Wednesday, 29th April 2009

Eric Ellis questions whether Kevin Rudd's plan to make Australia the West's most ‘Asia-literate' country has anything going for it except geography
 

An old friend of mine, a self-made corporate tyro embedded at the Big End of Sydney, asked me recently why I bother writing from miserable, crisis-racked places like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Thailand.

Moreover, he asked, why do I return to Jakarta, a city ranked by any measure you like as a corrupt urban hellhole of ocean-going proportions. ‘Mate,' he emailed after scanning perfunctorily through a Speccie despatch I'd penned from Afghanistan before he rushed to his bucolic hobby farm in the Hunter Valley, ‘no one here gives a flying f**k about these places.'

Then, almost on cue, Operation Slipper - as Australia's military contribution to Afghanistan's ‘just war' is formally known - claimed two diggers in two days after my mate's message. He looked like a twit; no comfort, of course, to the grieving families of those who'd made the ultimate sacrifice for their country's security, the official reason why Australian troops are there.

My friend is wrong. Many Australians do give an, er, airborne copulation about what is going on in Asia. That's because their Phuket package holiday got delayed for weeks at Suvarnabhumi airport last November when Thai royalists marauded yellowly through it to topple an elected government. They know someone who lost someone in Bali, or Mumbai, or got shot at in Lahore. They switch on the evening news and see Orientals in uproar again and something burning - Asia, unless it's rich China or Japan or Korea where you can sell lots of iron ore while staying home in cool places where the front gates are secure. Or Singapore's Asia-lite, a kind of Noosa-sur-Death-Row.

Australians know just enough about the broader region to know they don't really want that much to do with it. And now there's another blazing charnel house floating off the Kimberley coast full of desperate Asians. Whether they are refugees, asylum-seekers or queue-jumpers, that just helps Australians connect the dots.

This reporter's Sri Lankan notebook contains a few details too far for many Australians, but here's what that particular hellhole boils down to. There are 150,000 impoverished Tamils hemmed into 15 sq km of the most wretched ground imaginable. It's a tsunami-ravaged palm grove pummelled again by a Sinhalese military commanded by faraway bloodlust politicians in Colombo who many Tamils believe want to abolish their ethnicity. And these poor folk are imprisoned there as human shields by a murderous gang of Tamil thugs calling themselves freedom fighters. Faced with annihilation on both sides, a crowded boat across 5,000km of Indian Ocean via Javanese middlemen to Australia, where so many of their kin prosperously populate places like Sydney's Strathfield and Melbourne's Mount Waverley, looks the safer option.

Likewise, Australians en groupe probably don't really know the ins and outs of the Afghan imbroglio, beyond the tabloid takeaway that the Taleban are cavemen who cloak women in burqas, deny their daughters education and want to Islamise the world, including Australia, and kill and terrorise as they do so. Of course, it's rather more complex than that but, eight years after 9/11, the extremists are again emboldened across the sub-continent. Sensible Afghans - most of them - are appalled by the Islamists but just as disgusted by the corrupt spinelessness of the Western-sponsored government that replaced them. The peaceful, democratic future we promised Afghans after 9/11 hasn't arrived, the power's still disconnected, that was an American plane that bombed Cousin Ahmed's wedding party and so that sleazy guy in the village who reckons he can get them a visa to some paradise called Australia - for a generous fee, of course - again starts to sound good.

Paradise? That's what Australia sure looks like on the ABC's regional TV service beamed free into the region. The DFAT-sponsored Australia Network's signature promo - ‘From Our World To Yours' - portrays Australia as a land of healthy white people in fashionable locales dining, swimming, sporting and sipping latte affluently with their well-shod families and gleaming teeth. That's great for attracting tourists from Japan - another war-torn hellhole, not so long ago - but it also looks pretty good on the communal tellies in Oruzgan and north-east Sri Lanka.

It reminds me of what I once witnessed in Tangier, across the Strait of Gibraltar from Europe, reporting on the local mafia smuggling desperate Africans who'd handed over their life savings to make the watery 20km dash across the Med to Spain. Getting ready to go, these poor buggers were captivated by the Spanish TV stations transmitting to Morocco, with their flashy boobs and consumerism and suggestion that Europe's streets are paved with gold. For many, it was the last TV they saw. The Tangerine gangsters sailed them a few kilometres off Andalucia after midnight, pointed at the costa's distant lights and marched their human cargo at gunpoint into the cold black sea. It's not like they learned to swim in Sierra Leone or Burkina Faso. Or Oruzgan.

And if you think Afghanistan's a problem, then Pakistan is fast becoming Afghanistan writ eight times larger. And though Indonesia, the exit point in this nasty map of dots, may have just evolved into the world's third biggest democracy after India and the US, there is something fundamentally cancerous about the archipelago that universal suffrage isn't fixing - the chronic corruption that allows people traffickers, Kevin Rudd's ‘scum of the earth', sanctuary there. It's all a bit of a worry, all those teeming masses.

Rudd says he wants Australia to become the West's most ‘Asia-literate' nation, lest we miss out on the economic bounty the region's masses promise. He has also proposed an Asian ‘community', a regional version of the European Union, and sent respected Australian foreign affairs mandarin Richard Woolcott on a tour of Asia's power centres to sell it.

As I see it, understanding something of Asia's possibilities, both ideas are commendable in their vision. But it is going to take more than generations to make Australians like Georgie think that he might have to consider learning Mandarin or Bahasa for his future, much less be able to find the countries that speak these languages in an atlas or, pace my wealthy businessman mate, meaningfully care about them.

Who's Georgie? He's the bloke I encountered reporting the Corby circus a few years back, one of the ‘Schappellites' who'd taken time away from their beach-and-Bintang Bali holiday to give ‘Our Schappelle' moral support in the Denpasar courtroom where she faced drug-trafficking charges. Georgie complained to me that he hadn't realised he would need a passport to visit Bali, perhaps imagining it as Australia's seventh state (maybe Rudd's vision of Asia is closer than he thinks) before he set off from Oz. And sometimes it was a bit hard for him to hear proceedings, because at a neighbouring temple some Hindu priests were chanting a Sanskrit kidung, as Balinese do. Or, as Georgie interpreted it, ‘I can't hear a bloody thing because of the Muslims goin' off.'

Actually, he didn't say Muslims. He said ‘Mewwwslims', and then launched into a tirade about Indonesian justice and somehow connected Schappelle's plight to the World Trade Center, the 2002 Sari Club bombings and Australia's tsunami aid.

Georgie maybe doesn't need to be a Bahasa speaker to make a living in the future, but he should know that Bali is Hindu and that it is not part of Australia. In the last week, I've been wryly amused that Australian talkback jocks speak knowledgably about India's Deccan Chargers, because good blokes like Andrew Symonds and Adam Gilchrist play in the Hyderabad-based IPL team, while casually talking about Chennai as if it's Collingwood. But the same shock jocks showed little interest last November as to why the Pakistani terrorists who laid siege to Bombay called themselves the Deccan Mujahideen, evoking the sub-continent's once-great Muslim empire based in, well, Hyderabad and stretching toward Chennai, and what the implications of that might be.

Events like the Corby circus - let's not forget the Channel Nine ‘worm' that showed 92 per cent of Australians regarded her as innocent - Hanson, the Tampa and now another asylum-seeker tragedy periodically surface, sometimes as moments of national madness, to remind us that Australia is a long way from becoming a part of the regional community that's more meaningful than just trade.

If Rudd's ‘AU', per the EU, grows legs, the people who will ultimately sign off on any nation-changing initiative as he imagines it will have to be somehow persuaded that Asia isn't an amorphous mass where Dodgy Things Happen, of religious zealots and corruptors desperate to come to Australia and steal our jobs, especially in this recession.

Many of Asia's prominent thinkers dismiss Rudd's Grand Asian Plan as dead in the water among Asian leaders before it gets any traction, and they are probably right. But that won't be because Asians don't accept this vision from Canberra, but more because it won't get to first base among Australians themselves. Ah, you say, we've embraced pad thai as the new meat-and-three-veg, and we know our nasi goreng from our nasi lemak, our paratha from our naan. And the suburbs are full of Lao and Khmers and Hmong, and our colleges of Malaysians and Taiwanese.

True, but I wonder how many Australians understand Asia's myriad differences, or care to. If Rudd wants to pull this off, he needs, gently but convincingly, to titillate more than our tastebuds. He needs to bring round sceptics to the inevitability of our geography, convince them that not all of Asia is in turmoil and threatening, even though the media's superficial reporting of the region often makes it seem that way. And, of course, places like Thailand need to quickly sort themselves out too.

Maybe my Bali interlocutor Georgie's granddaughters will one day become wealthy polyglot Asiaphiles, and the heirs of Alan Jones will culturally reference Lombok and Nagoya - the one in Indonesia as much as Japan - as instinctively as they now do London and New York. And when they do, we might know a little more about why desperate people are dying to come here. And discuss it - and maybe even solve it - without the unhinged clamour, fear and racism of recent weeks.