Institute Paper
A fair-weather friend?
Australia’s relationship with a climate-
changed Pacific
Institute Paper No.1
July 2009
ISSN 1836-8948
Louise Collett
ii
© The Australia Institute 2009
This work is copyright. It may be reproduced
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purposes of fair dealing as provided by the
Copyright Act 1968. The author maintains
their moral rights in this work. Requests and
inquiries should be directed to The Australia
Institute.
iii
A fair-weather friend?
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
v
Abbreviations
vi
Summary
vii
1. Introduction
1
1.1 A threatened region: climate-change impacts in the Pacific
1
1.2 The adaptation imperative in the Pacific: mangroves to migration 4
1.3 Climate-induced migration
7
1.4 Australia’s tradition of assistance to the Pacific
10
1.5 Conclusion
11
2. The Howard years: failed states or a failed neighbour?
13
2.1 Introduction: a threatened Australia
13
2.2 The Pacific: Australia’s ‘arc of instability’
13
2.3 Refugees, racism and the politics of fear
16
2.4 Climate change as a threat to national security
19
2.5 Conclusion
20
3. Human security: the Labor Party’s promises
23
3.1 Introduction: a human security approach to the region
23
3.2 Seeing climate change through a human security lens
23
3.3 The ALP in opposition: a new stance on climate change and
the Pacific
25
3.4 The ALP elected: promising the world to the Pacific
28
3.5 Conclusion
32
4. Raising the white flag? The Rudd Government’s
performance
33
4.1 Introduction: all rhetoric no action
33
4.2 The CPRS and Australia’s mitigation targets
34
4.3 The lack of true adaptation assistance
35
4.4 Migration: the elephant in the room
39
4.5 Conclusion
43
5. Conclusion and recommendations
45
iv
5.1 Introduction: regional climate change and Australia’s
obligation to assist
45
5.2 Howard’s legacy and Rudd’s promises
46
5.3
‘It’s time to lead’
47
5.4 Conclusion
49
References
51
v
A fair-weather friend?
Acknowledgements
James O’Brien provided invaluable research assistance and input
into this paper while working at The Australia Institute.
David Corlett, Bill Standish and Chris Johnson all generously
provided important feedback which made this work far more
robust.
Thanks are also due to Richard Denniss for his oversight and
encouragement, and Leigh Thomas for her priceless editorial
assistance.
The opinions expressed and conclusions drawn remain the
responsibility of the author.
vi
Abbreviations
ALP
Australian Labor Party
CCDR
Climate Change & Development Roundtable
CPRS
Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme
DIAC
Department of Immigration and Citizenship
GHG
Greenhouse gas
IOM
International Organization for Migration
IPCC
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
MDG
Millennium Development Goals
ONA
Office of National Assessments
PIF
Pacific Islands Forum
SPF
South Pacific Forum
SPREP
Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment
Programme
UN
United Nations
UNDP
UN Development Programme
UNFCCC
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
UNHCR
UN High Commissioner for Refugees
vii
A fair-weather friend?
Summary
Climate change will bring significant challenges to the island
nations of the Pacific. Sea-level rise, flooding and storm surges will
result in erosion, salinisation and decreasing biodiversity. Fresh
water supplies will be scarcer, there will be more disease
outbreaks, less viable arable land for food production and the
fishing and tourism industries will suffer. For atoll islands with high
points only a few metres above sea level, the situation is dire. It is
expected that the more vulnerable amongst Pacific Island
communities will be forced to migrate as a result of these
environmental changes in the coming decades. Indeed, the people
of the Carteret Islands are already undergoing an essential
relocation to Papua New Guinea and Bougainville.
The appropriate response to these devastating impacts must be
threefold, with action urgently needed on mitigation, adaptation
and, ultimately, migration. However, the developing nations of the
Pacific cannot effectively pursue any of these actions alone. There
is a pressing need for global mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions to curb the most devastating of these impacts. Despite
whatever mitigation targets may be enacted, however, it is too late
to prevent some changes occurring to the climate. Therefore,
significant adaptation is required to build resilience to climate
impacts and reduce the threat to livelihood, including the planning
of migration options for when land becomes uninhabitable. The
developed world needs to assist Pacific communities to minimise
vulnerability to the potentially devastating harm of climate change.
In particular, Australia, as both the self-proclaimed regional leader
and a major player in the worldwide production of GHGs, has a
responsibility to assist its neighbours.
This paper examines Australia’s attitudes to climate change in the
region under the two most recent federal governments. The
Howard Government’s engagement with the region profoundly
influenced understandings of Australia’s role in a climate-changed
Pacific. During its time in office, the realities of climate change
were largely denied, the Pacific was portrayed as volatile and
potentially threatening and non-Anglo migrants were demonised as
the Australian electorate’s fears of terror and outsiders were
exploited. This agenda sidelined discussions of meaningful
adaptation assistance and neutered Australian ambitions to
viii
engage with the complex issues of possible climate-induced forced
migration within the Pacific.
Initially in opposition and later in government, the Australian Labor
Party (ALP) took issue with this approach. The ALP conspicuously
accepted the probability of anthropogenic climate change. It also
recast discussions of security in the Pacific as ‘collective’ within a
developmental ‘human security’ framework. As well as taking the
symbolic step of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the Rudd
Government committed to a host of specific actions aimed at
assisting the Pacific region to cope with the impacts of climate
change. From his time in opposition to the opening months of his
term in office, Prime Minister Rudd’s rhetoric was aimed at
rekindling Pacific faith in Australia’s leadership. The Labor
Government vowed to work hard towards significant climate-
change mitigation, both at home and abroad. Generous adaptation
assistance was guaranteed to Pacific nations. And perhaps most
profoundly, in the increasingly likely event that these will be
necessary, the ALP promised to champion compassionate
solutions to the problem of displaced neighbours.
Comparing pre-election rhetoric and early promises with the actual
progress achieved thus far tells a less optimistic story. Over
halfway into its first term, the Rudd Government has failed to
secure a more hopeful outlook for Pacific Islanders when it comes
to climate change. The targets set in the proposed domestic
emissions trading scheme and the lack of progress on global
negotiations to reduce GHGs lead Pacific Island nations to doubt
the prospects for mitigation.
In that case, it would seem that extensive adaptation assistance
and, ultimately, reassurances on the issue of resettlement are the
only responsible remedies an honest regional leader could hope to
offer when confronting a climate-changed future. Unfortunately,
this has not been the case so far. The adaptation assistance that
has been committed is inadequate and is being spread too thinly
with much of the funds directed to projects that have nothing to do
with building resilience in Pacific communities. The Labor Party
now refuses even to discuss the issue of climate-change-induced
migration.
The Rudd Government cannot continue to drag the chain on
mitigation and simultaneously refuse to openly and honestly
ix
A fair-weather friend?
engage with the Pacific on providing real adaptation assistance
and initiating discussions about migration planning. It is an entirely
incoherent policy position, which cannot be sustained, particularly
when Australia claims to have the region’s interest at heart.
In August 2009, Australia will host the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF)
meeting in Cairns, Queensland. As Chair, Prime Minister Rudd has
the opportunity to capitalise on the powerful sentiment of the Niue
Declaration on Climate Change, which came out of last year’s PIF
meeting. Concrete action on these issues is imperative, not only
for the wellbeing of Pacific communities, but also for the legitimacy
of the Australian claim to regional leadership. If real progress is to
fall by the wayside, however, replaced by another year of hollow
rhetoric, the Rudd Government’s approach to the Pacific will be
confirmed as nothing more than business as usual.
1
A fair-weather friend?
1. Introduction
1.1 A threatened region: climate-change impacts in the Pacific
The Pacific Islands region is recognised as an area that will be
particularly adversely affected by climate change.
1
The tens of
thousands of islands and atolls that constitute the region are
grouped into 12 independent states (The Federated States of
Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua
New Guinea (PNG), Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and
Vanuatu); two self-governing territories (Cook Islands and Niue);
and the eight remaining territories of France, Britain, New Zealand
(NZ) and the United States (US). Due to the immense cultural and
physical diversity within the region,
2
there will be significant
variations in the ways different people on different islands
experience the outcomes of climate change and any discussion of
these impacts within the Pacific must be read as generalised.
3
Nonetheless, such generalisations are useful in establishing a
broad understanding of the acute vulnerability of communities in
the region to the effects of a changing climate.
The range of effects that will result from climate change in the
Pacific are predominantly negative.
4
Coastal seawater inundation
and storm surges are expected to increase. Freshwater resources,
1
N Mimura, L Nurse, R F McLean, J Agard, L Briguglio, P Lefale, R Payet and G Sem., ‘Small Islands’.
In: Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to
the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, M.L. Parry, O.F.
Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
CSIRO, Climate Change in the Asia/Pacific region: A Consultancy Report, prepared for the Climate
Change and Development Roundtable by B L Preston, R Suppiah, I Macadam and J Bathols
(CSIRO, 2006).
2
It is important to note at the outset of any discussion of the Pacific that the idea of an homogenous
Pacific region is somewhat misleading and conceals a remarkable diversity of environmental, social,
cultural, ethnic, linguistic and political characteristics. See for example,
G Fry, Framing the Islands: Knowledge and Power in Changing Australian Images of ’the South
Pacific’, Working Paper No. 1996/5 (Canberra: Dept. of International Relations, Australian National
University, 1996);
M Jolly, ‘Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea of Islands’, The
Contemporary Pacific, 19:2, 2007;
E Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific, 6:1, 1994.
3
J Barnett, 'Titanic States? Impacts and Responses to Climate Change in the Pacific Islands', Journal
of International Affairs, 59:1, 2005, pp. 207–219.
4
Mimura et al., pp. 689–712.
2
already scarce on smaller islands, are likely to be further
compromised. The productivity of both subsistence and
commercial agriculture will deteriorate with changes in soil salinity
and more frequent weather extremes. Coral reefs and fisheries will
be heavily impacted and biodiversity is likely to decline. Tourism, a
key component of many Pacific Island economies, is likely to
suffer. Climate change will exacerbate already poor levels of
human health, with increases in malaria, dengue fever and food-
induced and waterborne diseases probable.
5
In short, as the 2006
Stern Review notes of developing countries more generally, the
poorest nations ‘will be hit earliest and hardest by climate change,
even though they have contributed little to causing the problem’.
6
Socioeconomic forces and poor regulation often drive coastal
degradation, putting coastal settlements at greater risk as tidal and
storm events increase.
7
For example, destruction of mangrove
forests that naturally protect against tidal surges has proliferated
as pressures to develop coastal land have risen, demonstrating the
tension between development and environmental vulnerability.
8
Apart from rain-storage tanks, freshwater resources on low-lying
atoll islands are restricted to narrow subterranean ‘lenses’ that are
highly susceptible to contamination from human wastes, oil and
insecticides as they become flooded by high sea events or
depleted in times of low rainfall. Increased salinity has forced many
5
For more thorough examinations of the science and nature of Pacific climate impacts see,
SPREP, The Science and Impacts of Climate Change in the Pacific Islands, meeting report. 1998.
Accessed at: <http://www.sprep.org/publication/pub_list.asp?int_pub_cat1=4> on 14/05/08;
Mimura et al., p. 689;
CSIRO, Climate Change in the Asia/Pacific Region.;
J Barnett, ‘Adapting to climate change in Pacific island countries: the problem of uncertainty’, World
Development, 29:6, 2001, pp. 973–993;
J Barnet, ‘Global Warming and the Security of Atoll Countries’, Revue Juridique Polynesienne, special
edition edited by S Levine, A Powles and Y Sage on Contemporary Challenges in the Pacific, 2007, p.
191–216;
Barnet, ‘Titanic states?’, p. 206.
6
N Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: the Stern Review (H.M. Treasury, UK: October, 2006),
p. 554. At http://www.sternreview.org.uk
7
UNDP, ‘Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World’, Human Development Report
2007/2008 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p.74.
8
A Simms, J Magrath and H Reid, Up in Smoke? Threats From, and Responses to, the Impact of
Global Warming on Human Development (London: New Economics Foundation, 2004), p. 26;
Barnet, ‘Global Warming and the Security of Atoll Countries’, p. 195.
3
A fair-weather friend?
families to begin growing their root crops in buckets rather than in
the ground.
9
Sea-level rise, anticipated to be one metre or more by the end of
the century,
10
will be the source of the most serious problems,
especially on the atoll nations of Tuvalu, Kiribati, Marshall Islands
and Tokelau (NZ) and the atoll territories of larger Pacific states
where high points are only a few metres above sea level.
11
On the
larger Pacific islands, where urbanisation is concentrated in
coastal zones, natural protections such as mangroves or reefs
have already been compromised by a range of human activities.
12
Any sea-level rise will exacerbate existing problems of salt-water
inundation and erosion with potentially devastating consequences
for the socioeconomic wellbeing of Pacific communities.
13
Land will
be rendered uninhabitable and unproductive for food crops when
minor sea-level rise leads to the salinisation of ground water.
14
The
people of the Carteret Islands of PNG are already undergoing a
difficult but imperative relocation to mainland PNG and
9
CCDR, Climate Change: Impacts and Australia’s Role in Assisting our Most Vulnerable Neighbors,
Background briefer, (December 2007). Accessed at: <http://www.ccdr.org.au/publications.html> on
10/05/08.
10
K Richardson et al., Synthesis Report, from IARU International Scientific Congress on Climate
Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions, Copenhagen, 10–12 March 2009 (Copenhagen:
University of Copenhagen, 2009), p.10.
This report provides the most authoritative, reliable and up-to-date estimate of sea-level rise although it
is worth acknowledging that figures about the extent of sea-level rise are still hotly debated. Contention
about rising seas revolves around methods of measuring the extent of the rise and, in many ways,
reflects arguments over climate change more generally. Various commentators, in particular climate-
change sceptics, dispute that current and anticipated environmentally forced migration from Pacific
Islands is a direct result of sea-level rise related to global warming. David Corlett provides an excellent
discussion of this dispute in Chapter 2, ‘Tuvalunacy or the real thing?’, of his book Stormy Weather:
The challenge of climate change and displacement (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008).
See also: IPCC, Climate Change 2007: The physical science basis. Contribution of Working Group I
to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, S. Solomon et
al. (eds) (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 13.
11
Simms et al., Up in Smoke?
12
Barnet, ‘Titanic states?’, p. 207.
13
Mimura et al., p. 689.
14
S de Tarczynski, ‘Climate Change Refugees Look to Australia, N.Z.’, Inter Press Service News
Agency, 1 September 2008. Accessed at: <http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=43743> on
21/09/08..
4
Bougainville.
15
In Vanuatu, Kiribati, and Tuvalu it is expected that
people will soon be forced to abandon their land as previously
arable zones and marginal freshwater reserves become unviable.
16
1.2 The adaptation imperative in the Pacific: mangroves to
migration
The Pacific region displays a particularly high level of vulnerability
to the climate-change impacts detailed above. The United Nations
(UN) defines this vulnerability as ‘a measure of capacity to manage
… hazards without suffering long-term, potentially irreversible loss
of well-being’.
17
Poverty, underdevelopment, ineffective policy
implementation and lack of infrastructure all exacerbate climate-
change vulnerability along with environmentally unsustainable
patterns of development (for example, the over-clearing of
mangroves for coastal development).
18
In other words, the extent
to which environmental effects threaten human wellbeing is a
function of the resilience that exists within the affected society; the
human catastrophe that followed the climate disaster of Hurricane
Katrina in the US provides a useful example.
There was scientific consensus long before the event that a large
storm would wreak havoc in New Orleans, yet that consensus
underestimated the scale of the effect upon humans when such a
storm occurred.
19
‘The human disaster in Louisiana was triggered
by vulnerabilities and inequities that have increased … as social
safety nets have been dismantled and institutions have been
weakened.’
20
In the same way, the epic scale of the suffering that
followed the 2004 Asian Tsunami was not simply a result of the
15
D Peebles, ‘Rudd’s chance to rebuild ties with the Pacific’, Canberra Times, 6 March 2008. Accessed
at: <http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/rudds-chance-to-rebuild-ties-
with-the-pacific/134994.aspx> on 12/05/08.
16
M Komai, ‘Climate change creating havoc in Pacific islands’, International Herald Tribune Online, 20
August 2008. Accessed at: <http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/08/20/asia/AS-Pacific-Forum.php>
on 23/08/08.
17
UNDP, ‘Fighting climate change, p. 78.
18
J Barnett, ‘Titanic states?’.
UNDP, ’Fighting climate change’, p. 79.
19
K O’Brien, ‘Are we missing the point? Global environmental change as an issue of human security’,
Opinion Editorial, Global Environmental Change, 16, 2006, p. 1.
20
O’Brien, p. 2 (emphasis added).
5
A fair-weather friend?
destructive capability of the ocean but rather a function of existing
levels of vulnerability, inequity and marginalisation, all exacerbated
by the destruction caused by the tsunami.
21
People’s vulnerability to climate change depends on a combination
of their dependence on their ecosystem (for example, a coastal
fisherman will be more vulnerable than a merchant banker), the
extent to which the ecosystem is climate-sensitive, and their
society’s ability to absorb shocks. Because of the effects that
climate change will have on biodiversity, human health, freshwater
availability and food production, it is vital that Pacific societies are
able to adapt in ways that minimise economic, social and
environmental damage. Without effective adaptation, hard-won
developmental gains in the Pacific may well be lost in the face of a
changing climate.
Adaptation to climate change refers to ‘those actions or activities
that people undertake individually or collectively to accommodate,
cope with or benefit from the effects of climate change’.
22
In the
words of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC),
23
such adaptation involves:
[T]aking the right measures to reduce the negative effects of climate
change (or exploit the positive ones) by making the appropriate
adjustments and changes. There are many options and opportunities to
adapt. These range from technological options such as increased sea
defences or flood-proof houses on stilts, to behaviour change at the
individual level, such as reducing water use in times of drought and
using insecticide sprayed mosquito nets. Other strategies include early
warning systems for extreme events, better water management,
improved risk management, various insurance options and biodiversity
conservation …
In the Pacific, initiatives such as emergency preparedness for
severe
weather
events,
water-tank
installation,
sea-wall
construction, coastal revegetation and appropriate agricultural
21
R Sukma, ‘Indonesia and the tsunami: responses and foreign policy implications’, Australian Journal
of International Affairs, 60:2, 2006, pp. 213–228.
22
SPREP, Pacific Islands Framework for Action on Climate Change, 15 June 2005, p. 105. Accessed
at: <http://www.sprep.org/publication/pub_list.asp?int_pub_cat1=4> on 12/06/08.
23
UNFCCC, Report on the expert meeting on adaptation for small island developing States, 26th
Session, Bonn, 7–18 May 2007, p.10.
6
planning are all examples of adaptive responses.
24
Adaptation is
considered effective if socioeconomic degradation caused by
climate change is minimised.
It is important to note that adaptation to its impacts is not
necessarily a process specific to climate change. Insofar as the
island nations of the Pacific exhibit ongoing vulnerability to natural
hazards such as low freshwater availability, tidal waves and
storms, there is a chronic need for initiatives that increase
resilience quite apart from those needed to prepare for the added
burden of climate change. In their article, ‘Lifting the taboo on
adaptation’, Pielke et al. discuss the shortcomings of the
predominant view that adaptation is the cost of, or solution to,
failed mitigation. They contend that discussions of adaptation
policy must be expanded to cover more than just the ‘margins’ of
failed climate-change mitigation, arguing that regardless of the
stance on anthropogenic climate change, increasing a developing
society’s resilience to climate-related events is good policy.
25
Bolstering the capacity of Pacific nations to adapt to existing
environmental stresses should be seen as a ‘no-regrets’ policy. For
example, even if both the climate and sea-level rise were to remain
stable, conservation and replanting of coastal vegetation would
nevertheless have a positive effect on fisheries, reef protection,
coastline stabilisation and timber supply.
Unfortunately, the island nations of the Pacific possess a limited
capacity to adapt to climate-change impacts. As the Fourth
Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) concluded, ‘[I]n most cases [the Pacific Islands]
have low adaptive capacity, and adaptation costs are high relative
to GDP’.
26
Generally, gross national income per capita is low
across the Pacific and the high proportion of subsistence farming
means that there is a heavy reliance on the natural environment for
meeting the most basic needs for food, water and shelter.
27
Thus,
24
CSIRO, Climate Change in the Asia/Pacific Region, pp. 53–55.
25
R Pielke Jr, G. Prins, S. Rayner and D. Sarewitz, ‘Lifting the taboo on adaptation’, Nature, 445, 8
February 2007,pp. 597–598.
26
Mimura et al., p. 689.
27
Barnett, ‘Titanic states?’, p. 206.
7
A fair-weather friend?
although the socioeconomic, cultural, and human costs of not
adapting to climate change will be high and likely disastrous, the
price of avoiding these costs via adequate adaptation is quite
simply beyond the means of Pacific states.
It is this gap between their vulnerability and their capacity to adapt
that so profoundly threatens Pacific Island nations. For years now,
Pacific leaders have been desperately calling for significant and
sustained financial assistance in order to pursue adaptation
projects that build resistance to climate-change impacts. But
regardless of any adaptation measures that Pacific communities
enact, some people in coastal regions and entire lower-lying
nations such as Kiribati and Tuvalu will almost certainly be forced,
as sea levels rise, to make the ultimate adaptation—to leave their
homes.
1.3 Climate-induced migration
The potential for large-scale human displacement in much of the
world is perhaps the most graphic illustration of the disruption
climate change is likely to bring. As the International Organization
for Migration (IOM) explains, current estimates for the number of
people at risk of being displaced by climate change ‘range
between 25 million and 1 billion people by 2050’.
28
People of the
Pacific region in particular are expected to experience forced
migration as life in coastal communities and the low-lying atoll
nations and islands becomes increasingly marginal.
29
The spectre of probable human displacement in the Pacific reveals
the profound challenge that climate change poses to vulnerable
societies. If, as is being speculated in the case of Tuvalu, an entire
country has to relocate, the fate of the nation and the state is at
28
O Brown, Migration and Climate Change, research paper No. 31 (Geneva: International Organisation
for Migration, 2008), p. 12.
29
IPCC, p. 708;
Brown, p. 25;
Barnett, ‘Adapting to climate change in Pacific Island countries’;
R Garnaut, Garnaut Climate Change Review: Draft Report, 2008, p. 192. Accessed at:
<http://www.garnautreview.org.au/CA25734E0016A131/pages/draft-report-> on 10/09/08;
Barnett, ‘Global Warming and the Security of Atoll Countries’.
8
best uncertain.
30
Beyond this extreme scenario, in a region where
land lies at the core not only of security but also of status and
identity, increasing numbers of dispossessed people will place
immense pressure on national governments that may not have
recourse to meaningful solutions.
31
Where such options do exist,
the very need to relocate raises a sense of futility and despair in a
region where the land has deep personal and cultural significance.
In the words of a Kiribati local, ‘We can’t just move to another
country. I would love to go to Fiji. But there I have no land. There I
am no one’.
32
In other words, migration is generally not a desirable
outcome. Rather, it is the last resort when climate-change
mitigation has been insufficient and all other adaptation options
have been exhausted. However, without being dismissive of the
wishes of Pacific people to stay on their land, it is important to
openly explore contingences. As Corlett argues, Pacific peoples’
desire to remain in their homes is legitimate and understandable,
but the decision to leave is becoming decreasingly ‘optional’.
33
While it might be an emotive and easy headline, the people who
are and will be displaced by sea-level rises and other climate
impacts are not, as they are often labelled, ‘climate refugees’. They
do not meet the definition of a refugee in that they do not have a
well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion or
nationality and they are not fleeing from their government. Thus,
they are not covered by the UN 1951 Convention Relating to the
Status of Refugees. This matter of semantics needs to be
stressed. As the IOM notes, ‘[L]abels are important … [W]hich
definition [refugee or migrant] becomes generally accepted will
have very real implications for the obligations of the international
community under international law’.
34
Instead of ‘refugee’, this
30
C Paskal, How Climate Change is Pushing the Boundaries of Security and Foreign Policy, Chatham
House briefing paper,(British Institute for International Affairs, June 2007), p. 5. Accessed at:
<http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/research/eedp/papers/view/-/id/499/> on 15/09/08.
31
M Edwards, ‘Security Implications of a Worst Case Scenario of Climate Change in the Pacific’,
Australian Geographer, 30:3, 1999, p. 320.
32
As quoted in IFRC, ‘Pacific Islands Foretell Future of Climate Change’, ICRC World Disasters Report,
Chapter 4, 2002. Accessed at: <http://www.ifrc.org/publicat/wdr2002/chapter4.asp> on 29/09/08.
33
Corlett, pp. 37–55.
34
Brown, p. 13.
9
A fair-weather friend?
paper adopts the IOM’s preference for the label of ‘forced climate
migrant’. The IOM defines the term as:
[P]ersons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden
or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their
lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes, or
choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move
either within their country
or abroad
.
35
This terminology is also far more acceptable to the people of the
Pacific for whom ‘the term refugee evokes a sense of helplessness
and a lack of dignity’.
36
It is important to note, however, that not
designating these people as ‘refugees’ in no way justifies treatment
of the issue as anything less than urgent.
37
At present, there is no international consensus on what could or
should happen to people displaced by climate change. In fact, the
current migration regimes of most developed countries, including
Australia, would not allow forced climate migrants entry, residence
or citizenship. Furthermore, the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees has advised that the UN is not equipped to deal with
‘climate change refugees’ and that instead ‘the broader
international human rights regime should serve as the basis for
guiding the responsibility of states towards’ these displaced
people.
38
While the sentiment of the UN is encouraging, Australia
and most other countries would not consider themselves as owing
positive human rights obligations towards foreign citizens who do
not have refugee status as is the case with climate-induced
migrants. This, however, is somewhat of a moot point. As the
Pacific nations continue to remind the developed world, ‘[w]e
should not [have to] negotiate for our continued existence on this
planet’.
39
The right to life, self-determination and nationality of
35
Brown, p. 15.
36
J McAdam and M Loughry, ‘We aren’t refugees’, Inside Story, 29 June 2009. Accessed at:
http://www.inside.org.au/we-arent-refugees/
accessed on 01/07/09.
37
Brown, p. 41.
38
K Gorethy, ‘UNHCR backs off on climate refugees’, Post-Courier, 13 January 2009. Accessed at:
http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20090108/news09.htm.
39
S Pareti,, We are no lesser people, Pacific tells world talks, media release, SPREP, 13 December
2008. Accessed at:http://www.sprep.org/article/news_detail.asp?id=587.
10
these people is being threatened and it is beyond the ability of their
own governments to assist.
40
1.4 Australia’s tradition of assistance to the Pacific
Australia has long assumed leadership and indeed custodianship
of the Pacific, a result of the enduring understanding that
Australian security hinges on a stable Pacific region.
41
This
relationship has been institutionalised in the ongoing extension of
development assistance aid and the promotion of free-trade-based
systems of regional economic integration. Consecutive Australian
governments from both sides of politics have consistently made
commitments to support, foster and, if necessary, create a
‘developed’ and prosperous Pacific. The current Labor
Government has enthusiastically accepted this role, proclaiming a
‘shared interest in the prosperity, growth, and stability of the
Pacific’, ‘the capacity to assist’, and indeed ‘a responsibility to do
so’.
42
In the words of Prime Minister Rudd, ‘The Pacific and the
Islands of the South Pacific are core business for Australia’s
national interest’.
43
This tradition of assistance to the region has driven the diversion of
just under $1 billion of Australian aid money to Pacific nations in
2008–09.
44
It is also in this spirit of regional management that,
since 2003, Australia has undertaken comprehensive police,
military, legal and governance interventions into PNG and the
40
E Pavihi, ‘Pacific MPs say climate change biggest threat to human rights’. Pacific Beat, ABC Radio
Australia, 29 December 2008. Accessed at:
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/programguide/stories/200812/s2452876.htm
accessed on 02/01/09.
41
G Fry, ‘Australia’s Regional Security Doctrine: Old Assumptions, New Challenges’, in G Fry, ed.,
Australia’s Regional Security (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991);.
G Dobell, The Arc of Instability: The History of an Idea, The Strategic and Defence Studies Centre’s
40th anniversary seminar series publication (Epress, Australian National University, 2006). Accessed
at: <http://epress.anu.edu.au/sdsc/hap/mobile_devices/ch06.html> on 23/05/08.
42
R McMullan, ‘Australia’s policies in the Melanesia and wider Pacific Islands Region, including the
Pacific Partnerships for development’, speech at the launch of the Lowy Institute’s Myer Foundation
Melanesia Program, 27 March 2008. Accessed at
http://www.lowyinstitute.org/Publication.asp?pid=776.
43
K Rudd, Doorstop interview in Niue, 21 August 2008, at
<http://www.pm.gov.au/media/Interview/2008/interview_0437.cfm> accessed on 03/01/09.
44
AusAID, Australia’s International Development Assistance Program 2008–09, media release, 13 May
2008. Accessed at:
http://www.ausaid.gov.au/media/release.cfm?BC=Media&ID=5748_7603_7093_1168_6081.
11
A fair-weather friend?
Solomon Islands. These initiatives, the Strongim Gavman Program
in PNG and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands
(RAMSI), remain ongoing. The responsibility to ‘protect’ Pacific
nations from their own political, economic or social inadequacies
and failures is commonly invoked within this tradition.
45
Surely
then, Pacific climate change provides the ideal opportunity for
Australia to exercise the creative middle-power leadership that the
Rudd Government claims to wield. Australian regional leadership
would be demonstrated best by a more aggressive pursuit of
climate-change mitigation in the international arena on behalf of
this vulnerable region and, closer to home, by making credible
assurances that Australia will do what it takes to help Pacific
societies weather the approaching storms.
1.5 Conclusion
Pacific Islanders live in societies that exhibit high vulnerability to
the sorts of adverse impacts that climate change will deliver. As
these changes progress and without extensive adaptation
assistance, the kinds of impacts discussed above will significantly
hinder, and in some cases reverse, progress towards the UN
Millennium Development Goals (MDG)
46
that the current Australian
Government has so emphatically adopted as benchmarks for
Pacific development.
47
And as Pacific communities struggle with
climate-change adaptation, the lack of any genuine resettlement
options for forced migrants only creates an added sense of
desperation.
To understand why Australia, despite professing a regional
leadership role, has not been forthcoming with assistance for its
neighbours in dealing with climate-change impacts, it is important
45
Fry, Framing the islands.
46
The MDG is a set of eight developmental targets, developed by the UN Development Programme
(UNDP) and agreed upon by the world's nations to reduce poverty by 2015. They include ‘halving
extreme poverty, getting all children into school, closing the gap on gender inequality, saving lives lost
to disease and the lack of available health care, and protecting the environment. These are
achievable commitments to improve the well-being of the world's poorest people’. See AusAID, ‘The
Millennium Development Goals: the fight against global poverty and inequality’, 2008. Accessed at:
http://www.ausaid.gov.au/keyaid/mdg.cfm
on 23/09/08.
47
P Garrett and R McMullan, Federal Labor’s plan for international development assistance and climate
change (Australian Labor Party, 24 July 2007). Accessed at
<www.alp.org.au/media/0707/msCCida240.php> accessed on 25/11/07.
12
to consider the era in which the issues came to prominence. Under
John Howard’s leadership, meaningful assistance to the Pacific
was obstructed. It is in no small part due to the influence of the
Howard Government over the politics of climate change in the
region that an effective framework for action is still so far away.
After all, how can a government help its neighbours when it denies
the existence of any threat to them whilst convincing its own
electorate to fear them?
13
A fair-weather friend?
2. The Howard years: failed states or a failed
neighbour?
2.1 Introduction: a threatened Australia
When Pacific Island communities first began to confront the very
serious realities of a future threatened by climate change,
Australia, the self-proclaimed regional leader, refused to position
itself to provide valuable assistance. Instead, the Howard
Government of 1996–2007 created a ‘Fortress Australia’
mentality
48
in which the probable effects of climate change in the
Pacific were ‘securitised’, albeit obliquely. The Howard
Government promoted a self-centred version of international
politics and security, seeing other nations as motivated purely by
economic and military power and acting only in their own national
interests.
This attitude emphasised Australia’s security as paramount and
completely disregarded climate-change vulnerability in the Pacific.
Australia was portrayed as threatened by overburdened, weak
states and the unregulated movements of desperate and
dangerous human beings, a construction that generated a
powerful politics of fear around Australia’s place in the region. In
essence, the country was in peril and an unstable Pacific was a
possible threat. By painting this view, the government was able to
dismiss the urgent need for early action on climate-change
mitigation and ignore Australia’s capacity to assist with regional
adaptation.
2.2 The Pacific: Australia’s ‘arc of instability’
Despite traditionally seeing itself as a leader in the Pacific,
Australia has a long history of discomfort with its geographical
location. As Peter Varghese, Director General of the Office of
National Assessments (ONA) has observed:
48
K Marks, ‘Fortress Australia: Veneer of tolerance cracks’, The Independent, 2 September 2001.
Accessed at:
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20010902/ai_n14419206/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1> on
14/09/08.
14
… [T]he historical memory of Australians is one of strategic anxiety,
an angst which has been shaped by many elements: a small
population on a large continent, a historical sense of isolation from
cultural roots, [and] a pattern of instability in near regions
.
49
This uneasiness in the national psyche has generated the concept
of an ‘arc of instability’, which refers to the strategic uncertainty
that Australia faces to its north and north-east. The ‘arc of
instability’ discourse has played a significant role in Australia’s
relationship with the region. As Varghese explains, ‘[I]n strategic
analysis, national psychology can be as important a vector as
national capability’.
50
Under Howard, this tradition of discomfort was seamlessly merged
with the ‘war on terror’ to fuel Australian fears of a breakdown of
economic and political stability in the South Pacific.
51
Responding
to a period of perceived political disorder and decay of governance
in the area, the Howard Government advocated and enacted an
Australia-centric security agenda, which took a hardline stance
against certain social, political and economic instabilities in the
area, including any irregular migration.
52
Narratives representing Australia as threatened by its region have
a rich history in the Australian geostrategic imagination. The
continuing emphasis on self-defence is tied up with fears of a
culturally and racially dissimilar region.
53
However, the historical
construction exists to appeal to Australian insecurities and
accordingly to achieve political ends rather than because of any
49
P Varghese, ‘Australia’s Strategic Outlook: A Longer-Term View’, speech by Director General of the
Office of National Assessments to the Security in Government Conference, Canberra, 5 December
2007, p. 1. Accessed at: < http://www.ona.gov.au/news.htm > on 12/07/08.
50
Varghese
51
G Fry, ‘Our Patch: The War on Terror and Australia’s New Interventionism in the South Pacific’, in G
Fry and T T Kabutaulaka, (eds.), Intervention and State Building in the Pacific (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2008).
Burke, ‘Caught between National and Human Security: Knowledge and Power in Post-crisis Asia’,
Pacifica Review, 13: 3, 2001, pp. 215–139.
Dobell, The arc of instability.
52
A Burke, In Fear of Security (New York:Cambridge University Press, 2008).
53
Burke, In Fear of Security, p. 127.
15
A fair-weather friend?
clear and present threat emanating from Asia or the Pacific.
54
In
2007, the Director General of the ONA admitted that, ‘Australia
does not face any direct threat to its territorial integrity … [W]e are
quite well equipped to manage the consequences of strategic
change’.
55
Nonetheless, the threat of terrorism and transnational lawlessness
in the Pacific was constantly reinforced by the Howard
Government after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US. A
simple link was made between unstable states and the likelihood
that they would become waypoints for terrorism.
56
Justifying
intervention in the Solomon Islands, Howard was blunt in claiming,
‘[I]t is not in Australia’s interests to have a number of failed states
in the Pacific’ because ‘failed states can all too easily become safe
havens for transnational criminals and even terrorists’.
57
As the
Pacific Islands became an ‘important security front’,
58
the
government went so far as to declare the right to strike pre-
emptively
against
threatening
developments
in
‘failing’
neighbouring states.
59
This has, perhaps, never been the most positive way to engage
with the problems of the Pacific. The label of ‘failed state’
mistakenly implies a history of robust states in the Pacific that have
somehow broken down. Critics of this description dispute that the
‘state’, as such, ever enjoyed much legitimacy in the Pacific in the
first place. Instead, it is argued that much of the socioeconomic
instability to which the term refers is the precise result of attempts
to impress the democratic nation-state model on Pacific societies.
54
M Cordell, ‘Everybody Needs Good Neighbours’, Newmatilda.com, 19 August 2008. Accessed at:
<http://newmatilda.com/2008/08/19/everybody-needs-good-neighbours> on 23/08/08;
Fry, ‘Our patch’.
55
Varghese.
56
Fry, ‘Our patch’, p. 81.
57
J Howard, Ministerial Statement to Parliament on the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon
Islands (RAMSI), 12 August 2003, quoted in T Allard, and C Skehan, ‘Danger Island’, Sydney
Morning Herald, 28 June 2003. Accessed at : <http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-
bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/06/27/1056683906987.html> on 20/09/08.
Fry, ‘Our patch’, p. 75.
58
DFAT, Transnational Terrorism: The threat to Australia, 2004, p. xv. Accessed at:
<http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/terrorism> on 23/09/08.
59
A Patience, The ECP and Australia’s Middle Power Ambitions, discussion paper 2005/4 (Canberra:
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2005).
16
Further, labels such as ‘weak’, ‘failing’, and ‘unstable’ reinforce the
notion of the region as a threat to Australia whilst preventing
discussion of the extent to which Australian policies might be
complicit in the causes of these instabilities.
60
Indeed, Pacific leaders might well consider Australia to be a ‘failed
neighbour’. Imposing paternalism on the Pacific and casting blame
upon island nations may suit short-term Australian security
objectives but it ignores the root causes of the instability. Worse
still, the economic and structural demands of Australia’s neoliberal
‘solutions’ have led to resentment and friction and also disabled
options
for
development
more
appropriate
to
Pacific
communities.
61
Yet the Howard Government managed to prime
Australia’s perceptions of its neighbours in such a way that, as the
impacts of climate change become more apparent, it is ‘our’
security against the threatening hoards ‘out there’ that remains
embedded in the Australian psyche.
2.3 Refugees, racism and the politics of fear
The Howard Government’s treatment of refugees was extremely
successful in constructing outsiders as threats in the minds of the
Australian people. The Tampa affair and the terrorist attacks in the
US occurred in quick succession in 2001 and led to an increased
focus on national identity and an escalating securitisation of daily
lives. By using force to deter the 433 refugees that had been
picked up the Dutch shipping vessel, the Tampa, the government
militarised Australia’s response to desperate people attempting to
get to Australian shores.
62
Ironically these refugees were sent to
60
H Nelson, Governments, States and Labels, discussion paper 2006/1 (Canberra: Research School of
Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2006), p. 1.
61
B Greener-Barcham and M Barcham, ‘Terrorism in the South Pacific? Thinking Critically About
Approaches to Security in the Region’, Alternative Journal of International Affairs, 60:1, 2006, pp. 67–
82;
C Slatter, ‘Neoliberalism and the Disciplining of Pacific Island States—The Dual Challenges of a
Global Economic Creed and a Changed Geopolitical Order’, in M Powles, (ed.), Pacific Futures
(Canberra: Pandanus, 2006);
C Slatter and Y Underhill-Sem, ‘Reclaiming Pacific Island Regionalism: Does Neoliberalism Have to
Reign?’ in B D’Costa and K Lee Koo, Gender and Global Politics in the Asia Pacific (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) (forthcoming).
62
P Smith, ‘Climate Change, Mass Migration and the Military Response’, Orbis, 51:4, 2007, p. 628.
17
A fair-weather friend?
the tiny Pacific island of Nauru for processing under the so-called
‘Pacific Solution’. The emotive debate that ensued transposed the
arrival of desperate foreigners on Australian shores into fears of
terrorism to form one single shapeless existential threat.
63
Howard’s use of ‘dog-whistle politics’
64
for domestic political gain
exposed a latent xenophobia in Australian society.
65
For example,
in his 2001 election speech, the line that received the greatest
applause was the now infamous slogan: ‘We will decide who
comes to this country and the circumstances in which they
come’.
66
As Noble and Poynting point out, this can be read as a
‘rational statement about national sovereignty’ but it can just as
easily be seen as a simple promise of protection of all that we hold
sacred.
67
Australia, like much of the developed world, increasingly
came to perceive unauthorised international migration, like
terrorism, as a threat to national identity and militarised its
response accordingly.
In 2006, the Lowy Institute released a compelling paper entitled
Heating up the planet: climate change and security.
68
The central
contention was that the rate rather than the magnitude of climate
change is what makes the security implications so significant.
Climate change, according to the paper, will threaten Australia’s
security. Weather extremes could exacerbate the region’s food,
water and energy insecurities and regional governments will find
themselves hard-pressed to cope with the associated tensions.
Sea-level rise will displace large numbers of people in Asia and ‘[i]t
63
Burke, In Fear of Security, p. 221.
64
A thorough discussion of Howard’s use of ‘dog-whistle’ politics—the art of using coded language that
refers to one item but also sends a message to other parts of the intended audience—can be found in
J Fear, Under the radar: Dog-whistle politics in Australia, discussion paper 96 (Canberra: The
Australia Institute, September 2007).
65
C Lawrence, Fear and Politics (Victoria: Scribe, 2006).
66
J Howard, 'Transcript of Address at the Federal Liberal Party Campaign Launch’, Sydney, 2001.
Accessed at http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/2001/speech1311.htm.
67
S Poynting and G Noble, ‘Dog-Whistle Journalism and Muslim Australians since 2001’, Media
International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 109 , 2003, p. 42.
68
A Dupont and G Pearman, Heating up the Planet: Climate Change and Security, Lowy Institute paper
12 (Double Bay: Longvue, 2006).
18
will be extremely difficult to carry out forced evacuations or
relocations without conflict and political disturbances’.
69
At a time when ‘security’ was never far from the screens and
papers of the nation, the idea that climate change too could
present a security threat easily gained traction. The Commissioner
of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) stated that across the region
‘in their millions, people could begin to look for new land and they’ll
cross oceans and borders to do it’.
70
Even more decisively,
Commissioner Keelty asserted that ‘climate change is going to be
the security issue of the 21
st
century’.
71
Consequently, by 2007
Australian newspapers were worrying that global warming would
‘create hordes of environmental refugees’ in the region.
72
This
struck a chord with the Australian public, their government having
demonised refugees and migrants for the previous decade.
Long before planning for forced climate migration became
necessary, the Howard Government made clear who would be
portrayed as a ‘threat’ and who would be ‘threatened’, further
reducing any pressure to take action on climate change in the
Pacific. These perceptions have been firmly lodged in the minds of
many Australians and will be difficult to change. A 2008 survey
conducted by The Australia Institute found that some two thirds of
Australians are against, or unsure about, the idea of permanently
resettling people displaced by climate change.
73
Yet thousands of
Europeans and Americans remain in the country illegally and are
never spoken of as constituting a threat to security. The issue, it
seems, is not the danger posed by outsiders but rather a fear of
difference.
74
As Anthony Burke argues, ‘[T]he perceived threat of
69
Dupont and Pearman, p. 81.
70
M Keelty, ‘2007 Inaugural Ray Whitrod Oration’, 24 September 2007. Accessed at:
<http://www.afp.gov.au/media/national_media/national_speeches/2007/inaugural_ray_whitrod_oratio
n> on 12/05/08.
71
Keelty.
72
N Butterly, ‘Security threats on the rise’, The West Australian, 6 December 2007.
73
Survey conducted by The Australia Institute between 2nd October and 8th October 2008. One
thousand respondents representative of the adult Australian population by age, gender and
state/territory were sourced from an independent online panel.
74
Burke, In Fear of Security, p. 213.
19
A fair-weather friend?
the boat people really lay in their … status as an unassimilable
excess that the pure being of the Australian subject could not
abide’.
75
2.4 Climate change as a threat to national security
Prime Minister Howard displayed mastery of a certain type of
politics aimed at shaping and deploying the national psyche to suit
his ideology. Without explicitly adopting a position on climate
change, his government was driving public and political opinion
towards a self-interested and adversarial approach to regional
issues. At the time, opinion pieces on the security challenge of
climate change worried frantically that ‘potentially millions of poor
and unskilled regional neighbours’ will come ‘begging for a new
life’ and in a destabilised Pacific ‘terrorists will hijack climate
change to recruit jihadists’.
76
Whilst noting that Howard was never explicit in characterising
climate change as a national security threat of any significance,
there is evidence to suggest that this is exactly what his
government considered it to be. In 2007, the ONA was tasked with
five major reports on the strategic implications of climate change.
77
The substance of these reports remains classified, suggesting that
the Howard Government was all too aware of the potential
significance of the situation. The decision to assign Australia’s
intelligence and strategy assessments agency to the analysis and
reporting of this issue belies Howard’s minimalist and defensive
approach to the effects of climate change. It is ironic that one of
the few governments that did not publicly accept the occurrence of
climate change, nonetheless commissioned the nation’s security
apparatus with assessing its impacts.
If climate change is anywhere near as destructive as the general
scientific consensus suggests it could be, territorial integrity—the
foundation
of
national
sovereignty—may
be
profoundly
75
Burke, In Fear of Security.
76
J Soderblom, ‘Climate Change: Is it the Greatest Security Threat of the 21st Century?’, Security
Solutions, 52, March/April 2008, p. 68.
77
Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public
Administration, Budget Estimates, 22 May 2007, p. 160, (P Varghese, Director-General, ONA).
20
challenged.
78
Migratory flows of people, resource scarcity and
increased environmental strains are not sociological speculation
but should rather be considered as probable physical impacts. The
IPCC estimates that by 2080, 1.1 to 3.2 billion people will
experience water scarcity, 200 to 600 million people will
experience hunger and two to seven million a year will face coastal
flooding.
79
As has been noted by the Australian Department of
Defence, it is in fact climate change that might act as a catalyst for
‘failed states’ in the Pacific.
80
Surely, the people most directly affected will be the ones who feel
the most insecure. It is understandable then that the Coalition
Government’s defensive security mindset regarding climate-
change effects together with Howard’s climate-change denialism
antagonised Pacific nations who were all too aware of the threats
posed to their security by the change in climate.
81
At a 2007 UN
conference debating whether climate change should be a Security
Council concern, Pacific Island leaders supported the notion
enthusiastically. In their opinion, ‘the impact of climate change on
small islands [is] no less threatening than the dangers guns and
bombs pose to large nations’.
82
2.5 Conclusion
There is a deep irony at the heart of any narrative that portrays
Australia as threatened and a failing Pacific region as the threat.
Australia refused to recognise climate change officially for over a
decade, during which Pacific leaders were already raising the
78
J Macken, ‘What happens after 2030?’, New Matilda.com, 28 March 2008. Accessed at:
<newmatilda.com/contributor/1244> on 28/04/08.
79
As quoted in J Vidal, ‘Climate change to force mass migration’, The Guardian, 14 May 2007.
Accessed at:
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/may/14/climatechange.climatechangeenvironment>
on 10/08/08.
80
J Pearlman and B Cubby, ‘Defence warns of climate conflict’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 January
2009;
Dupont and Pearman.
81
Barnett, ‘Global Warming and the Security of Atoll Countries’.
82
UNSC, Security Council Holds First Ever Debate on Impact of Climate Change on Peace, Security,
Hearing Over 50 Speakers, media release, 17 April 2007. Accessed at: <
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2007/sc9000.doc.htm> on 13/05/08.
21
A fair-weather friend?
alarm. At the 1992 South Pacific Forum (SPF), Pacific Island
leaders clearly stated that ‘global warming and sea-level rise are
the most serious threats to the Pacific region and the survival of
some island states’.
83
Five years later, at the 1997 meeting of the
SPF, now the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), Howard forced the
Forum to remove its concern for climate-change risks and its
support
for
emissions
reductions
measures
from
the
communiqué.
84,
From the Pacific perspective, Australia was driving, not solving,
insecurity in the region. Moreover, Howard’s bullying created
resentment with Nauru’s President, Kinza Clodumar, suggesting
that Australia’s disregard for Pacific Island realities undermined its
right to membership of the Forum.
85
Ultimately, Howard’s security
posturing and the pejorative assessment of the internal affairs and
governance of Pacific states created the sense of a combustible
region threatening Australian security and national interests. This
view made it impossible to begin planning and developing
programs for the extensive adaptation assistance now recognised
as urgent and still hopelessly lacking in the Pacific. It also
relegated the fate of Australia’s potentially displaced neighbours to
a crude electoral slogan affirming the right to decide who comes to
Australia and under which circumstances they come.
Yet by the time the 2007 Australian federal election was due, the
reality of the changing climate had finally gained political currency
both domestically and internationally. The plight of developing
countries facing a climate-changed future was also acknowledged
more widely. As the 2006 Stern Review made clear, developing
countries cannot themselves finance adaptation to climate change.
Further, ‘[t]he international community has an obligation to support
them … [W]ithout such support there is a serious risk that
83
SPF, ‘Forum Communiqué’, Twenty-third South Pacific Forum, 8–-9 July 1992, Honiara, Solomon
Islands, p. 2. Accessed at: <http://www.forumsec.org.fj/ on 23/08/08.
84
Barnett, ‘Global Warming and the Security of Atoll Islands’, p. 205.
B Sercombe and A Albanese, Our Drowning Neighbours: Labor’s Policy Discussion Paper on
Climate Change in the Pacific, Australian Labor Party, 2006, p. 1. Accessed at:
<www.anthonyalbanese.com.au/news/940/index.html> on 23/11/07.
85
G Fry, South Pacific Security and Global Change: The New Agenda, working paper no. 1999/1
(Canberra: Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,
Australian National University, 1999).
22
development progress will be undermined’.
86
To rephrase, unless
countries like Australia provide assistance to Pacific nations,
climate change will undoubtedly cause crippling poverty in the
region.
Towards the end of the Howard Government’s time in office, there
was growing despair amongst the Australian electorate with the
‘war on terror’ and frustration with the government’s fear-
mongering towards refugees in particular. When combined with the
increasing public awareness of climate change, this shift in the
political landscape made it possible for Australia to play a
constructive role in helping its neighbours deal with the impacts of
the changing physical climate in the region and exposed a moral
obligation to do so.
86
Stern.
23
A fair-weather friend?
3. Human security: the Labor Party’s promises
3.1 Introduction: a human security approach to the region
By the time the Rudd Government came to power in November
2007, it had already signalled a commitment to ‘assisting our
neighbours to adapt to the effects of climate change now, [and] to
taking climate change refugees when countries are finally
overcome by rising sea levels’.
87
In opposition, the ALP produced a
number of policy documents that accepted the need for a threefold
response to climate change in the Pacific, detailing plans to pursue
mitigation on behalf of the region, stressing the importance of
alleviating vulnerability through adaptation initiatives and stating a
willingness to provide refuge to displaced people if necessary. In
addition to this, Labor reaffirmed a commitment to Pacific
development and wellbeing.
This ‘human security’ centred approach promoted by the ALP
suggested a less adversarial and more cooperative option for
dealing with the threats posed by climate change. It marked a
fundamental departure from the Howard Government’s more self-
interested security rhetoric and the veiled and defensive approach
to climate change in the region that this entailed. The Labor Party,
in opposition and as the new Australian Government, argued that
its view was not only more attuned to the realities of global
warming in the Pacific but also promised better long-term
prospects for both Australia’s security interests and those of its
neighbours. Unsurprisingly, Pacific leaders welcomed the
recognition of Pacific vulnerability and the moderating of claims
that the Pacific somehow threatened Australia.
3.2 Seeing climate change through a human security lens
Broadly speaking, human security is primarily concerned with
protecting the wellbeing of humans. It means:
First, safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and
repression. And second, it means protection from sudden and hurtful
disruptions in the patterns of daily life—whether in homes, in jobs, or in
87
Sercombe and Albanese, p. 4 (original emphasis).
24
communities … [H]uman security is people centred. It is concerned
with how people live and breathe in a society, how freely they exercise
their many choices, how much access they have to market and social
opportunities, and whether they live in conflict or peace.
88
The applicability of a broad human-security framework to climate-
change impacts has found increasing expression over the past
decade.
89
The UNDP’s Human Development Report 2007/2008
was dedicated entirely to bringing the human security concept to
bear upon climate change.
90
At the centre of this perspective lies
the tragic irony that the people least responsible for creating
climate change will be the most adversely affected by it.
Pacific Island countries bear this irony out. Having made a
negligible contribution to climate change, they will suffer a
disproportionately large measure of its consequences. Insofar as
the cause can be linked to the consumption habits and political
choices of the developed world, it is Australia, the highest per
capita GHG emitter in the world,
91
which bears a far greater
responsibility for the changing climate in the Pacific. The effects of
climate change on a region already beset by major socioeconomic
and physical vulnerabilities will cripple efforts to achieve the
MDGs, such as gender equality and sustainability, which have
become so central to the international development agenda.
92
The
human-security framework prioritises the welfare of the most
88
UNDP, Human Development Report, 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 23.
89
Barnett, ‘Titanic states?’;
Barnett, ‘Adapting to Climate Change in Pacific Island Countries’;
O’Brien;
Oxfam International, Adapting to Climate Change: What’s needed in poor countries, and who should
pay?, Oxfam briefing paper, 2007. Accessed at
<http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp104_climate_change_0705> on 23/06/08;
SPREP, Pacific Islands Framework for Action on Climate Change.
90
UNDP, ‘Fighting Climate Change’.
91
CSIRO, CO
2
emissions increasing faster than expected, media release, 22 May 2007. Accessed at:
<http://www.csiro.au/news/GlobalCarbonProject-PNAS.html> on 12/08/08.
92
P Abeygunawardena et. al. (2003). Poverty and Climate Change: Reducing the Vulnerability of the
Poor through Adaptation, collaborative paper by UNDP, World Bank, Asian Development Bank and
others, 2003, p. 12. Accessed at: <http://www.undp.org/climatechange/adap01.htm> on 10/08/08.
25
A fair-weather friend?
environmentally insecure over the demands of national security
and is far more meaningful to Pacific nations.
93
3.3 The ALP in opposition: a new stance on climate change
and the Pacific
During its last years in opposition, Labor made a political issue out
of contrasting the scientific consensus regarding climate change
and its devastating effects on the region’s most vulnerable people
with Howard’s denial and securitisation. In January 2006, Bob
Sercombe, Shadow Minister for Overseas Aid and Pacific Island
Affairs, and Anthony Albanese, Shadow Minister for Environment
and Heritage and Water, wrote an ALP discussion paper
provocatively titled Our drowning neighbours.
94
It took clear aim
both at the Howard Government’s climate-change denialism and
its ignorance of the region’s vulnerability. Recognising the potential
for climate change to seriously destabilise the Pacific region, the
discussion paper called for aggressive GHG mitigation policies and
a strategic approach to adaptation and development appropriate to
climate-change requirements.
95
The paper went on to argue that
Australia has both the responsibility and the capacity to safeguard
the wellbeing of its neighbours from the most devastating impacts
of the changing climate.
Our drowning neighbours made it clear that ‘Australia should, as
part of an international coalition, do its fair share to accept climate-
change refugees’
96
and play a role in creating an effective regime
for resettling Pacific Islanders. Labor vigorously criticised the
Howard Government’s then Minister for the Environment and
Heritage, Ian Campbell, because he dismissed suggestions that
Australia might take some of those displaced by climate change as
an ‘absurdity’, equivalent to ‘pulling the doona up’ and giving in
because climate change had become ‘all too hard’.
97
The ALP, by
93
J Barnett, The Meaning of Environmental Security (London: Zed Books, 2001) p. 122.
94
Sercombe and Albanese.
95
Sercombe and Albanese, p. 7.
96
Sercombe and Albanese, p. 10.
97
I Campbell as quoted in ‘Govt. rebuffs climate refugee proposal’, ABC News Online, 5 January 2006.
Accessed at: <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2006/01/05/1542508.htm> on 14/08/08.
26
contrast, accepted that ‘in time, it is likely that one or more Pacific
Island countries will have to be completely evacuated’.
98
Recognising the urgency of forced climate migration, the ALP
stated that ‘Australia needs to work with our Pacific neighbours to
prepare for such contingencies now’.
99
It seemed that Labor was
preparing to tackle the difficult task of negotiating the national
identity and security trenches the Howard Government had dug
around the issue. This was a bold and undoubtedly onerous step,
considering that much of the Australian electorate was clearly
uncomfortable with the idea of accepting ‘others’ into its midst.
Leading up to the 2007 election, a related policy paper entitled
Federal Labor’s plan for International Development Assistance and
Climate Change was released in order to reiterate and solidify the
ALP’s position on climate change in the Pacific. Written by the
Shadow Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, Peter
Garrett, and the Shadow Minister for International Development
Assistance, Bob McMullan, the plan outlined the threat that climate
change poses to the MDGs in the Pacific. It documented Labor’s
belief that Australia as a rich developed nation should take
seriously its international legal obligations under the UNFCCC to
assist developing countries to adapt to changing climate conditons.
It promised increased financial support for existing multilateral
assistance programs such as the international Adaptation Fund
and the Least Developed Countries Fund and $150 million for
regional adaptation.
100
In the context of Australia’s responsibility as a regional leader, the
paper stated Labor’s intention to ‘take an international lead’ on
mitigation.
101
The plan defined by Garrett and McMullan outlines
Labor’s belief that by immediately ratifying the Kyoto Protocol,
Australia would ‘have a seat at the table’ for future global
negotiations from where it would be able to push for mitigation on
98
Sercombe and Albanese, p.10.
99
Sercombe and Albanese.
100
Garrett and McMullan.
101
Garrett and McMullan, p. 3.
27
A fair-weather friend?
behalf of the region.
102
Further, it commits a Rudd Government to
developing a specific ‘Pacific Climate Change Strategy’ which
includes a ‘Pacific Climate Centre’ for scientific monitoring,
‘[a]ssistance for adaptation and emergency response efforts,
including assistance with evacuations …’ as well as a ‘Pacific
Climate Change Alliance to add greater momentum to global
efforts to deal with climate change’.
103
In addition to these two specific policy documents, the National
Platform and Constitution 2007 that came out of the 44
th
National
ALP Conference in April 2007 enshrined much of this new human-
security approach to both climate change and Australia’s
relationship with its Pacific neighbours. Not only did the Platform
and Constitution recognise the existence and gravity of climate
change, it also ‘recognised that climate change could have a
dramatic impact on the lives of people living in low-lying islands in
the Torres Strait and the South Pacific’.
104
Again it underscored
Australia’s responsibility to act on mitigation as a member of the
world community and emphasised that assisting the Pacific in
climate adaptation must form an integral part of Australia’s
relationship with the region.
105
The document committed Labor
once again to developing a Pacific Climate Change Strategy. It
specified that such a strategy would include:
[E]stablishing an international coalition to accept climate change
refugees when a country becomes uninhabitable because of rising
seas [sic] levels, damage to coastal infrastructure or reduced food
security and water supplies; assistance to preserve the cultural
heritage of those who are evacuated; and establishing a Pacific
Climate Change Alliance to add greater momentum to global efforts to
deal with climate change …
106
By acknowledging the critical nature of climate change for the
Pacific in its national constitution, the ALP took an important step
towards re-engagement with the region.
102
Garrett and McMullan.
103
Garrett and McMullan, p. 4.
104
Australian Labor Party, National Platform and Constitution 2007, ALP National Secretary (Canberra:
2007) p. 137.
105
Australian Labor Party, p. 241.
106
Australian Labor Party, p. 241–2.
28
Kevin Rudd’s July 2007 speech at the Lowy Institute, ‘Future
Challenges in Foreign Policy’, hinted that a ‘fresh’ approach to
Australia’s engagement with the region would be a key plank in a
Labor Government’s foreign policy platform. Recognising climate
change as a major threat, Rudd attacked the existing security
framework for dealing with ‘the symptoms rather than the causes
of much of the instability that we see across the region’.
107
In stark
contrast to Howard’s preference for policing ‘our patch’ unilaterally,
in this speech Rudd revealed his plan for cooperative action
through bilateral ‘Pacific Partnerships’ with island nations. He
stated that his party did not see an irreconcilable contradiction
between Australia’s national interest and more considerate
relations with its less-developed neighbours. Indeed, the ALP
suggests that the former is better served in the long term by taking
care of the latter.
Kevin Rudd was not elected because of his party’s stated aims for
helping the Pacific cope with climate change. Nevertheless, he
came to power wielding promises of aggressive domestic and
international action on climate change, cooperation with Pacific
nations, adaptation assistance, a common regional identity and a
focus on human security.
3.4 The ALP elected: promising the world to the Pacific
The early signs were promising. On 3 December 2007, as the new
government’s first official act, the Prime Minister ratified the Kyoto
Protocol. In Rudd’s own words, it was ‘a significant step forward in
our country’s efforts to fight climate change domestically and with
the international community’.
108
With this symbolic act, the
government firmly placed climate change centre stage in Australia,
a move that was met with much admiration and optimism around
the world.
The new Australian Government accepted the overwhelming
scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change, stating its
107
K Rudd, ‘Future Challenges in Australian Foreign Policy’, speech to the Lowy Institute, 5 July 2007.
Accessed at: <http://www.lowyinstitute.org/Publication.asp?pid=628> on 05/05/08.
108
Rudd, ‘Future Challenges’.
29
A fair-weather friend?
belief in the probable consequences and the urgency with which
the world would need to deal with the grave environmental
challenge. By ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the Australian
Government gained a seat at the table in international negotiations
and with it the potential to demonstrate the international leadership
to which it claimed to aspire. The Prime Minister and the Minister
for Climate Change both took part in the UNFCCC Negotiations in
Bali that saw the adoption of the Bali Road Map, which includes
the Bali Action Plan for post-Kyoto negotiations.
As well as these significant gestures on the international stage, the
new government began rebuilding relationships in the region by
acknowledging the threat climate change posed to the very
survival of many people in the Pacific.
109
Rudd drew an explicit link
between climate mitigation and the potential impacts of climate
change in the region, claiming that meaningful action on climate-
change mitigation by Australia was ‘the right thing to do’.
110
In March 2008, Rudd visited PNG and announced the Port
Moresby Declaration, which heralded a ‘new era of cooperation …
based on partnership, mutual respect and mutual responsibility’.
111
The Declaration defined climate change as a ‘common challenge’
and acknowledged that ‘[m]any of our Pacific neighbours,
especially low lying atolls, are particularly vulnerable to the effects
of climate change, including devastation from more frequent and
severe extreme weather events’.
112
Whilst in PNG, Rudd also officially launched his plan for Pacific
Partnerships and established the MDGs as the benchmark for
regional progress.
113
To date, bilateral partnerships have been
entered into with the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, PNG, Samoa and
Vanuatu. They commit Australia and the respective Pacific country
to ‘work together to meet our common challenges, raise the
standard of living for people throughout the region, and in
109
Rudd, Doorstop interview.
110
Rudd, Doorstop interview.
111
K Rudd, Port Moresby Declaration, media release, 6 March 2008. Accessed at:
<http://www.pm.gov.au/media/Release/2008/media_release_0118.cfm> on 03/01/09.
112
Rudd, Port Moresby Declaration.
113
Rudd, Port Moresby Declaration.
30
particular to make more rapid progress towards our partners
achieving the … MDGs and their own development ambitions’.
114
Rudd’s symbolic trip to PNG was touted as an ‘olive branch’.
115
The Australian approach to Pacific security had, it seemed,
drastically changed. Climate change was being discussed as a
common threat and security as a ‘comprehensive’ endeavour.
Quite explicitly, the ‘arc of instability’ that concerned the previous
government has been transmuted into an ‘arc of vulnerability’. The
Port Moresby Declaration occurred within a broader shift in
Australian geopolitical discourse whereby Rudd adopted a stance
that positioned Australia as a willing member and friend within the
Pacific
116
rather than as a reluctant geographic neighbour and
disciplinarian poised above the region. The Australian Foreign
Minister, Stephen Smith, pronounced it a ‘breath of fresh air’ in
regional engagement.
117
Under
this new approach, help with minimising and adapting to
climate-change impacts became a stated central focus of
Australia’s aid program. As part of a broader commitment to
increase Australia’s official development assistance, the 2008
Federal Budget was true to the promise of Peter Garrett and Bob
McMullan, dedicating $150 million of funds over three years to the
task of meeting ‘high priority [climate-change] adaptation needs’.
118
This monetary commitment solidified the significant recognition by
the Rudd Government of regional vulnerability and the inadequacy
of existing mechanisms in Pacific Island countries to adapt to
climate-changed conditions. On the whole, Pacific leaders
expressed gratitude for the moves by the Rudd Government,
114
AusAID, ‘Pacific Partnerships for Development’, 2009. Accessed at
http://www.ausaid.gov.au/country/partnership.cfm
on 03/01/09.
115
Cordell.
116
See for example, Rudd, Doorstop interview.
117
S Smith, ‘Joint Statement: 18
th
Papua New Guinea—Australia Ministerial Forum’, with Sam Abal,
Madang Resort Hotel, Madang, 23 April 2008. Accessed at
<www.dfat.gov.au/geo/png/18_forum_joint_statement.pdf> on 21/05/08.
118
AusAID, Australia’s International Development Assistance Program 2008–09.
31
A fair-weather friend?
including the promise of adaptation assistance,
119
and
representatives of NGOs welcomed the new sentiment regarding
the serious nature of the human-security challenge imposed by
climate change.
120
As well as budgetary preparations to help with adaptation, the Niue
Declaration on Climate Change, signed by Prime Minister Rudd at
the 2008 PIF meeting, was a significant statement of intent.
Climate change was designated as the theme of the Forum
meeting. The Forum Communiqué and the attendant Niue
Declaration both couch discussions of climate change in
unequivocal terms of urgency, threat, survival, vulnerability and
security.
121
The emphasis is on meaningful and regional
cooperation towards the protection of wellbeing and societal health
under the rubric of sustainable development. The contention is that
‘mainstreaming human security’ is necessary for the viability of the
regional economic integration to which Australia is so
committed.
122
Rudd joined with Pacific leaders to reiterate that climate change
was a challenge ‘requiring a resolute and concerted international
effort’.
123
The Declaration stressed the need for urgent action by
the world’s major GHG emitting countries to set targets and make
commitments to significantly reduce their emissions and to support
the most vulnerable countries to adapt to and address the impacts
of changed climate conditions.
124
Following this, international
partners, including Australia, were implored to take ‘immediate and
effective measures to reduce emissions, use cleaner fuels, and
increase use of renewable energy sources’.
125
Australia’s support
for this declaration seemed a far cry from Howard’s demand at the
1997 PIF meeting that climate change not be discussed.
119
PIF, Forum Comunique, Thirty-Ninth Pacific Islands Forum, Niue, 19–21 August 2008, p. 14.
Accessed at: <http://www.forumsec.org.fj/pages.cfm/documents/other/> on 23/08/08.
120
de Tarczynski.
121
PIF.
122
PIF, p. 13.
123
PIF, p. 23.
124
PIF.
125
PIF, p. 24.
32
3.5 Conclusion
When the ALP came to power in late 2007, it seemed that a new
era of genuine and generous Australian concern regarding climate-
change impacts in the Pacific was indeed at hand. The Rudd
Government acted swiftly to reconcile with its neighbours,
recognising the danger that climate change posed to regional
stability. More importantly, in meeting this threat the need to
provide aggressive domestic, regional and international leadership
on emissions cuts was announced in the name of sparing the
Pacific from potentially devastating impacts. Where these impacts
were judged unavoidable, the ALP’s new era of Pacific cooperation
included impressive rhetoric and budgetary measures confirming
Australia’s obligation to provide adaptation assistance and
ultimately resettlement for those displaced by rising seas and
severe storms.
As Simon Dalby explains, ‘[W]ho we are, and what metaphors our
political leaders can use to invoke discourses of danger, are
unavoidably matters of popular geopolitics and practical
geopolitical reasoning’.
126
In this sense, the Rudd Government’s
attempt to relocate Australia within the Pacific, to concede the
threat posed by climate change to that region’s human security
and to portray the burden as ‘shared’, implied an inclusive and
optimistic version of geopolitical reasoning.
Now, more than halfway through its first term, it is time to assess
the new government’s performance in realising these laudable
beginnings. Unfortunately, as the promises have begun to fade,
Australia’s concrete actions to address a climate-changed Pacific
now look as if Foreign Minister Smith’s claim of ‘a breath of fresh
air’ in the relationship may be all there is to them. As is often the
case with political rhetoric, the gap between promise and practice
is beginning to look wider than the government is willing to admit.
126
S Dalby, Environmental Security (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2002) p. 165.
33
A fair-weather friend?
4. Raising the white flag? The Rudd
Government’s performance
4.1 Introduction: all rhetoric no action
Labor in opposition had promised international pressure for
climate-change mitigation, espoused a human-security-focused
agenda and expressed a genuine desire for cooperation with its
neighbours, and its election to government in 2007 encouraged the
island nations of the Pacific to believe that their fortunes had
turned. The new Prime Minister appeared to understand the gravity
of the region’s plight and promised to engage it in a spirit of shared
responsibility. Pacific leaders were given cause to believe that,
while international efforts to drastically reduce GHG emissions
progressed, assistance with climate adaptation and forced
migration would be high on Australia’s regional agenda.
Over halfway into the government’s first term, however, this
optimism is beginning to look misplaced. After Labor’s promising
rhetoric in opposition and the government’s symbolic early steps,
there has been a disappointing lack of real action. Having
announced its intention to limit Australia’s emissions reduction to
five per cent without international agreement and proposing a
highly problematic emissions trading model, the government can
no longer claim a leading, or even persuasive, role in international
mitigation negotiations. The expectation of significant mitigation
and the concomitant necessity of planning seriously for adaptation
can no longer be honestly presented as an option to Pacific
nations. At the same time, the $150 million adaptation assistance
pledged by the Rudd Government is looking increasingly
inadequate. And far from the strong stance it took in opposition,
Labor now literally refuses even to speak about the issue of forced
migration let alone ‘prepare for such contingencies now’ as it
promised.
127
It seems that after a brief period of hope, Australia is
again failing as a neighbour.
127
Sercombe and Albanese, p.4 (original emphasis).
34
4.2 The CPRS and Australia’s mitigation targets
Much has been made by the current government of the need for
action on mitigation before serious adaptation measures and
migration options are canvassed. As explained in the previous
chapter, the commitment to act on mitigation was made not only at
Bali, where Australia presented itself as a responsible international
actor before the rest of the world, but also to its neighbours at the
PIF where it assumed the mantle of a capable leader and regional
representative. However, after an auspicious start, which included
ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, it seems that the Rudd Government’s
ambitions concerning mitigation have been overwhelmed by
domestic political concerns.
In December 2008, the Australian Carbon Pollution Reduction
Scheme (CPRS) was announced and committed Australia by 2010
to an emissions trading scheme with an unambitious emissions
reduction target of five per cent, rising to 15 per cent if the rest of
the world was deemed by the Australian Government to have
‘done its bit’. This timid range was inconsistent with the advice
received by the government’s own climate-change adviser,
Professor Ross Garnaut, who suggested that a 25 per cent target
was necessary to ensure Australia as an effective participant in the
international negotiations.
128
In May 2009, amidst heavy criticism from a number of stakeholders
comprising industry, the environmental movement, the Opposition,
the Greens and the independents, the government announced a
raft of changes to the proposed CPRS, which included delaying the
start of the scheme until July 2011 and amending the emissions
reduction target to between five and 25 per cent. While a 25 per
cent reduction is far more closely in line with the scientific
consensus, this upper limit will only be adopted in the unlikely
event of an ambitious international agreement at the UNFCCC 15
th
Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen in December 2009. This
128
R Garnaut, Garnaut Climate Change Review: Final report (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press,
2008). Accessed at: < http://www.garnautreview.org.au/index.htm> on 10/09/08.
35
A fair-weather friend?
agreement would need to commit to stabilising carbon dioxide
levels at 450 parts per million or fewer by 2050.
Rudd has admitted that negotiations for an international agreement
at Copenhagen are not on track. And further, that the current
global economic crisis has made the negotiations more difficult and
reduced the likelihood of a good environmental outcome.
129
Indeed, it seems that the real reasons for the proposed changes to
the domestic emissions trading scheme have very little to do with
increasing good environmental outcomes and instead are focused
on maintaining business certainty and solid economic growth in
these turbulent financial times. However, as Kiribati’s Prime
Minister, Anote Tong, reminds us, ‘[I]t’s not an issue of economic
growth, it’s an issue of human survival’.
130
Australia has failed to fulfil the promises contained in the National
Platform and Constitution 2007 and Federal Labor’s plan for
International Development Assistance and Climate Change to
establish a ‘Pacific Climate Change Alliance’ in order to add
momentum and pressure on mitigation negotiations. Indeed, the
Rudd Government’s proposed CPRS demonstrates that Australia’s
current stance on mitigation could not be further from that demanded
by the Pacific nations and enshrined in the Niue Declaration to which
Rudd was an enthusiastic signatory. The urgent need for adaptation
planning must therefore be assessed in the context of the Rudd
Government’s actions to date, not its lofty rhetoric on the need to
achieve mitigation.
4.3 The lack of true adaptation assistance
If tough mitigation targets were to be adopted tomorrow, serious
and prolonged adaptation measures would remain necessary
across the Pacific. This is because both sea level and
temperatures will continue to rise for centuries ‘due to the time
scales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if
129
M Grattan and T Arup, ‘Climate shaded by economy’, The Age, 28 March 2009.
130
Quoted in ‘Kiribati likely doomed by climate change: President’, ABC News, 6 June 2008. Accessed at
<http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/06/2266607.htm> on 10/08/08.
36
greenhouse gas concentration were to be stabilised’.
131
Because
aggressive global mitigation is unlikely in the near future,
adaptation becomes more imperative than ever. Massive
infrastructure changes need to be made urgently in order to
efficiently reduce the economic, social, developmental and
environmental cost of climate-change impacts.
Strengthening adaptation efforts in the Pacific was a central pillar
of the Rudd Government’s plan for regional engagement
132
and to
this end Labor announced $150 million for Pacific adaptation prior
to the 2007 election. The Federal Budget of 2008 did follow
through in this regard; as part of a broader commitment to increase
Australia’s official development assistance, $150 million of funds
was pledged over three years to the task of meeting ‘high priority
[climate-change] adaptation needs’.
133
This financial commitment
appeared to back up the Rudd Government’s acknowledgement of
the region’s vulnerability and the inadequacy of existing
mechanisms in Pacific Island countries to adapt to a climate-
changed regime.
While the commitment of $150 million to support adaptation in the
Pacific appears to be a significant advance on the policy of the
previous government, the details governing the operation of the
policy serve to undermine the current government’s apparent
generosity of spirit. Unfortunately, the conditions placed on the
funding, including the delay to spending much of it and the
expansion in the scope of projects that now appear to be covered,
render this commitment increasingly marginal. In contrast to the
assistance Labor promised, when in opposition, to help Australia’s
neighbours as part of a ‘Pacific Community’,
134
government
spending in 2008–09 will make very little difference to Pacific
communities preparing for impending climate-change effects.
131
IPCC, p. 16;
See also, Richardson et. al., Synthesis Report, p.10
132
Rudd, Doorstop interview.
133
AusAID, Australia’s International-Development Assistance Program 2008–09.
134
Sercombe and Albanese, p. 3.
37
A fair-weather friend?
The 2008 Federal Budget allocated only $35 million of the $150
million in 2008–09.
135
Of this, $15 million was extracted from
existing aid money with $20 million representing new funds.
Drawing a significant amount of the funds from the existing aid
budget as the Rudd Government has done is an inappropriate
reallocation of resources that are already stretched. It is contrary to
the pleas of many NGOs in the international aid sector and the
advice from the Garnaut report, both of which call for climate-
change assistance to be additional to, not part of, existing aid
budgets.
136
The $150 million has already drawn heavy criticism from several
organisations for being grossly inadequate. Oxfam predicts that
Australian Government funding required for adaptation initiatives to
succeed is in the order of $300 million a year.
137
The Make Poverty
History coalition of over 60 aid agencies, community groups and
religious organisations have called on the Rudd Government to
commit to $300 million of adaptation funding to developing
countries in 2008–09, ‘scaling up to $1.7 billion per annum by
2015’.
138
In comparison to these figures, the $20 million of
guaranteed new money in the 2008–09 Budget is looking like a
very small drop in the ocean.
Quite apart from the question of the adequacy of the amounts
pledged, it is perhaps of most concern that the money has not
been restricted to adaptation-specific projects. Substantial
amounts of the 2008–09 funding are being allocated to scientific
and capacity-building programs and, although important, these are
manifestly not adaptation. According to AusAID, the aim of the
135
It is proposed that the rest of the pledged $150 million will be distributed as $49.4 million in
new funds in the 2009–10 Budget and $65 million in new funds in the following year. See
Australian Treasury, Budget 2008–09, 2008. Accessed at: http://www.budget.gov.au/.
136
Garnaut, Final report, p. 317;
Oxfam International, Turning Carbon into Gold, Oxfam Briefing Paper 123, December 2008, p. 6.
Accessed at: http://www.oxfam.org.au/media/files/OI-Nov08-finance-for-adaptation.pdf.
137
Oxfam Australia, More money needed to help Pacific cope with climate change, media release, 29
August 2008. Accessed at: http://www.oxfam.org.au/media/article.php?id=504.
138
Make Poverty History, See the bigger picture, act on climate change. Australian action on climate
change: A guide for Garnaut and the government, 2008. Accessed at:
http://www.makepovertyhistory.com.au/getdoc/5e81351c-4db8-4a97-8a17-
07f600633d79/Report_ClimateChange.aspx.
38
government’s adaptation initiative is to ‘improve the information
basis for appropriate climate change responses … and improve
the capacity of developing country partners to access donor
sources of adaptation funding and manage adaptation activities’.
139
To this end, the funding priorities are ‘scientific information for
policy and planning’, which ‘will enhance the information base for
planning adaptation responses and effectively implementing
adaptation support’ and ‘[i]nvestments in better risk information’,
which ‘will build on current Australian climate prediction/monitoring
investments’.
140
It is only after funding this scientific research and capacity building
that money is left for ‘contributions to major multilateral adaptation
funds’,
141
which may advance on-the-ground adaptation activities.
The government’s priorities are decades out of date. There is
international consensus that the world is past the point of needing
further research and there is a limit to the usefulness of scientific
predictions no matter how accurate; what is needed now is action.
What is certain is that, due to a combination of environmental
degradation, population pressures and ocean events, the
habitability of low-lying areas is now becoming more marginal.
Climate change will exacerbate this threat. For water-permeable
coral landmasses and islands with highest points only metres
above sea level, the admirable academic endeavour of predicting
the exact magnitude of sea-level rise is incidental to taking
concrete steps to prepare for it. Scientific research and capacity
building are certainly endeavours worth funding but not from an
already meagre pool of money that is publicised as being for
adaptation assistance.
Further, there is no indication of the geographical limits that may
apply to the dissemination of the $150 million of adaptation
assistance. Although a geographic focus on Pacific neighbours is
implied, in fact the fund exists ‘to meet high priority climate change
139
AusAID, ‘Adaptation to Climate Change Initiative’, July 2008. Accessed at:
http://ausaid.gov.au/keyaid/adaptation_initiative.cfm
140
AusAID, ‘Adaptation to Climate Change Initiative’.
141
AusAID, ‘Adaptation to Climate Change Initiative’.
39
A fair-weather friend?
adaptation needs in vulnerable countries in our region’.
142
All the
countries in our region, with the exception of New Zealand, exhibit
significant vulnerability. Given the votes required for the Prime
Minister to achieve his stated goal of gaining Australia a seat in the
UN Security Council by 2013, it is not inconceivable that there
might be political temptations to include South-East Asia and even
some African nations in ‘our region’ for the purposes of that
adaptation fund. It is instructive in this regard that AusAID has
recently expanded its aid program to include Africa after a long
period of omission.
143
Whilst it would be a useful step to fund
climate-change adaptation in Africa, it is vital that Australia ensures
first and foremost that the adaptation needs of its Pacific
neighbours are fully met before expanding the scope with a view to
further diplomatic gain.
4.4 Migration: the elephant in the room
Assessments of the impacts of climate change conclude that sea-
level rise, associated coastal degradation, salinisation and severe
flooding will lead to the displacement of people in the Pacific.
144
The Prime Minister of Tonga, addressing the 2008 UN General
Assembly, stated in unequivocal terms that ‘[t]he prospect of
climate refugees from some of the Pacific Island Forum countries
is no longer a prospect but a reality, with relocations of
communities due to sea level rise already taking place. Urgent
action must be taken now’.
145
Outlined in the National Platform and Constitution 2007 and Our
drowning neighbours, Labor’s commitments to establish an
international coalition to accept ‘climate change refugees’
146
142
AusAID, ‘Adaptation to Climate Change Initiative’.
143
AusAID, ‘Africa and Middle East’, July 2008. Accessed at:
http://www.ausaid.gov.au/country/africa.cfm.
144
IPCC, p. 708;
Brown;.
Barnett, Adapting to Climate Change in Pacific Island Countries ;
Garnaut, Draft report, p. 192.
145
UN News Service, ‘Climate change threatens international peace, Pacific Island States tell UN
debate’, 2008. Accessed at:
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28318&Cr=general+assembly&Cr1=debate.
146
Australian Labor Party, p. 242;
Sercombe and Albanese, p. 4.
40
seemed to accept the urgency of this proposition. Unfortunately, no
action has been taken to honour this commitment. In fact, since the
election, the issue of forced migration has been met with silence
from Labor politicians. For all its rhetoric aimed at creating a sense
of regional unity with Pacific Islanders, the Rudd Government has
thus far been at pains to avoid any discussions about allowing
those displaced by climate change to live in Australia if
resettlement becomes necessary. In justifying his government’s
apparent backflip on the issue, Rudd claimed that to do so would
be akin to ‘haul[ing] up the white flag and saying it’s all too late’.
147
Instead of planning for the worst, it appears that Australia would
prefer to act as a conduit for Pacific concerns by providing
leadership on forging an international emissions reduction
agreement and pursuing effective adaptation strategies. If this
were a genuine commitment, it would be admirable.
However, as discussed above, only a short time after the Niue
Declaration the Rudd Government effectively raised the white flag
on a workable climate-change agreement. Its emissions trading
scheme does nothing to shield Pacific communities from the
probable disaster of rising seas and the adaptation assistance
offered is not commensurate with the impending threat. It is to be
hoped that its apparent choosing to renege upon commitments
made to Australia’s Pacific neighbours might have led the
government to develop a plan to reassure these people that they
had not simply been cut adrift in the rising seas of Realpolitik
Former Greens Senator Kerry Nettle sought this reassurance in
Senate Estimates in February 2008. It was confirmed, however,
that ‘there are currently no specific criteria that would allow the
entry of a person purely on the grounds that they were displaced
by climate change’.
148
Furthermore, the Department of Immigration
and Citizenship (DIAC) admitted that it had no plans to consider
the impacts of climate change on people movement, nor any
effects upon, nor possible roles for, Australia in the regional
147
Rudd, Doorstop interview
148
Commonwealth, Estimates, Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, 19
February 2008, p. 81.
41
A fair-weather friend?
context. The Departmental Secretary then went on to explain that
the department was not conducting any research into the issue
and, indeed, confided that ‘we are rather strapped for funds for
research at the moment’.
149
When questioned again later in the
year, DIAC had not progressed noticeably; the only action it had
undertaken was a ‘literature survey’ on climate migration.
150
It is
difficult to understand how a literature survey, well into the new
government’s term, constitutes working ‘with our Pacific
neighbours to prepare for such contingencies now’ as was
promised in 2006.
151
The Deputy Secretary responsible for the Migration, Refugee,
Citizenship and Compliance Group in DIAC, Peter Hughes,
attempted to explain this lack of action in October 2008:
I think the general view that has emerged about climate change
displacement is that, first and foremost, the activities of governments
ought to be aimed at mitigation of the climate change factors that might
displace people, adaptation within countries where that is possible—
and internal relocation could be part of the adaptation process—and,
lastly, as a last resort, if needed, international resettlement as a
response.
152
Once again, the government’s approach has slipped way behind
the realities of climate change. Forced migration is already
occurring and it will continue to do so. Considering the pitiful
progress taken by Australia and indeed the world on mitigation and
adaptation, it should be a source of acute embarrassment to the
government that one of the most senior policymakers in the field
thinks that displacement is not already a pressing issue. As
discussed in Chapter 1, migration is not the preference of most
Pacific Islanders but it has become a very real part of the debate. It
can no longer be seen as attributable only to failed adaptation; it
needs to be considered as one of the possible adaptive responses
149
Commonwealth, Estimates, 19 February 2008, p. 82.
150
Commonwealth, Estimates, Senate, Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, 28 May
2008, p. 43;
Commonwealth, Estimates, Senate, Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, 21
October 2008, p. 33.
151
Sercombe and Albanese, p. 10 (original emphasis).
152
Commonwealth, Estimates, 21 October 2008, p. 32.
42
and, at times, the only one.
153
The international community must
react accordingly and begin making difficult decisions around
statehood, the right to nationality and the appropriate humanitarian
answers to this distressing situation.
Australia must be prepared to play a role in the relocation of
migrants forced to leave their homes because of climate change.
Capacity for internal relocations between low-lying atoll islands or
within the entire Pacific region is very limited; the financial and
social resources available to support migrants are restricted even
among the bigger islands and those with higher terrains. The
added socioeconomic burden of an increased population is contra-
indicated for countries already struggling and failing, by and large,
to meet MDGs. Further, it is both arrogant and ignorant to assume
that it is more appropriate for Pacific Islanders to relocate to other
countries within the Pacific rather than to Australia.
The Rudd Government’s stated intention to recast Australia as of
the region
154
is hollow if there is no inclination to accept those least
secure within the region. A troubling double standard is at play.
Australia is enthusiastic about economic integration and demands
the free movement of capital and goods between the Pacific and
its own shores but it denies the same freedom to human beings.
155
As Dobell explains, if Australia is to continue to claim such a
special role in the Pacific, Pacific people must be given a place in
Australia.
156
153
Brown, p. 10.
154
D Kerr, ‘Australia’s Focus on the Pacific’, speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute Defence
and Security Luncheon, 17 April 2008. Accessed at: <
http://www.aspi.org.au/admin/eventFiles/080417%20Kerr%20ASPI%20Pacific%20_Final%20-
%20as%20delivered_%20_2_.pdf > on 10/08/08.
155
M Penjueli and W Morgan, ‘What’s so new about Rudd’s Pacific policy?’, NewMatilda.com
,
19
September 2008. Accessed at: http://newmatilda.com/2008/09/19/whats-so-new-about-rudds-pacific-
policy on 28/09/08. This article provides an excellent analysis of Rudd’s push for closer economic
integration with the Pacific and the similarities with Howard’s free-trade policies.
156
G Dobell, ‘Australia and the Pacific’s Lost Generation’, Quadrant, 51:3, pp. 9–17. Accessed at:
http://www.abc.net.au/international/projects/pdf/Quadrant_auspac_lostgeneration.pdf.
43
A fair-weather friend?
4.5 Conclusion
It is clear that in order to truly assist Pacific communities certain to
face the brunt of disastrous climate-change impacts in coming
years, Australia should:
•
lobby aggressively in the international arena, as both
leader and representative of the region, to mitigate
climate change
•
extend extensive adaptation assistance to vulnerable
Pacific nations irrespective of any progress on
international mitigation agreements
•
position itself to ensure that, to the extent it appears
necessary in the long run, forced climate migration is
planned for and managed with compassion and regional
cooperation.
The incoming Rudd Government promised progress on all of these
issues and willingly accepted a great deal of credit for doing so.
Thus it is unacceptable for the government now to have failed to
make very much progress at all on any of these issues. They are
interlinked and a lack of progress on any one of them raises the
urgency of the other two.
The Australian Government has dealt with the Australian people
and the world on the basis that aggressive mitigation is unlikely. It
has then turned to face the Pacific and claimed that resettlement is
inappropriate because it undermines mitigation efforts. Despite
clear evidence that these claims together consign many Pacific
communities to destructive environmental impacts, much
publicised adaptation funding will not only be spread thinly across
the region but will probably be spent largely on the superfluous
task of establishing scientific certainty about a process that is
already claiming victims.
These policy positions on mitigation and adaptation are at best
incoherent and at worst duplicitous. The Rudd Government can no
longer promote them simultaneously if it is to retain legitimacy for
its claim to a new era of regional engagement. It needs to commit
to strong mitigation, both domestically and as part of an
international negotiating stance. Then it must turn again to the
Pacific and enter into a franker discussion of the region’s prospects
and Australian intentions in a climate-changed future, particularly
44
in regard to forced migration. This would truly be a display of
creative middle power leadership.
45
A fair-weather friend?
5. Conclusion and recommendations
5.1 Introduction: regional climate change and Australia’s
obligation to assist
Climate-change impacts will have a disastrous effect in the Pacific.
Extreme weather events will become more commonplace, the sea
level will rise, erosion will reduce arable land and salinisation will
threaten the availability of freshwater. Scientists meeting in
Copenhagen in March 2009, ahead of global negotiations in
December, have confirmed that predictions documented in the
2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report are out of date and the
situation is worse than previously thought.
157
Sea-level rise of one
metre by 2100 is beginning to look conservative ‘due to the
growing contribution of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica’.
158
The vulnerability of Pacific Island nations to this looming situation
is well-established and for some time now the region has been
seen as the canary in the climate-change coalmine. In future
decades, the changing climate will see a decline in both human
health and socioeconomic wellbeing as land, food and freshwater
are lost and ultimately villages are forced to evacuate.
The nations of the Pacific cannot prepare for this situation alone,
nor should they be expected to. Pacific nations do not have either
the financial or adaptive capacity to build appropriate resilience to
protect their citizens. Indeed, extreme poverty is steadily rising in
parts of the Pacific and both economic performance and
governance are seen as weak.
159
Progress towards the UN MDGs
in the region has been described as ‘heading in the wrong
direction’,
160
with some willing to characterise the state of affairs as
endemic.
161
157
Richardson et. al., Synthesis Report, p. 8.
158
Richardson et. al., Synthesis Report, p. 10.
159
AusAID, Tracking Development and Governance in the Pacific, Canberra, 2008. Accessed at:
http://www.ausaid.gov.au/publications/pdf/track_devgov.pdf on 21/08/08.
160
Rudd, Doorstop interview.
161
H Hughes, ‘Aid Has Failed the Pacific’, Issue Analysis No. 33, Centre for Independent Studies, 7 May
2003. Accessed at: http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA33/ia33.pdf.
46
Pacific communities will need to rely on assistance from developed
countries like Australia if there is to be any hope of reducing the
negative impacts of climate change upon the islands. Australia, as
assumed regional leader, has both a moral and a legal obligation
under the UNFCCC to assist.
162
Furthermore, it is in Australia’s
national interest from both an economic and a traditional security
perspective to do so. But, as this paper has documented,
adequate assistance has not been forthcoming. Australia has long
claimed to be a special friend of the Pacific nations but now, when
there is an urgent need for deep cuts to emissions and significant
adaptive measures including migration, the depth of the friendship
is being tested.
5.2 Howard’s legacy and Rudd’s promises
The Howard Government sought to separate the issues of ‘climate
change’ and ‘security’, largely denying the existence of the former
and affording the latter an alarming prominence. For over a
decade, John Howard encouraged a view of the Pacific as
unstable and likely to compromise Australian territorial integrity if a
hardline stance on governance and economic stability were not
enforced. In addition, the Howard Government fostered a
discourse of danger surrounding refugees for its own political gain.
The resulting fearmongering, which saw comparisons between
terrorists and Pacific Islanders forced to migrate because of
climate change, moved Australia further away from displaying the
will and the inclination to assist an increasingly desperate Pacific.
The Howard Government’s support of national security narratives
that denied climate-change vulnerability in the region was a failure
of imagination with serious consequences for those most truly
insecure.
On the other hand, the ALP in opposition chose to conflate climate
change and security and adopted a rhetoric of human security that
linked regional instability and vulnerability to a development
solution. By accepting the reality of the changing climate and the
need for assistance in the Pacific, Labor sought to distance itself
162
UNFCCC, Article 4.4.
47
A fair-weather friend?
from the Howard Government, committing to international
leadership on mitigation, the provision of significant adaptation
assistance and the establishment of an international regime for the
resettlement of those displaced by climate change. Upon its
election, the Rudd Government announced a new era of
cooperative neighbourly relations. The rhetoric was a powerful and
a promising start that did much to repair the damage done to the
Australian-Pacific relationship under Howard. Unfortunately,
however, policy and practice have failed to uphold these symbolic
gestures. To date, the Pacific has not witnessed any real
improvement in climate mitigation or adaptation on Rudd’s watch.
5.3 ‘It’s time to lead’
In 2006, the ALP scolded the Howard Government for failing to
show leadership on regional climate change and declared that it
was ‘time to lead again’.
163
It is now time for the Rudd Government
to listen to its own demands and fulfil the promises that it made in
opposition. If it is to regain the trust of the Pacific, it must:
•
garner the necessary political will to enforce domestic
emissions reductions and lobby internationally for
aggressive mitigation targets
•
guarantee the provision of targeted and meaningful,
rather than diffuse and token, adaptation assistance to
the region
•
demonstrate leadership and compassion in formulating
resettlement options for Pacific people displaced by
climate change.
Mitigation
Australia must set carbon reduction targets that are far more
ambitious, in line with the scientific consensus. As a senior CSIRO
scientist has recently counselled, considering climate change as
only one of the factors, along with the economy and other domestic
concerns, when setting mitigation targets ‘is like trying to negotiate
163
Sercombe and Albanese, p. 3.
48
with a speeding train’.
164
By agreeing to aggressive emissions
reductions before the Copenhagen negotiations in December
2009, Australia would be well-placed to provide international
leadership and encouragement to China and other major
developing countries reluctant to undertake deep cuts without
concrete commitments from the developed world. To this end, the
Rudd Government must fulfil its election promise and establish a
‘Pacific Climate Change Alliance’, allowing it to be part of a Pacific
regional negotiation strategy on mitigation. By lending Australia’s
middle-power voice to the Pacific during international negotiations,
the government would make a significant gesture towards
supporting the region.
Adaptation
It is time to remove discussion of adaptive measures and the
possibility of migration from the margins of mitigation
considerations and recognise their absolute centrality to the future
of the Pacific community. This paper has outlined the need to
extend far more substantial adaptation assistance to the Pacific
because of the predicted effects of climate change upon the UN
MDGs to which the Rudd Government says it is so committed. In
the words of Philipp Muller, the Marshall Islands’ Ambassador to
the UN, ‘The current levels of funds for adaptation are grossly
inadequate. We must put words into action and adaptation funds
must be truly new funds’.
165
Labor must ensure that the remainder
of the $150 million first pledged in opposition is guaranteed for
Pacific adaptation and is truly additional to the existing aid budget.
In addition to this, the Rudd Government should commit a
percentage of revenue from the CPRS to ongoing adaptation
assistance and emergency relief in the Pacific as requested by
international NGOs.
166
164
As quoted in T Arup, ‘Science ignored in climate targets’, The Age, 13 April 2009
.
165
Pareti,.
166
CCDR, p. 6.
Oxfam International, Turning Carbon into Gold.
49
A fair-weather friend?
Migration
This paper has established the need for the Australian
Government to confront the issue of displacement caused by sea-
level rise because, although resettlement of Pacific Islanders may
be seen as an undesirable adaptation strategy of ‘last resort’, it is
increasingly unlikely that any amount of adaptation assistance will
avoid some degree of forced migration. It is in Australia’s interest
to confront the need for future migration now and to evaluate
candidly and compassionately the potential for Australia to act as a
destination. The Rudd Government must honour the commitment it
made in opposition to establish an ‘international coalition to accept
climate refugees’.
167
DIAC must be tasked with investigating the
establishment of a new sub-class to the humanitarian intake under
the Migration Act, which could allow entry and residence for Pacific
Islanders displaced by climate change and at risk of displacement.
As life on some atoll islands becomes less viable, this contingency
should be urgently addressed. As well as affording Pacific
Islanders some dignity and control over their futures, staged
migration would provide for better integration and be far less costly
than emergency relocation in the future.
5.4 Conclusion
In August, Australia will host the 2009 meeting of the PIF in Cairns,
Queensland, the first time the meeting has been held in Australia
since 1994. Kevin Rudd has the opportunity to use his position as
Chair to demonstrate Australia’s capacity for real leadership on
climate change. This is a timely opportunity for the Rudd
Government to take a whole-of-government approach to mitigation
and adaptation and direct practical and honest attention to the fate
of a climate-changed Pacific. By honouring the commitments made
in opposition, the Labor Party can move forward towards securing
a better future for Pacific Island communities and, in turn, promote
Australia’s position as a regional leader. In order to do so,
however, the government needs to enact deep emissions cuts at
home, provide adequate adaptation assistance to the Pacific and
look to the possibility of providing refuge for those displaced by
167
Australian Labor Party, p. 242.
Sercombe and Albanese, p. 4.
50
climate change. By acting in good faith, the Rudd Government can
show that for the Pacific region facing the devastating impact of
climate change, Australia is more than just a fair-weather friend.
51
A fair-weather friend?
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A fair-weather friend?
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64
Discussion papers available from The Australia Institute
104 Fear, J., Go Away Please: The social and economic impact
of intrusive marketing, December 2008.
103 Fear, J and Pace, G., Choosing Not to Choose: Making
superannuation work by default, November 2008.
102 Saddler, H. and King, H., Agriculture and Emissions Trading:
The Impossible Dream? October 2008.
101 Harris Rimmer, S., The Dangers of Character Tests, October
2008.
100 Edgar, G., Agreeing to disagree: Maintaining dissent in the
NGO sector, August 2008.
99
Fear, J., Choice Overload: Australians coping with the new
financial order, May 2008.
98
Hamilton, C., Downie, C. and Lu, Y., The State of the
Australian Middle Class, October 2007.
97
Macintosh, A., Climate Change and Australian Coastal
Shipping, October 2007.
96
Fear, J., Under the Radar: Dog-Whistle Politics in Australia,
September 2007.
95
Hamilton, C. and Downie, C., University Capture: Australian
universities and the fossil fuel industries, June 2007.
94
Macintosh, A. and Downie, C., A Flight Risk? Aviation and
climate change in Australia, May 2007.
93
Rush, E. and La Nauze, A., Letting Children Be Children:
Stopping the sexualisation of children in Australia, December
2006.
92
Wilkie, A., All Quiet in the Ranks: An exploration of dissent in
Australia’s security agencies, November 2006.
91
Macintosh, A. and Downie, C., Wind Farms: The facts and
the fallacies, October 2006.