Right now, unfortunately, Australia is writing security cheques for itself and the South Pacific it can’t cash.  That’s the real message behind two major security developments in the Pacific this week.

On the day that Australian diplomats were celebrating getting the big new Australia-Fiji security treaty over the line and signed by Fijian prime minister Rambuka and Australia’s Mr Albanese, China decided to push the launch button on a nuclear-capable ballistic missile that it pointed into the South Pacific.  The long range missile splashed down near Tuvala.

Australia and Fiji were trying to project a confident, growing sense of regional security partnership.  Beijing was far more interested in just showing its growing hard power and willingness to use it.  The message is hard to miss: Australia can collect all the pieces of paper it wants to on security – China is more focused on creating and demonstrating actual military strength and reach deep into our neighbourhood.

The missile test brought back memories of the Chinese Navy’s live fire exercise that disrupted civilian airliners flying between Australia and New Zealand in February 2025 in another visit to our near region.

In recent years, Australia has signed security partnerships with Nauru, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, PNG and now Fiji.  They cover a range of areas and themes, but they also have a common subtext: the rising security challenge of China and its push into the South Pacific.

Pacific governments are reluctant to talk about China as a security challenge. They are more keen to accept Chinese support, training and equipment for policing, along with Chinese investment into their economies and infrastructure. 

We still don’t know what the former Solomon Islands government committed to in its secret security pact with Beijing.  And even the most candid leaders – like Fijian prime minister Rambuka – avoid mentioning Beijing when publicly discussing security challenges.  They also talk much more about wider, non-traditional, security challenges as opposed to the more direct defence and national security issues that are more prominent in Australia’s security debate.

Here’s Mr Rambuka in the joint press conference announcing the big new “Ocean of Peace” defence treaty between Australia and Fiji earlier this week listing security challenges. He mentions “the increasing sophistication of transnational organised crime networks, illegal drug trafficking, cyber enabled threats, and emerging public health challenges including the rise of non-communicable disease and HIV.” This language channels the broader notion of security Pacific leaders set out in the Boe Declaration back in 2018.  It reads nothing like Australia’s recent National Defence Strategy.

This means that these security deals with Australia are something quite different to what Australia might want.  In some ways, even the heavily defence-focused text of the Australia-Fiji agreement, which talks grandly about acting “to meet the common danger”, seems more a vehicle for the Fijian military to get more access to Australian defence cooperation funding for equipment and training.  And that’s fine – Australia just has to be clear about the actual Fijian motivations and expectations and not pretend that this is more than it is. 

The suite of recent agreements are very unlikely to change Pacific nations’ approaches to engaging with China, leaving Pacific leaders with an increasingly difficult balancing act for Pacific leaders looking at Canberra and Beijing.

So, Australia’s busy agreement making has not removed the growing Chinese security push into our near neighbourhood, which will continue to be enabled by its growing economic and political presence here, even as Beijing scores political own goals from aggression like firing nuclear-capable missiles into a region whose occupants have formally signed up to keep the South Pacific free of nuclear weapons and tests.

Foreign minister Penny Wong is right to say that the Chinese missile test into the South Pacific is destabilising in the region.  But neither she nor prime minister Albanese seem able to draw the necessary conclusion from this: Australia’s supposed success in ‘stabilising’ our relationship with China is a fiction.  It’s impossible to have a stable bilateral relationship with Beijing while China is using its military to destabilise regional security.

Despite this, the various security agreements the Albanese government has worked hard at are creating a stronger collective sense of security between South Pacific nations and Australia. This is probably the biggest, most durable outcome of the work so far. 

The fact that the “Ocean of Peace” treaty with Fiji is open to other Pacific nations to join underlines the ambition to move beyond bilateral deals to a wider regional framework. That is a valuable trajectory, particularly as Beijing prefers to work bilaterally, when its leverage and power is greatest dealing with much smaller counterparts.  That approach was reinforced by the failure of Beijing’s proposed regional security framework it presented to South Pacific nations back in 2022.

But there’s an ugly truth behind all this regional diplomacy and paperwork by Australia.  Australia’s military capacity to counter threats from China’s growing force projection capabilities has enormous holes that make Australia itself hugely vulnerable to China.  Any idea that Australian assistance will be effective protection for the South Pacific looks misplaced until some of these yawning gaps in our own defence capability are at least partially closed.

The biggest is shown by the Chinese ballistic missile test.  Australia has no capacity to shoot down this type of Chinese missile unless one of its three Airwarfare destroyers happened to be in just the right spot at just the right time and got a lucky hit with a rare SM-6 interceptor missile. And these three ships are just going into multi-year refits, so our Navy will only have two potentially available over the next few years.

Despite the Albanese government’s latest defence plan saying it’s investing $21-30 billion between now and 2036 on air and missile defence, on closer examination, most of that money is going on command systems, sensors like the JORN radar, upgrades for the RAAF Wedgetail aircraft and on weapons Australia was already buying, including some close-in protection for the Army. So our real missile defence capacity isn’t going to improve much over the coming decade. 

Looked at critically, Australia has two batteries of short range missile defence interceptors (the NASAMS system) and a plan to buy a medium range ground based missile defence system starting sometime between now and 2036.  Each NASAMS battery has interceptors that can shoot down incoming missiles from around 60km in, so that means that, at best, two 120km bubbles somewhere in Australia can have a level of protection, and our airwarfare destroyers can protect themselves and ships in their vicinity.  An additional medium range system being bought sometime over the next decade won’t do much to change this at the levels of investment proposed. 

The government’s plans still leave the Australian military itself enormously vulnerable to the existing missiles operated by the Chinese military, let alone new variants and types in development. That’s true even for the ADF’s most critical home bases like the AUKUS submarine base at HMAS Stirling, or the Tindal fighter base south of Darwin.  And our defence force has no capacity to protect anyone living in cities like Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra, let alone provide any support to the South Pacific in a time of crisis.   

A ‘Golden Dome’ missile defence umbrella isn’t in the realms of feasibility for Australia.  It’s probably unaffordable even for the Americans.  But there’s an enormous gap between a comprehensive continent-wide defence system and Australia’s current lack of even modest protection that can be positioned to protect key sites and places.  A government serious about Australian security and about having any credibility with South Pacific partners would be buying and building at least some capacity to protect parts of Australia’s critical infrastructure and population against now obvious threats. 

That, at minimum, should mean buying several batteries of systems like the Patriot missile defence system or South Korea’s highly capable and considerably cheaper Cheongung-II interceptor system that performed so effectively in the US-Iran war and having a plan to get interceptors in large numbers when we need them.  Hoping the US will put us at the top of the queue in a time of conflict for everything we need when we need it is the current plan, and that’s a bad bet to make.  Co-producing the Korean system would make strategic sense, given the almost certain competing demands for supplies just when Australia might need them most. 

The picture is equally bleak when we look at the ADF’s plans for counter drone systems as long range strike drones get ranges relevant to our wide region and as these systems proliferate. Government announcements and paperwork are piling up, but Australia is dabbling instead of acting.

It’s time for Australia to stop writing cheques for regional security until they can be confidently cashed.  More agreements might be diplomatically and politically satisfying, but they have to be underpinned by Australian military capacity if we are to retain credibility with our partners and deliver an Australian military able to provide a level of protection against very obvious threats right here at home.