by Mary-Louise O’Callahhan*

The Albanese government has pulled no punches in its hard-nosed approach to how and why Australian aid should be deployed in the Pacific.

But Canberra’s latest gambit to lock Solomon Islands into a “transformational ”security treaty is flying perilously close to the sun.

The proposal – to plough a sizeable chunk of Australian taxpayers’ money directly into the electorates of each of Solomon Islands’ 50 Members of Parliament – threatens to bring Australian development assistance dangerously close to the heart of a political system long plagued by instability, patronage and corruption.

The scheme is part of an almost $1 billion package of incentives, details of which emerged earlier this month during not-so-secret treaty negotiations exposed by the ABC when it published a text it had verified as having been sent by Australia’s High Commissioner, Jeffrey Roach, to Solomons’ Deputy Prime Minister, Francis Sade.

In his message, Roach outlined a plan over the next three years to give every Solomons MP access to almost $2 million in Australian aid for “development priorities” in their constituencies – $93 million in total.

Neither government has officially confirmed nor denied these details.

Landing the same week as Solomon Islands’ new, astute and Canberra-friendly Prime Minister Matthew Wale was frantically outmanoeuvring a planned motion of no confidence – since withdrawn – it unsurprisingly fuelled accusations of political expediency and foreign interference.

Neither the amount of funding involved nor the speed with which Canberra is willing to dispatch these payments does much to quell that impression.

If the deal goes ahead as outlined, come the end of this year, every member of Solomon Islands’ National Parliament will have access to 850,000(SBD5 million) in Australian development assistance for use in their constituency, with a further $1 million in annual tranches of $500,000 promised in 2027 and 2028.

Arguably, it was the Coalition that first pivoted towards a more pragmatic use of Australian development assistance in the Pacific, with Malcolm Turnbull’s 2016 “step change”, followed two years later by Scott Morrison’s somewhat awkward “Pacific Step-Up” rebrand, when, taking a leaf out of Beijing’s infrastructure-lending book, he unveiled the $2 billion Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific (AIFFP).

But it is under the hawk-eyed watch of Labor’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong that Australia’s development assistance has been progressively recast as a “core tool of Australia’s statecraft”.

To address neighbouring development needs, for sure, but more explicitly “to help shape Australia’s strategic environment” in an “increasingly volatile world”.

Four years on, Labor has more than doubled the AIFFP’s capacity to a whopping $4.55 billion, adding close to 50 new projects across the Pacific. Infrastructure investment and seemingly endless, culturally off-key public diplomacy are now Canberra’s tools of choice for winning Pacific hearts and minds in nations where many government ministers, officials, police officers and journalists have already been treated to VIP trips to Beijing.

Clunky optics aside, securing four new Pacific security-focused treaties with Tuvalu, Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu in less than three years is no small strategic achievement, requiring a degree of focus and commitment from the Albanese government hitherto unseen in Australia’s relations with the region this century.

But Canberra’s latest pivot towards substantial constituency-level funding for Solomon Islands MPs suggests the Albanese government’s determined effort to batten down the regional hatches in the face of Beijing’s cashed-up courting of Pacific Island nations is moving beyond strategic pragmatism towards a dangerous whatever-it-takes mindset, bringing with it increased risk for both donor and recipient.

Long the target of criticism over corruption and misuse of public funds, Solomon Islands’ Constituency Development Funds (CDFs) are far from being a politically neutral mechanism for delivering assistance to communities where government services struggle to reach.

For decades, they have been used to channel increasingly larger amounts of public funds through individual MPs.

Thirty years on, there is little to show across much of rural Solomon Islands for the billions of Solomon dollars poured into CDFs, with many communities still lacking essential services and basic infrastructure.

Some MPs have used the funds transparently and constituency-funded projects have undoubtedly delivered tangible benefits for some communities over the years, but overall CDFs’ development dividend remain deeply contested.

The mechanism has progressively drained resources and weakened the capacity of the Solomon Islands government to plan and execute anything resembling equitable national development.

In July this year, the International Monetary Fund added its latest in a series of warnings over recent years, urging the government to shift resources away from CDFs to improve the efficiency of public spending, highlighting that they now account for spending equivalent to 1.6% of GDP.

In the Solomons’ intimate, mostly Melanesian communities, traditional systems of reciprocity still provide an extraordinary social safety net for many.

Leadership, too, has often been associated with the ability of “big men” to mobilise resources and demonstrate their worth by sharing them with their people.

But the rivers of cash placed at individual MPs’ disposal through CDFs over the years have helped distort that tradition, entangling it with a highly personalised system of political patronage in which access to resources can generate obligation and loyalty, including political support.

The result has been persistent complaints from communities about politicised and inequitable distribution, weak accountability, misuse and corruption.

The 2019 national census found that 64.2% of households familiar with CDFs said they had had no positive impact on their livelihoods; a more recent 2023 survey by a consortium of Solomon Islands investigative journalists across three geographically dispersed constituencies, recorded voter dissatisfaction with CDFs as high 92% in one Western Province electorate.

Longstanding donor and domestic discontent over CDF governance helped drive the passage of a new CDF Act in 2023.

This wrests greater control from individual MPs over future spending but does not apply retrospectively.

The Wale government has announced it is already reviewing the new Act with a view to strengthening it, while the Office of the Auditor-General has begun Community Participatory Audits involving communities and civil society to verify whether projects reported on paper have actually been delivered.

CDFs have also provided a ready vehicle for foreign influence, with Taiwan providing substantial funding for years before Beijing enthusiastically stepped into the space following the 2019 switch in diplomatic recognition.

 It says a lot about the shortcomings of the mechanism that just over two years later, even Beijing had pulled back from directly contributing to CDFs, shifting its support to a proposal-based program subject to Solomon Islands government screening and oversight.

None of this is news to Canberra, which for many years funded research into CDFs and advocated reforms to make constituency funding more transparent and efficient.

It is not known if Canberra is now seriously contemplating channelling the proposed funds through the existing CDF mechanism – an option canvassed in a 2020 DFAT-commissioned evaluation as a way of helping “nudge it toward accountability and coherence”.

It is also difficult to see how Australia’s recently expanded Community Partnerships Program in the Solomons could readily be adapted to accommodate funding on the scale and at the pace proposed.

Since being ramped up five-fold in 2023, the program’s goal is to fund 100 small projects of up to $100,000 annually through small grants for practical, community-led development and does not currently require any involvement by the local MP.

The peculiarities of Solomon Islands politics mean the murky role of constituency-level funding extends all the way to the national level.

Ever since its British colonisers bequeathed the country a woefully inadequate constitution, prime ministers have been elected by and from MPs in a secret ballot requiring an absolute majority.

With one or two recalcitrant members potentially able to bring down a government, motions of no confidence are a recurring feature – as Wale knows only too well – making the support of individual MPs critical to any government’s survival.

Against this backdrop, Canberra’s embrace of constituency-level development assistance is difficult to square with any semblance of best-practice development.

Directing substantial sums towards individual constituencies, rather than through Solomon Islands’ national development priorities and planning mechanisms, also cuts across decades of Australia’s own development work – and that of other partners in the Pacific such as the World Bank – to strengthen public institutions, national planning and good governance.

More compelling is the development case for Canberra’s proposed $142 million investment in Wale’s signature free-education policy included in the treaty package. In a country where UNICEF reports net secondary school enrolment remains below 17%,  few investments are likely to reach more deeply into the lives and future opportunities of ordinary Solomon Islanders, provided the funding enables a sustainable rollout.

Funding for easier and more equitable access to Australian visas for Solomon Islanders is similarly long overdue and will probably do more than almost any other single initiative to improve relations. Along with responses to “security requests from Solomon Islands”, Canberra has allocated a further $47.8 million for these measures.

But it is Australia’s rapid offer of constituency-level funding that plays most neatly into the hands of Solomons’ Opposition Leader Manasseh Sogavare – the country’s longest-serving prime minister and arguably Canberra’s greatest nemesis in the Pacific.

It was Sogavare who led the Solomons’ switch from Taiwan to the PRC and, less than three years later, completely freaked Canberra when it secretly negotiated a framework security cooperation agreement with Beijing – a development Australia had somehow convinced itself would just not happen.

The agreement’s final terms remain hidden, with Wale confirming in June that a non-disclosure clause prevents his government from publishing them.

While the hypocrisy of Sogavare’s outraged rhetoric over Australia’s supposed interference will not be lost on many Solomon Islanders, committing Australian aid to MPs’ development priorities – however they may end up being administered – risks cutting across Wale’s efforts to reset both the country’s foreign and domestic policy frameworks.

No one’s stooge, Wale has moved quickly to restore some balance to foreign relations, with early visits to Australia and the United States and an increasingly assertive regional voice.

His handling of China’s provocative missile test is a case in point: “China is a good friend of Solomon Islands, but this is not something a friend does.”

For a population tiring of five years in the eye of a geopolitical storm, and of seeing their nation and its leaders buffeted by external powers and their money, there has been something reassuring in seeing Wale assert greater control over the country’s foreign relationships.

Domestically, Wale, an accountant and former highly effective chair of the Public Accounts Committee, has set an equally ambitious reform agenda, staking his government’s credibility on “zero-tolerance” of the Solomons’ endemic cronyism and corruption, and pledging to remove corrupt officials “regardless of who they are or who their friends may be”.

The appointment of Auditor-General David Dennis – who for years has almost single-handedly kept the flames of accountability licking at the heels of the nation’s public servants – as the Permanent Secretary of Finance suggests Wale plans to waste no time introducing long-overdue public finance reforms.

All this has helped the new PM draw a clear and rapid line between his GREAT (Government for Reform, Empowerment, Accountability and Transformation) Coalition and the track record of the four preceding governments – three under Sogavare and one, briefly, under Jerry Manele. But in its efforts to pull Solomon Islands closer, Canberra’s dive into the belly of the beast that is the Solomon Islands political system now risks putting Wale in the position of compromising that very divide.

Australia’s proposed constituency funding could undermine both the accountability credentials he has worked hard to establish at home and the greater sense of national agency he is trying to restore abroad.

If the Wale government does accept the treaty package as offered, Australian money intended to advance a strategic objective then risks becoming entangled with the domestic political imperative of keeping a friendly Solomon Islands government – and potentially the MPs who support it – in office.

Hardly sustainable development by anyone’s standards.

• Mary-Louise O’Callaghan is an award-winning journalist and senior strategic communications specialist with more than three decades’ experience in the Pacific, based in Solomon Islands. This article first appeared in the Lowy Institute website.