Speeches
Thursday, 06 August 2026
Book Launch of ‘Neighbours: Australia and the Pacific’
I am pleased to join you this evening to celebrate the publication of Neighbours: Australia and the Pacific by Professors Joanne Wallis and Jack Corbett.
After launches in Canberra by Lachlan Strahan, and in Melbourne by James Batley – both former colleagues of mine – it’s my great pleasure to launch Neighbours here in South Australia.
I congratulate Joanne and Jack on what is their eleventh and twelfth book, respectively.
With a collective forty years of research in, and about, the Pacific region, your insights are extremely valuable for those working in academia, government and beyond.
You say you wrote this book, as Australians with a long interest in the Pacific, because you wanted to identify how Australia can move its relationship in the region forward. Australia, after all, is not the only country seeking to achieve this and the book deals candidly, and in my view, accurately, with the long-running challenges of strategic competition.
Neighbours tells the story of the ideas that have shaped Australian policy in the Pacific Islands region for more than a century.
It includes chapters of our history of which younger Australians are largely unaware, including our nation’s role as colonial administrator of Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
The book argues that Australia's difficulties in the region are not simply bad luck, but the product of four recurring problems.
These are asymmetry in size and wealth, difference in identity and interests, misunderstanding of each other's perspectives, and the confusion that follows when different strands of Australian policy pull in different directions.
I found this framework insightful, not simply as critique, but as a diagnostic tool for a relationship that sits - and increasingly so - at the centre of Australia's strategic outlook, and deserves to be grounded in careful analysis and research.
During my term as Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, I, as did my predecessors and as have my successors, grappled with the question asked by this book: how does a large country conduct itself well among smaller neighbours?
It was during my time as Secretary that we established the Office of the Pacific, in recognition of how vital the region is to Australia. The office has gone from strength to strength, a measure in some respects at least for the extent to which Australia’s interests are engaged in our near region.
I recognise the tension the authors describe between the patient work of relationship-building and the pressures of strategic competition.
What I find most valuable in this book is its answer to that tension: the idea of ‘good neighbourliness’.
This is not a concept imposed from Canberra, but one drawn from the Pacific's own language, from ‘falepili’, the Tuvaluan term for good neighbourliness, duty of care and mutual respect.
It asks Australia to respect boundaries, to disagree well, to foster self-awareness, and to deepen ties through the region's own institutions.
It is a modest, yet wise idea.
I am particularly pleased that this book is informed by work being undertaken in South Australia, at Adelaide University.
Over the past six years a team of Pacific scholars, led by Professor Wallis at the Stretton Institute, has undertaken major research projects across the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and beyond, directly informing Australian Government policy, as well as this book.
Its scholarship is evident, but so too, is its practical application to policy makers, the more so for the currency of its recommendations.
As Governor, I am heartened to see serious thinking about Australia's place in the world being done at Adelaide University.
As a former DFAT Secretary, I can say I would have found such a book useful had it been published ten years earlier!
Once again, I congratulate Joanne and Jack on a timely contribution to discourse – and I hope to policy making - on Australia’s relationship with the Pacific region, and I thank La Trobe University Press, in conjunction with Black Inc, for bringing the book into the world.
It is my pleasure to officially launch in South Australia Neighbours: Australia and the Pacific.