The Solomon Islands debacle finally registers with the political class — and chaos sets in

It’s taken some time for political journalists to wake up to the magnitude of the disaster that is the agreement between the Solomon Islands and China — and the fact that the Morrison government is in absolute chaos over it.

Some foreign policy and defence specialists immediately understood the impact of the agreement — the ABC’s Andrew Greene and Stephen Dziedzic especially. But it’s taken the best part of a month — and a flurry of activity in Washington, and belatedly in Canberra — to wake up political journalists who have been readily transmitting the idea that the government’s “strong on China” tactic would be an electoral winner.

In fact, far from being tough on China, Morrison, Dutton and church mouse Foreign Minister Marise Payne have spectacularly failed, allowing the establishment of a Chinese base in the Pacific — and had no clue it was happening until a draft agreement was leaked on social media.

Journalists are also only now working out that it is Australia’s high-handedness in the Pacific, and its willingness to pursue its own interests at the expense of Pacific states, that has prompted the government of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare to look elsewhere. As Crikey explained to readers early last week, this is a disaster long in the making.

It’s impossible, however, to work out exactly how seriously the government views the agreement. While Washington, aghast at Australia’s failure, was preparing to dispatch top Indo-Pacific diplomat Kurt Campbell to the region, what was the Morrison government doing? It first dispatched two intelligence chiefs — the head of ASIS Paul Symon and National Intelligence Director Andrew Shearer — to find out what was going on, a complete humiliation for an organisation that seems perfectly fine at bugging regional states’ cabinet rooms if it helps Woodside, but learns of major strategic setbacks to Australia on social media like the rest of us.

Luckily, there is zero accountability for ASIS, which can operate without any scrutiny or examination of any kind, so no one will ever be required to answer for this.

The government then dispatched junior minister Zed Seselja to the Solomon Islands to try to persuade Prime Minister Sogavare to abandon the deal, unsuccessfully. Seselja is a heavyweight in the tiny ACT Liberal Party — he has turned it into an unelectable claque of right-wing zealots that are now in their third decade out of power — but a minnow in Parliament House, and he is in danger of the impossible outcome of actually losing what should be a guaranteed ACT Liberal Senate seat.

Where was Marise Payne? Too busy election campaigning — even after her predecessor Julie Bishop said she should be on the first plane to Honiara.

To be fair to the Morrison government, others weren’t so sanguine. The deputy prime minister warned in the days after the news broke that China was “going through the process of trying to restrict our capacity of movement and intimidate us”. Yesterday Barnaby Joyce went further, saying the deal, now ratified, “will be, absolutely, that’s a very bad day for Australia. We don’t want our own little Cuba off our coast.”

This forced Seselja to effectively correct the deputy leader of the government, saying “we are a long way from that”.

And what did the government know and when did it know it? The Solomon Islands opposition leader says he warned Australia last year about the deal, but the government is denying that. Yesterday Seselja clearly said the government was taken by surprise — “we found out about it when we saw that leaked draft”, suggesting a profoundly humiliating failure by our intelligence services. But at the same time, Morrison suggested the government had known of the issue for many years, and it was no surprise to them, even if Labor was surprised by it.

So who is lying, Zed Seselja, or the prime minister?

The deputy prime minister regards it as a disaster, equivalent to Castro taking over Cuba. The prime minister and foreign minister, however, appear to regard it as a relatively minor matter, sufficient only to send a low-level minister over to remonstrate — possibly because sending Payne herself might have been a major embarrassment if Sogavare had formalised the agreement right after her visit, which is likely.

It’s noteworthy that the media took so long to work all this out — it’s almost as if journalists have accepted the government’s own “tough on China” rhetoric as their mental guide to foreign policy, assuming that it’s impossible for Morrison to fail in any way to be as harsh as possible on China.

That mental guide is all the more ironic given that until 2016 the Coalition was ostentatiously pro-China, happily signing deals left and right with the Xi Jinping regime, and even happy for Chinese companies to buy major infrastructure.

It also reflects the close relationship between commercial media foreign policy journalists and intelligence agencies — the former effectively operate as stenographers of the latter. When intelligence agencies fail, even spectacularly, the last people you can expect to report this are their handmaidens.