Is It Time for a Pacific Union?

Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mataʻafa made an official visit to Australia in March. Having recently returned from a trip to Europe, Mataʻafa came with an idea that raised a few eyebrows. Inspired by the European Union, she floated the idea of a Pacific common market, with the free movement of goods, capital, services, and – most critically for Pacific Island countries – people throughout the region.

The idea was a push for Australia and New Zealand to actually put some weight behind the idea of the “Pacific Family.” At present the “Pacific Family” rhetoric is seen as little more than a device used by Canberra and Wellington to emotionally distinguish their countries from China, but it comes with only limited practical associations that a genuine family would have. For Mataʻafa, a common market is the next step in deepening the integration and bonds within the region.

The idea gained no verbal support from any Australian ministers, although Pat Conroy, the minister for international development and the Pacific, did note that the Australian government is working on a green-card style migration system that would be made available to 300 Pacific Islanders a year. But in doing so he may have missed the scope of what Mataʻafa was suggesting.

Pacific Island countries have been pushing for greater labor mobility in conversations with Australia and New Zealand for a while. The ability for Pacific Islanders to earn money in high wage countries and send these funds back to their families can be transformative to their lives.

This is something Australia has been increasingly receptive to. The Pacific Australia Labor Mobility (PALM) scheme is open to workers from Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu, as well as Timor-Leste. In June this year Australia will increase the positions available under PALM to 35,000.

Yet conditions for this visa remain stringent. Australia’s immigration department has an instinctive suspicion of people from countries that lack Australia’s wealth. The general assumption is that anyone seeking to come to Australia will be looking for cunning ways to try and stay in the country. It’s a unique form of Australian arrogance that cannot comprehend that people may actually prefer their home country and would naturally see their time in Australia as only temporary.

The current programs allow Canberra to control the two primary elements – providing agricultural labor to Australia and providing considerable remittances to Pacific Island countries. A common market with freedom of movement contains many unknown unknowns that Canberra would find confronting.

While the movement of people from low wage countries within the European Union to high wage countries has created significant local resentments, especially in the United Kingdom before it left the bloc, Pacific Island countries’ populations are small enough to not be as publicly obvious. But despite it being a migrant country, the Australian government still jumps at shadows on the subject of migration.

Of course, freedom of movement would allow for the flow of people in multiple ways. While Australians and New Zealanders have the right to live and work in each other’s countries, and New Zealand has one dependency in Tokelau, and two associated states in the Cook Islands and Niue, where movement is free, Mataʻafa’s idea would dramatically widen the scope and create a range of new interactions within the region.

There are most likely many within the laptop class in Australia and New Zealand who would relish the opportunity to work for extended periods from a picturesque Pacific Island – particularly those looking to escape a dreary Melbourne winter. This could provide an enormous injection of economic activity into these islands, but it may also bring inflationary pressures and housing shortages.

These negative effects on Pacific Islands would need to be weighed considerably, given that many island countries may not have the infrastructure to handle significant influxes of Australians and New Zealanders. There would also be a general fear of a massive brain drain from Pacific Island countries of those who have skills and qualifications that allow them to pursue careers outside of agricultural work.

However, Mataʻafa has floated an idea that requires serious consideration. An EU-style common market may be untenable at the moment, but other arrangements that increase the integration of the region could be plausible. If Australia and New Zealand are serious about the Pacific region being a family, then new structures of greater trust and cooperation are essential to fully demonstrate this.