Can Australia cope with China’s mineral needs

If Australia is to develop the capacity to meet the exploding demand for mineral commodities identified by Kloppers and others, there is a need for some urgent and uncharacteristically honest reflection about the way changes in global order are likely to impact on Australia. The alternative is for Australia to become marginalised and neglected, declining in prosperity and influence and more and more vulnerable to external pressures that disregard the interests of Australian nationals.

The ill-feeling generated in China by the failure of the Chinalco bid for a major stake in the London-headquartered Rio Tinto illustrated the way in which Australia continues to be run as a colonial offshoot of interests in the major Anglo-American capitals. Media coverage whipped up a fever of ill-informed national sentiment. Then poorly educated functionaries in Australian government overseeing foreign investment dilly-dallied long enough to kill the proposal. This may not have mattered if Anglo-American finance still ruled the world but those days are drawing to a rapid close.

As suggested above, the problem is even greater in academia than it is in the media. Australians are simply not being educated for a future where Chinese values, culture and authority shape the character of decisions that will impact on the lives of all Australians.

As John Gray, the distinguished Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics put it in Black Mass:

Modern politics is chapter in the history of religion … The world in which we find ourselves at the start of the new millennium is littered with the debris of utopian projects. Which though they were framed in secular terms that denied the truth of religion were in fact vehicles for religious myths.

In reality, many of the physical and social sciences taught in English language universities are Gray’s modern religious myths in plausible secular guise. As is now being discovered with increasing concerns about environmental pollution, climate change, epidemics of degenerative disease and poisonous foods and medicines, false belief in a secular utopia can be much more debilitating and harmful than false belief in a religious utopia.

Belief, truth, and transcendent authority are all qualities of human organisation that have played very little role in a Chinese civilisation that has continuously displayed the capacity to reinvent and revitalise itself after periods of decline - a quality far less evident in Western tradition.

It is a rediscovered sense of Chinese civilisation that is already shaping Australia’s future. Yet, most Australians have been so poorly educated that they will accept as dogma failed mythologies from London or New York before they will look seriously at powerful, seminal Chinese classics like the Lunyu or Yijing.

The fact that most Australians will find it anomalous to talk of Marius Kloppers, Clive Palmer, global shifts in financial and political power and the Lunyu and Yijing in the one context reflects the failure of the Australian educational system to equip Australians to understand a world where financial power is more centred in Beijing and Shanghai than in London and New York.