This week, after having neglected the south west Pacific for many years, the Australian government has belatedly realised we need to do something similar with Scott Morrison announcing a "step up in the Pacific".

The move, a direct response to Chinese investment and diplomatic influence, includes a $2 billion infrastructure fund, an Australian Defence Force Mobile Training Team, more naval deployments and a significant upgrade in diplomatic representation.

"Australia has an abiding interest in a south-west Pacific that is secure strategically, stable economically and sovereign politically," Morrison said.

He is spot on. Our connections with Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia and their many and varied micro states date back centuries.

The peoples of the south west Pacific have long looked to Australia and New Zealand for leadership, military aid and protection, financial and practical aid, disaster relief and access to higher education and advanced medial facilities.

We have been friends and partners with Palau, the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands, French Polynesia, Niue and the Cook Islands for many years.

In the early years of this century thousands of police and troops from Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere put their lives on the line to restore the rule of law in the Solomons. military observers were sent to Bougainville between 1997 and 2003.

The wheels began to fall off out relationship with our nearest neighbours when government bean counters began to focus more on the cost of the Pacific partnerships than on their value to our national security and cementing our role in the region.

This was highlighted in 2014 when, as a direct result of the first Abbott-Hockey budget, Radio Australia - our national voice which reached tens of thousands of people scattered across hundreds of islands and archipelagos - had its funding slashed.

This myopic penny-pinching had potentially serious consequences: "We rely a lot on Radio Australia when there is a cyclone coming," Miranda, a resident of Vanuatu's Futuna Island, said that July. "We have no telephone on this side of the island and we often can't hear Radio Vanuatu".

For Abbott, Hockey and other cabinet ministers, including Morrison, the relatively low cost of "soft diplomacy" was too high a price to keep our Pacific neighbours inside the tent.

A concurrent decision to turn Nauru and PNG's Manus Island into dumping grounds for our refugees and the adoption of climate change policies that did nothing to address the concerns of the residents of some of the lowest lying countries on earth haven't helped either.

Nature abhors a vacuum. When cashed up Chinese diplomats subsequently came knocking many Pacific leaders were happy to answer the door.

As a senior member of the Abbott government which made an already bad situation even worse, Scott Morrison must shoulder some of the blame for the current situation. At least he has begun cleaning up the coalition's own mess.