On the 6th of July, a Chinese submarine launched a nuclear-capable ballistic missile into the South Pacific, inside the nuclear-free zone the Treaty of Rarotonga established forty years ago. Canberra and Wellington were given a few hours’ notice.
Anthony Albanese spent the same day in Suva signing a defence treaty with Fiji. Narendra Modi landed in Melbourne the following morning, and by the end of that week had signed a joint declaration on defence and security cooperation in Australia and elevated the relationship with New Zealand to a strategic partnership.
In February 2025, a People’s Liberation Army Navy task group — the cruiser Zunyi, frigate Hengyang and replenishment vessel Weishanhu — sailed through the Torres Strait, down Australia’s east coast, and conducted live-firing exercises in the Tasman Sea on 21 and 22 February before circumnavigating the Australian continent. The exercises were conducted without prior official notice.
New Zealand’s Defence Minister called the deployment unprecedented in those waters. New Zealand’s response was concrete: a Defence Capability Plan in April 2025 committing NZ$12 billion over four years, raising defence spending above 2 per cent of GDP for the first time in over three decades. Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy reflects the same fundamental reassessment.
India brings a different kind of experience to this conversation. Chinese naval deployments have been a persistent presence in the Indian Ocean for years. What registered as a shock in the Tasman in 2025, Indian naval planners have been accounting for routinely. That shared experience — at different stages of familiarity — is part of what is pulling these three navies closer together.
Against this backdrop, will India’s Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Krishna Swaminathan’s visit to Australia on 10 September 2026 amount to much? Australians have been told for the better part of two decades that India is on the verge of mattering.
Uranium, the Quad, the trade agreement, the recurring language about natural partners: each cycle arrived with a summit and receded without altering a great deal at sea. According to the 2026 Lowy Institute Poll, half of Australians say they trust India to act responsibly in the world, four points fewer than last year. Set against the same poll’s numbers for the United States- 31 per cent, and China – 28, that result describes something other than affection. It describes a public that has become wary of almost everyone, and within which India occupies a middle position — neither trusted as Japan is, at 89 per cent, nor entirely written off.
Some of the reasons for the wariness are specific and will not dissolve with a single visit of a navy chief. India buys Russian oil and Russian weapons, and has declined to vote on Ukraine the way Canberra would prefer — a divergence officials on both sides have learned to work around. The same Lowy Poll found support for cultural diversity in Australia falling from ninety per cent to seventy-three in two years. Just under half of respondents described migration as too high. Indian-Australians are the fastest-growing part of that migration, which means the people-to-people warmth invoked in every ministerial speech, it appears, is carrying more weight than it can safely be asked to bear.
None of that settles the narrower and more tractable question raised by this week’s visit, which is whether the two navies can produce something operationally useful together. On the evidence, they already are. AUSINDEX began in 2015 and now incorporates even anti-submarine warfare, which is about as technically intimate as naval cooperation gets. India joined Exercise Kakadu this year and will be at Talisman Sabre in 2027. Australian ships sailed to MILAN at Visakhapatnam in February. The two navies held their seventeenth staff talks in Sydney last month. July added a defence industry roundtable, uranium supply under IAEA safeguards, and work towards an arrangement covering defence articles and services.
Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy calls India its most important defence partner in the northeast Indian Ocean, and the phrase is meant seriously. India operates the P-8I; Australia operates the P-8A; New Zealand operates four of the same aircraft. Maritime patrol aircraft are how all three countries locate submarines and follow shipping traffic across large oceanic distances.
The July missile launch reminded us that the problem in these waters is rarely a shortage of law and usually a shortage of domain awareness. Compatible procedures, shared sensor practice and an agreed picture across the eastern Indian Ocean would constitute a real capability, and would require no new platform, no new money and no treaty. June’s Defence Ministers’ Dialogue identified this as a priority. Admiral Swaminathan and Vice Admiral Matt Buckley are the two officers positioned to convert it into a coordinated information-sharing protocol.
Aircraft are the easier half of the problem. The human side of this relationship is underleveraged. The professional military education exchange currently moves two Australian officers to India and three Indian officers to Australia each year, which, against the scale of what July envisages, is a token. The summit promised an Australian instructor posted to an Indian institution in 2028–29, a welcome commitment that is nonetheless three years away.
Combined exercises do not solve this, because the difficulty in a crisis is never the equipment. It is that officers who have never worked a problem together have no shared experiences and reflexes to fall back on. War games on disaster relief and maritime law enforcement, building towards combined operations, would cost very little too. The New Zealand leg may attract less attention than it warrants. Three arrangements signed in Auckland in July — on maritime cooperation, on hydrography and nautical cartography, and on mutual logistics support, including reciprocal access— give the Indian Navy its first formal standing in the South Pacific.
The Pacific is not, however, a space for Canberra and New Delhi to apportion between themselves. India’s value in the region will be judged by whether it contributes to priorities Pacific states have already set, and whether it does so consistently rather than episodically.
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