Introduction by Croakey: In breaking news on Thursday, Papua New Guinea’s cabinet has approved a landmark defence agreement with Australia. PNG’s Prime Minister James Marape said the agreement, known as the PukPuk treaty, “will elevate the two countries’ security relationship to its highest level in history”.
Australia’s relationship with the Pacific Islands is covered in-depth in this month’s edition of the Pacific Islands focus column.
Isabelle Zhu-Maguire, PhD candidate at the Coral Bell School of Asia and Pacific Affairs, Department of International Relations within the Australian National University, also reports on PNG’s 50-year independence celebrations and wide-ranging health and climate news.
The quotable?
The Pacific Islands Forum meetings are not just photo-ops; they are the most critical platforms for regional politics in the Pacific and are central to advocacy and diplomacy in the region, and should be treated with utmost respect.”
Isabelle Zhu-Maguire writes:
It’s been another big month for the Pacific Islands, with nations taking their climate fight to the United Nations General Assembly, leaders meeting in the Solomon Islands for the Pacific Islands Forum, the stalling of two Pacific security agreements and elections concluding in Samoa and Bougainville, PNG.
Needless to say, working out what to start this column with was a hard task. However, I have decided to start with Papua New Guinea’s celebrations of 50 years of independence from Australian administration.
I was so excited to see how much of a party these ‘birthday’ celebrations were. I attended a student symposium at the ANU, which was the most well decorated symposium I have ever attended. There were all sorts of festivities around Canberra, including film screenings of various PNG movies.
But the incredible showing of the Canberra-based celebrations was out-done by the major festivities held in PNG. Ceremonies, music, dance performances and all sorts of huge, majestic, beautiful displays of PNG culture were seen across the country.
ABC Pacific covered much of these celebrations; all the articles they published on the festivities and the history of PNG’s independence can be found here. This includes free-to-watch documentaries about PNG, including ‘Abebe Butterfly Song’, ‘PNG: Road to Independence’ and ‘Wan Kantri: The Next 50 Years’.
The DevPolicy Blog also released a revitalised PNG Dictionary of Biography – an excellent read!
In early September, Aotearoa-New Zealand also celebrated ‘Papua Niugini Tok Pisin Wik – Papua New Guinea Pidgin Language Week’. As the world’s most linguistically diverse country, with over 800 different languages, Tok Pisin plays an important role in communication across the archipelago.
In the spirit of celebrating all things PNG, below are some Tok Pisin phrases for you to learn:
- Halo: Greetings/Hello
- Welkam: Welcome
- Yu orait?: How are you?
- Mi stap gut: I am good
- Gutbai: Goodbye
- Lukim yu bihain: See you later
- Plis: Please
- Tenkyu: Thank you
Wide-ranging health news
As usual, the major health news items to report from the Pacific region are very varied this month.
This insightful article in The Conversation about the remnants of World War Two that still pose a risk to various Pacific Island communities brings attention to unexploded ordnance, which have been found in diverse places across the region, including Palau, PNG and the Solomon Islands. These bombs not only have the risk of exploding but also potentially leaking toxic chemicals into the surrounding environment which can interfere with the body’s hormone system.
A positive update on the polio situation in PNG is that vaccines are being rolled out across the country, including in the capital Port Moresby last month. As I have previously reported, polio has been an emerging issue in PNG over the past few months. The World Health Organization (WHO) has administered over one million vaccines. Their aim is to have 95 percent of children under 10 vaccinated against the circulating strain across PNG – about 2.3 million in total.
Also on the World Health Organization, the regional director for the Western Pacific, Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, addressed a medical conference in PNG in September. Piukala highlighted the One Health approach that he believes is necessary for good health in the Pacific – the protection of human, animal and environmental health together, as one.
He made particular mention of the need to address zoonotic diseases (human disease from animals) and the launching of a “bi-regional coordination mechanism with our colleagues in the South-East Asia regional office, aligning efforts under the one health joint plan of action”.
With September seeing elections in Samoa and Bougainville, a particularly timely article written by Ellenah Kelly, Social Disability Inclusion Officer at the National Disability Forum Solomon Islands, and Dr Kerryn Baker, Fellow at the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University, exposed some of the barriers that people with disabilities face during elections in the Solomon Islands.
They highlight the inequities in access to secret ballots, lack of accessibility infrastructure like ramps, long wait times, and lack of transport options preventing Solomon Islanders with disabilities participating in elections fairly.
Staying in the Solomons, Opposition leader Matthew Wale has called for more funding for mental health support with rising cases of psychiatric patients. Nearly 300 new cases of people requiring mental health needs were seen over the past year, 25 percent being drug-related and others stemming from stress disorders, natural disasters, family issues, and unemployment.
Drug-related health problems and HIV continue to affect Fiji. In late September, six foreign nationals were arrested for the possession of methamphetamine. On the same day, RNZ Pacific reported that HIV still remains a ‘national crisis’ in Fiji.
It is expected the country will have a record 3,000 cases reported by December. Young people aged 10-19 now make up 10 percent of new HIV cases, a 45-fold increase since 2022. Almost half (48%) of known modes of transmission of cases were due to injecting drug use, with around 40 percent through sexual transmission.
Finally, newly elected Samoan Prime Minister Laaulialemalietoa Polataivao Leuatea Fosi Schmidt was, according to some commentators, mysteriously flown to Aotearoa-New Zealand for medical treatment, only a few days after being sworn in.
According to Samoan government policy, he is entitled to fully funded overseas medical treatment. However, the government has stated that Laauli’s family is covering the costs of his treatment. It is reported he had experienced exhaustion and some minor injuries. Victoria University senior lecturer Dr Iati Iati told Pacific Waves that this is a common occurrence in Samoan politics and it exposes the significant health gaps in the island country.
Gender inequities
Across the Pacific there are very varied gendered relations and understandings. However, the Pacific region has one of the highest levels of gender-based violence in the world.
In Pacific nations with data, 68 percent of Pacific women have reported experiencing physical or sexual violence by a partner in their lifetime – twice the global average. LQBTQIA+ people also face increased levels of violence against them.
In Fiji, Dr Leighley Leli Darling, a well-known doctor and social media influencer who was transgender, was allegedly murdered. The Pacific Sexual and Gender Diversity Network (PSGDN) wrote on Facebook that bigoted commentary about her death online has made queer people across the region quite fearful.
The facilitators of the ‘Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies’ program in PNG shared some reflections for PNG’s 50 years of independence on DevPolicy’s Blog. They posit that addressing PNG’s maternal death rate (one of the highest in the world) and nutrition needs of babies will be key to ongoing success as a strong and independent PNG.
Fijian/Samoan amateur boxer Jasmine Daunakamakama has been banned from competing at the World Boxing Championships in the UK because she did not take a genetic sex test – a new requirement for women competing in sports in the UK. She failed this requirement because the test is not available in Fiji.
Fight for fair and liveable climate
September saw Australia launch its new climate targets and then immediately face critique and concern, as reported at Croakey. This critique was echoed by Pacific leaders with Vanuatu’s Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu telling the ABC that he thought the targets were not enough. 350’s Drue Slatter said these targets were “not even close to what is required to protect, not only the Pacific Islands, but Australians as well”.
These targets were also critiqued from a very different angle by Liberal opposition members in Australia whose internal party politics flirt with the idea of scrapping all net zero targets. Almost in parallel to this, the right wing ACT party, part of the current governing Coalition in Aotearoa New Zealand, has called for their government to pull out of the “broken” Paris climate accord unless major changes are made to allow lower emissions targets.
Hence, the fight for a fair and liveable climate continues in the Pacific. I think that is why, despite these conflicts and tensions between Australia and the Pacific on the ‘ambitiousness’ (or lack thereof) of Australian climate targets and action, Pacific leaders at the UNGA urged Türkiye to “clear the way” and allow Australia to host the proposed ‘Pacific’ COP31 conference next year.
RNZ Pacific did a fantastic review of all the major topics Pacific leaders spoke about at the UNGA – climate and peace being particularly important.
Also at the UNGA, Colombia announced its plan to host the First International Conference for the Phase-Out of Fossil Fuels in April 2026, supported by the 17 countries participating in the development of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty – 13 of which are Pacific Islands (inclusive of Timor Leste).
In Suva, Fiji, a climate conference was hosted this month – the 2025 Research Symposium on Loss and Damage in PSIDS. The conference was hosted by The Pacific Community (SPC) and the Pacific Action for Climate Transitions (PACT), which is a collaboration between Fiji National University (FNU) and Monash University. More information about the conference can be found here.
Among all this dialogue, there was a story from Palau which is hoping that ‘super corals’ are bred to withstand higher temperatures. Palau’s corals apparently were already more heat resistant than other corals but now the breeding and propagating of these super corals is hoped to help slow the ever-increasing deaths of coral reefs.
In other environmental news, an agreement between the Ngāti Manuhiri Settlement Trust and concrete manufacturers, the McCallum Bros company will see sand mining cease in Pākiri beach which is a 90-minute drive north from Auckland. This agreement will help protect marine wildlife and is hoped to be a beacon of hope for other climate activists across the region.
Pacific Islands Forum
Below are excerpts from a piece I wrote for the Australian Institute of International Affairs’ Australian Outlook reflecting on the Pacific Islands Forum:
“The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders meeting sees the heads of sovereign Pacific Island states meet once a year. The purpose of these meetings is to ‘foster cooperation’ and to ‘convene, engage in discussions and agree on policies that will benefit the people of our region’. Given the importance of ‘listening’ in Australian diplomacy with its Pacific ‘family,’ one would expect Australian leaders to behave respectfully at these meetings. However, this year, their actions showed that true listening involves not just attendance, but also sensitivity, responsiveness, and accountability.
This year’s PIF leaders meeting was particularly unique. Due to a series of incidents last year, including a ‘furious’ Chinese Ambassador to the Pacific, Qian Bo, being comforted by Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown, caught in a hot mic moment, development partners, including China, Taiwan and the United States, were barred from entry into the PIF meeting.
This ban highlighted the privilege in Australia’s position as both a development partner and a ‘Pacific Island’. Despite these meetings attracting high levels of publicity, Australia fell short of honouring this privilege.
…Perhaps this is not an incapability to listen, rather an institutionally enshrined willingness to ignore. Australia does continue to be the largest donor to the PIF, but this ongoing behaviour shows Australia takes for granted its position in the Pacific. But, as symbolised by the stalled signing of bilateral security agreements with Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, Pacific Island leaders know their worth, value their sovereignty and are much less willing to let personal slights slip though.
The future of Australia’s behaviour at PIF meetings should continue to value the person-to-person links we hear so much about. It should see our leaders be generous with their time, willing to attend the whole conference. The PIF meetings are not just photo-ops; they are the most critical platforms for regional politics in the Pacific and are central to advocacy and diplomacy in the region, and should be treated with utmost respect.”
Other recent stories
- Federal Government inks $400m deal with Nauru to resettle people who have ‘no legal right to stay in Australia’ (ABC Pacific)
- Who is Samoa’s new prime minister, Laaulialemalietoa Polataivao Fosi Schmidt? (ABC Pacific)
- Bougainville election: Prominent female candidate Theonila Roka Matbob loses seat (RNZ Pacific)
- Top slavery expert calls on the Australian Government to step up and protect the rights of Pacific seasonal workers (Lucy Cooper, ABC Pacific)
About the author
Isabelle Zhu-Maguire is a PhD candidate at the Coral Bell School of Asia and Pacific Affairs, Department of International Relations within the Australian National University. Her thesis investigates the ways in which Australia listens and responds to the climate advocacy of Pacific Island Nations.
She has conducted extensive research into the experiences of women in Afghanistan and their perspectives and realities living through conflict, oppression, and climate change.
Isabelle has also been advocate for greater youth inclusion within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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