‘Australia is secure when Papua New Guinea is secure, and Papua New Guinea is secure when Australia is secure,’ said Billy Joseph, PNG’s Minister for Defence. It was an important reminder of the closeness of our two countries. In a time when neighbours are seemingly at conflict across the globe, Australia and PNG have an important shared history and future vision that centres around cooperation and trust.

Joseph joined Australia’s minister for defence industry and minister for pacific affairs, Pat Conroy, at ASPI’s Defence Conference on 4 June. During their ministerial panel, they shared their thoughts on security in the region and on the importance of an integrated approach that included climate, economic and cyber security alongside more traditional defence avenues.

‘The security and defence of both Australia and Papua New Guinea are inextricably intertwined given close proximity’, Joseph said, and as such we must ‘appreciate that PNG resilience and preparedness is also important to Australian defence and security’.

Joseph confirmed PNG had initiated defence-specific treaty discussions, noting that ‘security isn’t black and white—it’s a whole package’.  While PNG desires a strong economic partnership with China ‘just like everybody else’, he clarified that ‘when it comes to security, we choose our traditional Pacific partners, which is Australia and the US’.

Conroy reiterated that Australia’s partnership interests went beyond the security space. ‘We don’t just want to be the security partner of choice; we want to be the development partner of choice. We want to be the economic partner of choice. We want to be the people movement partner of choice and we’re going to use every tool of statecraft to deliver that,’ he said.

For Joseph, the strategic intent of the security treaty was clear. He said that PNG wanted ‘to send a message with all this competing interests in the region that PNG stands with Australia and those countries that share the same values and that we have strategic trust in, and also countries that subscribe to an international rules-based order and a free and open Indo-Pacific.’

Joseph also stressed the importance of economic development  alongside security development. He noted that Pacific countries, including PNG, faced resource challenges and that, because of this, there ‘lies opportunities as well as risks—risks in that countries can use economy as a means to push the security interest’.

It’s an important reminder that shared threats are often a driver of shared security. Joseph recalled the concern from PNG prompted by the Chinese navy’s circumnavigation of Australia and live-fire drills in February this year, stating that PNG is ‘not ignorant of what [they] are dealing with, but has to respect sovereign states’.

It was something that other Pacific nations should also have watched closely. In order to circumnavigate Australia, those ships sailed past the coast of PNG through the Torres Strait, with reports of a large drone flying overhead raising alarm across the country. The exercise wasn’t a signal just for Australia; it was for the Pacific. China can and will deploy warships to the region when it wants, with little consideration or notice given to its partners in the region. Its decision in September to fire a missile with a dummy warhead close to or over the top of several Pacific island countries without warning was another example of China failing to care about the region and its security concerns.

That is why Pacific nations must band together to understand and mitigate joint threats for the sake of regional security. Initiatives including the Pacific Response Group and the Pacific Policing Initiative are Pacific-owned and led and directly address the issues raised by Pacific leaders in numerous forums. As Conroy said, his ‘first piece of advice to every country in the world is: respect and follow Pacific priorities’. He also said that ‘security should be driven by sovereign governments in the Pacific where there was a gap and should be filled by other nations in the Pacific, including Australia as a proud member of the Pacific Islands Forum’. China is still seeking to disrupt these initiatives, and counter them with its own alternatives. But none of those alternatives will be led by the region.

During the panel discussion, Joseph remarked that ‘they say when two elephants fight, the grass suffers’—a sobering metaphor for how smaller nations are often caught between great power rivalries—and that the Pacific ‘doesn’t want to be the grass’. But the evolving partnership between Australia and PNG sends a different message to the region. Through deeper cooperation and mutual respect, Pacific nations are asserting their agency. They are not passive ground to be trampled, but more resilient actors shaping the region’s security landscape on their own terms.