Australian Public Diplomacy and a National Rugby League Team in Papua New Guinea

The 2024 Olympics in Paris demonstrated the continuing importance of sports events as an aspect of public diplomacy and soft power. France used the event to reflect the French commitment to diversity and equality while demonstrating its continued great power status. The recent endorsement by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for a National Rugby League Team for Papua New Guinea (PNG) is proof that Australia continues to use “sports diplomacy” as one element in its foreign policy toolkit.

Underscoring the Australian Federal Government’s commitment of AU$600 million (US$405 million) to support the new team, Albanese noted, “There is no country on earth that is more passionate, including Australia, than PNG when it comes to rugby league.” He suggested that the PNG Team would join the National Rugby League (NRL) in 2028.

It is hoped that the NRL team with deepen the bonds between the two nations as well as enhance communication, community interests, and soft-power elements in Australia-PNG relations – and relations with Pacific Island states more generally. These relationships have been challenged due to climate change, AUKUS, immigration issues, and China's competitive engagement with Pacific Island states.

As former Prime Minister John Howard noted, Australia has a self-appointed “substantial and special responsibility” toward the Pacific island states. Historically, this interest was as an outpost of the British Empire and nascent colonial power in the Pacific neighborhood, a status realized in the direct colonial control of Nauru after World War I and Papua in the 1880s.

The colonialist attitude impacted economic relations. With government support or askance, Australian commercial interests engaged in coercive agricultural labor recruitment process (blackbirding) involving the transportation of Pacific Islanders to Australian plantations and pastoral areas through the second half of the 19th century. The abandonment of the White Australia policy and the decolonization process throughout the Pacific led Australia to reposition itself as part of the “Pacific Family.” Nevertheless, this relationship has been characterized as unequal; Australia is the “Big Brother” while small Pacific island states are “Little Brothers.”

Australia has felt the region to be essential to its security and has supported it with the largest aid budget and extensive multilateral and bilateral relationships involving policing, security, rule of law, governance and environment. Yet the Australian presence in the region weakened over the past several decades. Pacific Island states are less willing to acquiesce to Australian interests and policy objectives.

First, Pacific Island states have unsurprisingly questioned Australia’s climate change credentials. Climate change and the accompanying sea level rise has become an existential issue for these states. During the Abbot-Turnbull-Morrison governments the relationship was especially strained. The current Labor government has worked hard to repair these relationships, signing a joint communique in 2022 with Pacific Islands states calling for deep cuts in emissions due to the “climate emergency” and re-emphasizing Australia commitment to mitigating climate change and fight sea-level rise by bidding to host the COP31 in Australia “in partnership with the Pacific.”

At the same time, these efforts have been undermined in the eyes of Pacific Island States by the Labor government’s continued approval of coal mining permits and the increase of coal exports. As Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine noted in 2024, “Australia should be leading the way in transitioning away from fossil fuels, not developing any further fossil fuel projects.”

Second, Australia has been criticized for its increased support of U.S.-led security objectives designed to counteract Chinese diplomatic and security inroads in the region, including joining AUKUS. Many Pacific Islands states question whether Australian policy unduly demonizes Chinese activities and mistakenly views the area through the lens of great power ideological conflict. Pacific Island leaders have stated their opposition to the “militarization” of the Pacific and instead called for “a united ocean of peace.” From this perspective, AUKUS will further polarize the region and raise the chances of armed conflict.

Moreover, the Australian procurement of nuclear submarines as part of AUKUS undermines efforts for a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone under the 1985 Rarotonga Treaty, a significant departure from the previous non-nuclear proliferation consensus within the region.

These two factors suggest to some commentators and Pacific Island leaders that Australia continues to stand apart from the Pacific “normative” community. The perceived lack of concern and disregard of shared values on matters of fundamental bearing to Pacific Islanders worldviews can create political and personal dissatisfaction and/or antipathy.

For example, while speaking out against an essentialized security-driven understanding the Pacific Islands, former Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaʻepa Saʻilele noted a “patronizing nuance” by some Pacific Island partners (such as Australia) who believe that “Pacific nations did not know what they were doing or were incapable of reaping the benefits of close relations with countries that are and will be in the region for some time to come.” This attitude erases any agency that a small island state may have in reacting to increased great power competition as well as ignores the potential for Pacific-led solutions and approaches to international relations.

This disconnect – being both a member and also outside of the Pacific community – has complicated Australian efforts to limit the expansion of Chinese influence. China has been increasingly successful in the region. It has entered into a security arrangement with the Solomon Islands and funded high-profile developments through the Belt and Road initiative as well as bilaterally. Beijing has managed to convince a number of Pacific Island states to derecognize Taiwan. These efforts have been underpinned by a willingness to leverage asymmetrical trade relations and the use of aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy to reorganize international arrangements in the South China Sea and the Pacific. Underpinning the actions is the belief by Chinese policymakers that U.S. and Western power (including Australian) is in decline, and the time is propitious to remake the international system in a manner more conducive to Chinese interests.

Public diplomacy involves an effort to improve international relationships and ameliorate interstate disputes by influencing the perceptions, narratives, framing, and opinions of various stakeholders and international/national publics. This exchange includes the creation and sharing of stories as well as cultural values. Sport is an important part of this diplomacy and the dissemination of values. It is one of the most widely shared activities across the planet. It reflects and refracts conceptions of sex, class, individual and collective (including national) achievement and development. It can exemplify and project such things as national identity and pride.

In addition, “sports can be a mirror on the social values we all hold dear,” such as fairness and equal opportunity, as well as reinforcing the generation of new forms of social capital. In those states that share few cultural touchpoints and values with other states or within their domestic populations, such as post-Apartheid South Africa under Nelson Mandela, sports can be particularly effective in creating empathy and share experiences that can then be used to build and deepen a broader set of relationships.

While the emblematic demonstration of sports diplomacy has been the China-U.S. “ping-pong” diplomacy of the early 1970s, sports diplomacy has less often been used to establish ties between states, but is rather used to deepen and entrench already strong identity or relationships, such as international soccer in Europe and Canadian and U.S. teams playing in the National Hockey League. As noted by one commentator, “Sports can promote the ‘national’ brand, such as the New Zealand ‘All-Blacks' that can serve as an emblematic symbol of the state’s political and cultural identity.” Even though commercial interests are often closely involved, the empathy and allegiances created by sports can in turn create common interests across state populations and color the perceptions of policymakers. 

Australia-PNG relations is complicated by their shared colonial past, but the ties – social, economic, political, and security – are deep. As the former colonial power, Australia has been criticized for being patronizing toward PNG as well as being unconcerned with the negative impacts its colonial rule has had on the island. Nevertheless, the sentiments of both populations toward each other are largely positive.

Australia is the largest donor of developmental aid to PNG (an estimated $637.4 million in 2024–25 and $2.56 billion in budget support loans, non-ODA, since 2019), and is PNG’s third largest export destination (after China and Japan). It is the largest source of PNG’s imports. For many years, it has assisted PNG police force training, and Albanese and Prime Minister James Marape recently signed an “Framework for Closer Security Relations” that requires the two states to consult and coordinate a response if either country believes it is facing direct or regional security threats. Australia will provide $200 million of funding commitment under the agreement to support PNG's security priorities.

Albanese was the first foreign leader invited to speak before the PNG legislature in 2023. Accentuating the symbolic aspects of the relationship, the two prime ministers hiked together along the storied Kokoda battle trail, remembering the shared fight against the Japanese in World War II.

The new NRL team will likely deepen and broaden the relationship between the two states. The soft power, social capital, and shared stories the sport will engender and stimulate are difficult to measure, but it impacts the quality of the social relationship in ways that intergovernmental communication, developmental aid, and simple tourism cannot. Sport overcomes distance and allows space for each population to view the games in an imagined community of sport lovers. It also reflects and builds on the shared history without the tendentious calculus of historical advantage, blame, and disadvantage that often tends to obfuscate the interpersonal relationships and social interactions that can lubricate reconciliation.

In addition, the presence of the team acknowledges the contributions Pacific Islanders have made the sport and the development of Australia. Finally, it signifies a shared community and a community of interest that reflects Pacific Islander ownership and sentiments. This will enhance patience and trust between the populations of the two states. Australian support of the NRL team in PNG suggests a growing awareness among policymakers that there are more emotive ways to connect the various communities across the Pacific with Australia.