Giles
Dexter, in Honiara
New
Zealand appears to be gearing up to offer more policing
support in the Pacific, as the prime minister heads to a
retreat with other Pacific leaders.
Christopher Luxon
and fellow Pacific Islands Forum leaders will spend the day
at the Solomon Islands settlement of Munda, around an hour’s
flight away from the capital Honiara.
There, leaders
will be free to discuss matters without officials, or media,
present.
It is a more relaxed affair than the plenary
sessions, which took place in a large sports hall in the
capital.
On the sidelines, Christopher Luxon held bilateral
meetings with fellow Pacific leaders.
In addition
to efforts to bolster trade, Luxon and Fijian Prime Minister
Sitiveni Rabuka’s bilateral was focused on law and order
collaboration.
A surge in methamphetamine use and
trafficking was something Luxon said the whole region was
grappling with.
“It’s something that I floated
probably a few months ago, to say, look, we have a Pacific
Policing Initiative. We all have challenges around meth
consumption, as we know, in New Zealand. And actually, we’ve
got to protect our borders across the Pacific,” he
said.
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The Australia-led Pacific Policing Initiative
intends to establish regional training centres and deploy
police response teams throughout the Pacific during times of
civil unrest, natural disasters, or major events.
It
was deployed at the CHOGM summit in Samoa last year, as
leaders from every Commonwealth state converged in once
place.
Luxon said United States-based organised crime
groups and Mexican cartels were making inroads in the
Pacific, and Pacific nations needed to co-ordinate to push
back against it.
He said he was more than happy to put
New Zealand boots on the ground to help.
“We should
work and use the Pacific Policing Initiative, collaborate
with our fellow partners around the region, and if we need
to put more assets into the region, that’s a good
thing.”
Leaders also signed an Ocean of Peace
declaration at the summit.
Speaking
to RNZ ahead of the summit, Pacific historian Marco de
Jong questioned whether New Zealand and Australia would use
the Ocean of Peace as a “chapeau” for an “alternative
regional security framework”, seeking to align the region
with broader geostrategic initiatives – namely the US-China
rivalry.
He said there was a parallel security
architecture, comprising initiatives like the Pacific
Policing Initiative, emerging outside of the Forum’s
auspices.
But Luxon dismissed a notion that China may
look at the initiative as a way of asserting dominance and
control, saying there was broad sign-up from PIF
members.
“From a leader-to-leader point of view, and
from a country-to-country point of view, we’re very aligned
that we’ve got a common approach to policing. But actually
we also need not just the mechanism of collaborating and
working together and joint training and all that good
stuff,” he said.
“We actually need to go to work and
actually work out how we’re going to push back on
transnational organised crime, because the resources coming
out of the cartels and out of organised crime are massive,
and that’s why we’ve got to coordinate better.”
Luxon
also met with the leaders of Palau and
Kiribati.
Earlier this year, New Zealand and Kiribati
were locked in a diplomatic stoush over a perceived
snub.
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said New
Zealand would review its funding to Kiribati, after its
president and foreign minister cancelled a meeting with him
– a claim Kiribati denies.
Kiribati remains the only
Pacific nation Peters is yet to visit.
In the end,
there was no pause to funding.
On Wednesday evening,
Luxon and Kiribati President Taneti Maamau sat down
together. While the two posed for photos with media,
unusually they offered no opening remarks.
Luxon said
it was the first time he had met with Maamau, and left the
diplomatic matters for officials to work
through.
“That doesn’t preclude us having a civil
relationship at a leader level as well. It’s quite possible
to do both things, to have the officials work through the
details of what we need to get right going forward, but
equally, to be able to build the relationship, a personal
relationship.”
He expected Peters would have a chance
to meet with Maamau when they are both at the United Nations
General Assembly in New York later this month.
On
Wednesday night, leaders ratified the Pacific Resilience
Facility, a financial institution to aid Pacific nations
with climate resilience and adaptation.
New Zealand
initially wanted a better idea of how it would be run,
before committing any money. It eventually put $20 million
to the fund.
Australia contributed $100m, but Luxon
said to look at the size of their respective
economies.
The goal for the fund is
US$500m.
Luxon said there was no plan for New Zealand
to put more in at this stage, and efforts would be focused
on attracting other donors.
He also met with Palau’s
president Surangel Whipps Jr.
Palau will host the 2026
Forum, where it is expected dialogue partners will once
again be invited to attend.
While much was made in the
buildup over the Solomon Islands’ decision to bar
PIF dialogue and development partners, Luxon said it was
not a focus on Wednesday.
“There might be differences
of opinion, but it’s not a show stopper, and it’s not the
major conversation, to be honest,” he said.
He
expected it would be discussed at the retreat, as PIF
leaders plot a path forwards on how it engaged with those
partners.
Luxon also confirmed New Zealand will host
the 2027 Forum.
He sat down with the president of
Palau, which is hosting the 2026 Forum, on Wednesday night
to discuss how to work together as part of the Troika for
the next forum.
The Troika is the Forum’s high-level
consultation mechanism, consisting of the existing chair,
the outgoing chair, and the incoming chair.
Luxon said
it would be a “great honour” to host, but as he prepared to
head to this year’s retreat, he said he had not given any
thought as to where New Zealand’s be hosted.
“We’re so
blessed, but no we haven’t got that far yet. But we’ve got
some amazing facilities coming on stream with convention
centres across the country. There’s a number of places we
could do
it.”
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