Editor's note: Sameed Basha, a special commentator for CGTN, is a defense and political analyst based in Australia, specializing in Asia-Pacific regional dynamics and conflict and security studies. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

Australia has been on a security-pact signing spree in the Pacific, with the signing of the Ocean of Peace Alliance with Fiji, a mutual defense pact framed around joint cooperation, consultation, and collective responses to security threats in the region, aiming at countering China's influence. The hypocrisy, however, is hard to ignore, as a week earlier, Australia signed the Nakamal Agreement with Vanuatu to prevent the securitization of its ports and infrastructure by any third party, essentially forcing the country to remain neutral in its relations with China while expanding its own security footprint in the region. This urgency reveals Canberra's internal anxieties, especially after Donald Trump dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID). And in 2025, he withdrew the US from its development partnerships in the Pacific, leaving Australia alone in countering the so-called China's rising influence in the region.

But Australia's security pacts, without tangible investments, are bound to be reduced to colonial outposts designed to deny China a strategic stake in the Pacific. Australia prioritizes aid, not trade, as its form of investment, while China concentrates on trade and infrastructure development throughout the region, integrating them into its global supply chain. According to the Lowy Institute's Pacific Aid Map, Australia is the largest aid donor to the Pacific Island countries, accounting for 38% of total aid over the past 15 years, significantly higher than China's contribution of 9%.

However, another estimate from the Institute shows that 40-50% of Australia's aid to the Pacific Islands is spent on technical assistance, such as advisors, rather than on infrastructure, thereby signaling to Australia's domestic audience that swift action has been taken to counter China. This strategy has not gained any prevalence, as a 2026 study found that 39% of respondents believed China held greater influence in the Pacific, compared to 33% who said Australia did. Australia's trade with Pacific nations is heavily skewed towards three countries: Papua New Guinea (80%), Fiji (8%), and New Caledonia (6%), with the remaining 12 Pacific Island countries accounting for just 6% of Australia's total trade with the Pacific nations.

This is further evidenced in a report by Jubilee Australia, which found that many of Australia's commitments were geopolitically motivated, aimed less at genuine Pacific development and poverty alleviation than at re-establishing Canberra's influence in the face of China's growing presence. A recent example of this failing approach is the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Electrification Partnership signed at the 2018 APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting by Australia, the US, Japan and New Zealand. The initiative aimed to increase PNG's electricity coverage from 13% to 70% by 2030. New Zealand has since suspended the project due to rising violence and an inability to understand the country's complexities, and it is expected to miss the previous deadline, demonstrating how quickly strategic ambitions can falter when decisions are made in haste.

In contrast, China's influence in the Pacific has been direct and focused on local needs, rather than delivering stern moral lectures or dangling defense pacts as a gateway towards economic cooperation. China's appeal rests on tangible assets that an average person can use. Beijing has funded critical infrastructure like roads, bridges, stadiums, government buildings, telecommunications towers, and energy projects across the region without favoritism. The $135 million Vanua Levu Road upgrade in Fiji connected 61 villages and 15 schools, improving access to vital resources. China also supported major infrastructure like $75 million for the Digital TV Transformation project in PNG, $66 million for the Huawei Cell tower project to improve telecommunications coverage across the Solomon Islands, and $120 million for the Malekula Phase III roads project in Vanuatu.

Canberra, however, views these initiatives with fear. It created the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific as a counter to China's soft-loans program, but its lending terms are more expensive and focus on strategic rather than economically meritorious projects. But what it fails to realize is that a road reduces travel time, a bridge connects communities, a telecommunication tower expands access to local and global markets, education, and emergency services, and enhances government communication, especially in a climate-affected region like the Pacific.

Ultimately, treaties such as Falepili with Tuvalu, Pukpuk with PNG, the Nauru treaty, Nakamal with Vanuatu, and efforts to enforce neutrality in the Solomon Islands may strengthen diplomacy, but they offer limited material benefit to ordinary Pacific Islander citizens. Based on Australia's record over the past decade, its primary initiatives have rarely been about economic transformation but rather about strategic denial aimed at restricting China's influence and preserving Australia's regional hegemony.

The danger is that Australia is reproducing a security architecture in the Pacific with the same dependency model that the US built in Europe after World War II. For decades, Washington provided Europe with a security umbrella, leaving much of the continent reliant on US military power and direction. This dependency became a source of leverage that Donald Trump has repeatedly used to threaten the partnership if Europe failed to heed.

The Pacific Islands that sign these treaties risk the same dependencies that Canberra is trying to foster. In a future confrontation with China, that dependency could be used to pressurize Pacific states into alignment, eroding their strategic autonomy. Canberra still views the region through its colonial hangover, professing respect for Pacific sovereignty in speeches and handshakes but, in practice, containing the region whenever it conflicts with Australia's China anxiety.

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