I think you have been watching too much of Alex Jones Info Wars.
The Vanuatu scare was nothing more than a clever ploy by the Vanuatu gov to get Australia to stump up more foreign aid cash. The Chinese have said they aren't interested in Vanuatu and seem to be perplexed that anyone would fall for that.
Australia is paying the price for 50 years of superiority complex. We though we were the best country and became lazy and complacent. meanwhile the other countries learned to play the game hard, negotiate better. Classic example is out free trade agreement with Thailand. The agreement that we signed up to allowed 1,000,000 cars to be exported from Thailand to Australia and we were allowed to export 100 cars to Thailand. If that's the standard of our negotiators, we deserve everything we get.