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Australia's Relations with Asia: Scholars, Practitioners and the Lost Debate (Words for a Book Launch)

Stephen FitzGerald
Chairman, The Asia-Australia Institute, UNSW

MIALS-ASIALINK SEMINAR
MELBOURNE - 17 April 2002

As I read this scholarly, measured and well-tempered account of our relations with Malaysia [1], I was brought constantly to contrast it favourably with the way the practitioners of our foreign policy have been approaching our foreign relations increasingly over the past decade. I recall, for example, an anecdote of the time when Prime Minister Mahathir was being testy and 'recalcitrant' about APEC, told to me by someone who was present: of one of our most senior policy officials, in company which would have ensured reporting back to ASEAN capitals, angrily (no room for the well-tempered there), and quite seriously, canvassing reprisal against Mahathir for his daring to challenge - the great APEC, the great Australia, the great us. Reprisal by way of an Australian trade boycott of Malaysia! It didn't happen, but we can only contemplate with some wonderment the kind of private advice and ego-pumping aggro that must have been going in to ministers, and not be too surprised at what we heard publicly in the intemperate language of that time and hear now in its recent, grubbier derivatives. I'm not suggesting this comes from officials and not politicians, but that there has emerged a quality to our Asia foreign policy and diplomacy that is intemperate, and lacking in balance, and a long distance from what might be called scholarly. Compare it, for example, with the polite, muted and elliptical way the government ventures the occasional difference with the United States.

This book traverses the period in our relations from about the time Dr Mahathir became Prime Minister, so it is a stormy period, and to be fair, the thunder and lightning have not all been on the Australian side. But that is not in any way to concede that its deployment in our diplomacy has been productive. It has not. We have a nil score with Dr Mahathir, and now a nil objective: ministers and senior officials in the Australian government now shrug their shoulders and say without apparent concern, nothing can be done until Mahathir is no longer on the scene. That amounts to a nil policy. With one of our closest and most significant neighbours. With whom we otherwise have a vast amount in common (not to be sneezed at in a world of division and strife), on which we could together strike out in new directions and great initiatives in our region's cause and for our peoples' human security.

Rita Camilleri's book also brought to mind another recollection, a discussion about our bilateral relations I had with the wretched Anwar Ibrahim, after the onset of recalcitrance but before he was flung vengefully into his wretchedness. (You may now say, no well temperedness here either!) Anwar said he believed we had lost the essence of the early period on which our relations had been built, for a while before and a while after Malaysian independence, which he believed owed profoundly to a small but widely influential number of politicians and officials and, yes, intellectuals - Australian and Malaysian scholars, working in Malaysia, people who thought about things and about the relationship and taught and wrote books, could actually write books (my gloss, not his). What he described was a connected policy community, not connected in agreement (many of the scholars didn't agree all that much with Anwar, for a start) or the connected slavering of a claque that sometimes passes for a policy community here and elsewhere, but connected in discourse, connected in ideas, connected in personal relations. For all the infancy of that relationship in the 50s and 60s, there was maturity in this policy community, and in it scholars had a recognised and influential and central place.

Which is by way of contrast with what we have here now in Australia in foreign policy in general and Asia policy specifically. And it's by way also of explanation for the title of my launch - or rather, having a title at all. I've never been asked for a title of a book launch before. I thought it might just be "Attitudes and Perceptions in Australia-Malaysia Relations by Rita Camilleri". Or perhaps just "Book Launch". But as with all things Asialink, one moves with their mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. So I accept. But I did refuse a synopsis. I mean, fair dinkum!

I accepted to launch and do so now, with enthusiasm, because I want to give praise to this book. It takes on the analysis of that most self-referencing and often least informed of observers of this complicated relationship, the media. How do you get truth out of the media! For some years, I have moderated a high-level private dialogue between Australia and Malaysia, with government ministers and business and other leaders and an academic or two, known as the Malaysia-Australia Dialogue, or MAD. This dialogue is intended in Australia-Malaysia relations to advance the sub-text (while we wait for the text to retire or have a heart attack). In every one of these meetings, the Malaysians always have a go at the Australian media. And some Australian always responds: what about the Malaysian media! Fair enough. Even if nil-all in the progress of the sub-text. But when taxed, what do the representatives of the Australian media say? They say, you have to accept anything we write or broadcast because the Australian media is robust, and that's how it is, like it or lump it. Robust. Like rugby league. What about robustly learning something about Malaysian society? What about attempting one of its robustly challenging languages other than English or a deep look at its cultures? What about the roots and complicated dynamics of its politics? Know anything about Islam in Malaysia? Or why, to your surprise in 2001, Mahathir was pro anti-terrorist?

It is courage to try to find the reality in this relationship through examination of media, but Rita Camilleri does so and forensically and successfully reconstructs for us a wonderful profile of the relationship. And that's achievement. It is courage also to take this on through six celebrated and emotionally stroke-threatening episodes. Remember the Barlow-Chambers case? The Embassy TV series? Turtle Beach the movie? The Raja Bahrin-Gillespie case? Recalcitrance - well, that one's passed into the vernacular. And of course, Anwar Ibrahim. But she does this, and does it very fairly. Almost too fair on the Malaysians for the writer of the book's foreword, Johan Saravanamuttu. But it's actually a very good book of record. And more. It does more by streets to set the context and diagnose the attitudes and perceptions working away in this relationship, to harmonise or poison, than you will divine anywhere from the public official record then or now, or find anywhere else. This makes it an important book and not just a good book. We have too few books at all on Australia-Malaysia relations, and even fewer good ones; so few good books in fact on any of our bilateral relations with other countries.

I want to praise this book also because it's a quiet investigation of us, from which the quiet reader will find much for self-reflection. She shows that what drives and has driven Australian attitudes and responses to Malaysia are cultural perceptions of the colonial past; a pretty awful, but convincing, conclusion, for Australians in 2002. Whether the raucous politician of the John Howard stamp of Asia diplomacy will find this cause for self-reflection is another matter.

And I want to commend the book because it's a bit of a political challenge. I mean, a challenge to politicians and other practitioners to read it. The Malaysian relationship, and the six causes celebres it details, go far wider in Australia than the foreign policy community, and for this last reason if for no other this book ought to be read more widely. But a book on a bilateral Asian relationship? Who among our foreign policy practitioners reads such a book?

Which brings me to the lost debate.
I use 'lost' here in two senses. First is the debate we lost. We lost. The Asia people, the Asia constituency. The scholars and public intellectuals. We. Who were there when the Asian Studies Association of Australia was set up, who taught and researched, who did the first or second or third or fourth enquiry into Asian studies, who won - and then lost - an Asian Studies Council for Australia at the federal level, who started the Faculty of Asian Studies at the ANU and the School of Modern Asian Studies at Griffith and a heap of other such centres around Australia, who made RIAP and Asialink and the Asia-Australia Institute. And the Johnny-come-lately into this field, the US-based Asia Society AustralAsia Centre, notwithstanding its successful predatory fund-raising and colonisation of areas previously well-served by Australians, is not interested in this debate and has done nothing to give it sustenance or strength, which is not surprising given its parentage.

What did we lose? Not everything, of course. We have the trade and the tourism and the students and the other things for which we campaigned. But we lost the debate about the way. About the way Australia, and Australia at the level of policy and foreign relations between states, and business and university relations, discovered, engaged, enmeshed, became part - with, of, in, or about - Asia. It was about - not replacing the Western, never about replacing the Western - but about making a place alongside it for Asia by broadening the cultural horizons and changing the intellectual universe of Australians.

Few have captured the rationale for this better than that scholar and sometime Australian public intellectual Pierre Ryckmans, in the Introduction to his recent great translation of The Analects of Confucius, of which he says:

"no book in the entire history of the world has exerted, over a longer period of time, a greater influence on a larger number of people than this slim little volume. With its affirmation of humanist ethics and the universal brotherhood of man, it inspired all the nations of Eastern Asia and became the spiritual cornerstone of the most populous and oldest living civilization on earth. If we do not read this book, if we do not appreciate how it was understood through the ages (and also how it was misunderstood) - how it was used (and how it was misused) - in one word, if we ignore this book, we are missing the single most important key that can give us access to the Chinese world. And whoever remains ignorant of this civilization, in the end can only reach a limited understanding of the human experience".[2]

So, we saw education as fundamental. And from the broadening and change we hoped for from Asia in our education would come more of an inside perspective on Asia, a psychologically and socio-linguistically deeper and more stable understanding of the societies we were dealing with, from which in turn could come a different kind of foreign policy and a different kind of relationship with Asian countries, that would be good for Australia. In what way different? One that could be capable of being as close to an Asian country in foreign policy and other ways as we are with our closest relationships with Western countries. Foreign policy might not take that step for other reasons, like political incompatibility. But foreign policy could contemplate it culturally and ethnically, with an open mind, and range freely across the possibilities.

We lost here. It's complicated, the why. But the debate was lost because whatever we did to persuade about the way, it did not become ingrained, cross-political, cross-generational. When we thought we were getting somewhere, and there was a time in the late 80s and early 90s when you could have argued we were, there was in fact little or no change in the cultural horizons or intellectual universe of Australia's political and other leaders. From the policy-makers' point of view now - including policy-makers outside government who do significant things in Asia - you can 'do' Asia without any of that. And of course it shows. How it shows!

We lost even in our own lead institutions, the universities. Look at the way the leadership echelons in our universities so disdain by their own practice the proposition that there might be need for them to have cultural or linguistic Asia skills or skilling, or even inter-cultural skilling, for their peripatetic careers which take them so frequently around the nicer capitals of Asia. Look at the research last year that showed the overwhelming majority of academics who go on sabbatical leave fly over the region (to which they resort to fill their student quotas and their cash registers) on their way to Europe or North America.

And because we lost this debate, Australia also lost the popular debate on foreign policy. How easily (if sneakily) did our unscrupulous policy practitioners draw popular opinion into empathy with their demonisation through East Timor of 'the Indonesians' - undifferentiated, unpleasant Indonesians! How instantly (if indecently) was the government able to incite public frenzy against Islamic refugees, and how readily (and supinely) did the opposition come dragging its tail along when it read the polls!

The Asia constituency has put a lot of connection into the relationships with Asia, and that is the sustenance now in this time of need and, because I am of course an optimist, the leaven for the future. But if we think of the way, no one can pretend for a moment that that debate, for now at least, is anything but lost, when you look at education, and when you look at foreign policy.

The Asian Studies Association of Australia, ASAA, has recently conducted another review and come up with another set of recommendations for Asia in education. This is now in draft form. For anyone in the Asia constituency, it makes sobering, depressing reading. At a quick read you could be looking at the first ASAA review of this kind, more than twenty years ago. Not because the authors are twenty years back but because our education is not twenty years forward. Had we won or at least not lost that debate about the way, ASAA would not now be having this review, or if it were, it would be very different, and very confident. For the other thing I have to say about the draft review I've seen is that the confidence (or is it the hope?) has been leeched out of the cause. This is not my review, but it is something we all feel. We go, again, cap in hand, to politicians and officials, who may be persuaded or who may not. But we're not sure. Because we are not talking to a generation of politicians and officials who have changed, or been changed by education. We are talking to the same mind, twenty years on, about the same need. Had we won that debate, we may not have got all the money we asked for - you never do - but we would have known there would be receptivity to the idea.

And foreign policy? What I'm looking at in foreign policy is what it tells, what the statements and speeches and positions tell, about the way the policy practitioners are thinking, about their culture, and what that says about their potential for dealing with Asians; their potential for taking Australia into a foreign policy that would be relaxed and comfortable in a really intimate relationship, across all policy domains and at the personal level, with Asian countries. And it is just not there. You can argue of course, as they do, that Australia is doing this and achieving that in Asia. Foreign relations do not stand still, and the solid connection that we, the Asia constituency, have put into relations with Asia will drive the policy practitioners as much they will drive the connections. Indeed, as the very clear example of domestic politics indicates, our policy practitioners are more driven than driving. But the point is that so long as their approach to Asia is reactive, instrumentalist, arm's-length and almost totally superficial intellectually, culturally, linguistically and even socially, Australia suffers. It suffers by not being closer and easier and more able to find compatibility for mutually advantageous initiatives. It suffers by exclusion, as from ASEAN+3 (and, if you want the list, from all the other regional initiatives and arrangements listed by Greg Sheridan in last Thursday's Australian). And it suffers by not being in the right position at the right time to influence that region which can be of greatest benefit to us if it prospers and greatest injury if it does not.

That wisest of observers of Australia in its regional and historical setting, Professor Wang Gungwu, has said of the Australian situation that because of our Western origins and our Asian location, in foreign policy we have never had anyone to 'talk to', as 'equals', in the way European states have, whatever their size or power, and Asian states have, whatever their differences. Equals here meaning joined, however fractiously, by being Europeans or being Asians, the socialising effects of community, with all its conflicts. This lost debate has meant that we remain losers in our region, losing out on possibilities through not having a neighbourhood of countries who in this sense we talk to as equals.

Now to the other mening of 'lost debate'. This one is lost in the sense that it is nowhere to be found.

At the beginning of last year the Asia-Australia Institute received some funding via a project for the centenary of federation called 'Australia's Choices' and the choices we had to address were in foreign policy. In a first workshop in Sydney (out of which was born an intellectual coterie describing itself as The Cliffbrook Group), academic international relations theorists and other IR specialists, academic historians who work on the history of our foreign relations, public intellectuals and foreign policy practitioners, all from very different backgrounds (and mostly from Melbourne and Canberra), found much to dispute but unanimity on one thing: that there is a near-total disconnect in Australia between the practitioners of foreign policy, and the theorists and others who make up the academic or intellectual approach to foreign policy. Hugh White, for example, then a Deputy Secretary in the Department of Defence, said that from his standpoint in no other area of public policy in Australia is there such a void, that from health to social welfare to finance or the law there may be furious disagreement between theorists and practitioners, but there is connection and debate. But the kind of connected foreign policy community described by Anwar Ibrahim does not exist in Australia. The Cliffbrook Group's conclusion, as it met and discussed in two more workshops through the year, was that this is, surely, the central issue of choice in Australia's foreign policy.

Here is Phillip Ruddock. On 'The 7.30 Report' on the twelfth of February this year, putting down impertinent calls for a debate on an immigration and population policy for Australia, Phillip Ruddock said: "You wouldn't get a policy out of a debate. What you'd get is, er, different views".

Debate has almost ceased as a driver in foreign policy, as government and opposition rummage among the populist and prejudicial opinions of polls and talkback radio for leadership direction. Ideas, openly disparaged by many in the Coalition, have little place in the making of foreign policy. Intellectuals are dismissed pejoratively, as not qualified to speak for 'the Australian people', as not, indeed, even in the category of 'the people' (as in Mao's China). Why have debate at all when, as Minister Ruddock so frankly puts it, all you get is 'different views'?

Debate has almost ceased as a driver in foreign policy, as government and opposition rummage among the populist and prejudicial opinions of polls and talkback radio for leadership direction. Ideas, openly disparaged by many in the Coalition, have little place in the making of foreign policy. Intellectuals are dismissed pejoratively, as not qualified to speak for 'the Australian people', as not, indeed, even in the category of 'the people' (as in Mao's China). Why have debate at all when, as Minister Ruddock so frankly puts it, all you get is 'different views'?

Well, there are different views. Their foundations lie in the kind of scholarly examination exemplified so well in Rita Camilleri's book, the self-examination that goes with it, the surfacing from it of the lessons of history, and, hopefully, the self-knowledge that follows, for the framing of less self-centred and self-referencing foreign policies. We need her study and many, many more like it, the raw material for what absolutely has to be debated. And what absolutely has to be debated?

The great landmarks of Australia's independent post-war foreign policy - its contribution to the formation of the United Nations, immigration policy, the Colombo Plan, and the less vaunted but no less significant support for Indonesian independence against the resumption of Dutch colonialism - expressed a commitment to internationalism and humanitarianism by Australian governments. They each in their own way (criticisms and imperfections accepted) were steps onto a path of change for Australia. The first three were promoted by domestic campaigns of positive government propaganda to bring the populace along with policy (it is called leadership), and for several decades they stood in bipartisan acknowledgement as landmarks to Australia's global citizenship. They were the statement Australia made about itself.

Half a century on, what might that statement be? On those great issues, Australian policies have the appearance not of a landmark but of a demolition site. The government opts in or out of commitment to UN obligations and regimes as it fancies, pleading national interest and even denouncing the UN for 'interference' in Australia's internal affairs (as do the grubbiest of human rights violating states around the world). Immigration since the late 1980s has been suggested increasingly by government as harmful - initially to jobs and more recently to the Australian way of life. Numbers have been pushed down to almost 50% of late 1980s highs; and the government has shamelessly exploited falsehoods about refugees 'threatening' Australia. Foreign aid is in a state of long decline - from 0.46% of GDP in 1984 to a miserly 0.25% in 2001. In Indonesia our relations, described by the government as 'realistic', are distant, tense and adversarial.

Whatever statement contemporary foreign policy might make about Australia, it is not one of great internationalist or humanitarian causes. It is more about what has been called since the 2001 election the 'aspirational voter', said to be motivated only by what politicians offer to satisfy individual material aspirations. This is not peculiar to Australia in the contemporary world. But when it is not tempered by any sense of wider government horizons, or commitment to enlargement of the liberal and humanitarian agenda, or public policy formed out of public debate, it will have a serious negative impact on foreign policy. Aspirational politicians seek for what satisfies the aspirational voter, and this has become a characteristic of Australian foreign policy in the recent past, for example in East Timor, the failed relations with Indonesia, and the 'refugee peril'. To the extent that the government entertains choice in foreign policy, it is not big choice, in breadth of thinking or length of perspective. Nor has the opposition presented big-picture alternatives to force debate. Their choices are rarely outside the parameters set by the government, and often simply 'for' or 'against' the government's own choices, barren of fresh-thinking, impoverishingly short-term.

So, what we have to do now is to 'find' or 're-invent' debate in this policy domain. But here is a caution: for the most part, it will not work at long-distance. There are many reasons for this but to encapsulate the problem I simply say that on too many occasions have I heard our Foreign Minister dismiss the propositions of those who do attempt to engage through public statements and the media, with the throw-away phrase - 'the usual suspects'. The task before us is clear. We have to set out to create new and sustained forums of regular debate with practitioners about the way they - we - 'do' Asia. These forums must be mostly at close quarters, in small numbers, often private. Forums, councils, colloquia, standing seminars. Lots of them, at different levels for different purposes. And we'll have to go out and find funding. And they have to have a life beyond the one-off meeting of the 'wasn't it good and aren't we lovely and doesn't everyone else think so' kind. Some of them will need to be quite structured and some will be quite informal.

But every one of them must engage the academic or scholarly or theory community with the practitioner community, sometimes just at the official level and sometimes just the political and sometimes both, and not forgetting the practitioners in other fields I referred to earlier. And they must be on terms of equal engagement (for which, by the way, I would suggest the Foreign Minister's Foreign Affairs Council is not a model).

Oddly, perhaps, we have models in our foreign relations. We have confidence-building dialogues and Track Two forums that engage policy practitioners and scholars and others in building privately between countries what cannot easily be built in public or official diplomacy. We can use these devices on this issue within our country; confidence-building dialogues, track two forums. And not the least benefit of these models is that the people actually get to know each other. How many in ASAA, for example, know well the politicians and officials they would like to influence or can talk to them easily and engage them readily on equal intellectual terms?

Once we have such connected dialogue between the scholars and the practitioners, then we can debate much more fully at long-distance and in the media in the knowledge that it will not simply lead to mutual deprecation.

And because the first debate was lost, in any new debate the first issue we have to open up is whether to remain predominantly within a Western frame of reference for our foreign policy and have that determine all our major policy choices, or whether to move forward into a new and global frame of reference that would assess the options in a more open way and therefore admit the possibility of relations with other countries that could be as close and deep as those we have with Western countries. This is not a shallow or an easy matter, as the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments have all found. It was being addressed, if often uncertainly, under Hawke and Keating; but the Howard government has backed away from it and it is no longer visible on the foreign policy agenda and any attempt to debate it is deflected with rejoinders like: 'our relations with Asia (or with China, or whoever) have never been better'. That, of course, is not the point.

The point is whether we choose a foreign policy that politically and strategically follows Western ethnic and cultural affinities or one that can set them in a broader ethnic and cultural context and act flexibly, that is culturally selective in the application of humanist and liberal and multicultural principles or universal, that operates intellectually in a limited Western box or is open and global.

If we choose the more contemporary and open of these options, this would also lead us back once more to liberal and compassionate attitudes and internationalist and humanitarian causes.

And to history. We seem to have no history in our foreign policy apart from selective bits of war and patriotism and the British crown. If we have no history we may believe, for example, that what we choose to do in immigration is free of association for others. But people in Asian societies happen to know us also through our immigration history and judge what we do now in that context. The policy choices we debate have to be history-literate, and history-sensitive. The book we are launching today is both.

To achieve what we must now set out to do, then, we have three tasks.

In the Australian scholarly setting, we must assert the value of the research and analysis of serious scholars who work on foreign policy and Australia-Asia relations, encourage it ourselves, and debate the need for more public funding and other support for more of it (and for policy practitioners to read it).

In the domestic context, we must rebuild a connected foreign policy community in which to restore the value of foreign policy debate. It will be difficult with this government, and probably no less easy with the opposition. But if it is debate and change we want, then we must have this community, and the responsibility is ours.

And in the foreign policy context, we must debate the case for Australia finding for itself in Asia, in Wang Gungwu's sense, a company of 'equals', and debate the need to accept and work among them as one among equals. And that, as Phillip Ruddock might object, requires a different view.

Now, may I pronounce the only words I thought originally to say on this occasion: 'I launch this book!'

1. Attitudes and Perceptions in Australia-Malaysia Relations. A Contemporary Profile, by Rita Camilleri. Bangi, Selangor. 2001.
2. "Introduction", The Analects of Confucius. W.W. Norton & Company. New York. 1997.