Australia's Pacific Cables Need a Plan to Last

Nikko Riazi | Australian Foreign Policy Fellow

Image sourced from Venti Views via Unsplash

In 2017, the Solomon Islands selected a supplier that Canberra judged to pose a security risk to lay its first undersea cable into Sydney. The following year, the Australian government stepped in to fund the replacement itself. The replacement, the Coral Sea Cable System, became the template for one of Canberra's most effective instruments of Pacific influence.

In the years since, Australia has committed more than AU$450 million to undersea cables across the Pacific and Timor-Leste. Much of this flows through the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific (AIFFP), an arm of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The AIFFP has funded connections to Palau, Tuvalu, Tonga, and East Micronesia. The reasoning is straightforward: these cables carry much of the region's international data traffic. Canberra’s approach prioritises trusted suppliers and security considerations over the lowest-cost bid.

A gap at the water's edge

Australia’s cable financing is built around construction, and the money effectively stops at the water’s edge. The distinction matters, because nothing in the AIFFP’s mandate formally prohibits spending on maintenance, and its own investment principles ask whether ongoing maintenance and operations have been adequately considered before approval. The packages themselves lack a dedicated, funded mechanism for upkeep, leaving the recurrent cost of operating and repairing these systems to the recipient government once the cable is operational.

The AU$35.6 million grant behind Tonga’s second cable, which went live in May 2026, covered construction but not the decades of upkeep that follow. The grant behind the East Micronesia system was structured the same way, and even where Australia lends rather than grants, the financing is primarily directed towards the build rather than the asset’s longer-term working life.

That gap matters because the Australian-funded cables are not monuments but working systems liable to fail, and in the Pacific, they fail in ways that are unusually slow and expensive to put right. A single fault can cost between US$1 million and US$3 million to repair, and fewer than 20 dedicated repair ships exist worldwide, so reaching a remote site can take a month before the repair begins. When an eruption severed Tonga’s only cable in 2022, the country spent 38 days largely offline, a stark illustration of how long a Pacific cable can remain offline after a major fault.

What a dark cable would cost

The long-term reliability of these cables matters to Australia as well as to the countries they connect. Its investment and its strategic credibility are both tied to their success. Since Coral Sea, Canberra has presented itself as the Pacific’s quality-infrastructure partner. If a cable Australia financed sat dark for weeks because no repair mechanism was in place, that reputation would suffer at the very point Australia has invested heavily in building it.

The consequences extend beyond reputation, as cable diplomacy rests on the claim that trusted infrastructure delivered on transparent terms serves Pacific partners better than the cheapest available offer. However, a cable that cannot be repaired would undermine that claim. A government left holding a stranded asset and a repair bill beyond its means may be forced to prioritise whatever offer restores service, and the supplier most willing to move may be one Australia had earlier passed over. Having paid a premium to build these cables on trusted terms, Australia risks losing that trust during repairs, precisely when a strategic failure could pass for a routine technical fault.

Paying for the whole life

Putting this right is less about spending more than about spending across the whole life of the asset rather than only up to the moment it is switched on. The most direct change would be dedicated maintenance funding written into each package at approval, whether through a sinking fund or multi-year operations and maintenance grant. In each case the effect is the same: money for a first major fault exists before the fault occurs.

Regional repair capacity deserves the same treatment, since a shortage of repair vessels severe enough to leave a country offline for weeks is a strategic weakness that no fresh construction will cure. Commercial maintenance agreements covering the South Pacific already exist, with servicing based at a depot in Apia. Underwriting access to that standing capacity would provide the region with a shared repair capability, rather than leaving each island government to secure emergency repairs on its own.

Beyond individual projects, a lifecycle financing requirement across the AIFFP portfolio would ensure that no cable proceeds to approval without a funded and agreed answer to who pays for repairs, on what timeline, and from which source.

Australia has demonstrated, at Coral Sea and at every cable since, that it will pay handsomely to build these connections and switch them on. Far less certain is whether that same willingness extends to the less visible years that follow, when a cable stops being an announcement and becomes simply the thing a nation reaches for the moment a fault cuts its connection. While Australia has made its strategic case for cable diplomacy, the harder commitment is ensuring these cables are funded not merely into existence, but through the failures and repairs that come with their working lives.

Nikko Riazi is a government relations and public policy professional whose work experience spans banking, healthcare, international trade and investment, infrastructure and the public service. 

Her writing has appeared in The Mandarin, the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter and ASPI’s The Strategist, focusing on Asia-Pacific housing, superannuation and the links between finance and national security. 

A former OECD Australian Youth Delegate, she also chairs the Education CHANCES Foundation - a youth education not-for-profit. She holds a Master of Public Policy and Management, Bachelor of Commerce (Economics/Finance) and a Diploma of Languages (French Studies) from the University of Melbourne.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Young Australians in International Affairs. All content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article. No AI tools were used by this author in the preparation of the article.