Australia pledges funds for maritime cooperation as ASEAN summit begins
Radio Free Asia
Canberra will invest $41.8 million during the next four years to expand maritime cooperation in Southeast Asia, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in early March 2024.
Wong made the pledge on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-Australia Special Summit in Melbourne, which marked 50 years of partnership between Australia and the 10-member group. The summit was held against a backdrop of increasingly assertive posturing by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the South China Sea and a protracted and intensifying civil war in ASEAN member state Myanmar.
Wong said the new funds would contribute to regional security and prosperity. “What happens in the South China Sea, in the Taiwan Strait, in the Mekong subregion, across the Indo-Pacific, affects us all,” she said in her keynote address.
She said the region’s “character” is being challenged and that no country must dominate.
“We face destabilizing, provocative and coercive actions, including unsafe conduct at sea and in the air, and militarization of disputed features,” Wong said, without specifying a nation.
The PRC illegitimately claims sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, through which trillions of dollars in trade passes each year, putting it at odds with other claimants including Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.
In 2016, an international tribunal refuted the legal basis for nearly all of the PRC’s expansive maritime and territorial claims, saying Beijing’s insistence on holding “historic rights” to the waters was inconsistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Beijing has never recognized the arbitration or its outcome.
Speaking at the summit, Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo said the rule of law, and especially UNCLOS, is the fundamental starting point for maritime cooperation.
“The shared stewardship of the seas and oceans in the region behooves us to unite in preserving the primacy of international law so we can ensure equitable and sustainable outcomes for all,” he said.
Under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the Philippines has taken a stronger stance in dealing with Beijing on the South China Sea. Manila also has strengthened ties with the United States, its longtime ally.
In recent months, tensions between Manila and Beijing have led to numerous run-ins, including the Chinese coast guard’s harassment of Philippine vessels delivering provisions to troops at a military outpost on Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea.
In March 2024, the Philippine Coast Guard deployed a patrol vessel to Benham Rise, a huge resource-rich underwater plateau off the archipelago’s eastern coast, amid reports of Chinese research vessels there. The BRP Gabriela Silang also will visit the northern Batanes islands, near Taiwan, the Philippine Coast Guard said.
