Between backyards and nakamals: Shifting Australia–Vanuatu relations

Key findings

• Australia’s strategic anxiety and narrative emphasis on security “threats” in the Pacific Islands region have increasingly dominated bilateral affairs in the past decade. This has progressively reconfigured its valued development cooperation and risks a neglect of historical and contemporary reciprocal relations, which in turn can undermine diplomatic trust-building.
• Deeper Pacific literacy — particularly through a whole-of-government Australian investment in strategic empathy — can meaningfully contribute to more enduring and resilient diplomatic relations with a key Australian neighbour: Vanuatu. The anticipated Nakamal Agreement with Vanuatu offers opportunities for Australia to “think outside the box” in its statecraft, with broader lessons for regional relations.
• Leaning into an inclusive conceptualisation of the Vanuatu nakamal way — through joint crafting of a more comprehensive engagement model — will better enable the two countries to create a transformational economic partnership that responds to Vanuatu’s most pressing climate and development concerns, while alleviating Australia’s strategic anxiety.

What is the problem?

Australia’s current relations with Pacific Island countries are infused with strategic anxiety; Canberra holds genuine concerns about China’s exponential growth in bilateral security engagements and its more assertive posture in a region once carelessly described as “Australia’s backyard”. In its attempts to become the Pacific’s partner of choice, Australia has at times suffered an identity crisis and been characterised as “heavy-handed” in its engagement with the region.^* At the core of these issues is a tension between Australia’s claim of being part of a “Pacific family” and its pursuit of national interests.^* All countries prioritise their national interests, but for Australia, its Pacific relations produce a particular type of unease due to colonial histories, stark differences in national economies and scale, and asymmetrical power.

While Australia plays a central role in regional institutions and is a valued bilateral partner, past and present policy decisions — particularly on climate action via the International Court of Justice and the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine agreement — have undermined Pacific aspirations of regional diplomatic solidarity. Pacific states often view Australian policies in the region as imposed rather than collaboratively developed.^* The proliferation of Australia-led bilateral security agreements in the region since 2018 underscores this tension.^* Canberra has been criticised for its emphasis on traditional security over the more expansive Boe Declaration-informed definition of security, which encompasses Pacific Island countries’ preferred focus on engagement that directs attention towards long-standing and compounding development needs.^*

In Vanuatu’s case, this tension is reflected in the bumpy momentum of the proposed Nakamal Agreement, which has been variously reported by Australian and regional media as a “pact”, a “treaty”, or a “security and business deal”.^* Australia’s preference for securitising relations risks neglecting or, worse, disregarding other aspects of the partnership that matter deeply to Vanuatu. These aspects, which include formally acknowledging the history of blackbirding, truly engaging as “family” on shared economic interests, and nurturing resilience within a critical friendship, demand appropriate high-level, practical recognition of the two countries’ interdependence. There are strategic gains for both parties when common challenges are genuinely and collaboratively tackled. A renewed diplomatic settlement with Vanuatu — via an anticipated Nakamal Agreement — presents an opportunity for Australia’s leaders and policymakers to directly address these tensions with a key Pacific neighbour.

What should be done?

Australia has unique relationships with each Pacific Island country, and is regularly encouraged by stakeholders to deepen its “Pacific literacy”, which includes cultural competence, deep listening, and decolonial engagement.^* A guiding ethos of strategic empathy — sensitivity to other countries’ emotional, symbolic, and aspirational goals — along with an acknowledgement by Australia of its own biases and national ego would strengthen regional relations.^* However, the trend of delegating development cooperation to third-party managing contractors often places Australian officials at an additional distance from their Pacific counterparts. This creates a dynamic where Pacific Island governments feel they are being “project managed” rather than treated as collaborative colleagues.^* Strategic empathy is only attainable when relations do not require mediation through third parties.

Greater Pacific literacy encourages deeper engagement with the region’s histories and political economies. It also promotes a shift away from hyper-securitised policy approaches and from narratives that marginalise local actors and development solutions.^* Pacific literacy means staying the course with long-term, constructive development approaches instead of flashy aid and security transactions and announcements — a sentiment widely expressed across the Pacific, including in Vanuatu.^*

Extending this approach requires a more nuanced interpretation of Australia’s “Pacific family” narrative and a genuine engagement by Australian government agencies with Pacific Island partners that allows for slow diplomacy where Australia does not impose its anxieties onto the tempo of relations. It also requires capacity-building within Australian policy institutions and among aid-managing contractors and media outlets. This is needed to counter persistent “zombie narratives” — superannuated debates and fixed mindsets that refuse to expire — centred on the idea of a pliable “backyard” that reinforce paternalistic framings of aid and security and undermine Australia’s regional diplomatic credibility.

In relations with Vanuatu, an acknowledgment of historical ties and unresolved grievances would recognise that cooperation extends beyond aid and security. Vanuatu’s nakamal way — dialogue enabling broad participation and deeper understanding — offers a framework for more inclusive and empathetic bilateral engagement.^* It enables attention to be drawn to Vanuatu’s material contributions to Australia’s domestic economy and middle-power status, notably through labour mobility and diplomatic support internationally. It can stimulate innovation in diplomatic models, such as the joint progression of a comprehensive economic partnership that addresses compounding climate-related development challenges. Priorities could include incentivised private sector investment, reduced barriers to trade, expanded labour and education mobility, and streamlined visa access.^* These measures would foster a more mutually empathetic inter-state dialogue, better address Vanuatu’s structural constraints, and support more resilient, long-term bilateral relations.

Introduction: Beyond the backyard

A long-held perception that the Pacific Islands are a part of Australia’s “backyard” has been shaken by concerns about China’s rising presence in the region.^* Political analysts and Australian media often focus on Pacific countries’ leveraging of these geopolitical rivalries to maximise development options.^* What this heightened state of strategic competition has achieved is a fundamental reset of any neo-colonial presumptions about a pliable Pacific “backyard” supportive of Australia’s policy of strategic denial.^* This new dynamic requires Australia to confront the unhelpful asymmetries of power that are cultivated by its current framing of aid and security interventions.

Australia’s 2018 shift in strategic narrative towards a “Pacific family” was aimed at “normalising Australia’s presence in the Pacific Islands region”.^* However, despite a now-long-ago policy retirement of the “backyard” reference, Australian media regularly project a paternalistic, sometimes polarising, and often hostile “China threat narrative” that does a disservice to the more mature and nuanced relationships in the region.^* By contrast, the “Pacific family” narrative has the potential to foster solid and enduring connections. To do so with Vanuatu includes not only being Pacific literate but also sensitive to the “emotional, symbolic, and historical meaning behind actions”.^* Australia must also moderate its current dogmatic focus on securitising relations at the risk of deprioritising valued developmental cooperation in the region, particularly where Australia’s engagement is seen as paternalistic.^* These structural issues in the Australia-Vanuatu relationship must be confronted if Australia is to foster more resilient ties.

A shared history but unresolved relations

We want an apology from Australia to recognise a shameful part of history.
–– Vanuatu Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil, 2013^*

In 2013, at a Port Vila commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the departure of the first blackbirding ship bound for Queensland, the then Vanuatu Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil called on Australia to apologise for its nineteenth century indentured labour trade.^* His remarks came at a time when Australia had begun a tentative return to a policy of integrated labour mobility with the Pacific Islands. Yet this shared history is not always acknowledged; and on the occasions it is acknowledged, this does not occur at the highest levels of the Australian government.^*

Australia–Vanuatu relations date back to the 1800s when, between 1863 and 1904, more than 62,000 islanders from the Melanesian archipelago were “blackbirded” — forced, coerced, or deceived into working as indentured labourers on Queensland plantations for low or no pay.^* Thousands were subsequently deported under the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901, in pursuit of the White Australia policy. However, about 2,500 remained in Queensland and along Australia’s eastern seaboard, and their descendants now comprise the Australian South Sea Islander (ASSI) population.^* At the time, Australia’s racist immigration policy, coupled with the forced statelessness of Pacific labourers, precluded any form of political exchange with islanders outside of a colonial capitalist framework.^*

Presbyterian missionaries, however, played a key role in calling for an end to the labour trade and advocating for the Anglo-French Condominium in Vanuatu in order to defend mission land interests against growing French settlement.^* A sustained lobby targeted the prime ministers of Australia between 1901 and 1904 to protect land claims in the islands; efforts also supported by Australia’s largest trading firm Burns Philp & Co, which had been steadily acquiring land in the archipelago at the turn of the twentieth century.^* A race for land between the French and the British, through Australian mission and commercial interests, thus became the foundation of the joint colonial administration.^*

Australian self-interest in labour and land in the islands for more than a century prior to Vanuatu’s independence in 1980 established an extractive, paternalistic dynamic that has endured.

Since independence, tentative efforts to reconcile the disturbing blackbirding history have been made, primarily initiated by local communities in Vanuatu and within the ASSI population.^* In 2011, a delegation of chiefs from Vanuatu visited historic blackbirding sites in Queensland, connecting with descendants of blackbirded labourers.^* There are ongoing efforts to connect the ASSI population, individual ASSI families, and families within Vanuatu, often privately funded and without Australian government recognition. There have been suggestions of possible financial compensation for blackbirding, although not from the Vanuatu government itself.^* Setbacks such as former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s 2020 denial that slavery had ever existed exacerbated concerns about the erasure of historical injustices and potentially set back efforts to reconcile a shared dark history. Morrison later apologised, qualifying that his comment was made in relation to the founding of the New South Wales colony, not a general claim about Australian history.^* Nevertheless, it demonstrated what Carcasses Kalosil identified in 2013, that the Australian government needs to do more to acknowledge this shared past to move forward into deeper bilateral relations.

The Australian government’s Indigenous Diplomacy Agenda, which included the 2023 appointment of the country’s inaugural Ambassador for First Nations People Justin Mohamed, provides an opportunity to engage with Vanuatu on this shared but unresolved history. While ASSI have limited political recognition in relation to First Nations groups within Australia, the promise of the Agenda is in the commitment to reconciling turbulent histories and the opportunity for First Nations Australians to substantively participate and lead on international engagement.^* This commitment could extend to the Australian government fully reconciling, in a culturally appropriate way, the legacies of the blackbirding era. It also provides a foundation for repairing the Australia–Vanuatu relationship and could include steps such as streamlined visa access for genuine ni-Vanuatu travellers visiting kin and friends in Australia, teaching this “secret” history in the classrooms where Australia’s future leaders are educated, and formally acknowledging that blackbirding existed.Stefan Armbruster, “South Sea Islands Mark Sugar ‘Slave’ Days”, SBS News, 11 March 2016, https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/south-sea-islanders-mark-sugar-slave-days/wdufp4za5; Nance Haxton, “‘Australia’s Slave Trade’: The Growing Drive to Uncover Secret History of Australian South Sea Islanders”, ABC News, 22 December 2017, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-22/australian-south-sea-islanders-blackbirding/9270734.

Being family, not paternal

Perhaps it is not possible to have totally shared expectations, totally shared assumptions, but at least let us try to understand them.
— Prime Minister Walter Lini, 1982^*

Speaking to a Canberra audience at the “Australia and the South Pacific” conference in February 1982, Vanuatu’s then Prime Minister Walter Lini described bilateral relations as “almost of a Siamese-twin nature”.^* He called for Australia to work towards understanding Vanuatu’s needs and expectations more deeply, remarking that “if we [do] not over the years, [we will] experience the pain of pulling in different directions”.

Australia was one of Vanuatu’s first diplomatic partners. The bilateral relationship began in 1978 through a Port Vila consulate that became a full mission after Vanuatu’s independence in 1980.^* France’s reluctant exit from the archipelago, conditional post-independence aid, and tense relations with the Lini-led government allowed Australia to fill the vacuum with the provision of technical personnel and aid packages — a practice that Australia has maintained with Vanuatu over the past 45 years. Internationally, Prime Minister Lini and Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke had shared interests in decolonisation and protecting the neighbourhood, working closely at the South Pacific Forum (now the Pacific Islands Forum) and the United Nations on matters relating to East Timor (Timor-Leste), New Caledonia, and a nuclear-free Pacific treaty. But despite this early closeness, each remained watchful: Lini criticised Hawke’s government for not going “nearly far enough” in controlling nuclear weapons intrusions;^* and Canberra expressed wariness over Lini’s pursuit of a Melanesian socialism, his non-aligned foreign policy, and maintenance of bilateral relations with anti-West countries such as Libya and Russia. Diplomatic collaboration has generally been amiable — if sometimes sensitive — in the more than four decades of formal relations since. In 2012, Vanuatu established its foreign mission in Canberra to strengthen bilateral relations, including in trade cooperation, and manage a growing volume of consular issues relating to ni-Vanuatu workers under the Pacific labour mobility programs.^*

Australia, however, still grapples domestically with an entrenched national mindset that the Pacific region is “only a place of threat, rather than collaboration or opportunity”.^* This has manifested in shifting narratives about its Vanuatu relations — and accompanying interventionist programs — which tend to reflect Australia’s insecurities and only selectively engage with Vanuatu’s interests. This is problematic for two reasons.

First, when development assistance has been, to date, a primary framing of Australia–Vanuatu relations, the Australian public’s gaze becomes focused on outflows of taxpayer dollars and the “burden” of the neighbourhood, rather than the reciprocal aspects of the relationship such as the ni-Vanuatu labour that underpins Australia’s thriving and lucrative AU$18 billion annual horticulture industry.^* This labour market is largely made up of ni-Vanuatu, with formal remittances to the country estimated at AU$277 million or 21% of annual GDP in 2021.^*

While there is considerable government-sponsored public relations media and targeted academic literature about the contribution of labour mobility to Vanuatu’s growing remittance economy, there is notably less coverage of the outsized contribution of Pacific labour to Australia’s domestic economy.

Second, Australian threat narratives about the region constrain Vanuatu’s genuine interest — and development need — in growing bilateral economic and trade relations. Vanuatu’s offshore financial services, for example, are closely monitored by Australia, as is its lucrative but controversial “golden passports” citizenship-by-investment scheme.^* Both are seen as, and unfortunately have also been proven at times to be, a backdoor for bad actors and illicit finance into Australia, that must be blocked.^* Australia’s strict quarantine regulations and controlled market access have also restricted trade flows.^* In 2007, Australia banned the commercial importation of kava, Vanuatu’s most lucrative export, which was not lifted until 2021 by the Morrison government with strict regulations.^* These types of restrictions have left the relationship feeling more like that of distant cousins than close “family”. Australian and New Zealand support for the Pacific Horticultural and Agricultural Market Access Plus program has incrementally addressed market access issues for Vanuatu commodities since 2011 — through mechanisms such as quarantine guides — but more sustained and significantly increased investment in infrastructure is needed to advance regulatory reform, particularly for Vanuatu’s kava and cocoa industries.^*

For Australia to genuinely be part of the Vanuatu “family”, therefore, requires a more intrinsic domestic shift in national mindset towards its Pacific neighbours, and sincere collaboration on transformational bilateral opportunities, such as a more integrated economic relationship.

A “critical friendship”

It is particularly concerning that some of these nations, upon whom we depend for aid and support, have not acknowledged the severity of the crisis or their responsibilities under international law.
— Vanuatu Minister for Climate Change, Ralph Regenvanu, 2024^*

In December 2024, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) heard from nearly 100 nations in a landmark case spearheaded by Vanuatu for an advisory opinion on the legal obligations of polluting states with regard to climate change, Australia sat in the opposing camp. Vanuatu Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu expressed disappointment at Australia’s position, seeing it as a failure to acknowledge the gravity of the climate crisis.^* Australia defended its stance, expressing the view that existing global instruments like the Paris Agreement were sufficient.^* When the ICJ unanimously ruled in favour of Vanuatu and supporting states in July 2025, victory was felt across the Pacific region and the world.^*

Australia, for its part, had co-sponsored Vanuatu’s bid for an ICJ advisory opinion, despite ultimately arguing against Vanuatu in the submission process.^* Australia also continues to support the region in its pursuit of climate finance, being the first to commit AU$100 million to the Pacific Resilience Facility, for example.^* Australia is a valued humanitarian assistance and disaster response partner and is often the first to come to Vanuatu’s aid after disasters. Yet Australia’s flip-flopping on climate change has left its relationship with Pacific nations described as “dysfunctional”.^* Australia’s unreliability on climate action highlights an uncomfortable truth that underscores the tensions in its Pacific-oriented bilateral relations. The key test of these relations, therefore, is whether there is sufficient diplomatic resilience to weather moments of policy divergence or contradiction.

In 2018, Australia’s then shadow foreign minister Penny Wong described a foreign policy principle of constructive internationalism.^* While the instrumentalisation of this principle since her tenure commenced in 2022 might aid an interpretation of Australia’s contradictory diplomatic engagement on Pacific climate diplomacy, it is equally useful to consider how Australia’s strategy might be received by a Pacific family member like Vanuatu. Vanuatu has long deployed the principle of non-alignment to facilitate its own instrumentalist internationalism. But perhaps Vanuatu’s point of departure from Australia is that the “friends to all, enemies to none” principle is also fundamentally reflective of a global decolonial internationalism that strives to level — not defend — an uneven playing field.^* Australia’s use of an instrumental internationalism to maintain, rather than remove, structural barriers to diplomatic equity on international climate policy, for example, particularly undermines its Pacific relations. It reinforces a neo-colonial, pro-West hegemony, rather than decolonial engagement.

The notion of a “critical friend” is a useful frame here. Friendly criticism is a two-way dialogue that plays out differently at technical and political levels. For example, Australia has repeatedly positioned itself as a stabilising foil against a Melanesian “arc of instability”,^* providing valued and timely assistance to Papua New Guinea during the Bougainville civil war and to Solomon Islands during its ethnic tensions. This has enabled more direct, targeted law enforcement and democratic governance interventions. Yet a fine line often exists between sanctioned external intervention and foreign interference. In 2004, Vanuatu prime minister Serge Vohor expelled two Australian Federal Police officers and two AusAID legal advisers, citing concerns about interference and espionage.^* Australia’s then foreign minister Alexander Downer threatened to cut much of its AU$31 million in aid to Vanuatu “because of corruption and poor governance”, calling on the country “to accept the presence in Port Vila of Australian advisers and police”.^* Vanuatu eventually allowed the two police officers to return, with conditions.^* This political row revealed a dynamic of mutual critique and diplomatic boundary-setting. Various criticisms of Australia’s development programs — whether on gender, land rights, or law reforms — have also been levelled by Vanuatu, with critics regularly referencing Australia’s domestic treatment of indigenous lands, for example.^* These have often resulted in collaborative reviews and adjustments of development programs.

A critical bilateral friendship must therefore be sufficiently resilient to weather shifting policies and politics, building on a shared historical foundation such as that found in Australia–Vanuatu relations. Above all, critical friends must remain in dialogue with each other, hold space for resolution of differences — which includes allowing for slow diplomacy — and adopt a mindset that allows them to reach agreement on solutions that are both sustainable and mutually acceptable.

Implications for a Nakamal Agreement

The anticipated Nakamal Agreement between Australia and Vanuatu is the latest in a series of bilateral arrangements connecting the two countries. Development assistance and humanitarian support have been particularly dominant themes over the years. The draft Nakamal Agreement has its origins in a 2022 bilateral security agreement between Vanuatu’s then Prime Minister Alatoi Ishmael Kalsakau and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.^* That agreement focused on disaster response, policing, cybersecurity, and border security. Climate change was only minimally addressed.^* However, the 2022 deal did not carry the support of Vanuatu’s Parliament, and was not ratified. In 2025, Vanuatu Prime Minister Jotham Napat instructed officials to “go back to the drawing board” and include climate change as a security priority.^* Officials entered into negotiations for a more comprehensive agreement that would also consider development-related topics such as trade, investment, and simplifying travel to Australia for ni-Vanuatu citizens.^*

On 13 August 2025, the proposed Nakamal Agreement was initialled in a high-profile ceremony attended by three senior Australian ministers: Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Pacific Island Affairs Minister Pat Conroy, and their three Vanuatu counterparts: Deputy Prime Minister Johnny Koanapo, Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu, and Internal Affairs Minister Andrew Napuat. The signing took place on Prime Minister Napat’s home island of Tanna, set against the dramatic backdrop of the active Yasur volcano.^* Valued at AU$500 million over ten years, the draft agreement supposedly maintains (rather than increases or decreases) existing Australian partnership commitments with Vanuatu.^* The rush by both sides to an announceable agreement was a miscalculation causing diplomatic embarrassment all round. Expectations that prime ministers Napat and Albanese would formalise the agreement ahead of the annual Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Honiara in 2025 stalled over disputed wording on “critical infrastructure” and supposed concerns within Napat’s cabinet about the implications for Vanuatu’s sovereignty.^*

As the agreement continues to be negotiated, some issues are reportedly being advanced, while others are deferred.^* For example, simplified entry for Vanuatu travellers into Australia is to be pursued under a secondary agreement.^* The drawn-out process of talks is reflective of the name — a nakamal way — despite rumours that China-influenced geopolitical undercurrents were the reason for delays, which both the Vanuatu and Chinese governments dismissed as false.^* Recent media suggestions about the parallel development of a security agreement between China and Vanuatu are yet to be confirmed.^* Vanuatu’s prime minister remarked that his country’s foreign policy would not be “guided by external speculation or pressure” and that conjecture about the partnership and its effects were “unhelpful and not a cultural reflection of nakamal values”.^* In early May 2026, after an extensive internal consultation period, Vanuatu’s cabinet approved a revised version for signature with Australia, bringing the two countries closer to final agreement.^*

A nakamal framework to renew bilateral relations

Vanuatu’s nakamal concept is a powerful tool for fostering more meaningful diplomatic relations and achieving a mutually beneficial bilateral agreement. As Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Jotham Napat explained in March 2025, “A nakamal is for everyone.” Shared across a culturally diverse archipelago, the nakamal symbolises inclusion, dialogue, and political agency.^* Transposed to the present geopolitical context, therefore, it is unsurprising that negotiations stalled when Australia suggested limiting Vanuatu’s engagement with certain countries in some sectors. Vanuatu’s nakamal way underpins its staunch commitment to the “friends to all, enemies to none” mantra of non-alignment. In cultural diplomatic terms, a key marker of the nakamal way is the inclusive space it creates for dialogue, listening, and nurturing relationships.

A nakamal framework for bilateral relations can enable a more balanced partnership between the two countries — one that deepens Australia’s Vanuatu literacy and signals a genuine shift in diplomatic engagement. More than 40 years ago, Prime Minister Walter Lini remarked,

“The success of Australia’s relations with the Pacific island states will be based upon practical and sustained recognition that no one culture is basically superior to another, that each and every culture, together with its social, political and economic ingredients, has a meaning and value to the people who gave birth to it, and it remains the hope of the [Vanuatu] Government that such a principle will colour Australian Pacific policies for the years that lie ahead.” – Walter Lini, 1982

The resilience of Australia’s relations with Vanuatu will depend very much on how it is able to engage with the “social, political and economic ingredients” of which Lini spoke. This has been echoed by many of Vanuatu’s prime ministers over the years. The shift in Australian rhetoric from its Pacific “backyard” to that of “family” can be enhanced by Vanuatu’s framing of a nakamal way, which fosters inclusive and iterative dialogue with an emphasis on relationships and understanding.

Conclusion

A nakamal framework must be more than a decorative headline for Australia–Vanuatu engagement if it is to be a key tool for fostering robust, resilient diplomatic relations. The historical links between the two countries, and the socio-economic and political ingredients at the heart of the relationship, are assets to be leveraged in bilateral relations going forward. Implemented well, the benefits will have broader application to Australia’s Pacific relations.

The following recommendations are offered as practical and meaningful steps to address both Australia’s strategic anxiety and Vanuatu’s compounding climate and development insecurities.

The Australian government should:

• Acknowledge the shared history to deepen trust
  Genuine and resilient bilateral relations must be underpinned by the reconciliation of a dark shared history. This should be formally recognised at the highest level. Australia’s Indigenous Diplomacy Agenda presents one of several policy levers that are needed to achieve this and to more deeply nurture future engagement.
• Demonstrate a “family” approach through a comprehensive economic partnership
  Australia should formally — and regularly — give explicit recognition to the substantial labour contributions that Vanuatu and other Pacific Island nations make towards Australia’s economy. This includes publicly highlighting the considerable economic contribution made to Australia, not simply focusing on the (much lower value) remittance economies. Acknowledgement is needed of interdependence and shared challenges, demonstrated through concrete partnership policies that facilitate a “family-like” approach. For example, streamlining border entry for legitimate ni-Vanuatu travellers, workers, and students, and reducing barriers to trade through productive sector market access.
• Deepen Pacific literacy
  Pacific literacy programs must be intensified, not only across the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Defence, but across the whole of government, to improve cultural, historical, and policy understanding of the Pacific Islands region. Literacy must include empathy and the acknowledgement of longstanding interdependent relations. It also means recognising when slow diplomacy is necessary.
  
  Australian media and the country’s development industry also need greater Pacific literacy. Narratives of mutual strategic interests need to present more balance on issues of labour trade, for example, and the significant contribution Vanuatu labour has made, and continues to make, to the Australian economy.

Both Australian and Vanuatu governments should:

• Embrace a “critical friendship”
  A “critical friends” approach should be institutionalised within bilateral relations to strengthen diplomatic resilience while respecting each other’s sovereign foreign policy choices. This entails leveraging the existing senior official and high-level diplomatic structures to allow room for constructive criticism without undermining the partnership.
  
  Authentic relations would be further nurtured through official engagement beyond formal meeting rooms — in community and public domains, for example — in the spirit of the nakamal way. This would provide opportunities for Australian and ni-Vanuatu publics to engage in and contribute to mutual understanding and shared narratives.