‘Pacific drugs highway’: Australia’s new plan to target cocaine traffickers moving through islands

SYDNEY – Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced an A$600 million (S$545 million) plan to combat cocaine smuggling in the Pacific as organised crime groups increasingly use semi-submersibles to traffic cocaine along the so-called “Pacific drugs highway” from South America.

In recent years, remote islands across the Pacific have been reporting cases of small smuggling semi-submersibles running aground on beaches or packages of cocaine washing up ashore.

At least five “narco-subs” have been found in the Solomon Islands and Marshall Islands since November 2025. More than A$4 billion worth of cocaine was seized in French Polynesia and Fiji in January and February, and 19 packages of cocaine were found on a Cook Islands reef in July.

Transnational crime experts say the drugs are part of a lucrative trade targeting Australia, where the use of cocaine has soared to make it the second most-used illicit drug after cannabis.

Australia has some of the world’s highest cocaine prices after the Gulf states, making it a prized target for international cartels.

Vincent Hurley, a former New South Wales police officer who investigated cocaine trafficking and is now a lecturer in criminology at Macquarie University, told The Straits Times that South American cartels have in the past 10 years worked with Australian organised crime groups that have Pacific island members, such as the Sydney-based Coconut Cartel, named after a slur against Pacific islanders.

Hurley said these groups often have family or associates on Pacific islands who can help to store drugs in sheds or houses, or resupply smuggling boats before the narcotics are smuggled to Australia inside shipping containers or on pleasure craft like yachts.

“The Coconut Cartel and the South Americans have come to realise they can mutually use each other to import cocaine to Australia,” he said.

“The Pacific Ocean is a porous border. It is easy to get drugs through there and the islands don’t have adequate (policing) infrastructure or resources,” he added.

Albanese, who has been boosting security ties with Pacific countries as part of a battle against China for influence in the region, announced on Sept 2 the new plan to combat drug smuggling in the region.

The A$600 million scheme, unveiled during a Pacific Islands Forum summit in Palau, aims to boost intelligence and surveillance across the region.

It includes A$49 million for the Australian Federal Police to expand policing in the region, support island police forces, and work with the authorities in South and Central America, and A$312 million for Australia’s Department of Defence to conduct aerial and space surveillance and counter transnational and organised crime in the Pacific.

“We need to ensure that there’s greater cooperation between our border services, (including) exchange of information and intelligence… and more work to stop drugs at their source, which is coming from South America and Central America, in particular, through the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand,” Albanese told reporters.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in May that 17 tonnes of illicit drugs – mostly cocaine – had been seized in the first 4½ months of 2026, compared with 4.6 tonnes in 2025.

A government survey in 2023 found that 13.5 per cent of Australians aged 14 or above had used cocaine in their lifetime, up from 4.4 per cent in 2001.

“It is our nation’s shame that Australians consume too many illicit drugs and pay high prices for them,” AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett told reporters.

Boosting drone and maritime surveillance of drug traffickers

The government said the latest scheme will involve the Australian military boosting surveillance and feeding information for assessment at a transnational crime centre in Samoa. The findings will be used by a maritime headquarters in Fiji to assign tasks to individual Pacific states.

Jose Sousa-Santos, head of the Pacific Regional Security Hub at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told ST that the scheme was timely and that focusing on surveillance was “exactly what is required to make it more difficult for the cartels to use the Pacific as a thoroughfare”.

He said Australia should boost the capacity of Pacific states to identify and target narco-subs and other technologies used by the cartels. This could involve upgrading surveillance capabilities of the Guardian-class patrol boats that Australia has provided to Pacific states, and training and creating specialised units for drone surveillance and for operating uncrewed maritime surveillance vessels.

“Pacific island countries currently have a lack of capacity among law enforcement and maritime agencies to patrol their large maritime porous borders,” he said. “To cartels, it is an easy route.”

The cartels have increasingly been using narco-subs in the Pacific – specially designed, small-crew ships with outboard motors that mostly sit underwater and can be difficult to spot on the high seas.

Traffickers typically resupply their water, diesel and food at designated bases on remote Pacific islands or obtain them from corrupt members of fishing fleets. After completing their voyage, crews typically try to scuttle the subs.

Risk of small island nations becoming ‘narco-states’

Sousa-Santos said Australia’s cooperation with Pacific states in targeting smugglers would boost its efforts to counter China’s growing influence in the region.

But he said Australia’s main motivation was to combat smuggling to its shores and ensure that cartels and their operations do not destabilise small island nations and risk turning them into “narco-states”.

“The China battle is one of the key reasons for Australia to be involved in this initiative, but the main reason is that Australia – unlike China – is part of the Pacific and doesn’t want to see the Pacific destabilised by drug smuggling,” he said.

However, analysts say the battle against smuggling in the Pacific – which comprises an estimated 30,000 islands, including 28,000 that are uninhabited, spread across a vast ocean expanse – will not be easy, especially as the cocaine trade into Australia proves increasingly lucrative.

“It’s such a massive geographic area,” Hurley said.

“It’s not possible to police every island. The Australian scheme will help, but will it stop it (drug trafficking through the Pacific)? No, that’s an impossible ask.”