Asianising Australia

The Taliban have recently put to white Australia what in effect amounts to an ultimatum: either assimilate into Asia or get out.   Of course the wording was not quite as straight forward as that but at the same time they were not what you may call diplomatic either.nbsp  Mustafa Hamid's exact words were "It can either return to its motherland in Europe or reconcile with its Asian surroundings and assimilate into it as a wealthy and active member."   The irony of this is that Australian's, in general, tend to feel that when Asian peoples come to this country, even though we take great pains in telling the world how multicultural we are,  should assimilate with Australia.

If you remove the rhetoric from Hamid's article,  there is some truth in what he says.   Australia is geographically closer to Asia than to Europe, there is no argument there.   Culturally we are predominately European and our history links us to Europe.   But times,  and the world,  have changed since Captain Cook's fleet landed here some two hundred years ago.   Europe is trying to comes to terms with it's own unification and has little time for this,  not insignificant,  island at the bottom of the world.   We have,  in modern times,  tried desperately to ingratiate ourselves to the US by taking part in all their wars no matter how immoral some of those wars have been.   But even the world's sole remaining superpower has enough problems of her own to be overly concerned about what is happening down here.   Most American's have no idea where Australia is and a former President couldn't even get our Prime Minister's name right.  

The only direction Australia has to go is towards Asia.   It is true that in recent times some effort has been made to improve our relationship with Asia.   There is a free trade agreement in place with Malaysia,  Singapore and Thailand and our dialogue with ASEAN has improved to the extent that earlier this year Australia completed the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (AANZFTA).  So the signs are there albeit only economic gains.


I don't expect that advances in defense pacts will come quickly or easily,  yet this is an avenue Australia should be pursuing with more zeal.   There is something in the pipeline involving Japan but it does not appear to be a full defense pact,  more a defense supply agreement.   Australia has a defense pact with the US which does us no favours in Asia.   Some parts of Asia resent Australia's relationship with the US and see Australia as being America's guard dog in the region.   It would be crazy for us to break our ties with the US at this point in time but we should be looking to more actively pursue similar pacts with countries in our region in order to eventually do so.

Australia's future needs to be tied to Asia's future.   In order to take advantage of the promise that Asia's future holds we need to be making the right decisions now.