Nuku’alofa, Tonga:

An unguarded exchange between Australia’s prime minister and a veteran US diplomat about a sensitive Pacific policing plan was caught on camera, causing blushes at a regional summit Thursday.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell were heard celebrating a deal at the Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga that is seen as a way of stymying similar Chinese-led efforts.

“We had a cracker,” Albanese told Campbell, celebrating a deal to establish a police training facility and a crisis reaction force of about 200 personnel. 

“It will make such a difference,” he said, with a coffee cup in hand.

Campbell hailed the agreement as “fantastic” and said Washington had considered doing something similar, before allowing Australia to take the lead.

“We’ve given you the whole lane, so take the lane,” Campbell urged Albanese, in an exchange filmed by a reporter.

Albanese seized the moment to jokingly ask if Washington would like to help bankroll the project: “You can go us halfsies on the cost if you like”.

“It would only cost you a bit.”

Australia has set aside US$271 million for the initial phase of the project.

The exchange will fuel often-repeated Chinese allegations that Australia is doing America’s bidding in the region, and that both countries are preoccupied with countering Beijing’s growing influence.

Sydney has tried to paint the police initiative as coming from the Pacific Islands — despite Australia bankrolling the project and hosting the training facility in Brisbane.

Asked later Thursday about whether the pair had been guilty of saying “the quiet part out loud”, Albanese bristled.

“This has come from the Pacific. And I’m aware of the video of a private conversation. Kurt Campbell’s a mate of mine, it’s us having a chat,” he claimed.

“People try and read something into it, you must be pretty bored, frankly,” he said.

“It is Pacific-led, this has been led by police ministers who have been meeting about this for a year,” he said.

China’s Pacific allies — most notably Vanuatu and Solomon Islands — had voiced concern that the policing plan represented a “geo-strategic denial security doctrine”, designed to box out Beijing. 

China tried and failed to ink a region-wide security pact in 2022, but has since been plying some under-resourced Pacific police forces with martial arts training and fleets of Chinese-made vehicles.

While all members of the forum have endorsed the deal in principle, national leaders will have to decide how much they participate, if at all. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)