DFAT responding to the COVID-19 challenge in the Pacific

Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic represents a significant challenge for governments and communities across the Pacific. It is a challenge the Australian Government is committed to tackling with its Pacific partners, in the long-term interest of the stability, prosperity, and resilience of the region.

Prime Minister Morrison told G20 leaders on 26 March that the Pacific needed to be a focus of international support. As the world’s economies, large and small, grapple with a pandemic that does not recognise national borders, co-operation will be critical.

Australia’s response will build on existing Pacific Step-up, which has strengthened the co-operation in helping to grow economies, build resilience, and enhance regional stability through the defense, policing and border security cooperation.

The top priority for the governments right now is to keep infection rates as low as possible. As have many Pacific nations, Australia has closed its borders to non-citizens and non-residents and has banned Australians from traveling overseas. Pacific islanders transiting Australia to return home are exempt from the travel ban. It has also put in place enhanced health screening for passengers flying to the Pacific.

Australia is already taking steps, as a transit country to much of the region, to facilitate a humanitarian and essential services corridor to the Pacific, and Timor-Leste. Australia’s high commissions and embassies across the Pacific remain open.

Australia is assisting Pacific Island governments with laboratories, medical equipment, health expertise, public information campaigns and support for national preparedness plans and the World Health Organisation’s regional plan. The regional institutions are critical to this response, and Australia is working closely with the Pacific Islands Forum and the Pacific Community.

No country should be alone in this crisis. Nowhere is this more true than in the Pacific. Australia faces its own immediate challenges, but the support for, and partnership with, Pacific family is essential for regional health security and long-term interests.

Original source: DFAT
Published on 01 April 2020