HUGH WHITE, DIRECTOR, AUSTRALIAN STRATEGIC POLICY INSTITUTE: Well, I think we're seeing the beginnings of it, Mark. The point we were making in our report last year were that in situations like the Solomons and other weak and failing states in the south-west Pacific, the kinds of hands off approach that Australia's tended to take since those countries became independent has run out of steam.

That the scale of the problems, the depth of the problems and the kinds of demands we've had from the South Pacific countries themselves for Australia to take a bigger role have reached the point where we now need to be more active, be willing to take a more sort of engaged role and I think the Solomons, as the Prime Minister has stressed in his speeches over the last couple of days, has been the Australian Government has decided to take that kind of a U-turn and start taking a more engaged approach.

So yeah, I think we're seeing the beginning of a paradigm shift.

MARK DAVIS: The Vanuatu Foreign Minister Serge Vohor has just broken the rather cosy atmosphere that's been surrounding this issue. He says he's deeply suspicious of Australia's intentions in the region, doubly so, I assume now that John Howard has said that the Solomons will be a model for other interventions in neighbouring states.

Are there broader motivations at play here? I mean, is China's role in the Pacific becoming an issue, concerns about their influence, concerns about building an allegiance with America for regional control?

HUGH WHITE: I think that's a bit overdrawn. I'm not surprised that there are some in the South Pacific who do have reservations about the approach we're taking. It is a change in direction, it does go against, if you like, the long tide against colonialism, against active intervention in the affairs of other countries which has characterised the Pacific and a lot of other parts of the world in recent decades.

MARK DAVIS: Well, John Gershman, we are hearing a lot about terrorism and money laundering issues in the Pacific right now. Is Serge Vohor correct? Are there other issues at play?

JOHN GERSHMAN, DIRECTOR, FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS: I believe there are and I would, I think, disagree a little bit with Hugh's position here.

In part, I think some of the suspicion has stemmed from the fact that Australia and the Howard Government in it's most recent white paper and the defence update has clearly effected a paradigm shift by hueing and defining its security posture as so defined by the alliance with the United States in the emergence and legitimation of a neo-imperial vision coming out of the Bush Administration. And I think there are some - first of all, some legitimate concerns that the model of intervention in the Solomons may not be as wholly driven by humanitarian concerns and maybe in fact a model of some kind of proconsul like neo-imperial intervention in the Pacific.

And I think, secondly, the fact has been fairly clear that the Bush Administration has, in the medium to long-term, clearly identified China as a major strategic concern and again, the fact that Australia has defined its security posture so closely to the US alliance and that while it may not be explicitly discussing China openly as a target.

That clearly other actors in the region are viewing Australia's moves as in part not simply defined by legitimate concern about terrorism and trans-national crime, but because it's framed its posture so closely to the United States and is seen by many as a deputy of the United States, that it sees Australia as also positioning vis-a-vis in a semi-containment, neo-containment approach towards checking the rise of an emerging China.

MARK DAVIS: Well you've been maintaining for sometime now that America does have an interest, a renewed interest in securing the western Pacific. Are you suggesting that Australia is now to perform that role?

JOHN GERSHMAN: I think it's been made fairly explicit that the 50th anniversary of the ANZUS treaty last year the now former head of the policy planning staff at the Department of State, Richard Hus, basically outlined its vision that Australia was effectively the deputy of the United States in the Pacific.

And that Australia was seen as not just a regional player but indeed a partner, a global partner of the United States in its broader national security doctrine.

MARK DAVIS: Hugh White?

HUGH WHITE: Well I think it's a bit more complex than that. I mean, I certainly take the point that John's making that the Australian Government, the Howard Government is very closely identified with the posture of the United States both in the region and more broadly.

But I think that's actually less true of the Howard Government's attitude towards China than it is on almost any other issue. The Howard Government, in fact, I think, like any other Australian government, is very concerned to avoid a situation in which Australia has to choose between the United States and China and is viewed with some anxiety the way in which, particularly before September 11, 2001, the sort of emergence of a structurally adversarial relationship between the US and China seemed to have taken on a certain momentum almost inevitably.

MARK DAVIS: I think you'd agree, or perhaps I shouldn't presume that - would you agree that the pitch for going into the Solomons in fact hasn't been humanitarian, it's been primarily about Australia's interests which have been claimed as drugs, money laundering and it's a potential terrorist base.

Now particularly on the terrorist assertion, they were claims that you made very strongly in your report last year but none of those assertions were backed by any evidence whatsoever, even anecdotally, that I could see. What information did you base those claims upon?

HUGH WHITE: Well, we didn't - terrorism was a factor that we thought was important but it was far from being the only or the most important one. In our report Beyond Bali last year and our report specifically on the Solomons released on 10 June, we identified three sets of issue.

The first was the trans-national criminal issues which includes the threat of money laundering, arms smuggling, drug smuggling, people smuggling, the whole range of trans-national crimes which Australia and a lot of other countries around the world are concerned about.

MARK DAVIS: But these are extremely serious claims. I'm sure that Serge Vohor is not the only one to have taken offence on them. We're forming policy partly upon your report, we're forming public opinion, what empirical evidence do you have to suggest that terrorism is an issue in the Pacific? What empirical evidence do you have to suggest that money laundering is on the rise or indeed drug running is on the rise?

HUGH WHITE: Well, unfortunately you don't always have the luxury of making strategic policy on the basis of empirical evidence of problems that have already arisen.

There is a lot of organised and what you might call 'semi-organised' crime in the Solomons, and there is a lot of evidence, for example, from developments in West Africa, where the problem of failed states is somewhat more advanced that it is so far in the Pacific, that once states fail, they become petri dishes, breeding grounds for a whole range of trans-national criminal concerns.

The question for Australian policy is whether we want to stand back and see whether that happens in our part of the world, or whether we want to acknowledge that as a serious risk and take sensible steps now to prevent it occurring.

MARK DAVIS: I think everyone would agree with you about the Solomons. I assume the concerns are using the Solomons as a model to intervene in other nations.

HUGH WHITE: That's a very legitimate point and I must say I think it is important that we treat the Solomons as, if you like, a case in its own right. I think as we mentioned earlier, a lot of countries in the south-west Pacific...

MARK DAVIS: Mr Howard is not treating the Solomons as a case in its own right - he's referred to it as a model.

I guess what I'm trying to get at here - is there a broader policy shift that we can see and perhaps I might bring John Gershman in at this point - is this consistent with perhaps what you're seeing in your country's attitude towards South-East Asia and the Pacific in general, this use of terrorism and money laundering, etc, as an issue?

JOHN GERSHMAM: Well, I think there's two things, I think first I'm a bit disconcerted to hear Hugh's framing of the issue which is that we don't really have necessarily a failed state and evidence of the things that can come from failed states.

But we have the potential for that to emerge and therefore pre-emption is a legitimate policy choice and I think again that's a concern that other countries throughout the region might see independent of the specific case of the Solomons that if in fact the Prime Minister Howard is framing this as a model, that this is then at a much smaller scale than say the Bush Administration is pursuing.

But institutionalising a doctrine of pre-emption in the name of trying to prevent the emergence of potential threats that might emerge at some point in the future, can become a very slippery slope.

I think one of the major differences that is behind some of the concerns expressed by Vanuatu and others, is at the same time this shift towards trans-national security concerns is taking place, the way in which the United States and Australia have framed the ways in which they are going to intervene to deal with these has downplayed multilateral institutions and emphasised pre-emptive and unilateral steps and I think that's one of the areas of concern that countries in the region have - that we're kind of opening a whole window for interventions that are going to be really grounded in kind of unilateral pre-emptive doctrines as opposed to a more multilateral approach to deal with the very real trans-national threats that do exist.

MARK DAVIS: Hugh White, is that a concern, the moving from the multilateral nature of most of our history?

HUGH WHITE: I'm not sure that that's really a fair description of what the Government's been about in relation to the Solomons.

Of course, there's a lot of debate internationally and of course in Australia about the way in which the idea of pre-emption has arisen in relation to the war on terror but I wouldn't draw a close metaphor between the way that idea was applied, for example in Iraq and what the Government's thinking of doing in the Solomons.

Because right at the heart of the Solomon's policy is the idea that we do it with the consent of the people of the Solomon Islands, which is a very different concept from the kind of pre-emption we saw in Iraq.

MARK DAVIS: But this of course could rebound, couldn't it? I mean, last year the Australian Federal Police were accused of spying in Vanuatu, of intervening in the political process.

Perhaps an enthusiastic ASIO officer read your report and thought that's just what you're calling for. Now in the wash-up of that, we've now got Vanuatu saying that they are going to actively seek more assistance from China. Now this is hardly an outcome that Australia would welcome.

HUGH WHITE: Well, that may or may not be the case, it depends on what sort of assistance Vanuatu seeks. Of course, Vanuatu is a sovereign country - it's entitled to seek whatever assistance it likes from whomever it likes but I'd also have to note that sometimes actions don't follow words in the South Pacific diplomacy and I think I'd wait and see what actually happens before I got too alarmed about it.

MARK DAVIS: Alright gentlemen, we'll leave it there. Thanks both for joining us.