Managing an Asian future and an Anglosphere past in 2014

As outlined above, the challenge is not just in the intelligence area but in fact exists in most areas of Australian policy. Successive governments have, consciously or unconsciously, found reassurance in the Anglosphere and have simply neglected the multiple challenges posed by Asia’s peaceful rise.

These challenges take two major forms. The first concerns educating Australians in the languages, cultures, strategies and traditions of the major Asian communities. The second concerns educating Australians in how quickly Asian cultures, strategies and traditions are transforming the 21^st Century and relegating the Anglosphere to the history books.

Australia has failed so badly in these areas that a leading authority on international relations recently answered a question before a large informed audience by affirming the failure to advance in Asian language learning and suggesting that further attempts in that area be discontinued. Clearly influential positions in Australia are occupied by people who have never progressed to the point of understanding the insights that can come from even imperfect progress in Asian languages.

Until Australia starts to aspire to emulate Chinese traditions of educational excellence, to transform its intellectual culture into one consumed by debates about contrasting Anglosphere and Asian thought cultures and to inhabit its media outlets with as much Asian as Anglosphere focus, it will remain very difficult to avoid an escalation of problems that derive from fundamental errors of judgment. These may well be much more serious that the present difficulties with Indonesia.

If someone responds “But this will take decades”, the reply can only be “Yes”. It must also be remarked that this dilemma is the consequence of half a century of empty rhetoric and failure to follow through with meaningful action. As someone who first co-authored books on this foreseeable predicament in 1989 and 1997, one can only hope that a Prime Minister of Tony Abbott’s outstanding personal qualities and integrity can provide the necessary leadership. It is urgent that a national effort be made to educate the Australian community to comprehend the dangers inherent in misplaced confidence in the unearned privileges that came in the past from being part of the Anglosphere.   

For any foreseeable future, the comforts associated with the legacies of the Anglosphere will need to be constantly re-evaluated in the context of many still poorly understood challenges. These derive largely from Australian aspirations to be part of the political and commercial dynamics of an Asian future.