On my first visit to Vanuatu, I spent a week on the island of Pentecost.
Among its many colourful inhabitants was a 30-something teacher from the United Kingdom, who’d made his way there on holiday and never left. He’d married, settled into island life, and even found a local job.
When I asked if his wife and young child had ever made the long journey back to England, he noted that, even if they had the cash, they’d never bother: it’s too hard for ni-Vanuatu to navigate Australia’s stringent border requirements.
If there is a greater than 8-hour delay between the inbound flight from Port Vila and their next outbound service, ni-Vanuatu, like most other Pacific Islanders, need to go through the onerous task of applying for a transit or tourist visa.
This often means visits to their capital to sort out the admin – an additional, and at times insurmountable, expense for low-income Pacific islanders.
These barriers contrast to the ease with which Australians can visit the Pacific, where the nations, so dependent on Australian travellers, have always rolled out the welcome mat. With the exception of Nauru, travelling to the region is just about as easy as it gets for an Australian passport holder.
This visa asymmetry flies in the face of Australia’s strategic embrace of the Pacific. It needs to end.
Given the indifference – even, perhaps hostility – the Trump administration is displaying towards the Pacific, Australia should act with haste to pursue a scheme that makes it easier for people from the region to visit or transit.
It was recently revealed that officials in the Trump administration are considering banning all entry to the United States from three Pacific nations: Vanuatu, Tonga and Tuvalu, the latter of which has worked to seek assurances this won’t be enacted.
The United States, while strategically critical, is a smaller player in the South Pacific than some might anticipate. Australia, New Zealand, and China each have a more active presence. But the Biden administration, in recognition of the changing geopolitical winds in the Pacific, had made overtures to the Pacific.
Those efforts never came to much, and with Trump’s ascension, they are likely to wither. The leaking of potential visa restrictions will only deepen the mistrust between the region and Washington. It also suggests that the Trump administration is, if nothing else, disinterested in the Pacific Islands.
There have been issues with the issuance of visas in the Pacific in the past, however, that may have been the reason why the three Pacific countries were caught in the crosshairs of this latest visa restriction.
Vanuatu’s “golden passport” scheme is a legitimate issue. Nauru, similarly, has sold citizenship in the past to rogue actors.
Small states with weak economies often trade investment for citizenship.
It is a problem, but not one unique to the Pacific, and one that could be addressed through negotiations between Australia and Pacific nations: Australia could encourage Pacific states to tighten these visa issues while establishing a visa-waiver scheme between the Pacific and Australia.
There may be logistical and legislative challenges associated with carving out the Pacific for special visa status, these shouldn’t stand in the way of a visa policy that serves Australia’s national interests.
The establishment of a visa-free travel arrangement for Pacific countries would be a powerful symbol of the deepening ties between Australia and the Pacific, and a signal of the importance of the Pacific to Australia for the rest of the world. Australia liberalising its visa approach to the Pacific would also improve Pacific countries’ ability to pursue freer visa relationships with other developed countries, using the visa-free status with Australia as evidence of its viability.
For all the language Australian policymakers have deployed towards the Pacific – calling it “family” – there has been little meaningful reform to the barriers to entry many Pacific islanders face when coming to Australia.
While there may be logistical and legislative challenges associated with carving out the Pacific for special visa status, these shouldn’t stand in the way of a visa policy that serves Australia’s national interests. A sound policy that retains all the checks and balances of other visa-free or visa waiver schemes, where applications for the waivers can themselves screen out unsavoury visitors, could readily be applied to Pacific Island nations.
These checks can also be applied against any Pasifika’s that do overstay their visas, limiting pathways to more permanent visas, just as they are applied to other visa-free entrants.
As Australia works overtime to deepen ties and integrate with the Pacific, its visa policy is holding the relationship back. Visa-free access for all Pacific Islanders to Australia is a practical next step in the Australia-Pacific relationship.
