The reluctant Pacific nation: policy taboos, popular amnesia and political failure. (The Pacific).

OVER THE PREVIOUS two centuries, Australia went out into the South Pacific as biblebashers and blackbirders; as carpetbaggers, captains and canegrowers. We sailed and traded and built and searched for gold and souls. And, of course, we sought security for this country.

If the title of this piece had been thrown up in 1903, in Melbourne, where federal parliament was meeting, or in Canberra in the climactic year 1943, the MPs, officials, academics and military men who gathered for the argument would have taken as a given the idea that the Pacific was vital to our security. They would, as the chattering classes always do, have easily jumped into an argument about policy taboos and political failure. Where this title would have puzzled them--a century or sixty years ago--is in the claim of amnesia, the idea that the Australian community has forgotten about the South Pacific.

I'm certainly not claiming that our politicians, diplomats and defenceniks have taken their eyes off the region; that is a rather silly claim that ignores the more serious charge about Canberra--its inability to think new thoughts, to alter failed policies. We are in a hole, and the only response has been to increase the vigour of the digging. Much of our Pacific policy has been reduced to aid policy. And because our aid is going into failing states our Pacific policy is beset by a sense of failure.

In the Australia that lives beyond Canberra, the amnesia about our dynamic and vigorous Pacific history is striking. The colour of our Pacific past is the sharpest of contrasts with this faded popular memory and the almost defeatist mindset in our capital. I was struck last year when a very senior person in the Foreign Affairs Department said Australia's objective in the South Pacific is to "cleverly manage trouble". It clearly defines what we face--trouble--but shows blinkered thinking about our ability to act. Surely, even in the darkest realms of realism, we can aim for more than a mere clever handling of decline into chaos.

I come from a craft proud of punchy, alarmist headlines known as "screamers". Yet to describe a Pacific in crisis, or a slow-motion disaster on our doorstep, is merely to reflect what is becoming a regional consensus, almost orthodoxy. The policy-makers and analysts talk of lawless badlands and failing states, especially when looking at Melanesia. Our predecessors of a century ago or in the midst of the Second World War would be astounded at how acquiescent our policy-makers are about this prospect. They would be equally bemused by the strangely defensive posture Australia has adopted from the day the South Pacific Forum was created three decades ago. Arms-length disengagement or a perpetual posture of "standing ready to help" is now woefully inadequate. The South Pacific may be a slow-motion disaster but it is still a process of collapse that is happening now, and which has profound implications for Australia's interests.

POPULAR AMNESIA

IT'S EXTRAORDINARY how little impact our long colonial experience has had on Australian collective memory. A federal parliamentary report on Papua New Guinea judged that Australians were "diffident colonisers who governed with casual practicality and who departed with alacrity and too little care". However diffident, Australians seem to have forgotten that our colonial role in Papua New Guinea started in 1883 and lasted until 1975. Where today is there any evidence of that association on our streets, in our language, in our cooking, in our understanding of ourselves? There are amazingly few Papua New Guineans in our midst. The 2001 census found only 23,000 people in Australia who'd been born in Papua New Guinea; the Immigration Department estimate is that the great majority of these were born in Papua New Guinea because their expatriate parents were working there in the Australian administration. There are nearly twice as many Fijians in Australia as there are Papua New Guineans.