The former official who was Australia's top diplomat in Solomon Islands when the Pacific nation signed a deeply contentious security agreement with China says Labor was wrong to claim it could have stopped the pact if it was in office at the time.
Lachlan Strahan — who spent three decades with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) — has also used his memoir to criticise parts of the Coalition government's response to the 2022 deal, while revealing some Australian officials pushed to impose "punitive" measures on Solomon Islands if it deepened security cooperation with China.
Dr Strahan's often-candid account of his public service career includes a lengthy section on his final job, when he served as the Australian High Commissioner in Honiara in the critical period of 2020 to 2022.
Solomon Islands signed the high-profile security agreement with Beijing in the dying days of the Morrison government, and the episode featured heavily in the election campaign, with then-shadow foreign minister Penny Wong calling it the "worst foreign policy blunder in the Pacific that Australia has seen since the end of WWII".
In his book, Dr Strahan says he understood why Labor pounced on the deal in the heat of the campaign, but the ALP was incorrect when it argued that more adroit diplomacy could have stopped the agreement in its tracks.
"I knew Wong was taking aim at her political opponents. She did not have me and other DFAT officials in her sights," he writes.
"But Labor could not have stopped the security agreement had it been in power."
Deadly riots were unpreventable: Strahan
The then Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare ushered in the sweeping security agreement with Beijing in the wake of devastating riots across central Honiara in November 2021, which Dr Strahan said left Mr Sogavare fearing for his life.
"A convergence of factors, particularly the November riots, brought the security agreement into being," he writes.
"No Australian government could have prevented the riots. Nor could any Australian government unpick Sogavare's long and complicated interaction with Australia."
Dr Strahan reveals in his book that Australian officials travelling in a convoy through Honiara were targeted during the unrest, with the vehicles being pelted "with rocks, bricks and tools" that shattered the windows.
"The convoy made it through to the defence compound, the vehicles pulling up with projectiles on board, including a bolt cutter and a small sickle," the book says.
"We were lucky that no-one was seriously hurt."
Australia quickly deployed police to restore order in Honiara, and Dr Strahan says a "shaken" Mr Sogavare thanked him, saying Australia had again "saved" his country.
But he said the prime minister still harboured resentment towards Australia that stemmed from the RAMSI period from 2003-2017, and that the riots hardened Mr Sogavare's determination to look for new security partners — opening the door to China.
Dr Strahan says the "shit hit the fan" when a draft of the agreement was leaked on social media in 2022, drawing a cavalcade of headlines in Australia, and that a "deeply worried" Canberra quickly instructed him to press Mr Sogavare not to sign it.
Efforts to prevent signing 'rebuffed'
But he also suggested the pact wasn't a total surprise, writing that Australia had been tracking China's forays into policing and security in Solomon Islands for years, and that they considered using "both positive and negative incentives" to check Beijing's progress.
"Some in DFAT wanted to impose punitive consequences if the Solomons overstepped what we considered tolerable limits. A security agreement with China fell into that category," he said.
"But we quickly ran up against another uncomfortable fact. Almost all the negative tools — curtailing our assistance in the security sector, denying visas, trimming our health and education funding, restricting access to our labour mobility programs — would rebound on Australia, pushing the Solomons further into China's embrace and hurting Solomon Islanders."
Dr Strahan's book — titled The Curious Diplomat — also captures the intense diplomatic activity that followed the leak of the draft document, the signing of the security agreement, and the sometimes furious election debate about its national security implications.
The former high commissioner says he and veteran Australian diplomat Ewen McDonald tried several tactics to convince Solomon Islands not to sign the deal, including offering to help find independent legal advice to get Honiara "a firm handle on the implications of the agreement, including whether it was legally binding".
But, he writes, they were "rebuffed".
"We also noted that the presence of Chinese security forces could disrupt command and control and interoperability, making a response to renewed unrest less effective," he writes.
"But we were reassured that such issues would not arise."
Dr Strahan also says "several" Solomon Islands ministers "expressed reservations" to him about the deal with China, with one unnamed minister telling him that some cabinet members were thinking of asking Mr Sogavare to delay the signing because they had doubts.
But in the end Mr Sogavare managed to corral his ministers and the government behind the deal, ensuring it was signed in the midst of the 2022 election campaign in Australia.
Coalition's missteps
Dr Strahan also notes how just before the deal was signed, the "notoriously cautious" former-foreign minister Marise Payne decided to send her Pacific minister Zed Seselja to Honiara to meet with Mr Sogavare instead of going herself — something Labor sharply criticised at the time.
Dr Strahan says Mr Seselja performed well in Honiara and was treated with respect by Mr Sogavare, but argues that Ms Payne's decision was still "a mistake".
"Would it have changed anything? No," he writes.
"But it is the job of foreign ministers to show up and handle such difficult issues firsthand."
Dr Strahan also gives a mixed review of Scott Morrison's handling of the bilateral relationship both before and after the security treaty being signed.
He praises Mr Morrison for the way he dealt with Mr Sogavare when China first started to make incursions into the security and policing sector.
But Dr Strahan says he "flinched" when the then prime minister later declared a Chinese military base in the Solomons would be a "red line" for Australia — arguing the threat rang hollow, and that Mr Morrison had fallen into a "trap".
"A government might consider what its red lines were in private but it was another thing to use such a categorical term in public," he writes.
"Morrison unsurprisingly refused to say what Australia would do if we reached that red line."
He also dismisses Mr Morrison's suggestion that China was using Mr Sogavare as a puppet when the prime minister delivered a fiery speech criticising the AUKUS pact, saying the speech was "pungently Sogavare's own", adding that the remark "finished" the political friendship between the two men.
'Considerable' hurdles to Chinese military base
Dr Strahan is equally dismissive of a 2022 allegation from then-home affairs minister Karen Andrews, who suggested China timed the signing of the security pact to undermine the Coalition's election chances.
"There was no basis for such a claim," he writes.
He also takes aim at the broader Australian political debate on Solomon Islands during the election campaign, saying "extravagant and sometimes downright silly claims about Chinese bases continued to raise the temperature".
The former diplomat says it was certainly "possible" that China was after a military base in Solomon Islands, and it was "naïve" to assume it wasn't looking for new military footholds in the broader Indo-Pacific region.
But he also writes that it was "alarmist to claim that a base in Solomon Islands was a certainty, and one that would happen quickly" — arguing there are "considerable practical hurdles" which Beijing would have to overcome, even if they get the green light from Honiara.
Dr Strahan also rebukes Karen Andrews and then-Labor frontbencher Bill Shorten for calling Solomon Islands Australia's "backyard" in the lead-up to the May election, saying such "loose" language was insulting to the Solomons and "played into China's hands".
