Two landmark events in Australia reiterate the country’s growing understanding of China’s increasing importance and significance in the region, writes Rowan Callick.
Australia’s relationship with China has recently received an unexpected double boost.
First, from Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Second, from a group of young people from both countries eager to build closer links.
Gillard is one of those Australian leaders who take time to work out that their fellow citizens want them to be at ease on the international stage, and to be the prime interpreters of the world to Australia, and of Australia to the world.
Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd were exceptions, leaders who had travelled from a young age and from the start felt at home in the wider world.
Gillard notoriously said a year ago that “foreign policy is not my passion, it’s not what I’ve spent my life doing.” But on September 28 she delivered a speech in Melbourne brimming with vision about Australia’s place in the world to a who’s who of the country’s business and foreign affairs elites.
Even more importantly, she announced in the speech that she has commissioned a white paper on Australia in the Asian Century – not, significantly, the Asia-Pacific century – that will focus on economic engagement but will also review a much broader range of policies.
The White Paper will be drafted within the PM’s own department, by a team led by Ken Henry, the former Secretary to the Treasury. It will take a whole-of-government approach, tackling issues from investment approvals to language education, and will be completed and published by the middle of 2012.
Gillard said: “We truly are already a decade into an Asian century. A great future is there for us – there for us if we understand and explain these great changes – there for us if we make great decisions as well.”
“Australians should be optimistic. Not because change is always good but because Australia is always good enough to make the best of change.”
Gillard has travelled during the past year to Australia’s key Asian partners, with especially important visits to Indonesia and Malaysia late last year, and to Japan, South Korea and China in April. This experience has clearly helped her focus on the bigger picture, beyond her government’s own many domestic travails and poor polling. “We can stand strongly in our changing region,” she said in Melbourne.
And having a story to tell about how Australia can create a better future is a crucial building block in providing a fresh start for Gillard’s faltering prime ministership. Few people involved in business or education, or even those who holiday in Asia, will disagree with most of Gillard’s speech, in which she said that today’s global changes, and especially Asia’s rise, “will define our future.”
At present rates, she said, China is doubling its economy every eight years, India every 11 years and Indonesia every 15. It took Britain, when it pioneered the world’s industrial revolutions, from 1830 to 1900 to quadruple its economy. The resulting shift to Asia is not temporary. It involves, as Gillard said, “changes of type, not of degree.”
Gillard described “a new China… transforming the economic and strategic balance of our world.”
Australia’s own era of “opening up and reform”, as it is described in China, began about 30 years ago, at the same time as China’s. Now China is Australia’s biggest trading partner, with a record $105 billion two-way trade last year. But the implications of the rise of China, India, Indonesia and most of the rest of the neighbourhood, to become the new centre of global economic gravity, have not before been drawn into a coherent policy framework.
It will take on difficult choices, such as whether to sanction more migration and Chinese guest workers, and whether to declare that the Doha trade talks are finally dead and instead provide greater political weight and resources towards concluding the myriad bilateral trade deals outstanding with Asia.
Economist and former ambassador to China Ross Garnaut responded: “The public education and discussion surrounding development of the White Paper will help. The most important words, repeated in the course of the PM’s address, were ‘Australia hasn’t been here before’.”
Tony Milner, the Basham Professor of Asian History at the Australian National University, said: “Her emphasis is on the opportunities for Australia in the Asian century, not the threats.”
Andrew Shearer, director of studies at the Lowy Institute, said: “She went out of her way to reject, at least implicitly, Hugh White’s thesis that our economic and strategic interests cannot be reconciled: ‘Strong in the Asian century, with an ally in Washington and respect in Beijing’ was nicely put, I thought.”
The second big boost for the relationship is starting to come from the Australia China Youth Association, and its spin-off Australia China Youth Dialogue.
The former was set up at the Australian National University in Canberra almost three years ago, and has since spread nationwide in Australia, with growing connections in China too.
One of the founders of the ACYA was Henry Makeham, who graduated with a double first from the ANU in law and Asian Studies (Chinese), and who is now working as a lawyer based in Hong Kong. It was Makeham who had the vision to launch the dialogue, first held last year in Shanghai and Beijing.
The participants are about a dozen people in their 20s from each country. They will be different every year – but the process itself, and the network being developed around the dialogue, will keep everyone in close touch as they work their way into top jobs in both countries. That’s the great aim.
The participants in 2011 work in sectors including education, NGOs and development, law, sport, business, creative industries and media.
This year the dialogue began in Canberra and then shifted to Sydney. It attracted some terrific speakers, including Trade Minister Craig Emerson, the country representative of the Ford Foundation in China John Fitzgerald, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, Foreign Affairs department Secretary Dennis Richardson, former High Court judge Michael Kirby, former president of BHP-Billiton in China Clinton Dines, leading Chinese-Australian artists Guan Wei and Guo Jian, former prime minister Bob Hawke, Lowy Institute China expert Linda Jakobson, and Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson.
The sessions all leave time for genuine discussion, in which the participants joined fully. The aim is “to foster learning, mutual understanding, respect and future friendships – in a frank and forthright fashion – for the benefit of the long-term Australia-China relationship.”
Extraordinarily, this bold aim is already being met. ■
