Australia’s 'Asian Century' White Paper: a Nation in Search of a Region?

A few days ago Prime Minister Julia Gillard released the long-awaited White Paper, setting out the “roadmap” for Australia’s relations with “Asia” until 2025. When this was first mooted Greg Sheridan, Australia’s leading foreign affairs and international relations media commentator, produced a wonderful observation: “how many more reviews and reports do we need? Just do something!”. That reaction was shared by many observers, especially those already dealing with “Asia” over a very long time, and whose entreaties to a series of governments had been ignored. Sheridan’s point was this: Australia actually knew a good deal about Asia, had a lot of expertise on it as well as an extensive history of interaction, but was always dilatory in scaling up bar the odd occasion, such as when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam re-engineered relationships with China during the early 1970s.

Some examples concerning India help make this point. During the late nineteenth century Alfred Deakin, one of Australia’s first Prime Ministers, wrote two books about India which he identified even then as a country of deep significance for his own. By then Australia was already trading with India, Australians were working in the Indian Civil Service, and Australian horses were as prized there for military reasons as much as for racing. During World War Two Sir Bertram Stevens, a former Premier of New South Wales, was posted to India as part of war munitions coordination, and later produced a book in which he, too, identified India as a place of significance. (Sir)Harold Bailey, born in Devizes but brought up in Western Australia, was already then at SOAS in the early days of his wonderful career as an Indologist. By the 1960s and 1970s Australia was a world-renowned site for the study of South Asia.

There was always a chance, then, that the White Paper would risk a wheel rediscovering tone. The team assigned to conduct the review was chaired by a former head of Treasury, included a lawyer, the board chair of the telecommunications giant Telstra, three senior public servants – and Peter Drysdale, a pre-eminent academic economist of Asia, the only team member with a clear and deep expertise on the region.

From the outset the emphasis was with the Australian economy and its interdependence on the Asian powerhouses notably China, South Korea and, increasingly, India. Predictably, too, the published theme is mostly about how Australia can benefit from a deeper and stronger relationship with its immediate region. Throughout the conduct of the review, as well as in its report, there were and are frequent references to the rapid rise of ‘middle classes’ in Asia, for which read markets for Australian goods. There is a reminder in all of this about that epic line from the early days of China’s “reopening”: “well, just how many pairs of Raybans do they need?”

It was at this point, perhaps, that (if they had not already) task team members and the Cabinet might have read Tim Clissold’s remarkable little book on how market potential in places like China can blind even the most clever to operating conditions on the ground, and on how relationships must be built over a timeframe longer than twelve years (looking to 2025).

Prime Minister Gillard, who came to her present position under controversial circumstances and professing no expertise or interest in foreign affairs and policy, set up this White Paper as her great vision for Australia, and it has come out that way. For one thing, every great thing that “will” be done is based inexorably on “reforms” her government has already initiated.

Unfortunately, that leads to contradictions. The university system is targeted as the principal source for a growing Australian cultural understanding of Asia. So, for example, it is posited that all Australian universities will have at least one formal exchange agreement with a partner institution in Asia. The immediate university response is “we did that years ago” and are already operating exchanges in research as well as in learning and teaching. Then, the White Paper mandates that by 2025 there will be ten Australian universities in the world’s top one hundred. Leaving aside (a) the on-going debate about the efficacy of rankings and, (b) the proliferation of ranking surveys that cause a debate about which one to choose, there is a structural bar to this aspiration.

Over the past few months, for example, the government held up considerable sums in research grant allocations as it sought desperately to maintain its budget surplus for broader political reasons. There might even now be a thought that those grants (and not all were) were only released because of the timing of the White Paper. Even more seriously, the government has sat on to the point of burying a report on the base funding systems for the tertiary education sector. For years, universities have argued the funding formulas to be inadequate, and in good part because those formulas meant Australia was slipping behind developments in places like China and Singapore.

Similarly, the White Paper argues for improved standards and quality, yet has recently introduced an uncapped student numbers system whereby universities enrol all the students they can. Given the present funding regimes, the argument is that such escalation in numbers, by definition, challenges present quality levels let alone any possible higher ones that might be set.

The point here, in the view of the universities, is that the government has grand Asian aspirations but is not prepared to fund them.

This principle of aspiration not backed by funding (or by an associated strategy and tactics plan) pervades the White Paper. Company boards are exhorted to have a third of their memberships Asia “savvy” by 2025, but there is no clear means by which that will come about. Additionally, many leading companies claim they have already invested in Asia and that government policy has not always assisted them in doing so. Hindi and other languages are to be taught in primary school and throughout the education system, yet the Prime Minister has confirmed a current Asian languages scheme will receive no further funding. There is just one university in the country teaching Hindi currently, and language programs in universities generally are under huge pressure, so where will all those Hindi teachers come from? One answer reverts to another government “reform”: the $42 billion National Broadband Network is raised as a possible major means by which all this Asian literacy will arise, and that has raised alarm bells in teaching quarters.

One significant strand missing from the review is how Australia appears to its Asian neighbours, and how that might need to be transformed if serious progress is to be made. Indonesia put out a cautious, even reserved endorsement of the White Paper, but focused almost solely on the proposal to teach Indonesian more systematically through the education system. In India, similarly, the move to teach Hindi was noted, but other than that not much more speculation arose, at least publicly. The Australia-India relationship has been difficult over past years, pock marked by episodes of physical violence against Indian students during 2009-10, and further aggravated cricket pitch spats and one or two other episodes. Several Australians voiced irritation that cricket star Sachin Tendulkar was made a member of the Order of Australia, on the grounds he was allegedly involved in some of those spats. The Australian government has papered over much of this with the decision to sell uranium to India, but that in itself is a controversial decision both at home and throughout the region. Predictably, the White Paper has caused little stir in India, one of its main targets.

Having looked for action rather than another review, then, what did Greg Sheridan think of the White Paper? His has been the most vociferous response – the document is just “pure spin”.

In some respects it is, but there is something else reflected, an on-going national complex both about what to do with “Asia”, and how to do that? This is the country, remember, that had a “white Australia” policy for much of the twentieth century, and that currently is struggling to come to terms with refugees and their immediate source countries, again some of the White Paper’s prime targets. The refugee issue is a core political issue because all sides of politics grapple with the problem that their private polling tells them broad scale immigration from many parts of the world is unwelcome. That explains why this has become such an intractable problem. Yes, Australia is a multicultural country, but the rise of strong ethnic centres of population brings with it some difficult issues – a recent report has some of the current Syrian tensions being also played out in Sydney and Melbourne, repeating earlier bouts of “problems” with Vietnamese, Lebanese and Croatians to note just a few.

The Gillard government is right in one respect, if rather too many years late: how Australia deals with Asia will be crucial as the twenty first century deepens. Yet that is not really a new condition, it has been an Australian problem for a very long time, as its neighbours have observed. Those neighbours will be and are now waiting to see if the latest rhetoric translates into anything more substantial that they can work with as a basis for deep and flourishing relationship. If the Australian government does not produce quickly a clear, substantial and committed budget and action plan for this latest statement of intent, those neighbours might be disappointed, again.