Australia Pushes Sporting Diplomacy To New Levels In The Pacific

CANBERRA — The Albanese government has been unabashed in using rugby league as a key tool in Australia’s diplomatic arsenal, integrating the business of sport to an unusual degree into treaty-based relationships with South Pacific neighbors that cover defense, economic and climate policies.

Two years into this strategy, Australian officials say it’s paying off, with Australia — not China — locked in as the region's preferred partner. But the Canberra's policy establishment is not easing off.

"We need to remember that for Australia’s national interest to succeed we have to succeed in blocking the PRC [People’s Republic of China] from establishing military or policing arrangements every time they try. For the PRC’s national interest to succeed, they only have to succeed once,” shadow defense minister James Paterson told POLITICO.

Rugby league, developed as a breakaway from rugby union at the turn of the 20th century, has deep roots across Australia and the Pacific region.

Pacific Island Affairs Minister Pat Conroy believes that rugby connections provide Australia with a unique influence tool, which makes them “fundamental” to Australia’s middle power diplomacy.

“It’s an essential factor in building people-to-people connections. It interlinks our countries at fundamental levels. It’s about economic development,” Conroy told POLITICO.

At the heart of this diplomacy is an extraordinary $600 million deal struck by the Australian government with its closest northern neighbor Papua New Guinea, to bring a Port Moresby-based team — the PNG Chiefs — into Australia’s National Rugby League competition.

The deal delivered Prime Minister James Marape a win PNG had been seeking for 18 years. The country’s first leader, Sir Michael Somare, a Marape ally, had long attempted to use rugby league as a way to unite his fractured nation of 800 languages and 1000 tribes, but the NRL prize eluded him.

“To unite our country, we must have a team in (the) NRL,” Marape said of Somare’s vision when the team was announced in December 2024, standing alongside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who he described as his “brother.”

This form of sporting diplomacy, while unprecedented, is an easy fit for Albanese who is a diehard rugby league supporter.

And it builds on the sport’s new reality: Today “fifty percent of National Rugby League players are of Pasifika heritage,” Conroy said, referring to the cohort of players with Pacific Island heritage. “That bond is so powerful.”

When the landmark Pukpuk treaty was signed with PNG in 2025, it cemented Canberra as Port Moresby’s “preferred partner” on security, and there were unwritten parts of the deal.

A senior Australian diplomatic source, granted anonymity to speak freely about the deal, told POLITICO that Australia reserves the right to withdraw the PNG Chiefs’ funding and terminate the Chiefs franchise if PNG takes action that undermines Canberra’s role as its major security partner in the region.

Marape also explicitly framed the team as means of improving stability inside Papua New Guinea and around the region: “We want to preserve our Pacific: safe, peaceful and good for all of us to live in, especially our children.”

PNG’s embassy did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.

And while Marape is careful to keep Australia onside, it’s not all plain sailing for Canberra.

In July, PNG ousted Taiwan’s trade mission in a move Beijing claimed was an “example that the One China principle has the overwhelming support of the international community.”

Memory lane

The importance of rugby league in Albanese’s statecraft was on full display in July. The prime minister hosted a trio of Pacific Island leaders — Marape, Tonga’s Lord Fatafehi Fakafānua, and Samoa’s La'auli Leuatea Schmidt — at the State of Origin decider, the Australian equivalent to the Super Bowl, in Brisbane.

It wasn’t the first time his government had used the State of Origin to deepen Pacific links.

While many Australians believe the State of Origin — an annual grudge match between New South Wales and Queensland, began in 1980 — it started 35 years earlier in Bougainville, PNG.

That match was played between Australian soldiers waiting to be shipped home from jungle postings in World War II.

When Conroy learned that “The captain from New South Wales was from Newcastle — my home,” his interest was piqued, and he set about locating the trophy, to use as a prop for an important diplomatic message. “The trophy was collecting dust in an army museum in Brisbane,” Conroy said.

The start of the next move was PNG Police Minister Peter Tsiamalili — whose great uncle was the “ball boy” during the 1945 match — parading the original trophy, which was carved out of a Japanese artillery shell, alongside two Australian soldiers to 90,084 adoring fans at Australia’s largest stadium, the MCG, during the half-time show of a 2024 State of Origin game.

“We're using every lever of statecraft to be the partner of choice. That means picking things that are high-value to our Pacific partners that only we can offer,” Conroy said. “This is the first time in the history of the world a country’s used sporting diplomacy to this level.”

But it takes more than a love of rugby league to draft a treaty.

In 2025, Albanese joined Marape on a trek along PNG’s Kokoda Track — a place of comparable significance to Iwo Jima for Americans — where Australian troops halted advancing Japanese troops in 1942.

They were the first prime ministerial pair to do so. “They slept in tents next to each other for three bloody days,” Conroy said. “That level of personal commitment symbolizes and demonstrates this government's commitment to this region.”

Power vacuum

Australian diplomats say they are putting into action the world view presented by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the 2026 World Economic Forum: That the old rules-based multilateral order is over and middle powers need to rise to fill the power vacuum.

The strongest proof of that claim came in October 2025, when Canberra formalized its first treaty in decades: the Pukpuk treaty, with Port Moresby. The treaty’s clauses include the right and expectation for PNG citizens to serve in Australia’s armed forces.

“Recruitment is well and truly underway,” Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said on an Aug. 16 visit to Port Moresby. He expects “thousands of Papua New Guineans” to enlist.

Another pivot point in Australia’s Pacific strategy came a month earlier, in July, when Albanese signed the Vuvale Union treaty with Fiji, and the Ocean of Peace mutual defense alliance. The government opened the way to supporting a multilateral security treaty across the region.

A two-pronged visa strategy allows Pacific Islanders to work in Australia for up to four years, creating a remittance economy between Australia and Pacific Island nations. A special visa class will also be established to allow PNG fans to visit to watch the Chiefs play in Australia.

“The more trusted we are as a partner, the more it is the case that we deny China the space to move in,” former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo told POLITICO.

China has advantages, but not rugby

Looming over the region is an increasingly assertive Beijing, creating a strategic dilemma for Canberra, which relies heavily on China for trade.

In his 40-minute phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump on Aug. 12, Albanese outlined the new alliances and raised China’s testing of a long-range ballistic missile in the Pacific — fired within hours of Canberra confirming its deal with Fiji last month. “This caused a great deal of concern right across the Pacific,” Albanese said.

A Chinese military base in the region, which Australia believes could be used to coerce it and force it to reorient its defense posture, remains the major fear among defense strategists in Canberra.

A month before the 2022 Australian election, a security pact between Solomon Islands and Beijing, allowing for Chinese police to be deployed to the country, sparked alarm in Canberra.

In response, Conroy has made 37 trips to Pacific Island nations as a minister, and is determined to reframe how Australians see their region. “It's not our backyard, it's not our neighborhood. We're a proud member of the Pacific family,” Conroy said.