Australia deploys rugby diplomacy to tempt neighbour away from China

Australia is banking on sports diplomacy to lure Papua New Guinea away from China’s sphere of influence.

It has signed an agreement to invest A$600m (£301m) over 10 years to establish a new rugby league club, based in Port Moresby, and promote a grassroots rugby league across the Pacific.

The deal will see the new team, which is yet to be named, join Australia’s National Rugby League in 2028, becoming either its 18th or 19th franchise.

There’s a catch: the deal includes a separate pact requiring Papua New Guinea to prioritise Australia as its major security partner and avoid security ties with nations outside the “Pacific family” – an implicit referrence to China.

The agreement was signed by the prime ministers of the two countries in Syndey on Thursday who described it as the “world’s first sports diplomacy deal”.

The deal underscores rugby league’s role in fostering unity within Papua New Guinea and strengthening ties with Australia, and marks a strategic breakthrough for Australia in its competition with China for influence in the Pacific.

Beijing has sought agreements with Papua New Guinea and other South Pacific island nations to enhance cooperation in many strategic areas, especially policing. Australia and its partners, chiefly the US, worry that such deals could potentially give China greater influence in a strategically significant region.

Australia is Papua New Guinea’s largest aid donor, contributing A$637m (£320m) this year alone to support the developing nation of 12 million people.

Following January’s riots in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea revealed that China had proposed a policing deal. However, prime minister James Marape said that PNG would maintain its security partnerships with Australia and the US.

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Rugby is the most popular sport in Papua New Guinea, a country beset with widespread poverty, escalating tribal conflicts, rising violent crime rates, and ongoing civil unrest.

Mr Marape said the security agreement with Australia aligned well with ensuring the safety of players and officials, who would be stationed in the capital of Port Moresby in state-of-the-art secure compounds.

“Australia is a security partner of choice in the first instance,” he said. “That doesn’t stop us from relating with any nation, especially our Asian neighbours. We relate with China, for instance, a great trading partner, a great bilateral partner, but on security, closer to home we have this synergy and our shared territory needs to be protected, defended, policed.”

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said: “Partnering on rugby league is a genuine and powerful way of building lasting ties between our peoples and ensuring long-term development, social and economic outcomes for Papua New Guinea and the Pacific.

“Our partnership will create new opportunities for girls’ and women’s rugby league across Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, recognising the power of sports programmes in championing inclusion and improving gender equality.”

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According to the minister for international development and the Pacific, Pat Conroy, a clause in the agreement gives Australia the right to withdraw funding if its trust is violated and requires the National Rugby League to remove Papua New Guinea from the competition.

While details of the trust agreement are confidential, Papua New Guinea foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko has publicly ruled out any security pact with China.

International relations expert Stuart Murray described Australia’s use of sport in diplomacy as unprecedented. He told the BBC that the scale of this deal could open up numerous avenues for cooperation in areas like business, trade, policing, education, and climate change.

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“Basically, through this one channel, we will open up 20 or 30 other channels – for business, trade, policing, educational exchange, gender work, climate change,” he said. “I think it is fantastic.”

Beijing did not officially respond to the agreement, but an op-ed in the state-owned The Global Times commented on it. “How sincere is Australia when developing relations with countries of the South Pacific islands, a region Canberra always views as its own backyard and considers to be under its sphere of influence? The answer is that Australia’s offers are never without conditions. In its views, it is all about what is in its tool box to control those island countries,” it said.

“On one hand, it is about rugby, on the other, it is about China’s perceived influence. If Australia has truly linked these two unrelated matters, that would be laughable.”

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Qin Sheng, research fellow at the Center for Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told The Global Times that Australia was using Papua New Guinea’s strong emotional ties to rugby to its advantage.

He argued, however, that Australia was actually introducing geopolitical competition into its financial aid to Papua New Guinea.

Peter V’landys, chair of the Australian Rugby League Commission, said he didn’t think Papua New Guinea would ever risk losing its rugby league team by striking a security agreement with China. “Rugby league is such a religion in Papua New Guinea that they will never take the risk of losing a rugby league team to do a deal with another country,” Mr V’landys said.

Mihai Sora, director of the Pacific Islands Programme at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, told Reuters that the deal was a “marriage between soft power and hard power”.

“It’s vital for Australia to secure its immediate strategic environment, and while unusual that this would connect with an issue like support for a sporting franchise, this is the context,” he said.

Additional reporting by agencies