Knockers silenced as Australia thrives in Asian century

Some of the smartest people in the world have long warned Australia that it cannot ever truly be part of its neighbourhood.

Remember Malaysia’s former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad? He did his best to shut Australia out of regional groupings, saying “they are Europeans, they can never be Asians.”

The American scholar Samuel Huntington wrote the famous 1996 work The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. The book is remembered for foretelling a reinvigorated struggle between Islam and the West.

But he also classified Australia as a “torn country”. Why? Because Australians were “divided over whether their society belongs to one civilisation or another”, torn between the West and Asia.

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Most colourfully, however, a Chinese academic likened Australia to the forsaken figure of the bat in an Aesop fable, an animal doomed to be forever friendless and alone.

In the story, the kingdom of the beasts is about to go to war with the kingdom of the birds. Each side tries to recruit the uncommitted bat, which has wings like a bird but fur like a beast.

The bat fears the consequences of joining the losing side, so refuses to join either. When the war is averted at the last minute, the bat finds himself despised by both kingdoms.

The rueful bat delivers the moral of the tale: “Ah, I see now. He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends.”

Tang Guanghui, writing in World Affairs, a journal of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said this was Australia’s fate, to flit forever between the two civilisations of the East and the West, belonging to neither.

“It seems that Australia is suffering from the same confusion and embarrassment” as the bat, he wrote. 

Tang’s prophecy was delivered in the same year as Huntington’s, 1996.

So, with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe today giving us cause to reflect on our place in the world, how does the prediction look 18 years on?

At the time Tang wrote, two-way trade between his country and Australia was running at $7.7 billion a year. Today Australia’s China trade is worth $145 billion a year. That’s a gain of about 1800 per cent. 

And in the intervening years China has invested more money in Australia than in any other country on the planet. This is, itself, a powerful statement about Beijing’s view of the centrality of Australia in supplying China’s future needs. The two countries are negotiating a free trade agreement. But there’s much more than trade and investment.

Tang’s prophecy was pretty plainly repudiated by China’s President, Hu Jintao, when he accepted John Howard’s invitation to address a joint sitting of the Australian Parliament in 2003.

And under Julia Gillard, China and Australia declared a “strategic partnership.” This was not a unique status - China already had bestowed the same designation on 10 other nations at the time. But it was hardly the act of a country that thought of Australia as some sort of outcast.

At the same time, Beijing announced that the Australian dollar would become the third currency, after the US greenback and the Japanese yen, to be directly convertible with the Chinese currency.

“Quite the contrary,” to the forecast of Australia as lonely and friendless in Asia, “we are one of the most integrated countries in Asia,” says Tim Harcourt, a trade expert at the University of NSW.

Australia’s top trading partners are China, Japan, South Korea and the US. Harcourt likes to say that the “tyranny of distance,” the geographic liability keeping Australia from the great Atlantic centres, has now become “the power of proximity” with the dominance of Asia’s growth.

If Australia is a bat, says Harcourt, “we’re lying upside down, gorging on all the wealth of the region.”

The research and advocacy group Asialink publishes an annual index of Australia’s engagement with 25 nations of Asia embracing trade, investment, education, tourism, business development and humanitarian assistance. The index was set at a benchmark 100 points in 1990. In 1995 it was 175. The latest reading, for 2012, was 448.

“With the big-picture lens, though there have been some obvious ups and downs, we are overall doing well,” says Asialink’s chief executive, Jenny McGregor.

Looking even more broadly, the picture is pretty positive. Immigrants from China, South Korea, Vietnam, for instance, bring not only new skills. They are a case study in successful integration, enriching a cohesive Australian diversity. 

Has this intensification of relations with Asia perhaps been at the expense of Australia’s relations with the West? 

Not in the least. The day before Hu Jintao addressed the Australian Parliament, the then US president, George W. Bush, received the same honour. It was in Canberra that his successor, Barack Obama, give his most notable declaration of America’s “Asia pivot”.

No longer the country that Paul Keating once disparaged as “the arse end of the earth,” it has been dubbed by a scholar at London’s Chatham House, Charles Emmerson, “the pivotal country.”

Australia has been intensifying its US alliance even as it deepens relations with its regional neighbours.

There are serious dangers in the rising tensions between Asia’s great powers, especially China and Japan. The Asian arms race is real. But there are enough real problems without coming up with phantoms.

Australia joins elements of both kingdoms, East and West, in a successful combination that is not a bat but a platypus, uniquely adapted to its environment and thriving.

Peter Hartcher is the international editor. SMH