Source: Australia Asia relationship: Why has a long-term understanding with Asia eluded us?
Australia appears to be accepting that a transactional relationship with Asia will do. And some appear to be entirely relaxed and comfortable about it. But during a speech in Canberra late last month Foreign Minister Penny Wong raised the alarm.
She pointed out that the number of Mandarin-speaking Australians of non-Chinese origin total in the low hundreds.
In the decade to 2022, the number of university students studying an Asian language fell 30 per cent. In secondary schools, German is twice as popular as Bahasa, and five times as many students opt for French.
Indeed, fewer take Indonesian than 50 years ago when Gough Whitlam was prime minister, despite Australia’s population today having doubled.
No wonder a former, senior regional leader from Singapore quipped not so long ago that Australia’s knowledge of South-East Asia was better in the 1970s than it is today.
The figures show the flipside of Australia’s broad success in managing relations with the region over the past half century, of securing a footing in Asia after the collapse of Britishness, the demise of “White Australia” and the end of the Cold War. It has done so in crisis management, disaster relief and especially via the building of multilateral architecture that helps underwrite Australian prosperity, and which has given the country a real place in the region that for so long was its psychological nemesis.
Yet save for pockets of academia, that deeper seam of cultural knowledge and engagement is getting harder to mine.
McCarthy cites the crushes Australia has had on India, Indonesia, and China that have tended to end up as loveless marriages.
The figures Wong cited underline just one part of the sense that Australia’s relations with Asia, notwithstanding the success the Albanese government has had in its Pacific and regional diplomacy, appear to be drifting.
But they raise important questions too about why Australian multiculturalism has not fostered a greater curiosity about knowing Asia. And how fear of China has so quickly brought to the surface a slew of older fears and anxieties: over Australia’s vulnerability, democratic integrity, even its hold on a vast island continent.
The country’s most experienced former diplomat, John McCarthy, pointed out recently that despite Australia having started late as a “serious regional actor, arguably after the fall of Singapore”, it did so with “a spirit of inquiry and zest”.
But, he laments, “our earlier sense that Australia’s destiny is in the region has dissipated.”
He cites the crushes Australia has had on India, Indonesia, and China that have tended to end up as loveless marriages.
Indeed, Australia’s periodic bursts of Asia focus might be compared to a boa constrictor, its tendency being to bolt great meals of reports urging greater engagement with the region, only to find that after repose and digestion, the government has changed and a new banquet of reports is ordered.
McCarthy knows the answer lies beyond greater development assistance or building bigger embassies. He says “it is about re-educating ourselves about the region. It’s about all-of-nation heft.” McCarthy was a diplomatic head of mission in Japan, Indonesia, India, Vietnam and Thailand.
‘Back to Mummy’
But the only “whole-of-nation” exercise the government intones is AUKUS. Some business leaders now drink from that font. Business Council of Australia head Bran Black recently said AUKUS required the “whole nation to step up”.
Such rhetorical gallantry will please Canberra. But it shows a certain meandering in the national mindset, flowing back to the Atlantic, leaning in to older comforts. As a senior French official said to this columnist not long after the AUKUS announcement, “I can kind of understand why you went back to Uncle Sam, but I cannot understand why you went back to Mummy!”
Leaders and champions are needed to mobilise a new national effort in securing Australia’s future prosperity and destiny in Asia. That’s why The Australian Financial Review’s Asia Summit comes at a propitious time: among the questions it will raise is just how serious is Australia in coming to terms with the damage this decline in understanding the region, and doing business there, is doing to its broader international policy objectives.
The summit is one way of bringing new energy to a debate which tends, at times, to get caught in a cul-de-sac of language about “discovering”, “rediscovering” or “facing up” to the realities of Asia.
Yes, it’s getting harder given China’s growing size, its muscle flex and lack of transparency.
But the debate over economic and national security, as Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy observed in June, needs to be mindful of security interest mission creep.
The multilateral framework that has delivered so much prosperity for Australia and its East Asian partners, and which provided the means by which Australia withstood Chinese economic coercion, is clearly worth saving and strengthening.
The healing power of trade was the primary reason the Australia-Japan political relationship was able to so quickly recover after the Second World War. ANU Professor Shiro Armstrong recently pointed out the role Australia’s trade war against Japan in the 1930s played in fanning Japanese fears of economic insecurity.
Then, once hostilities ceased, Australia was faced with a question. Could it “trade with countries it did not trust”? But “rather than give in to the temptation to trade only with trusted partners, Australia signed the 1957 treaty with Japan”. So trust was “a consequence of trade”, Armstrong stresses, “not its cause”.
History rarely repeats and even if it does, it never does so exactly. But it can illuminate the possibility of other paths beyond locking in behind unyielding spite, and closing the mind.