistence agriculture, he adds, and they are governed by so-called ‘Big Man politics’, which requires access to money.
Sometimes this money comes from unsustainable logging – timber is Solomon Islands’ largest export, and corruption means that licences are continually granted, regardless of dwindling resources.
Sometimes it comes from foreign support. Until Solomon Islands switched diplomatic allegiance in 2019 from Taiwan to China, political patronage in the form of so-called ‘constituency development funds’ to members of parliament came from Taiwan. “Now, Chinese money is playing that role,” says Hameiri, at roughly SBD $2m (Solomon Islands dollars, roughly US $250,000) per constituency per year. Since the switch of diplomatic recognition, China has started to repair the country’s only gold mine and to build a stadium for next year’s South Pacific Games.
Those bright and shiny things are another attraction of dealing with China, say experts. Beijing does exciting, immediate, tangible stuff, which contrasts with Australia’s dull and slow (if well-meaning) health and governance programmes. In response, Australia is rethinking its aid to focus on infrastructure.
The challenge may be to end the boomerang effect – also witnessed with US aid in Afghanistan – when the greater part of developmental spending goes right back to the donor country via fees for consultants, goods and services.
Additionally, Australia’s development projects are seen as unresponsive to local priorities. “Solomons needs more help with labour mobility and climate change,” says Wood from the Development Policy Centre.
Crucially, Australia also needs to walk the talk on climate change, which is of paramount concern to Pacific islands at risk of rising sea levels. In the 2018 Pacific Islands Forum’s Boe Declaration, Australia concurred that climate change was “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific.” But Canberra’s carbon reduction goals seemed to indicate a low level of real commitment to the task.
That this matters is clear from prominent Solomon Islands journalist Dorothy Wickham’s social media post in the midst of the uproar over competition between China and the US: “As we talk the big things, lets [sic] also look at the small things,” she wrote. “Managing our sea resources is of serious concern for Solomon Islanders. Food security is [an] important issue for Pacific Islands as our populations grow, sea level rising. How do we look after our people? Will our children tomorrow have the same food supply as we do now?”
Comments
We encourage anyone to comment, please consult the oD commenting guidelines if you have any questions.