Australia's Overdue "Re-Orientation"

"Ultra Asia" (Beyond Asia) is an apt anagram for Australia.

Geography pointedly and unsentimentally places Australia right at the southeastern corner of Asia, yet the country's cultural heart wanders wistfully in the mid-Atlantic, somewhere between the US and the UK. If it were possible for countries to move house, tectonic plates and all, that's the white picket-fenced neighbourhood Australia would choose to reside in. Alas, the tyranny of geography has no room for pity.

Australia is in serious need of "re-orientation" (pun fully intended). Map courtesy "thetruesize.com"

Now these are the most interesting times in over three centuries. The world order is being overturned before our living eyes. The future is Asian, and Australia's corner of the world has never seen this asserted so forcefully.

Former prime minister Paul Keating lectured for years to deaf ears that Australia needed to accept it was an Asian country, and that it needed to start behaving like one. His countrymen never bothered. And now, the future is here. Australia has been wrenchingly yanked back to Asia, away from the seppos and the poms, and forced once more to mingle, however uneasily, with Asian hordes of all hues.

Australian foreign policy over the past century has been quite simple-minded - to fight other countries' wars instead of looking towards the interests of its own citizens. First it fought in Britain's wars, then in America's.

The Gallipoli campaign during the First World War is a breathtaking example. Australian troops were sent to fight a European war. It wasn't even the understandable assignment of defending Britain against an attack by its enemies. It was an offensive campaign against Turkey, a country Australia had had no quarrel with. Over 8000 Australian soldiers gave their lives for a British war. To this day, the event is remembered in Australia as ANZAC Day, with the accompanying slogan, "Lest We Forget". Pity that Australians do forget to ask why they had to fight an offensive war against a country that had no quarrel with them, and shed their blood for another one that they just happened to identify with.

Lest we forget to ask why

The Second World War was a bit different, with Australian troops initially fighting at several overseas theatres in the service of the British Empire, and allying with the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. The only dramatic rift came in 1942, when Australian PM John Curtin defied Winston Churchill and brought Australian troops back to defend the home country instead of deploying them to Burma, as Churchill had wanted.

Soldiers of the British Commonwealth, sorted by colour

By the end of the Second World War, Australia had switched its loyalties across to the United States, faithfully sending troops first to Vietnam and then to Iraq, both ill-advised misadventures that could have been avoided. Canada proved a savvier country in that respect.

All of these go to show that Australia's heart has belonged in the Anglosphere, and if anyone thought the years since Iraq may have brought about a change in attitudes Down Under, these latest examples should disabuse them of that notion.

• Needlessly antagonising China to please the US, predictably inviting Chinese sanctions. (What did the US do to bail out Australia? It threw Australia under the bus and sold the same goods to China!)
• Cancelling a multi-billion dollar submarine deal with France in favour of getting US nuclear subs - 20 years in the future! The Anglosphere doesn't even care about other Western nations.

For a country situated in Asia's neighbourhood, Australia has shown a contemptuous refusal to belong.

Australia's attitude to Asia thus far has been quite unsubtle:

• We're white
• We're Western
• We're superior

But now, Australia is starting to hear Asia's message:

• You're in our backyard
• You're alone, and the odd one out
• There are far bigger players here than you

It will be interesting to watch the tenor of public discourse in Australia as the new reality begins to sink in.

History holds some pointers. The first Englishmen in India who came to trade were quick to learn Indian languages, adopt Indian modes of attire, and some even took Indian wives. But as Western power grew, cultural adaptability gave way to hauteur, and the received wisdom of Western superiority over the East took root. As history begins to right itself, my guess is that hauteur will once again yield to gracious accommodation.

From my experience living in this country for the past quarter century, my bet is that after a round of characteristic cursing, Australians will take to being Asians with gusto.

Should Australians Learn Hindi?

The Gillard government's recently released white paper on "Australia in the Asian Century" is making lots of news. Weighing in at 320 pages, it can be quite a cure for insomnia (like all good white papers). But some of its policy implications have jolted people awake.

Let's look at just the impact on education policy. Some experts have estimated the cost of these policy changes to run into billions of dollars. Let me focus on one particular aspect of the education policy, under which "every schoolchild will be able to learn one of four "priority" languages: Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Japanese and Indonesian".

Knowing a second language is always useful in a myriad of ways, especially learning a language that is very different in nature to English. The benefits include staving off Alzheimer's, and so no one can argue with the proposal in concept. Engaging with emerging Asian countries where the locals speak no other language but their own obviously requires proficiency in those languages. China, Japan, Korea, Thailand - one cannot survive in these countries without knowing the local language. But India?

It's symptomatic of superficial thinking that Hindi has been clubbed together with Mandarin, Japanese and Indonesian. I call it superficial because of India's unique linguistic make-up. The penetration and role of Hindi in India are very different from those of these three other languages in their respective countries.

First, who is the target population in India with whom the next generation of Australians is meant to engage? If, as is most likely, these are going to be educated Indians from urban areas, for purposes of commerce or scientific collaboration, then English is already more than adequate. The lingua franca of the professionally-educated middle and upper classes in India is English. These people usually speak in English even to each other, and an Australian is unlikely to gain any special advantage through a knowledge of Hindi when dealing with these people.

Second, if the objective is to build rapport with common people rather than to communicate with just the elite, then wouldn't it be much more effective to communicate with people in their mothertongue? Only 40% of Indians have Hindi as their mothertongue, although about 70% can speak it. Quite apart from major cities like Chennai and Bangalore where Hindi is not widely spoken, one would be better served speaking Bengali in Kolkata, Marathi in Pune and Gujarati in Ahmedabad, even though Hindi is well-understood in all of these cities. But it would be asking too much to teach Indian regional languages in Australian schools. The benefits would be even more narrow and unjustified.

The most economically vibrant and growing regions of India are the West and the South, not the Hindi heartland, so the relative importance of Hindi may not even be as high as the demographics suggest

Third, from a purely practical standpoint, the kind of Hindi that is most likely to be useful in India is the mongrel variant popularly spoken in Mumbai and Hyderabad, and not the chaste, literary form that the Delhi elite tend to favour. For non-native speakers, it's far more important to be able to get the meaning across, grammar be damned. But it seems depressingly certain which version will be taught in Australian schools, especially since any Australian Hindi language curriculum will be determined in collaboration with New Delhi's officialdom. [It would indeed be ironic if Australians turned out to be incomprehensible to Indians because their Hindi sounded like the news on the government-owned TV channel!]

Rangebank Primary School in Melbourne is the only school in Australia that teaches Hindi to all its students. But will Hindi be useful or just nice to know?

For all these reasons, I believe Australia's Hindi policy is probably utopian and will not serve its intended purpose. Indeed, I don't believe Australian policymakers have thought deeply about the intended purpose of teaching Australian schoolchildren Hindi in the first place. Australia's approach to India should be arrived at by a body of people who have a sufficiently high number of flying hours under their belt (i.e., people who have travelled and lived extensively in India), not by armchair strategists who just see colour-coded countries on a world map.

It's important to engage and to understand another nationality, but language is not always part of this (It's even less true of India than of monolingual countries that have very little English). It's cultural understanding that is required, and I'm not sure if that is being addressed by the policy. For a start, Australians could learn to pronounce Asian names, including Indian ones (Rajeev is not pronounced Razheev, any more than John is pronounced Zhohn.)

On a personal note, I remember my stint at IIT Kanpur in India's Hindi heartland, where a fellow South Indian and I overheard a conversation on the hostel lawns. A card-carrying member of the RSS (the Hindu right-wing organisation that also believes Hindi is the unifying language for the country) was trying to convince a couple of South Indians of the benefits of learning Hindi.

"If you know Hindi, you can speak to 70% of all Indians", he argued, "you can speak to Punjabi[s], you can speak to Gujarati[s], you can speak to Bengali[s]..."

As we left the place, my fellow-South Indian friend said in contemptuous disgust, "If you know English, you can speak to 100% of the Indians who matter".

A snobbish opinion to be sure, but painfully true.

As the white paper makes clear, Australia definitely needs to understand Asia better.

New Thinking in Australia - The Asian Century

In a recognition that the Asian Century is upon us, the Australian government has commissioned a policy white paper on the place of Australia in the new Asia.

Let's not be distracted by GFC II or any short-term economic crisis sweeping the world. Over the medium to long term, there is going to be a massive shift in the make-up of the world, from being mostly poor to being mostly middle-class. (Whoopee!)

What's interesting is that the bulk of this middle-class will be from Asia. [What's also interesting is that while the aggregate spending of this Asian middle class will be huge, an individual family will still be highly budget-conscious, because they still won't be as well-off as a Western middle-class family. That calls for a very different product and marketing strategy to sell into this market.]

The rise of Asia is therefore a significant shift in the world's centre of gravity, and Australia would be wise to plan for it. This is in fact a welcome development for Australia, since the historical "tyranny of distance" that the country has suffered from has now been replaced by the "advantage of adjacency", as the Economist puts it. Australia is now closer to the action than any other Western country and should take full advantage of it. Given that Australians still don't have a high awareness of Asian societies, how they work and how to work with them, perhaps the white paper will spur the necessary investments in education and the like to better gear up the country.

The related controversy is around the notion of "Big Australia" (i.e., should Australia aim for a population significantly above its current 20 million?) and immigration policy. The relative advantages of size versus sustainability will be fought over for a few years at least. Regardless of which side is "right", it's important that Australia begin to have this debate. The stakes are high and the potential payoffs enormous.

I like it when debates are about planning for prosperity rather than about problems.