PRIME MINISTER, JOHN HOWARD: The National Security Committee of Cabinet met this morning and had a detailed briefing...

MARK DAVIS: When John Howard announced in Parliament last Wednesday that Australia would send soldiers and police to the Solomon Islands, there were few dissenting voices.

PRIME MINISTER, JOHN HOWARD: The assistance that is being contemplated includes substantial policing, law and justice and economic assistance, backed up by significant operational support from the Australian Defence Force.

MARK DAVIS: Few would doubt the need for someone to intervene in the Solomons, a nation crippled by ethnic violence and civil war for the past five years. But why has Australia chosen to intervene now, despite earlier pleas for help, and what are its possible broader motivations?

John Howard has signalled that his renewed interest in the Pacific underscores a significant shift in Australia's regional policy.

PRIME MINISTER, JOHN HOWARD: But our friends in the region are looking to us for help and we do not intend to fail them.

MARK DAVIS: The Prime Minister claims that it's not in Australia's interest to have a number of failed states in the Pacific, apparently potential havens for criminals and terrorists organisations.

Mr Howard's comments were of particular interest to Pacific leaders meeting in Sydney this week, especially the Prime Minister's comment that the Solomons could become a model for Australian intervention in neighbouring countries.

The meeting of the Pacific Forum endorsed Australia's plan and Solomon Islands' Foreign Minister, Laurie Chan, openly welcomed it.

LAURIE CHAN, SOLOMON ISLANDS FOREIGN MINISTER: I'm absolutely happy. I think my country's very happy.

MARK DAVIS: But behind the general array of smiles, there are concerns about Australia's broader agenda in other countries in the region.

The first cracks in the unanimity surfacing through Vanuatu's Foreign Minister and Deputy PM Serge Vohor in this interview with Dateline.

SERGE VOHOR, VANUATU FOREIGN MINISTER AND DEPUTY PM: We don't want to be recolonised. I think we been fighting for our independence, free from colonisation power, colonist power, and we like to be free. We don't want to have someone who exploit us again.

MARK DAVIS: It's not Vanuatu's first dispute with Australia. Last year, suspicions were raised that Australian advisers almost triggered an armed conflict between the Vanuatu police force and its army, secretly interfering in the affairs of a sovereign state.

MAN: Australia's playing a big spy. Yes, spies of the Pacific. They tap every phone, every fax and everything.

MARK DAVIS: Serge Vohor threatened to arrest Australian Federal Police officers in Vanuatu for spying and for trying to manipulate politics in his country.

According to Vohor, Australia began muscling into the Pacific last year. It was a strategy that was laid out in a report published by a Government-funded defence think-tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI.

Last year's ASPI report, Beyond Bali, called for active intervention in Papua New Guinea, the Solomons and Vanuatu, raising the prospect that these countries could become terrorist havens.

With uncanny prescience, the report called for a paradigm shift in Australia's engagement in the Pacific to enhance Australia's intelligence and military presence - exactly the type of policy shift that the Government is now openly embracing.

The new Pacific policy also falls in line with the US Administration's vision of proactive intervention around the globe and its own strategic goals for the Asia-Pacific.

Talk of terrorists aside, at the moment there's only one likely competitor to US influence in the region, and that's China, which, despite little public attention, is gaining increasing influence in small Pacific nations desperate for aid. Vanuatu is one country happy to rely on the new generous benefactor.

SERGE VOHOR: You have a freedom to use those funding for any project you want. They are not giving like Australia and they impose your policy.

MARK DAVIS: China is also gaining influence with PNG, but not with the Solomons, which has been courted by China's old enemy, and American ally, Taiwan.

The public mantra about Australia's renewed interest in the region focuses on the risk of failed states becoming terrorist havens but there's no sign of that occurring, even in the Solomons, the only genuinely collapsed state - at least not according to the chief of police there, Englishman Bill Morrell.

BILL MORRELL, SOLOMON ISLANDS POLICE COMMISSIONER: I think more likely, drugs and other crime, money laundering and those sorts of things are the more likely scenarios. I don't see the Solomon Islands particularly as being a target for terrorism, certainly of the sort of the type that we have seen in the last couple of years.

MARK DAVIS: Some of these Pacific leaders are bemused about their nations being seen as possible terrorist bases but, desperate for aid, they're nevertheless keen to engage with Australia which for more than a decade has been perceived to have been losing interest in the Pacific.

If the ASPI report and the Government's comments to date are any guide, Australia's new regime of involvement won't just be about water projects, but about encircling governments with Australian police and intelligence agents and, if necessary, Australian soldiers.

One nation who will oppose Australia's moves is Vanuatu. Despite being one of three nations specifically targeted in the ASPI report, Serge Vohor says his country will never accept any form of intervention by Australia.

SERGE VOHOR: I don't think that the people of Vanuatu would accept any intervention from Australia. I hope that this is a joke. I think this is a joke, not a reality.