Pacific leaders endorsed the Australia-backed Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI) in 2024 amid geopolitical rumblings. Then Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai was among those who cautioned against the $400 million initiative becoming entangled in strategic competition. It must instead be framed to ‘fit our purposes’, he declared.
Many commentators nonetheless continue to view Australia’s police cooperation across the region primarily through a geopolitical lens. This framing reflects a growing consensus that Pacific policing is a ‘new front in China-West rivalry’. Yet it only captures part of the story.
Reducing Australia’s policing partnerships in the Pacific to a matter of strategic competition obscures their long history and the multiple, sometimes conflicting, purposes they serve. It also discounts how Pacific Islands countries themselves understand and engage in these partnerships.
This brief offers a corrective. It identifies six interrelated ‘faces’ of Australia’s police cooperation, each reflecting a distinct purpose. Alongside the geopolitical face, it highlights five others: diplomacy, security, stability, development and governance. Together, they provide a more nuanced framework for understanding Australia’s significant and growing investment in regional policing.
As Australia works with its Pacific partners to integrate the PPI into a new regional policing bloc, to be known as ‘PACPOL’, questions about its intentions will inevitably resurface. Rather than confining the conversation to geopolitics, this is an opportunity to recognise the many faces of Australia’s police cooperation in the Pacific.
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