Australia and Asia Pacific by Jean-Pascal Bassino, Senior Lecturer, College of Business and Economics

According to opinion polls, a former diplomat who reads and speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese could become the next Australian Prime Minister, at the end of the 2008 Federal Parliament elections. Kevin Rudd, Leader of the Opposition, has admittedly quite an unusual profile among Australian politicians, but the Asian tropism of the Labour Party’s Leader reveals the recent transformation in the country.

Australia’s involvement in Asia was first of all linked to strategic issues. The rising importance of Asian countries as export markets and opening up to Asian immigration and usually immigration of non-European origin then led to a stronger integration into the Asia Pacific countries (the ‘White Australia Policy’ was gradually abandoned between 1973 and 1978). The Australian society seems to become multicultural, with most of the Asian immigrants adopting what people call ‘Australian values’ although they still indulge in the joys of surfing and barbecue. It is however quite a slow development. The British and the New Zealanders still represent the first two quotas of immigrants. The New Zealanders are the only ones to be able to enter without visa. For the other immigrants, the criteria for obtaining an entry visa have practically become the same for all (a test of English is generally required for the non-anglophone nationals).

The opening up to Asia is also characterized by the presence of officials in top administration and big companies speaking an Asian language, most often Japanese, Chinese or Indonesian, or having lived in Asia. About one million Australians, often young and highly qualified, reside abroad. Most of them are found in the United Kingdom, United States or Canada, but a large number of them are also in Asia. This opening up is also indicated by the mass presence of Asian students, with higher education in Australia having become the fourth exporting sector. The Australian universities moreover attract Asian researchers (even Europeans and Americans) both on a permanent job basis and as part of visiting researchers’ post for sabbatical leaves. In the course of the last decades Australia has become one of the main world centres for research on Asia, in economics, political science, history and sociology. The Australian National University (ANU), Kevin Rudd’s alma mater, plays a significant role in this domain by virtue of geographical proximity to the Federal Government, the seat of government being situated at Canberra like the ANU, the ‘capital of the bush’ (interior).

While in most of the western countries Asian studies developed at the end of the XIXth century in the form of orientalist studies, they took flight in Australia after 1945 in the context of close collaboration among academic researchers in anthropology, history, sociology, political and economic science, and the leaders of the military and economic intelligence. Australia was too close to Asia for strategic dimension of research on Asia having the possibility of being neglected, and this is true even today.

Until 1941, notwithstanding the geographical proximity and the migratory flows from Asia (strongly reduced after adopting the ‘White Australia Policy’ in 1901, it is true), the Australians were able to see themselves as being closer to the United Kingdom, their mother country and main business partner, than to Asia. However, from the beginning of British colonization, close economic ties were established with Asia. Chinese tea and Javanese sugar were cheaper in Australia than in Europe, which contributed to create the impression of disembarking into a land of plenty for the British immigrants. Tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants also arrived as gold diggers on the boats coming from China and participated in the Gold Rush of the 1850s-1860s. They represented 3% of the Australian population in 1861, but the majority of them went back before the end of the XIXth century.

The true realization of the geographical proximity of Asia came as a brutal shock in 1942, when Churchill informed the Australian government, after the fall of Singapore, that the British priority was to defend Burma and India. Australia had to count on its own strengths. The Japanese aviation then bombarded Darwin (and other cities of the North of the country) and the Imperial Navy’s submarines made incursions into the port of Sydney. The American military intervention quickly put an end to these threats, but this episode left a sentiment of extreme vulnerability. The strategic considerations have therefore played a fundamental role in the drawing up of Australia’s Asian policy after 1945, with whole-hearted support from the United States, particularly indicated by the dispatch of Australian military contingents during the Korean and Vietnam wars, then more recently in Iraq.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Japan gradually lost its status of former hated enemy (one however finds a large number of relatively recent books with all the secondhand booksellers, describing the fate of Australian prisoners in Japanese camps). It has become an important economic partner replacing the United Kingdom as main importer of raw materials and supplier of manufactured products in the 1970s. In the following decades, the economic relations with the other countries were also strengthened. The will to pursue integration into the Asian economic space is revealed by the on going negotiations that should be brought to a successful free trade with ASEAN, China, South Korea and Japan. The stepping up of commercial exchanges is likely to produce big profits on trade. At the same time it exposes Australia to a new form of vulnerability as proved by the recent decision to implement a bilateral military partnership with Japan, particularly to ensure security of sea links, which has provoked negative reactions from China. The interdependance of the Asia Pacific countries is strengthening but it does not however wipe out the asymmetries that arise from the demographic and economic weight differences.

For all that, unlike the predictions of Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, the Australians have not become the 'poor white trash in Asia'. Their country is still predominantly ‘white’, but it is richer than most of the Asian countries. The Asian countries import huge quantities of a cornucopia of minerals. The quality of life is high (ranked 3rd in the world for the Human Development Indicator) and the Asian immigrants are well off, including many Singaporians attracted by large spaces (20 million inhabitants in a country as vast as Europe) and probably also by the more relaxed atmosphere there than in their country of origin.
On 28th March, while receiving the title of doctor honoris causa, from the Chancelor of ANU, Lee Kwan Yew realized that he had made a mistake. Claiming that his words were perhaps justified in the 1980s in spite of everything, he observed that Australia had changed. At the same time as Asian politicians who had the tendency to want to exclude Australia (and New Zealand) from regional economic agreements ended up changing their minds, the Australian leaders actually adopted a form of ‘Asian’ pragmatism, as shown by the decision of honouring the former strong man of Singapore by conferring the title of Doctor of Law on him.