Defence Minister Richard Marles hasn’t ruled out stationing troops in PNG as China’s influence grows

The Albanese Government hasn’t ruled out stationing Australian troops in the Pacific in an effort to boost security ties with our closest neighbours.

The Prime Minister and other key cabinet ministers will travel to Papua New Guinea on Monday for a three-day visit to mark the Pacific nation’s 50th anniversary of independence, where it’s expected that a new defence treaty will be signed following months of negotiations.

Defence Minister Richard Marles said the agreement with PNG would be “genuinely historic” but he wouldn’t say whether it would lead to basing Australian troops within the region.

“We’re not planning on that, but we operate very significantly with Papua New Guinea, as we do with Fiji and Tonga,” Mr Marles said.

“Increasingly we are doing exercises and operations with all of those countries, and they, in turn, are doing exercises and operations here in Australia. I think what we’ll see with the defence agreement that we sign in the coming days is an agreement which speaks to an enormous amount of ambition between our two countries to work even more closely together.”

The new treaty would replace the existing Status of Forces agreement signed in 1977 and comes at a time of increasing attempts by China to grow its influence in the Pacific region.

“I believe what we’ll be seeing in the next few days is a genuinely historic agreement between our two countries,” Mr Marles said.

“What has characterised our relationship in a defence sense, between our two defence forces, over really the course of PNG’s history as an independent state, has been to try and evolve the capability of the PNG Defence Force.

“The defence agreement that we are going to sign will greatly facilitate that in a much bigger way going forward.”