Secretariat of The Pacific Community - History

History

SPC was founded in 1947 as the South Pacific Commission by six developed countries with an interest in the region:

• Australia
• France
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• United States

For reasons either of reduced development interest in the Pacific Islands region or a desire to concentrate assistance in other areas of greater poverty, two founding members have since withdrawn from the SPC: the Netherlands in 1962 and the United Kingdom in 1994 and – after rejoing in 1998 – again in 2004.

SPC's founding charter is the Canberra Agreement. In the aftermath of World War II, the six colonial powers which created the SPC, arguably intended it to secure Western political and military interests in the postwar Pacific.

From the start, SPC's role was constrained, and the invitation from Australia and New Zealand to the USA, France, Netherlands and the United Kingdom to participate in a South Seas Commission Conference in 1947 included the statement that "the Commission to be set up should not be empowered to deal in any way with political matters or questions of defense or security" This constraint on discussion (particularly the constraint on discussing nuclear weapons testing in the region) led, eventually, to the creation of the South Pacific Forum (now Pacific Islands Forum), which not only excluded the more distant "metropolitan" powers of France, UK and USA, but also their Pacific Island territories.