A DF
ADF health partnerships should be the next step in Australia’s Pacific step-up The Australian Defence Force has long had an important role in providing humanitarian assistance to Pacific island countries. The force has extraordinary capabilities—people, expertise, training and equipment— in delivering assistance quickly and efficiently. The ADF is one of our most important agencies in helping our Pacific islands partners develop capabilities to address a range of security challenges. My new report for ASPI, Next step in the step-up, released 8th April, looks at ways in which the ADF can build health security in the Pacific as part of a new phase in Australia’s Pacific step-up. The community health needs of Pacific island countries will grow significantly in coming years as they endure ever more natural disasters. Climate change is likely to cause ongoing stresses to island health systems through extreme weather events, increased diseases, reduced water quality, heatwaves and population displacement. Calls for assistance from Australian civil and military organisations will almost certainly grow ever louder. Many countries rely on the unique capabilities and expertise of militaries to provide humanitarian assistance. With assets such as ships, planes and trucks and expert personnel, military organisations are often best placed to deliver food, logistic support, engineering assistance and emergency medical services, especially in times of crisis. The provision of medical assistance to communities in need is seen as a particularly important way of ‘winning hearts and minds’. Socalled medical diplomacy can involve short-term relief, such as responding to disasters, or long-term measures to 8
AUSTRALIAN PEACEKEEPER
RAAF Dentist Squadron Leader Alistair Soon provides dental advice to a patient at the Bowali Primary School during Pacific Angel 19-4, held in Lae, Papua New Guinea.
build capabilities. The US military is often at the forefront of assistance efforts as an integral part of US humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions. The United States, and now China, are also increasingly using naval hospital ships to deliver military health assistance. These gleaming white ships certainly capture the imagination. Indeed, who wouldn’t be impressed with the idea of a floating hospital, fully staffed and with access to all the latest technology, anchored off a tropical island, delivering the medical services to (hopefully, grateful) locals? But using militaries to deliver health services is also subject to a lot of criticism. ‘Drive-by medicine’ by military health professionals on brief visits can do more harm than
good, including by undercutting and discrediting local health providers and providing treatments that can’t be sustained. Importantly, they rarely build local capabilities or relationships. For these reasons, the ADF is rightly cautious about providing health assistance. ADF personnel regularly provide logistics and engineering assistance following natural disasters, including in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations in countries such as Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, the Philippines and Vanuatu. But since 2007 the ADF hasn’t provided health assistance as part of those operations. This has led to the underutilisation of Australia’s military health capabilities in the Pacific. Important opportunities to reinforce regional partnerships aren’t being pursued.
