PARTISAN!

The Central Committee releases its analysis on the ‘Pukpuk’ treaty and Australia’s imperialist endeavors in Papua New Guinea.

The announcement of the intent of the Australian and Papuan governments to sign the Pukpuk treaty must be understood within the context of Australia’s historic engagement with Papua New Guinea (PNG) and current global inter-imperialist tensions. The announcement of the treaty, in a deeply ironic turn of events, came on the 50^th anniversary of the independence of Papua New Guinea from Australian colonisation.

While, on the face of it, the treaty merely establishes a mutual defence pact between PNG and Australia – looking beneath the surface reveals a more cynical development. It includes allowing the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to recruit from Papua New Guinea, and the de facto incorporation of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) into the ADF. Historically, Australia’s strategic outlook towards PNG has seen it as a barrier against military aggression from the north, as well as an arena for the destructive extraction of tin, gas, and other key resources.

The treaty also falls within Australia’s recent ‘muscling up’ towards Pacific nations under both the Morrison and Albanese governments. The treaties with Nauru and Tuvalu, the stalled Nakamal agreement with Vanuatu, and ongoing talks with Fiji are all part of the same ongoing process in Pacific politics. Australia and New Zealand have a vested interest in controlling the sea lanes across the South Pacific, because they provide connection with the United States and form part of the broader global context of the American bloc aligning towards war with China. By granting Australia military access to PNG, the Pukpuk treaty ensures that Australia’s strategic depth is pushed several thousand kilometres north. Furthermore, it provides the constantly undermanned ADF access to a new pool of recruits. To these recruits, the promise of an Australian citizenship and a high paying job offers a way out of the desperate and grinding poverty in PNG.

At the same time, the treaty hypothetically imposes Australian NATO armaments standards on the PNGDF. This creates a massive financial burden for the impoverished and underdeveloped state. Access to high-quality firearms is hardly an encouraging development in the context of PNG’s longstanding issues of rural tribal violence. Indeed, factions of the PNG bourgeois have denounced the treaty on these grounds, reflecting the divisions within peripheral states – that will only deepen as the march towards war with China develops.

The Pukpuk treaty is just the latest form of the long running struggle between China and the American bloc for influence over the Pacific. China’s increased investment in the development of infrastructure, policing, and governmental efficiency across the region since 2018 has been met with a counter-flurry of Australian-Kiwi-American investment. This tug-of-war is beginning to pay off for the west, as the un-democratic governments of the Pacific are turning towards the US.

Politics in Papua New Guinea are based in varying elite cliques squabbling for control of the national economic pie; not genuine clashes between the exploited and the bourgeois. Any attempt to rely upon these national elites as a ‘revolutionary force’ is practically impossible.

The fight for genuine freedom and democracy in Papua New Guinea cannot be separated from the fight for liberation from Australian imperialism or the fight for workers’ power. The strategy of the proletariat in Papua must be to fight to dissolve Pukpuk, abolish the colonial monarchy, and fight for genuine social development. None of these are possible without the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government in alliance with the international working class.

As Communists organising in Australia, we must understand our tasks in relation to this struggle. So we stand for the establishment of a workers’ republic in Australia – one that builds international solidarity across the Pacific.

In Solidarity, 

The Revolutionary Communist Organisation