Charlie's been in terrible trouble this last week or so. He's been having a nasty old row with his neighbour and it finished up in the Magistrates Court. You have to be very careful with your neighbours. Charlie made the mistake of cutting a few limbs off a banyan tree that he reckoned was hanging over his side of the fence. It then got really inflamed when he threw the cuttings back over the fence, with a couple from his wattle tree. Not only did he get into trouble with the neighbour, but he now has the tree huggers society after him as well.
I can remember the days when it was all the go to pull down fences around our houses and have working bees with neighbours to plant natives all over our places. A couple of the locals out Melbourne's bohemian Eltham way even built a swimming pool across their boundaries so all the children in the street had somewhere to go after school. Those were gentler days with fewer regulations.
All this prompted me to consider how we're getting on with our biggest neighbour, Indonesia. Their national ideology is based on five principles, one of which is ''Persatuan Indonesia'' or the unity of Indonesia. It is represented on the national emblem by the banyan tree, its canopy giving shelter to all.
And that's very necessary in Indonesia because more than 17,500 islands make up the archipelago (Louise is always happy when we use words like that). It is a nation of more than 300 ethnic groups and 742 languages. The official language is Bahasa Indonesia, and the country has a population of more than 230 million, compared with our 23 million. Within six years, its population will increase by a further 35 million. And in this amazing and truly multicultural society, the national motto is "unity in diversity".
I have a feeling it would be a very good idea to work out how to get on with these neighbours of ours.
McKinsey and Co says they have the 16th largest economy in the world; Australia is 13th. PwC says by 2030 Indonesia will be the seventh largest and Australia will have slipped to 17th unless we get very smart very quickly. We have to understand what they are about so that we can work and live together - just like Charlie should have - especially if they are going to have an economy double the size of ours within a generation.
Culturally, the vast majority of Indonesians aspire to live in harmony; direct confrontation is to be avoided as far as possible. They seek to get on with each other, and by and large they succeed. The divorce rate, for instance, is less than 1 per cent. In Australia, it is 46 per cent. Not much harmony there.
But there's good news. Prime Minister Tony Abbott and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, have recently taken an important initiative in establishing the Australian Indonesian Centre, which brings together our great universities of Melbourne, Sydney, Monash and ANU, along with the CSIRO, six leading universities in Indonesia and great philanthropic families such as the Pratts. A board of 15 members, eight from Australia and seven from Indonesia, has been formed and I have agreed to be its first chairman. The director is Paul Ramadge, a former editor-in-chief at Fairfax.
America became a great nation more than 100 years ago through a powerful combination of civic leaders, government and the people. Charlie's always telling me about J.P.Morgan, who in 1907, locked a dozen leading bankers in his famous Morgan library till five o'clock in the morning to sign a document that saved the Tennessee Coal Company, which was about to collapse, and with that, the American economy. Morgan then sent two of his people down to Washington to get the president to sign the agreement as well, and America was saved through a cohesive working combination of government and the people.
The government can do only so much; the people have to help. And they will as we can see with the formation of this centre. As they say in Indonesia, "unity in diversity". That's more than good enough for me. The Sydney Morning Herald
By Harold Mitchell Illustration: Cathy Wilcox.
No comments:
Post a Comment