TO HEAR it bruited about in the Australian general election campaign, the pact between China and the Solomon Islands is the biggest threat to the country since the Japanese briefly held the islands in World War II. Prime Minister Scott Morrison even warned that hosting a Chinese military base on the islands would cross a “red line”. In response, Solomons’ Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said Australia was being hypocritical because it had kept its own negotiations with the United States and Britain over the AUKUS pact top secret; he only learnt about it from news reports. He then mocked Morrison’s claim of respecting the Islanders’ sovereignty by saying he too respected Canberra’s right to enter into any treaty it wants to, “transparently or not”.

Washington also seems to have suddenly rediscovered a glitch in its Pacific strategy after the Sino-Solomon deal. Kurt Campbell, Washington’s Indo-Pacific supremo, was duly dispatched to Honiara to wield the formulary carrot and stick. After his meetings with Sogavare, he announced that the United States would reopen its embassy that had been closed for decades. The US would also send a hospital ship to boost the country’s Covid-19 vaccination programme.

Whatever the strategic ramifications of the pact, it has to be acknowledged that Canberra’s general attitude towards the small islander nations of the South Pacific has been a mixture of condescension and indifference. When they are thought about at all, it is in the context of aid bestowed or withheld. Islanders’ fears about climate change and rising sea levels that threaten their homes is always given short shrift.

On top of that, both Australia and New Zealand share a deep anxiety about their place in the South Pacific rooted in their colonial settler history. So, they were very happy when Britain colonised the Solomon Islands in 1893. At that time, it was feared that hostile powers, then France and Germany, might take control of sea approaches to the two British settlements.

As postwar islander independence loomed, many ideas were floated, one even about absorbing them into the Australian federation. But it did not take off. Solomon Islands gained independence in 1978.

For Canberra the islanders were always seen as source of cheap farm labour. From the 1860s men were coerced, tricked, and sometimes kidnapped, to work for Queensland sugar plantations in a system known as “blackbirding”. Then in 1902, thousands of islanders were kicked out as the White Australia policy kicked in. A century later the Pacific is once again treated as a source of cheap labour. There is currently a Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme where workers are tied to employer-sponsored visas and often forced to work in slave-labour conditions.

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More than security, Beijing offers economic development to the Solomons where about 30 per cent of homes still have no electricity and 13 per cent live below the poverty line. Canberra can match this. In March, an Australian parliamentary inquiry suggested Compacts of Free Association with islander nations, giving them rights to freely come and work in Australia. The Marshall Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia have a similar scheme with the US.

Australians would be better off with this sort of deal with islanders than tie themselves in knots over the prospect of a Chinese naval base on their doorstop that may or may not eventuate.