Source: asopa.typepad.com --- Saturday, November 05, 2016
JON FRAENKEL | Journal of Pacific History | Extracts Read the full paper here THE ‘PACIFIC Solution’ for asylum seekers arriving in Australia’s waters by boat needs to be seen in the context of broader changes in Australian foreign policy. An era of intervention centred on exporting ‘good governance’ and economic liberalisation that took Australian-led missions to Solomon Islands and East Timor has given way to a ‘new mood of austerity’. It is a mood linked to a more overt focus on Australia’s ‘national interests’. Echoing similar developments in Canada and New Zealand, the Australian aid agency, AusAID, was absorbed into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in late 2013, a move which incoming prime minister Tony Abbott described as enabling ‘the aid and diplomatic arms of Australia’s international policy agenda to be more closely aligned’. The previous government’s winding down of the ten-year Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) in mid-2013, and the transfer of many of its civilian programs to the Australian High Commission, was similarly claimed to be ‘ensuring the alignment of program objectives with Australia’s broader national interests’. The primacy of the ‘national interest’ in contemporary Australian Pacific policy is most strikingly expressed by Operation Sovereign Borders: entailing military interception of ‘unauthorized maritime arrivals’ who are then sent to Manus Island in Papua New Guin ...
from Australia http://ift.tt/2fOYd0X
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