Darwin has the bases, Cairns has the people

When the Australia–PNG Emerging Leaders Dialogue convened in Cairns in May 2026, the delegates from Port Moresby had a shorter flight than those from Brisbane. That small fact of geography captures something Australia’s strategic conversation keeps missing: for the Pacific, the nearest Australian city is not Canberra, Sydney or even Darwin. It is Cairns

Australia has begun what can be considered a generational deepening of ties with Papua New Guinea. The Pukpuk Treaty (Opens in new window), signed in October, is Australia’s first new alliance since ANZUS and opens a pathway for up to 10,000 Papua New Guineans to serve in the Australian Defence Force. A PNG team entering the National Rugby League in 2028, as part of a broader sports diplomacy push into the Pacific, is backed by $600 million in Australian taxpayer cash. Brisbane (and Queensland more broadly) will host the Olympics in 2032. The next decade will see more Papua New Guineans and Pacific islanders moving through Australia – training, studying, working, competing – than at any time in our history.

The defence architecture for this moment is being built, with much of it in the north. But “Northern Australia” in the national imagination still defaults to Darwin and a militaristic framing – bases, fuel, airfields. But while alliances are sustained by militaries, relationships are sustained by people – students, entrepreneurs, churches, sporting clubs, diaspora families. And the people side of Australia’s Pacific engagement needs a home. Cairns is already playing that role, but Australia hasn’t realised it yet.

Consider what is quietly taking place in this city of 180,000. HMAS Cairns, the Navy’s northernmost base on the eastern seaboard, is undergoing a $250 million expansion (Opens in new window) to become the home port of the new Arafura-class offshore patrol vessels. The Cairns Marine Precinct has long maintained the patrol boats Australia donates to Pacific nations – so Pacific crews have trained in Cairns for decades. The city is the closest Australian international airport to Port Moresby, Honiara, and Port Vila. And its community fabric is already Pacific. Just walk the Cairns Esplanade to see for yourself. Papua New Guinea maintains a consulate in Cairns (Opens in new window). Business ties run through networks such as Tradelinked Cairns-PNG-Pacific. The city’s civil society includes the PNG & Wantoks Association; the Cairns Australian South Sea Islander Committee; the FNQ Samoa Advisory Council; Tongan, Cook Islands and Māori community organisations; Pacific church congregations; and a PNG student association.

Less noticed is the knowledge infrastructure. Two universities with deep Indo-Pacific footprints have Cairns campuses: James Cook University, one of the world’s leading tropical research universities, and CQUniversity, whose Cairns campuses deliver the applied professions – engineering, allied health, education, aviation, and digital media – that Pacific workforces need. Skills and disciplines the Pacific most needs are the ones Northern Australia’s tertiary institutions are best at. Yet student mobility between Cairns and the Pacific remains a trickle, while New Colombo Plan (Opens in new window) cohorts overwhelmingly fly past the Pacific to Asia.

None of this diminishes Darwin or Townsville. Darwin’s role facing the Indonesian archipelago and Townsville’s as a garrison and disaster-response hub are well-established and complementary. The point is that Australia’s northern strategy has a defence capital but formally no civilian one – no centre for the diplomacy, education, commerce, and people-to-people machinery that the Pukpuk decade will demand. A serious Northern Australia vision would assign that role deliberately.

Three practical moves would be a start.

First, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade should establish a regional office in Cairns. The department maintains state offices in every capital, yet Australia’s Pacific engagement is run from cities further from the Pacific than Cairns is from Port Moresby. A northern post focused on Pacific mobility, trade facilitation, and program delivery would put the Office of the Pacific’s work where the flights, the diaspora, and the patrol boats already are.

Second, institutionalise the commercial relationship young. An annual exchange between the Cairns Young Chamber and the Young Port Moresby Chamber of Commerce and Industry would cost little and compound quickly, building the organic youth partnership a treaty cannot legislate. The business leaders who will run the Australia–PNG economic relationship in 2040 are in their twenties now, on both sides of the Coral Sea.

Third, scale the people-to-people platforms that already work. Youth networks such as the Pacific-Australia Youth Association have shown that Cairns can host Pacific leadership development at low cost and high trust. The model exists but the missing piece is treating such programs as strategic infrastructure rather than community goodwill – and putting scholarship flows where the strategy is. That means a hard target for New Colombo Plan students in PNG and the Pacific and more of the Pacific’s Australia Awards (Opens in new window) scholars placed at Cairns campuses. Those locations where the applied disciplines they seek and the wantok networks that ease the landing already exist.

The Pukpuk Treaty was justified, in PNG Prime Minister John Marape’s own words (Opens in new window), by “geography, history and the enduring reality of our shared neighbourhood”. Those are precisely Cairns’s credentials. Australia is about to spend a decade proving its Pacific commitments. It should anchor that effort in the city where the Pacific already lands.