Albanese's Busy Week: Fiji, the Pacific, and a Long-Awaited Uranium Deal

In the first week of July, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did three major things in quick succession: signed a defence pact in Fiji, hosted Pacific leaders in Brisbane, and announced Australia would sell uranium to India. Any one of these would normally top the news. Together they made for the busiest stretch of foreign policy this government has packed into a single sitting fortnight.

Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong travelled to Fiji and Solomon Islands from 5 to 7 July, visiting Suva and Honiara. In Suva, Australia and Fiji signed a new defence alliance. Albanese stated that an attack on Fiji from an outside force would trigger Australia's full support for Fiji's sovereignty Reuters. This is about as close to an explicit security guarantee as Canberra has offered a Pacific partner outside the ANZUS framework — think of it like Australia saying "if you're attacked, we've got your back."

The timing mattered. The same week, Beijing tested a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile launched from a submarine in the South Pacific The Guardian. Solomon Islands leader Matthew Wale noticed and cited the missile test as a reason to pursue a new regional security pact of his own.

By Wednesday, the action shifted to Brisbane, where Albanese hosted the leaders of Papua New Guinea, Samoa and Tonga. The government called these "ongoing regional security talks" PM.gov.au. But the public messaging leaned harder on rugby league than strategy — soft power in league jerseys rather than khaki. Assistant Minister Matt Thistlethwaite told ABC Radio National Breakfast that Albanese was expected to sign agreements with the PNG and Tongan prime ministers detailing how roughly $200 million would be spent DFAT. That figure had been flagged the previous September, when Albanese told reporters in Honiara there'd be more details about Papua New Guinea "next week" PM.gov.au — a promise that took ten months to deliver, which says something about how these regional packages actually get through Cabinet.

None of this happened quietly on China's side. AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett was in the United States the same week, talking about the "changing tides in Pacific security." Former Beijing ambassador Graham Fletcher published a Lowy Institute piece arguing China "plainly wants to win, in everything" and is pursuing hegemony — regional dominance — rather than just influence. Albanese himself has used similar language before. He told the New York Times in June that Xi Jinping's government is interested in "increasing their influence at a minimum, and hegemony in the longer term" New York Times.

That's a notably blunt assessment from a prime minister who has spent three years trying to stabilise the Australia-China relationship without damaging trade. The rhetoric and the diplomacy aren't quite in step — something worth watching rather than assuming will resolve itself.

The uranium announcement came almost immediately after, and it carries decades of history. Modi arrived in Canberra as part of a swing through Australia, Indonesia and New Zealand. This was his first official visit to Wellington as prime minister Reuters. In Canberra, Australia agreed to sell uranium to India for peaceful purposes, ending a stalemate that had outlasted several changes of government on both sides AP. Albanese called Modi a "living bridge" between the two countries Reuters — the kind of phrase that will get recycled in joint statements for years.

The uranium deal sits alongside a defence agenda both governments want to advance. It also arrives after Albanese spent much of last October talking up a Quad leaders' meeting (involving Australia, India, the US and Japan) for the first quarter of 2026 Reuters. That meeting hasn't yet happened in the form he described — a reminder that Quad scheduling promises tend to slip.

What connects Fiji, Brisbane and Canberra is a government trying to balance three things: build a shield against Chinese strategic weight in the Pacific, keep the trade relationship with Beijing intact, and deepen ties with India, a nuclear-armed democracy that isn't a formal treaty ally. Each move makes sense by itself. But whether they add up to a coherent Indo-Pacific strategy or a series of parallel moves pursued at speed depends on what happens next. Agreements signed in a fortnight of intense diplomatic choreography look clean in announcements. They're historically harder to fund once the first budget cycle comes around.