She said then: “I’m not going to leave undisturbed the impression that I made an announcement about a specific location.”
Australians were not told — until the story was broken on Saturday by The Weekend Australian — that impecunious Pacific countries then began to put their hands up. Solomon Islands was among them. But no one in the Solomons public had heard anything about the proposal until Saturday.
Danny Philip, who became prime minister on Aug. 25 last year following a national election, announced it was his government that made the approach to Canberra.
It was always bound to provoke controversy because of the country’s growing shortage of productive land. This became an issue when refugees flowed over from Bougainville during the civil war there during the 1980s and 90s.
The disastrous fighting that was brought under control only by the intervention eight years ago of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, or RAMSI, was in part caused by disputes between people of Guadalcanal and Malaita islands over land on Guadalcanal being used by Malaitans.
A prominent Solomon Islander, who did not wish to be named, told The Australian: “Perhaps the plan is to convert the RAMSI headquarters near the airport into a processing center” — because it would provide a ready-made facility. But RAMSI remains highly popular in the Solomons, as the stability and training it provides improve government service delivery and job opportunities. Replacing it with an asylum-seeker centre would prove at best controversial.
Philip said that it was not the RAMSI facility he had offered, but the unused former World War II base on Stirling Island.
He anticipates that the infrastructure required for an asylum-seekers centre there would also enable his government to police what has been over the past few decades a problematic and leaky border with Papua New Guinea.
Now he is frustrated that the Gillard government has failed to enter into negotiations on his proposal.
Solomon Islands, like Papua New Guinea and Malaysia, with which the Gillard government is continuing negotiations about asylum-seekers, is a participant in the Bali regional process on countering people-smuggling.
Yet it remains unclear how Canberra’s approach can be perceived as part of a regional solution.
Motives are mixed in the Pacific islands about such issues.
To some extent, countries are simply seeking the income and jobs that such a centre would bring, and the training and other opportunities. There is also a residual sentiment of genuine affection and of wanting to help out the big neighbor.
Most Pacific nations are still struggling to grow at a faster rate than their populations — with overseas migration providing a crucial outlet, along with guest-working in New Zealand, although the Australian pilot guest-worker scheme has proven a failure to date.
It is now unclear whether the Gillard government is still concerned about whether a potential processing centre is located in a country that has signed up to the U.N.’s refugee convention.
Malaysia, with which Canberra is still negotiating a asylum-seeker swap deal, is not a signatory.
Solomon Islands, like PNG, is a signatory.
Of the other 12 Pacific island countries, only three others are signatories — Fiji, which is very alienated from Canberra under its military regime, Samoa, and Tuvalu.
Tuvalu is tiny, and Samoa is a long way from the usual beaten paths of boatpeople. Samoa is also one of the Pacific’s few recent economic success stories, with Vanuatu.
New Zealand is also a signatory, but with an election coming at the end of the year, Prime Minister John Key comfortably ahead in the polls will not want to help out Canberra at considerable political risk.
