Changing attitudes and policies

When I read last year that the Labor Party’s new leader had studied Chinese language and history at Australia National University and spoke fluent Mandarin, I wondered: could a new day be dawning?

I recalled the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Gordon Menzies, who ignored Asia, thought “the world” meant Atlantic Rim nations only and visited Britain as often as possible, seeing his own country as isolated, unpalatable and insignificant.

Australia and the world are much altered since Menzies stepped down in 1966, yet remnants of his attitudes remain. Now that Kevin Rudd is prime minister, will Australia become a team member of its Asia Pacific region?

Given that the country’s current prosperity is largely due to trade with China and a few other countries in the area, this would seem logical though it’s much too early to tell. At a time when Australians by the dozens are writing about what the new administration may bring, perhaps the views of a foreigner may be in order, one who became interested in your country, spent a decade studying its past and present and wrote a book about it.

On my initial visit in 1991, two aspects of Australia intrigued me. As an American who has long thought my own country puts too much emphasis on “rugged individualism” and getting rich, it was refreshing to find another Land of Opportunity, one where the paramount goal was not making a lot more money than anyone else. I was also impressed to find a multiethnic nation that made the transition from a highly restrictive immigration policy to one that accepts people from around the globe, and did so with remarkably little violence.

Its policy of cultural pluralism, first articulated in the 1970s, which encourages immigrants to retain their traditional cultures while also becoming loyal Australians, seemed a model that other nations might follow to their advantage.

Yet paradoxically, I would learn, in America and in many nations, Australia is seen to this day as an essentially British nation with a sprinkling of Indigenous people. At home in Berkeley, whenever I told people about Australia’s multiethnic population, they expressed amazement. But how would they know that Australia in 2007 is not the same as it was in 1927 when all they ever hear about are its athletes and animals?

An unknown but palpable number of Australians still downgrade their country as Menzies did and look westward for models. Nor has the nation projected an image abroad that includes its achievements. Many observers have noticed this.

Travel writer Bill Bryson said: “One of the oddest things for an outsider to do is to watch Australians assessing themselves. They are an extraordinarily self-critical people. You encounter it constantly in newspapers and on television and radio - a nagging conviction that no matter how good things are in Australia, they are bound to be better elsewhere.”

Within the country, journalist Paul Kelly wrote: “The repeated impression left by senior overseas visitors to this country is their admiration for our achievements and astonishment at the complacent devaluation of this achievement by the host community. Australians are trapped in a contradiction - too reluctant to grasp their successes outside sport, too willing to overlook genuine national progress as a role model.”

People in Britain and other English-speaking Commonwealth nations know the most about Australia, including its multiethnic makeup, yet some harbour egregious stereotypes passed down from one generation to the next. A columnist for the London Sunday Telegraph wrote in the 1990s: “There is a kernel of truth in the view of Australians as somewhat simple minded folk. Originally settled by the detritus of 18th and 19th century Britain, Australia has the distinction of being the world’s only entirely proletarian country.”

A Scottish friend I asked about attitudes towards Australia said: “The British see Australia as a land of beer-drinking macho men, a place of little value whose people have no depth.” And in December, 2006, an article in London’s Financial Times about social and political divisions in Australia had this lead: “One doesn’t think of Australia as having a culture war: indeed, as the old joke goes, one doesn’t think of Australia as having a culture at all.”

Certainly the numbers of Britons and Australians with this outlook has decreased but patches remain embedded in both places. It seems as if there is a co-dependency relationship, with Brits putting down Aussies and some Aussies, expecting to be put down, reacting by trying to trump the Brits in badmouthing Australia. This, in the face of a history of accomplishments that any nation should be proud of.

To give but a sampling: Australia had world’s first secret ballot; it gave women the vote in 1902; it was a pioneer in old-age pensions; and in setting up machinery for resolving labour-management disputes. Recently a United Nations index rated Australia as the third best country to live in, after Iceland and Norway, based on wealth, life expectancy and literacy rate.

The frequent accusation that the country is racist, based on the old “White Australia” legislation (removed from the law books in 1958), contradicts its record of peacefully absorbing peoples from some 240 countries, places and ethnic groups since the late 1960s.

But ethnic tensions have increased worldwide over the past decade and Australia has not been immune. When ethnic-based riots broke out on Cronulla Beach in late 2005, at least two reporters mentioned anti-Chinese riots in the gold fields in the early 1860s to show that the latest riot reflected a recurrent national pattern. My reaction: a country that has to go back 145 years to find another full-blown race riot must be doing something right; I wish my country had such a record.

When China’s president, Hu Jintao, spoke to the Australian Parliament in 2003, he praised the country for its cultural pluralism, apparently well aware of what was happening on that score. Now, with a Mandarin-speaking prime minister who has worked as a diplomat in Beijing and Stockholm, Australia would seem to have its best shot yet at finally becoming a part of its region. But unless Mr Rudd can gain public support for this change, it is unlikely to happen.

A concerted effort is needed to make the public aware of the benefits of more interaction with the region and equally important, to explain why its diversity is an asset.

A document setting down this policy in 1989 defined multiculturalism as “simply a term which describes the cultural and ethnic diversity of contemporary Australia”. It includes everyone, with Anglo-Australians as well other immigrants and Indigenous people encouraged to preserve their cultures. What goes out the window is the much earlier policy that immigrants should discard their cultures and strive to become Anglo-Australian clones.

For nearly 12 years the country has had a prime minister whose core beliefs were in the Menzies mould. Mr Howard detested multiculturalism and did all he could to resuscitate the 1950s policy of urging assimilation to Australian (read British) values. It will take some doing to put the country back on the path it started down three months after Menzies left office; but it is possible. Is a new day dawning for Australia? Stay tuned to see what happens.