Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is accusing the current Australian government of creating a political vacuum in the Pacific region by neglecting their needs and concerns.
China has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Solomon Islands on police cooperation.
But there are fears China could also set up a military base as part of a broader deal.
"What is also being leaked apparently just now, however is a draft broader agreement which takes this level of police cooperation between the Solomon Islands Police Force and the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to a broader military agreement between the Solomons and China," Rudd told Saturday Morning with Kim Hill.
"(This) would contain within it the possibility of Chinese naval visits, for the Chinese to engage in wider forms of military cooperating with the government of the Solomon Islands."
"From my own perspective this would represent a highly retrograde step in terms of peace and security and stability in the Southwest Pacific."
Photo: Supplied / AAP
Rudd said much of the blame lies with the current Australian government led by Scott Morrison.
"The current conservative government of Australia has frankly had its eye off the ball when it comes to the South Pacific and Pacific Island countries more generally both on aid and on climate change policy, over a long period of time, creating therefore in the Pacific Island countries a growing strategic vacuum which made it possible for island states to turn to other countries like China."
Rudd said Australia also slashed the aid budget for the Pacific for several years after his term in office ended.
'When I left office at the end of 2013, our annual aid flows to the Pacific Island countries was something in the vicinity of about $1b per annum," Rudd said, noting in subsequent budgets that was cut by "hundreds of millions of dollars".
"We've had more or less seven or eight years of a gaping financial hole in the Pacific Island countries where Australia withdrawing its aid effort has had a huge and negative impact on the budgets of Pacific Island countries. That's just a fact."
Australia has also been ignoring requests from the Pacific for help with climate change since 2013, Rudd said.
Rudd said that it was no surprise China was making moves.
"Our friends in the Pacific Island countries have concluded that Australia under this government does not really care for their interests either on the question of their development assistance needs or on the question of climate.
"It's a matter of logic that creates an opening for other countries beyond the region, including China, to begin to advance their interests in our part of the world."
On Nauru and the NZ resettlement deal
While holding office in 2013, Rudd took a tough approach to asylum seekers.
Following in the footsteps of an earlier arrangement with Papua New Guinea, Rudd signed an agreement with the Republic of Nauru that denied asylum seekers the chance to resettle in Australia, allowing them to only be processed and settled in the tiny Pacific Island nation.
When asked if he had any regrets about this, Rudd said it was a framework implemented by the previous Prime Minister Julia Gillard that he inherited upon his return to office in mid-2013.
“When we signed the agreement both with Nauru and Papua New Guinea in the middle of 2013, it was an agreement for 12 months only. It was an agreement which had within it an assumption that asylum seekers could be processed within a maximum of 12 months and beyond that, if they could not be relocated in third countries that they would be relocated in Australia.
“The fact that this has gone on for nine years is actually outside the spirit and the letter of the agreement we signed with Nauru back in 2013.”
Last week the Australian government announced that it would accept New Zealand’s long-standing offer to resettle boat refugees held in Nauru and other facilities, nine years after it was first made.
Rudd said he called upon successive Australian conservative governments to let refugees go to New Zealand, or else resettle them in Australia.
“It's been inhumane, unacceptable, and utterly contrary to the spirit and letter of the United Nations refugees convention for them to be effectively detained without rights in Nauru for this length of time.
“It's been an act of monumental cruelty, and inconsistent with the arrangements we'd put in place back in 2013.”
The Avoidable War
Rudd is currently promoting his new book, The Avoidable War, which proposes a mechanism to avoid catastrophic conflict between China and the US called 'managed strategic competition'.
Managed strategic competition, he says, seeks to deal with “strategic red lines, open strategic competition, but also continued areas of strategic collaboration between Washington and Beijing, in areas like climate change.”
Under Xi Jinping China has become increasingly assertive, Rudd says.
“What has actually changed here is in fact both the underlying nature of Chinese power and the balance of power between the United States and China, as China has progressively become stronger militarily, economically, technologically, but also the particular leadership posture of Xi Jinping as he has sought to assert China's interests around the region around the world.”
China’s relationship with Russia is an example of its global strategic interests, Rudd says.
“You’ve got to look at this, in my judgment, from two perspectives. The first is the underlying structure of the Russia-China relationship, which from China's perspective is enormously advantageous.
“It's meant that over the last 10, 20, 30 years, China has turned Russia from being a strategic problem to its immediate north, to being frankly a strategic partner in the rest of Asia and the rest of the world.
“That, in turn has enabled China to focus its strategic energies against its principal regional and global strategic adversary, namely the United States.”
President Xi Jinping sees enormous Chinese national interests at a structural level as lying with the Russians under Putin's leadership, he says.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a problem for the Chinese, Rudd says.
“If Putin fails militarily in Ukraine, and if he was to run a risk of falling in Moscow, you may begin to see at five minutes to midnight a Chinese diplomatic action in order to mediate a ceasefire in Ukraine, in order for China to save face with the Europeans, and being seen as part of the solution, as opposed to a present where they are part of the problem, at least as defined by the NATO communique issued in Brussels.”
Any Russian use of WMD would also be a red line for China, he suspects.
"I do not believe knowing the Chinese system reasonably well, that China could any longer sit on the fence on such a question.
“It would be far too damaging for China's standing and reputation in Europe, and to the rest of the world, for it to continue to be seen as tacitly supporting the Russian position.
“So that's, I think, the second set of circumstances under which you would see a parting of the ways.”
China made a foreign policy error, he says, when it signed a joint declaration with the Russians on 4 February.
“What the Chinese did, and I believe committed a fundamental foreign policy error, was to send a message through to Berlin, to Paris, to Brussels and all the countries of Europe that China was siding with Russia against a European state, namely Ukraine, and therefore it suffered enormous reputational damage in Europe the target of its strategic economic intentions.”
China has been de-coupling from the United States for more than a decade, he says, and Europe is an important market and source of capital and technology.
“That's why the Chinese care about any further reputational damage to itself in Europe and in the world, and for Russia to use chemical weapons in Europe, effectively for the first time since First World War, this would be a remarkable, dramatic and grotesque event, which the Chinese in my judgment could not in any way remain neutral on.”
Photo: Public Affairs
China’s de facto alliance with Russia through the two countries' joint declaration has changed the world order, he says.
“This actually recasts the nature of the unfolding ideational or ideological battle between authoritarian states represented by the Russian Federation and Xi Jinping in China, and the liberal democratic world, both in Asia and in Europe on the other.
“That seems to be the trajectory on which we are headed, Unless China elects to change course, and to depart from its ever-deepening strategic entente with Moscow.
“That would strike me as unlikely because of China's underpinning strategic interests in Russia, the importance of maintaining a benign common border with the Russian Federation, and the combined assets, economic and military, which China believes it derives from being in a strategic partnership with Moscow.”
China understands that ultimately it is on a collision course with the US, Rudd says.
“Xi Jinping’s mid-century ambition by 2040 for what he describes as the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is code language for China becoming the dominant military and economic and technological power in Asia and in the world.
“For those reasons the Chinese leadership have concluded that they are on a collision course with United States.
“Therefore, it can either end peacefully, with United States quietly returning to the pavilion as it were, or it can end non-peacefully if there was to be a military crisis and clash over Taiwan, or in the South China Sea, or in the East China Sea with unresolved territorial claims around the Japanese occupied islands.”
Rudd believes there is little chance of a reconciliation between Beijing and Washington.
“Economic decoupling one way or another is underway, currently manifest in terms of technology restrictions, emerging restrictions in terms of foreign direct investment.
“So, for those reasons, I no longer think it is China's view that it needs the United States. If it does, the Chinese could view that as a temporary arrangement, rather than consistent with their long term strategic ambitions for being the dominant country in the region and the world, which is quite clear from their public ideological declarations within Beijing itself.”
Therefore, a new form of diplomacy is required, Rudd argues.
“When I talk about managed strategic competition, this is not an appeal to what I described as the kumbaya theory of international relations, whereby if we sat in a room and quietly had a chat with each other over a cup of tea and some iced vovos late in the afternoon, that will all be sorted out by tomorrow morning.
“We're well past that stage between China and the United States.”
The question then is one of realism, he says.
“Can you have a strategic competition between these two giant powers, which is managed within certain guardrails, within certain rules of the road? Or is it going to be completely unmanaged? No guardrails, no real rules of the road, where it's quite likely that crisis, conflict and even war erupting through a series of unanticipated and unmanaged incidents.”
His proposed structure has three elements: A limited set of guard rails, which prevent crisis, conflict and war by accident rather than design, within those guard rails a fully competitive relationship and a political space for the two countries to continue to collaborate on defined areas of common interest.
“What I’m saying is there must be some basic rules of the road which maximise the prospects of stability for the decade or so ahead; a decade which I described as the decade of ‘living dangerously’, because of these four to five outstanding sets of security tensions between the Americans and its allies on the one hand and China on the other.”
