tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/what-is-australia-for-3156/articlesWhat is Australia for – The Conversation2012-06-19T20:14:57Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/76582012-06-19T20:14:57Z2012-06-19T20:14:57ZAustralia: moving on up from down under<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11751/original/69gyv5xw-1339657988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It's time to let go of our old identity.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Matthew McVickar</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Currently The Conversation, in conjunction with <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>, is publishing a series of provocations. Our authors are asking the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.</strong></p>
<p>Australia is on the move. Australia, this thinly populated bastion of the Atlantic-centered, English-speaking world, is drifting towards ever greater union with Asia. If you think this is yet another prognostication about the flow of socio-economic power from the Atlantic Ocean, and the resurgence of a world dominated by Indian and Pacific states, the truth is more literal. Our drift toward Asia is underpinned by something fundamental, a bedrock fact. </p>
<p>With each passing year, our continent drifts 70mm to the northeast towards the equator. This inexorable motion, which is happening at a velocity somewhere between the rate at which hair and fingernails grow, is driving us towards <a href="http://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/mbh/series.html">inevitable collision and amalgamation</a> with the Asian continent. It seems as though the geological processes underfoot are conspiring with world events to bring us even closer to the centre.</p>
<p>So, if we could afford to wait a few tens of millions of years, we would see our future in a new continental array that we can call <a href="http://www.scotese.com/futanima.htm">“Austrasia”</a>. </p>
<p>If we want to know how we got here, we can think of the present moment as a snapshot of a long-running geological motion picture lasting some 4.5 billion years. If our movie lasts for two hours, then each “geominute” of our film will encompass 37.5m years, and each “geosecond” represents a little more than 300,000 years. </p>
<p>To put this into perspective, had you been been distracted from the last five geoseconds of the film, you would have missed the entire emergence of <em>Homo sapiens</em> from Africa. Getting up for two geominutes to get something from the refrigerator would mean you missed the impact of a 10km asteroid into the Yucatan peninsula (in present-day Mexico), wiping out the dinosaurs and ushering in the Age of Mammals.</p>
<p>We should back up a few geominutes to get some perspective on where Australia has been, so that we see the changing position of our continent in both absolute terms, but also relative to other continents. From the standpoint of European colonists (arriving a ten-thousandth of a geosecond ago), the cultural and economic remoteness of Australia was imposed by geography (though physical geography is anthropomorphised geology with climate added in). This geological isolation of Australia was set into motion nearly 200m years ago. Before this time, Australia was more cosmopolitan, a citizen of the Gondwana supercontinent, that massive landbody occupying most of the Southern Hemisphere. The other member states – Africa, South America, India, Antarctica – were arranged in a fixed geometry that moved in unison, slowly drifting together for more than 300m years from the time of their first assembly.</p>
<p>During the Gondwana portion of Australia’s history, our flora and fauna were not improbable creatures surviving in nearly impossible conditions, the peculiar denizens of a dusty reliquary. At that time, Australia’s plants and animals were part of a broad family spread across the greater part of Gondwana. A classic example of a Gondwanan-type species are the marsupials, which, until recently, were the dominant mammals in South America. “Recently” in this case refers to the Pliocene epoch, 3-5m years ago (or 18 geoseconds ago in our film). That was when the closing of the isthmus of Panama allowed the invasion of North American placental mammals, decimating the ranks of South American endemic species in a story that is familiar to anyone in Australia. (Care to wager on the outcome of a race for survival between the bilby and the rabbit?) </p>
<p>Since the extinction of the native South American fauna happened before humans had colonised the Americas, and therefore in a guilt-free geological past, this tragedy is referred to in rather anodyne terms as the “The Great American Biotic Interchange”. Great for the migrants from the North, not so great for the South American species. With the exception of possums and armadillos, they were largely unable to penetrate the North American ecosystem from their geographic base in South America.</p>
<p>In a strange historical coincidence, the same man who laid the observational foundation for the biological invasion of South America, Alfred Russell Wallace, also defined the boundaries of Australian biogeography. A contemporary and colleague of Charles Darwin, Wallace spent many years in the Amazon basin, and then several more in the “East Indies”, more familiar to us as the region containing the modern countries of Indonesia and Malaysia. His observations of the distinct fauna populating different islands of the archipelago allowed him to draw a geographic boundary separating species of Asian affinities from those that derived from the Australian continent. This boundary is now known as the Wallace line, in his honour (scant honour indeed for the man whose findings finally goaded Darwin out of a 13-year reverie of barnacle studies into publishing On the Origin of Species). </p>
<p>Wallace was no stranger to the obscure; during his field studies in the East Indies, he collected about 80,000 specimens of beetle, but that was mostly for sale to collectors in order to finance his habit of making bad investments in British railroad concerns. Wallace is now best known as the father of biogeography, the study of changing patterns of species in different regions through time.</p>
<p>Digression aside, biogeography alone cannot answer our question about Australia’s past. After all, living organisms move around much faster than the continents. Our question about where Australia has been is really a question of paleogeography, the reconstruction of ancient continental configurations, a cartography of past worlds. If we want to know about the migration of Australia, we have to study the rocky bones of the continent itself. </p>
<p>One of the most important tools for our pursuit of paleogeography is paleomagnetism, the study of ancient magnetic directions preserved in rocks. Since the geometry of the Earth’s magnetic field varies with latitude, the fossilised record of past magnetic fields allows us to pinpoint the position and orientation of the continent in the past. This is possible because most rocks contain trace amounts of the minerals magnetite and hematite. Just like the needle in a magnetic compass points north, these minerals will become magnetically oriented by Earth’s magnetic field when they form, say, during the solidification and cooling of a hot, molten lava.</p>
<p>Using paleomagnetism as our compass, we can track the motion of Australia back continuously for at least the past 550m years (or roughly 15 minutes in our geofilm), but with increasing difficulty for time periods much older than that. These last 15 minutes of the geofilm begin with the period just after Gondwana had formed, with Australia at the easternmost portion of the great landmass. Given the near hemispheric girth of Gondwana, parts of the supercontinent could be located at very high, polar latitudes, while other regions could be located in balmy, tropical locations. So, it is helpful to concentrate only on Australia, which at this point 550m years ago, sat astride the equator, but rotated almost 90˚ clockwise from its present orientation. Slowly, the entire continent begins to rotate in a counterclockwise motion. </p>
<p>At one point, during the middle Devonian (370m years ago, or 10 minutes ago in our geofilm), the position of Australia was coincidentally almost identical to the modern position and orientation. So, the Canning Basin of northern Western Australia was the location for Devonian version of the Great Barrier Reef. Over the next 100m years, the position of Australia moved steadily south, towards more temperate zones, and finally to the edge of the Antarctic Circle by roughly 270m years ago (seven minutes ago, in our geofilm). Not surprisingly, the record of paleoclimate from this period of time alternates between dry glacial periods and moist, cool-temperate forests.</p>
<p>Finally, about 150m years ago, Australia begins to slowly move back towards the equator. Now something is different, for cracks are beginning to develop in the Gondwanan shield. These cracks were marked by large outpouring of basaltic lavas, such as the dolerite sills and dykes that form Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain. With time, these cracks would widen would widen into rift valleys, and rift valleys would become ocean basins. The splintering of Gondwana would give birth to the Indian, South Atlantic, and Southern Oceans - you can watch an animation of the splintering <a href="http://www.scotese.com/satlanim.htm">here</a>. For Australia, our last break-up would be with Antarctica. The cracks that had begun to develop in the late Cretaceous were already developing into a narrow ocean by the late Paleocene, roughly 55m years ago, or a little more than a minute of our geofilm.</p>
<p>It is in the last minute of our geofilm that the modern contours of Australia emerge, the geographic isolation imposed by the separate path we are drifting along.</p>
<p>Australia is now heading steadily northwest, and every year brings us closer to becoming part of Asia. Already we can see the effects of this in Timor. Timor, which is the northernmost edge of the Australian continental plate, is crumpling from the tectonic strain brought about by the slow-motion collision with Indonesia. Antipodal only to the Atlantic, Australia will once again be part of a new supercontinent. Long live Austrasia!</p>
<p><em>Read more provocations at <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/what-is-australia-for">The Conversation</a> and at <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/7658/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eric Tohver receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Chevron Australia.</span></em></p>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Currently The Conversation…Eric Tohver, Associate Professor of Geology, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/75282012-06-18T20:39:32Z2012-06-18T20:39:32ZResearch for the future of Australia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11619/original/z7gn7njj-1339477202.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">How do we conduct research on the big problems so we can contribute to collective well-being?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ed Salkeld</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks The Conversation, in conjunction with <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>, is publishing a series of provocations. Our authors are asking the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.</strong></p>
<p>For centuries, the frontier of human knowledge has expanded through academic research. But despite large strides in the advancement of knowledge, great challenges still lie before our world, our society and our communities.</p>
<p>At the grandest level, we do not know how to make societies that are stable, prosperous and just; we do not know how to build cities that are beautiful and convenient; we do not know how to ensure good relationships; we do not know how to use technology to make ourselves wiser, rather than merely busier; we do not know how to bring out the best in everyone. True, these are vast aspirations for knowledge – but isn’t it beholden on universities to respond effectively to these and other challenges that face us?</p>
<p>Traditionally, universities have played a major role in research and innovation, particularly in basic research. In our world, universities are the single biggest concentration of research activity and the only institutions that undertake research in all its relevant aspects. The unwritten, but real, social contract for universities includes – as a crucial element – the idea that universities are organisations that deploy resources to conduct research on the big problems in such a way as to contribute to collective well-being.</p>
<p>The crucial issue for universities is how to hold together both the natural (if often inarticulate) aspiration towards the most important knowledge and its role as a place where that knowledge is sought.</p>
<p>This is the key question. How should we undertake research to create the kind of valuable knowledge that is needed, and bring it powerfully to effect in the world?</p>
<p>Today, there are essentially two approaches to research. One is curiosity-driven where research questions are determined by the curiosity of the individual researcher. It is based on the premise that the scientific discovery process is essentially unpredictable. We stumble upon discoveries. And our findings will trickle down serendipitously through society and at some stage find their applications. A large part of today’s academic research is curiosity-driven.</p>
<p>The other approach to research is mission-driven. Here, the research effort is organised around missions that are important to science and to society – our grand challenges.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://griffithreview.com/images/stories/edition_articles/ed36/provocations/john%20armstrong%20and%20carsten%20murawski%20-%20merchants%20of%20light.pdf">recent article</a> in the Griffith REVIEW we advocate that universities embrace a mission-driven model of research, while at the same time keeping the high standards of scientific enquiry developed within academic disciplines.</p>
<p>An integral aspect of any mission-driven model is the integration of research efforts across disciplines in a way that is best suited to achieve a research goal. We call the latter “vertical integration”, as opposed to “horizontal integration”, integration of research within a specific academic discipline.</p>
<p>Mission-driven research, in combination with vertical integration, can have tremendous advantages. It organises the research effort in a way that best achieves the goals important to society. It will lead to the creation of multidisciplinary teams of researchers and encourage collaborations beyond the boundaries of disciplines and institutions. It may also bring new expertise to bear on important problems.</p>
<p>But ideally integration of universities with the rest of society would not just happen in research. We need (for example) businesses to tell the teaching staff of universities the skill sets they need graduates to have. And we need educators to prepare students better for their lives outside of university.</p>
<p>So what to do? A good starting point is to consider an aptitude or skill which (if widely enough dispersed) could increase our chances of succeeding in one of the headline grand challenges.</p>
<p>For instance, we are in general not very good at making decisions which reflect our longer-term well-being. And this cognitive weakness undermines almost all collective effort to address our real needs. So a major task for higher education would be to work how to improve this capacity across whole societies. But the task is not merely theoretical: it is practical – you need to actually do it.</p>
<p>Such an undertaking expands rapidly not only across disciplines (can art, for instance, instill prudence – as <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pous/hd_pous.htm">Poussin claimed</a>?) but into the business world – where some of the largest commercial entities like pension funds and insurance companies have a deep interest in promoting prudent behaviour. And, of course, this is in alignment with the conditions for successful democracies, in which the passions and rhetoric of the day win out against the long-term project of creating a civilised society.</p>
<p>Or consider the capacity to form stable and satisfying long-term relationships. This capacity is poorly distributed and the consequences (at present) are vast and unfortunate. It may be that we understand quite a lot about how good relationships are established and maintained, but this knowledge is mostly inert. We don’t know how to make this ability normal and pervasive in the western world.</p>
<p>But it may well be that improving the quality of our relationships is an important factor in tackling many other huge issues: the funding of retirement, the improvement of early years education, age care, the quality of mental health.</p>
<p>The point is to see how integrated these great tasks are. And that the ideal of an integrated response provides universities with a massive opportunity – although growing into these opportunities may involve some awkward transitions.</p>
<p>It may well be – for instance – that it is only through much deeper and more intelligent relations with commerce that it is actually possible to harness the resources necessary for the task. And that is a hard thought for universities to address. The vertical integration of research is an ideal founded on devotion to the common good; it harnesses commerce not because it is commercially minded – but commerce is such an elemental feature of how the world works that it plays an inevitable part in addressing our grandest challenges.</p>
<p><em>Read more provocations at <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/what-is-australia-for">The Conversation</a> and at <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/7528/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carsten Murawski receives funding from the Australian Centre for Financial Studies and Janus Capital Asia Ltd.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Armstrong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks…John Armstrong, Philosopher, The University of MelbourneCarsten Murawski, Economist, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71702012-06-18T05:27:00Z2012-06-18T05:27:00ZWe can’t compete on cheap and nasty; let’s be a country that makes high-quality, lasting things<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11493/original/v3g5trm9-1339032897.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Embracing an Australia that makes things doesn't mean taking backwards steps.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pizzodisevo/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks The Conversation, in conjunction with <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>, is publishing a series of provocations. Our authors are asking the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.</strong></p>
<p>When BlueScope Steel announced in August 2011 it was about to close one of its Port Kembla blast furnaces and cease steel exports, Australian Workers’ Union national secretary Paul Howes asked, “do we want to be a country that still makes things? Do we want to value-add to our natural resources, or do we want to become just one big sandpit for China?”</p>
<p>Australia should think positively of its future as a country that makes things. Exactly what things we make, and how we make them, is the difficult part of the equation.</p>
<p>Making things does not necessarily require backwards steps to a protectionist era when import tariffs meant artificially cheap Australian fridges, shoes or cars. But nor is making things in Australia necessarily dependent on competing with low wages in China or India for “bread and butter” manufacturing. That presumes we join in the “race to the bottom” through cheapening labour and relaxing environmental standards. Judging by the spectacular failure of Howard’s WorkChoices in 2007, Australians won’t accept cuts in wages and conditions in the name of global competitiveness (and in any case our reserve army of labour is just too small). Likewise, although cynicism towards Federal Government policies on climate change is at an all-time high, Australians care deeply about the environment (especially our beaches, national parks, air and water quality) and won’t accept deterioration in how industrial waste is handled simply so things can be made more cheaply.</p>
<p>So, in the face of seemingly impossible competition abroad, the question is whether it is worthwhile making things here in Australia at all?</p>
<p>The Sydney Morning Herald’s economics commentator, Ross Gittins, seems to think not. Gittins <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/passing-the-hat-to-save-manufacturing-not-forward-looking-20110830-1jk1e.html">editorialised</a> in August last year that the decline in manufacturing in Australia was part of an inevitable and permanent transition, a “historic shift in the structure of the global economy as the Industrial Revolution finally reaches the developing countries”. Rich countries such as Australia must now find other things to do to replace manufacturing. We can dig up resources to supply manufacturers in China. We can focus on the so-called “knowledge” industries (where a product’s value is in its intellectual or design content, not its material fabrication). We can export “know-how” rather than physical commodities. </p>
<p>Hence for Gittins, “the knowledge economy is about highly educated and skilled workers… Jobs in the knowledge economy are clean, safe, value-adding, highly paid and intellectually satisfying”. The Herald’s business editor and ex-television commentator, Michael Pascoe, <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/business/barbienomics-the-reality-of-manufacturing-20110831-1jl6y.html">agrees</a>: “Australia’s never going back to having armies of people sewing buttons on shirts and gluing shoes together. Or at least, we should hope not.” </p>
<p>This line of thinking oversimplifies what we mean by manufacturing. It smuggles into the debate certain assumptions (manufacturing work is unsafe, deskilled and unsatisfying, requiring uneducated workers) that don’t match with existing manufacturing workers, their skills, or how lots of things are now made. Australians have become expert producers of hearing aids, hi-fi speakers, agricultural equipment, kayaks, saddles, metal detectors, four-wheel-drive accessories, satellite dishes, shock absorbers, musical instruments, and many other “quality” things. None of them rely on cheap labour or deskilled or uneducated workers. Most are made by small firms - hardly the mythic Fordist factory. According to the <a href="http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/oecd-factbook-2011-2012_factbook-2011-en">OECD</a>, 88% of Australia’s manufacturing firms have fewer than 10 employees. Australia has four times the proportion of employment in such small firms than that much-touted manufacturing miracle, Germany.</p>
<p>Andrew Warren, an economic geographer at the University of Wollongong, <a href="https://theconversation.com/once-a-cultural-icon-is-australias-surfboard-industry-destined-to-disappear-7001">details a great example</a> - the Australian custom surfboard industry. In contrast to cheap mass-produced surfboards, which are imported from China, Warren describes how our cultural and natural advantages as a nation of coastal-dwellers have given Australia global dominance in custom surfboard production. Custom-making surfboards is a far cry from spitting out sneakers or cheap plastic toys: it requires craftsmanship, artistic flair, precise environmental knowledge of prevailing wave types and dynamics, a sense of care for the finished product and connection with the consumer who will use it. Innovation, creativity and knowledge are not separate from making quality physical things, but are deeply embedded in them.</p>
<p>Some products, such as paint, continue to be made in Australia because they are heavy and expensive or tricky to transport. Others - such as high-tensile steel and mining equipment - are made here because the construction, defence and resources sectors want customised products and ongoing support. They need manufacturers who respond quickly, can visit in person and who speak the same language. Distance and speed still matter despite the more-integrated nature of the global economy. All countries need a certain amount of locally based production, and necessarily so because factors of production other than cost of labour are significant.</p>
<p>Our natural and human resources are also geographically differentiated within Australia: skills and materials are not evenly distributed, but clustered and specialised. Sydney does financial services, Wollongong does not – and probably never will. But Wollongong has coal, steel, enormous port capacity and specialised knowledge in industrial design, machinery, operational health and safety, robotics and battery cell technology. </p>
<p>The thousand workers that lost their jobs at Port Kembla are not likely to get replacement jobs as graphic designers, financial advisers or lawyers. To suggest that workers in specialised regions must adjust to an inevitable shift to the knowledge economy is little short of what English academic John Lovering has called a “<a href="http://egrg.org.uk/pdfs/lovering.pdf">transition fantasy</a>”. It is calling on sacked factory workers to achieve the impossible by reinventing themselves as something they are not, or are unlikely to want to be. Meanwhile re-educating masses of workers already skilled in something useful is inefficient and expensive.</p>
<p>Steelworkers’ skills could form the basis of new kinds of industries geared towards solar, wind and sustainable building technologies. Reading the writing on the wall, the <a href="http://www.sclc.com.au/content/greenjobs.php">South Coast Labour Council</a> has made efforts towards exactly this in Wollongong, with some limited federal and state funding. But if we are to seriously compete with countries such as Germany, much, much more is needed. Through massive public investment, others have already leaped well ahead of us. Germany now holds more than <a href="http://www.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_50475829_1_1_1_1,00.html">17,000 patents</a> for new green production technologies. The private sector cannot be relied upon to fund the long lead-time in research and development, nor should we expect it to wear continual losses in the early years when fledgling new products are developed. </p>
<p>Massive public investment in manufacturing doesn’t have to be nostalgic or nationalistic. Rather, in a more calculating fashion, governments could take seriously the possibility that there are regional competitive advantages already in the hands and minds of manufacturing workers. These are not obsolete people, regions or skills; serious long-term investment could help gear their skills towards future needs. </p>
<p>The biggest challenges are posed by climate change and the pressing need to integrate human and ecological systems. If we are to reduce carbon emissions, we must find ways to make things that last, that can be repaired, recycled or reused. The end-game of economic globalisation and low-cost labour is one where the only stuff we buy is cheap, poor-quality and disposable, to be replaced shortly by more cheap, poor-quality, disposable stuff. This kind of high-throughput existence isn’t tenable for humans if we are to take seriously the challenges of climate change or the need to conserve habitat and resources.</p>
<p>Ruth Lane from Monash University argues precisely this point in <a href="http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409408154">Material Geographies of Household Sustainability</a>. We must connect a sense of stewardship to the ordinary things in our lives: our appliances, furniture, clothes, toys, electronics. Stewardship over material goods is a crucial ingredient in producing more sustainable households: whether people consume less, look after the things they have, repair rather than replace, or recycle materials more comprehensively when they are no longer useful. People are more likely to feel a sense of stewardship over things when they are well made and clearly involve human ingenuity, care and creativity. </p>
<p>Imagining manufacturing as only ever guided by global market forces towards low-costs and cheap prices is the low-road alternative. To shift manufacturing offshore doesn’t alter its unpalatable elements: it simply sends the dirty, unsafe and poorly-paid elements of making things to some other country – an option that surely isn’t morally defensible if we want to uphold labour and environmental standards here in Australia, or make a difference to climate change. Some responsibility must rest with the consumer to buy things that last, to look after them throughout their lifecycle and “un-make” them conscientiously, through how we deal with waste. Addressing this would go some way towards kicking our addiction to the fruits of cheap offshore manufacturing.</p>
<p>One option is to revisit the basic notion of the economy as the “proper husbanding of material resources”, as<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718506001904">Timothy Mitchell</a>, New York University’s Professor of Politics, puts it. This was a notion much more widespread in earlier decades of the 20th century, and it got Australia through the Great Depression. It could be revived now and inflected with a contemporary twist in light of climate change. What matters less is whether or not we want to make things, and more that we want to make high quality things that last, with decent wages and environmental standards, and that these things are available widely to all Australians.</p>
<p>Such thinking is not new: it underpinned the arts and crafts movement in early 20th century architecture and furniture, and the Bauhaus school in industrial design. Both were utopian visions of how to arrange production to maximise quality, democratise the possession and use of well-made things, and to nurture human creativity. Inklings of a revival in such thinking include:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>the trend towards hand-made things gaining pace in the inner-city set (made-to-measure suits, shirts and skirts, bespoke cabinetry)</p></li>
<li><p>the thriving antique market for well designed mid-20th century second-hand goods (objects that often survive precisely because they were of a high quality, from an era when the “proper husbanding of material resources” was an overriding moral principle)</p></li>
<li><p>the broader shift across Australian households towards purchasing goods as longer-term investments rather than as disposable items.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>There is also a link to a feminist take on “economy”, valuing and recognising the different forms of domestic and non-capitalist work that are productive, and not just a prerequisite to industrial development. We are a country that makes things all the time – we make babies, cakes, meals, beds, homes. Such things are not separate from the productive economy; in the sense of furnishing humans with the means to subsistence, they <em>are</em> the economy.</p>
<p>This is, then, an image of Australia with respect for the skills required to design and make things, and proper stewardship of our natural resources. The offshore manufacturing model of making things cheaply and replacing them often only works if consumers throw out things before their utility is exhausted, if resources are plentiful, and if labour is perennially cheap. </p>
<p>Australia cannot compete with this production of cheap and nasty stuff. But we do have choices whether to participate in this torrent of production and consumption – choices as consumers, voters, families, workers. We know that resources are not infinite, and as the global economy looks increasingly shaky, more people are choosing not to replace the phone, television or car quite as often. Consumers want, and will buy, quality things made in Australia that suit Australian conditions best. There are likely export markets too for such things, even with the high dollar. What counts is how we value the making of things, beyond cheap labour, and beyond a narrow view of what constitutes the Australian economy.</p>
<p><em>Read more provocations at <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/what-is-australia-for">The Conversation</a> and at <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/7170/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Gibson receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks…Chris Gibson, Director, UOW Global Challenges Program & Professor of Human Geography, University of WollongongLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/73082012-06-15T00:24:02Z2012-06-15T00:24:02ZBeyond setting an example: what is Australian environmental policy for?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11179/original/q4wx72bk-1338342215.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Australia could have led the world in assessing projects for their economic, social and environmental impacts, but we lost our nerve.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks The Conversation, in conjunction with <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>, is publishing a series of provocations. Our authors are asking the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.</strong></p>
<p>Throughout the debate about establishing a carbon price, one of the most-cited reasons for Australia taking action was that we could <a href="https://theconversation.com/australias-contribution-matters-why-we-cant-ignore-our-climate-responsibilities-1863">encourage others to act</a> by doing so. We could model to the rest of the world behaviour consistent with a sustainable future. There is no doubt that we could, in principle, fill that role if we had the collective political will. The problem is that we have steadily and systematically retreated from that position.</p>
<p>It could all have been so different. A crucial turning point was the report of the Resources Assessment Commission into the <a href="http://www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/public/adt-QGU20030226.100510/index.html">proposed mine for gold and palladium</a> at Coronation Hill in the Northern Territory. The RAC was established by the Hawke government specifically to advise on developments like this which raise complex economic, social and environmental questions. The RAC provided clear advice in each of those areas, but it declined to make an overall recommendation for or against the mine. Its reasoning was that weighing up the costs and benefits was a social value judgement which should be made by elected politicians. </p>
<p>This could have been seen as a model for informed and responsible decisions: an expert body quantifies the information in each of the three main areas, economic, social and environmental, allowing elected politicians to make the judgement call in the light of the overall costs and benefits. The Cabinet fell into line with Bob Hawke’s view that the economic benefits did not justify the environmental risks and the social costs to Indigenous people, but the politicians were clearly uncomfortable with the process, which forced them to show their values. The outcome was also the last straw for the forces within the government wanting a more simplistic economic policy agenda. </p>
<p>Within weeks Hawke had been overthrown and replaced by Keating, who disbanded the RAC. So we no longer have any process for weighing up the overall cost and benefits of major proposals. What politicians get is detailed financial assessments, superficial environmental assessments commissioned by proponents to show that the impacts are acceptable, and no attempt to assess social impacts apart from some simplified and usually optimistic calculation of the number of jobs that might be created. Not surprisingly, the elected politicians usually approve the proposal, effectively having only heard the case for the prosecution rather than a balanced assessment.</p>
<p>The reports of the working groups set up by the Hawke government to consider Ecologically Sustainable Development [ESD] led to COAG’s 1992 adoption of the National Strategy for ESD, with a consolidated set of recommendations that commanded widespread support at the time. Most are still gathering dust in Canberra pigeon-holes, despite the evidence that they would have brought economic and social benefits as well as environmental improvements. </p>
<p>Earlier in 1992 Australia had supported Agenda 21 and the Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio Earth Summit, but the tide was already turning. The 1993 election was a contest between Keating’s relatively conservative approach and John Hewson’s “Fightback!” agenda, which proposed explicitly taking Australia to an extreme market-oriented approach. Hewson lost what the Coalition had regarded as an unlosable election. When John Howard eventually became the leader, he was clearly determined not to repeat Hewson’s mistake of telling the electorate in advance how far back he would take environmental protection. His approach of retrospectively disowning what he christened “non-core promises” allowed a systematic dismantling of environmental protection, despite pre-election assurances. (I have written at length about this issue in Robert Manne’s book, <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/7782727">The Howard Years</a>.) </p>
<p>Suffice to say that we now have very few instances of projects which have commercial backing being blocked to prevent environmental harm. The only front-page example in recent years was environment Minister Peter Garrett’s decision to <a href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/timeline-of-the-traveston-crossing-dam-proposal-20091111-i8bb.html">block the proposed Traveston Crossing dam</a>, a project that was proving an electoral liability to the Queensland government. Very few commercial developments have ever been prevented on environmental grounds, but there are still calls from business interests – and some extremely short-sighted State governments - to wind back what they have called “<a href="https://theconversation.com/spinning-green-tape-as-the-climate-changes-6632">green tape</a>”.</p>
<p>The first national report on the <a href="http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/1996/publications/report/index.html">state of the environment</a> in 1996 said that Australia had serious problems that needed to be addressed to achieve the stated goal of ecologically sustainable development. Three consecutive reports have each said that all the most serious problems are worsening. The basic issue remains the same. As the 2012 report of the UN high level panel on sustainability observed, the fundamental obstacle is that decision-makers still see sustainability as a fringe consideration of lower importance than the core business of economic management. </p>
<p>The most obvious indicator of this mindset is the approach to population. Successive governments have supported rapid population growth in the belief that this is good for the economy, despite signs of increasing social tensions caused directly by high levels of immigration and despite the clear evidence that all significant environmental problems are made more difficult to manage by increasing population. Serious economic analysis shows that there may be a slight benefit in per capita wealth to set against declining lifestyle opportunities, but it is at best only a small benefit. Our rate of population growth is unusually high by OECD standards, but this is cheered by most politicians rather than being seen as a problem. My recent book, <a href="http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780702239090/bigger-or-better-australia-s-population-debate">Bigger or Better?</a> Australia’s Population Debate, shows how superficial much of the discussion is and the extent to which short-term economics trumps social tension, environmental harm and long-term economic impacts in the decision-making calculus.</p>
<p>So what do we have to offer the world in environmental terms? Not our approach to integrating sustainability into decision-making, which was abandoned 20 years ago. Not our ensuring that environmental harm is prevented by independent assessment and decision-making, since our approach is fundamentally weighted in favour of commercial interests. Not our response to climate change, having demanded an outrageously generous target in the Kyoto negotiations and having done almost nothing since to curb the growth in energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. Despite weird claims by some commercial interests that the package introduced by the Gillard government imposes draconian charges on productive enterprise, Australia lags well behind most advanced nations in responding to climate change. Not our approach to product stewardship, since successive state and Commonwealth governments have supported the use by coal producers of the drug-dealer’s defence: there is a demand there, if we don’t supply the product somebody else will, we are not in any way responsible for what people do with the product or any harm it may cause. Not our approach to responsible consumption, since the failure to restrain irresponsible developers has led to our having the largest new houses in the world, despite continuing shrinkage in average occupation levels. Not our protection of productive land, since State governments have allowed minerals extraction and residential development to sterilise some of the most important food producing areas.</p>
<p>If we have anything to show the world, it is that many aspects of the Australian environment remain in relatively good condition. This is not a result of wise stewardship or a mature political culture, but simply a reflection of the fact that we still have a relatively small population for a very large continent. Quite big areas, especially in the northern half of the country, remain relatively unspoiled. These areas are threatened by a manic rush for economic development in general and resource extraction in particular, but in many places the damage is not yet irreparable. </p>
<p>There remains the possibility that a more mature approach to development could yet make us a model for other countries. I have argued for many years that we could be a shining example; if it is not possible for 22 million people to live sustainably on our resources, what prospect is there for other nations? Of course, the obverse is true; if our immaturity and short-sightedness makes us incapable of living sustainably, the prospects for global civilisation are very bleak indeed.</p>
<p><em>Read more provocations at <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/what-is-australia-for">The Conversation</a> and at <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/7308/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Lowe is President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.</span></em></p>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks…Ian Lowe, Emeritus Professor, School of Science, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71722012-06-14T00:28:44Z2012-06-14T00:28:44ZBush, beach, beer and bayonet - or a grown-up Australia in Asia?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11350/original/rkx45v9b-1338791027.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Don't we want to be interesting, relevant, useful, independent and well-informed?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gary Hayes</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks The Conversation, in conjunction with <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>, is publishing a series of provocations. Our authors are asking the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.</strong></p>
<p>Dawn at Bondi reveals a snapshot of today’s Australia: nightclubbed couples prone on the sand, Chinese tripod photographers framing the sunrise, young women lifesavers marching to Scotland the Brave, laconic line-fishermen trying for a feed of whiting, boot-camp fitness instructors yelling at the northern end of the beach, silent yoga and tai chi practitioners on the southern ledge, human shark bait swimming between the two, and the driver of a sand-grooming machine having a smoko with a council garbage-picker. People arrive at Bondi in waves throughout the day, bringing, binning or taking away the duties and diversions of their many diverse demographics. The whole thing is a continuous animated cartoon. It’s the Australian beach cliché, updated.</p>
<p>Australia, you could even say, is a country of clichés. We inherit them, we reproduce and export them. Then others play them back to us from abroad. So often have we heard them repeated that we forget to ask what they mean and if they are still relevant, and unthinkingly we let them become mandatory. Australians wear the clichés as obligatorily as sheltering hats, rashies, and sunscreen, and swim obediently between them. We are regularly assured that these flags of identity will preserve us from whatever rips and currents may lie beyond our security zone or excised territory. </p>
<p>Our tourism clichés led a Japanese ambassador, a few years ago, to joke that shorthand for Australia in his country was KK – kangaroos and koalas, RR – rock and reef, and LLL – large, lucky and lazy. Boat people all, we inculcate the Australian clichés in new arrivals too. John Howard even set tests on them, though he was quick to deplore “the endless seminar on the national identity”.</p>
<p>Our obsession with identity is a cliché in itself. I am, you are, we are Australyun. As Barry Humphries, cliché aficionado par excellence (now there’s a string of them), used to sing, “all ye who do not love her, ye know where ye can go”.</p>
<p>We all know the list of our clichés by heart, not that it’s challenging: they are simple and mostly self-deprecating. In culture, advertising and politics, the overarching cliché is that of the Australian “way of life”. It has four components: bush, beach, beer and bayonet. English landscape romanticism laid the seedbed for images of the bush poet, the leathery, laconic drover, the lost child, the lonely wife, the Southern Cross, and the sunlit plains extending. Irish resistance bred the bushranger, the rebel, and the republican. The boozing larrikin came from the currency lads. Whig egalitarianism created mateship, then sports fanatics and surfies, and eventually slobs, bikies and bogans. </p>
<p>In Australian suburbs, novelist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_(novelist)">David Foster</a> claimed a few years ago, two categories of homeowner are recognisable from the street: the handyman and the drunkard. Australia’s two cultures, if you like, with women, children, and all our ethnicities scarcely rating a mention. Beer and barbecues are what Australians supposedly live on, but we may in fact consume more wine, soy sauce, and even books. Bush nationalism remains the default Australian cultural narrative, even now, when Australia rides on minerals conveyors, not on the sheep’s back; when our population is one of the world’s most urbanised and multicultural; and when the closest most Australians get to the wide brown land is a suburban block, a McMansion, the view from a high-rise unit, or a fly-in fly-out job.</p>
<p>Tourism promoters everywhere thrive on clichés, and so do the airlines, which is why you should never judge a country by its brochure. National occasions bring out grand parades of clichés. The Australian icons that opened the Sydney 2000 Olympics mystified many foreign observers who didn’t detect its self-satire, and annoyed others, like visiting Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Irritated by Oi Oi Oi, <a href="http://epress.anu.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ch051.pdf">he wrote that</a> “everyone made a great racket, drank copious amounts of beer, and sang Waltzing Matilda about fifty times”. But we insiders recognised Director of Ceremonies Ric Birch’s skilful send-up of the clichés: the stockhorse parade, Hills hoist, Victa mower, and corrugated iron, the flora and fauna, and a huge banner saying “G’day”. </p>
<p>They were invoked again by Baz Luhrmann in his 2008 movie Australia, which seemed as much a promotion for tourism and Bundaberg Rum as it was an introduction for Americans to a fanciful Australian history. Coles supermarkets in 2012 promoted Australia Day with food to be consumed around barbecues, much of it labelled with brands formerly Australian-owned, and prawns that were most likely imported. </p>
<p>At such times, a collective wince can be heard around the world from Australian expatriates, and from diplomats who are supposed to encourage regard abroad for Australia as a “clever country” of diversity, talent, innovation and multiculturalism. But when asked to appear in national dress, and to produce Australian cuisine, the temptation is to default to beer, barbecue, and bushman’s clobber, for want of better. As one of them <a href="http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1096&context=theses">lamented to a PhD researcher</a>, “Australia has no national dress, national songs nor literature that are widely embraced … and we are left with an apologetic use of indigenous imagery (which most of us do not understand), Crocodile Dundee images of the outback (where few of us live), kangaroos (which we shoot) and Kylie. Hardly enough to define a country”. A national narrative made up of bush, beach, and beer (or Bundy) clichés, modest and harmless as they are, is anachronistic. It sells Australia short, or not at all.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11346/original/8rhvx22g-1338789286.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11346/original/8rhvx22g-1338789286.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11346/original/8rhvx22g-1338789286.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11346/original/8rhvx22g-1338789286.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11346/original/8rhvx22g-1338789286.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11346/original/8rhvx22g-1338789286.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11346/original/8rhvx22g-1338789286.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">mugley/Flickr</span></span>
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<p>National identity seems, like nature, to abhor a vacuum, so into the space where a different Australian narrative might live and grow slouches the digger, originally a gold-seeking opportunist, later a ten-bob-a-day volunteer in the AIF, then <a href="http://www.anzacsite.gov.au/1landing/bean.html">sanitised by CEW Bean</a>, and blown up into a heroic Anzac. He is ennobled on large monuments in Australian cities and on small ones in country towns, on honour rolls in RSLs and private schools and on wooden panels in railway stations. </p>
<p>This is the bayonet cliché, the one that is not harmless but aggressive, not modest but big-noting (as <a href="http://arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/people/robin-gerster/">Robin Gerster</a> has called it). Blameless Australians in every generation since European settlement have fought and died, first in British conflicts and later in American ones. Few of them went to war to be big-noted, and some old diggers now want no more of it. But this brave, conditioned, or pointless behaviour – depending on your point of view – was what dominions were expected to do. </p>
<p>Wars provided a political stockwhip with which successive Australian leaders rounded up the waverers and instilled patriotism. WM Hughes’ conscription referendum taught politicians never again to ask the people for their views on being sent to war. Nor did they ever invite voters to decide who Australia’s enemies were. To this day an Australian prime minister can more easily send troops into conflict than can a president of the United States, as John Howard demonstrated in 1999, 2002 and 2003. </p>
<p>Every year, in the countdown to Anzac Day, the muffled drumbeats begin again in the news media, another generation of young enthusiasts turns up at dawn services, and spines shiver to <a href="http://allpoetry.com/poem/8528573-For_The_Fallen-by-Robert_Laurence_Binyon">Laurence Binyon</a> and the Last Post. As if Alan Seymour’s classic 1960 play, <a href="http://www.wyongdramagroup.com.au/OneDayFiles/OneDayDirectorsNotes.pdf">The One Day of the Year</a>, had never been written, war books and television documentaries keep the bayonet cliché alive, ready for the next war. So do Australia’s overseas representatives: in Paris in July last year, in the vast public space of the Harry Seidler-designed embassy, the only display was of brochures in English for Australians visiting World War I battle sites.</p>
<p>Our cultural and public diplomacy may <a href="http://www.ifacca.org/publications/2007/08/17/australias-public-diplomacy-building-our-image/">have its deficits</a>, but that does not inhibit our export of the bayonet cliché. The first Australians ever encountered by the people in several Asian countries were in uniform, whether they came as enemies or allies. The same was true, of course, for Indigenous Australians, and for many people in Africa and the Middle East. Australians have taken part in some 19 wars, and only once in defence of Australia. </p>
<p>Putting on military uniforms so often has hereditary consequences for the national mindset. Writing from Malaysia in 2000, Vin D’Cruz and William Steele <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Australia_s_Ambivalence_Towards_Asia.html?id=89C_QgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">detected</a> a “militarist streak in the Australian psyche”. That impression was powerfully reinforced, lest we forget, by the Iraq invasion, in which Australia was observably the only country in our region whose troops were there from the start. Howard’s threat in November 2002 to make first strikes against terrorists in neighbouring countries was widely noticed in Asian capitals, as <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/About_face.html?id=sbRyAAAAMAAJ">were reports</a> that he saw Australia as the “strong man of Asia” and the United States’ “deputy sheriff”.</p>
<p>But Howard merely confirmed what many in the region already knew from experience of Australia. Japanese <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/About_face.html?id=sbRyAAAAMAAJ">surveyed at the time</a> of the Iraq invasion saw Australia as a militaristic nation, more so even than heavily-armed Japan. Many Indonesians remain convinced that Australia is a military threat (just as some Australians see Indonesia), poised for invasion. Chinese official media have asked whether Australia thinks it is a bat or a bird – an independent country or not.</p>
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<p>Far from seeking to dispel such impressions, the Rudd and Gillard governments have <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-a-us-marine-base-in-darwin-really-a-good-idea-4260">opened military bases</a> in Australia’s north to United States marines, with no clear explanation of their purpose, no sunset or review clauses, no clarity about whose law will apply to them, and no assurance that they will not make Australia a target in a future American war. Worse, the notion is now being dribbled out that the Cocos (Keeling) Islands may <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-28/gillard-tight-lipped-on-us-drones-claim/3916460">take the place</a> of Diego Garcia and become a permanent United States base on Australian soil. </p>
<p>Successive Australian governments have progressively degraded our sovereignty, widening the scope of the ANZUS treaty far beyond its intent, allowing Americans to choose our wars and our enemies for us, and thus undermining what little independence we have in defence and foreign policy. They are circumscribing our trade policy and our economy too, since one of those putative enemies is China, Australia’s biggest trading partner. Yet prime ministers continue eagerly to send Australians to war, and then, as always, line up for the cameras when the bodies return. Their hope of winning khaki elections, it seems, eclipses any thought of seeking peace in our region, or of representing Australia as a conscientious party to the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation – which, in apparent conflict with ANZUS, forbids its parties to threaten or use force.</p>
<p>Australia has, Gareth Evans <a href="http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2031969">once said</a> with masterly understatement, “something of an image problem”. That was in 1991. To this day, ignorance, negativity, irritation and even hostility towards Australia persist in several of our neighbours and important trading partners in Asia – and for good reason. So militarised is Australia’s widespread image that the children’s puzzle book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wheres-Bin-Laden-many-others/dp/1741103320">Where’s Bin Laden?</a> identifies Australians in London by their old army uniforms and slouch hats. Take away the bayonet cliché, after all, and what would be left to distinguish Australians, in their current Afghanistan gear, from Americans? </p>
<p>It makes sense for any country, finding itself in this situation and hoping to improve the image it has created and exported, to address the perceptions held by others, the reality of its own behaviour, and the deficiencies in its self-representation. If it is true that Australia’s national narrative is clichéd, static, anachronistic, and damaging, then it needs revision, and when better to do this than now, in what’s being called the <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/australia-in-the-asian-century">Asian Century</a>? What better time than when Australia is seeking a seat on the UN Security Council?</p>
<p>An alternative Australian narrative is available, if we choose to use it. Paradoxically, it’s unfamiliar to many, because mainstream historians and cultural commentators have traditionally ignored it. It’s the story of Australia in Asia, and it not only makes better sense of our evolving national experience than my five clichés, but also illuminates what distinguishes Australia from all Western countries. </p>
<p>For a start, it drops the notion that Australians don’t know or care about Asia. It dispenses with the notions of the “isolated outpost”, the “tyranny of distance”, and the “Asian hordes”. It recognises that in the mid to late 1800s people from China, Japan, India and other Asian nations joined the multicultural mix that was Australia, and that many Australians were also travelling to, living in, and learning from Asian countries, as they still do today. It acknowledges that many of the Australian connections that flourish within Asian societies are not new and strange, but centuries old and, if we read our history, familiar. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11349/original/qyrb8d28-1338790253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11349/original/qyrb8d28-1338790253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11349/original/qyrb8d28-1338790253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11349/original/qyrb8d28-1338790253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11349/original/qyrb8d28-1338790253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11349/original/qyrb8d28-1338790253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/11349/original/qyrb8d28-1338790253.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jung Moon</span></span>
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<p>There have always been Asian Australians, and “Asia-literate” Australians, many with far-sighted views that deserve more credit than they usually get. To cite only one example among many, in the early 20th century, Griffith Taylor, Professor of Geography at Sydney University, <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Anxious_nation.html?id=spS6AAAAIAAJ">challenged the White Australia policy</a> by pointing to the advantages of intermarriage between Australians and Chinese, and in 1923, proposed relaxation of immigration restrictions. He foresaw an “unprecedented amalgamation of peoples in the next few centuries”, urged Australia to develop closer contact with Asia, and well ahead of his time, anticipated China becoming a great power.</p>
<p>Whenever business opportunities beckoned, Australians hurried to Asian capitals. Culture, tradition, and religion lured others, and after World War II more Australian travellers, journalists, and writers developed a fascination for Asia. The <a href="http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/colombo_plan/index.html">Colombo Plan</a> in the 1950s, and the Whitlam government’s burial of the White Australia policy in the 1970s, enabled more Asian collaborations. The first tentative moves were made towards an Asian forum that would seek collaboration rather than confrontation or containment. The long peace after Vietnam, and the ascendancy of Northeast Asia, enabled Hawke to foster APEC, and Keating to engender more Asia-enthusiasm. But opportunism is transient, and peaks turn to troughs whenever we have wars, economic crises, terrorist attacks, or mass movements of migrants.</p>
<p>Today, acceptance of Australia in Asia remains a work in progress, both among Australians and in Asian countries. Asian regionalism is a large house whose inner sanctum is reserved for ten Southeast Asian nations. Three Northeast Asian ones inhabit the outer rooms, and three more occupy the veranda – Australia, India, and New Zealand. Who’s invited and who isn’t will be decided by those inside, and certainly not by Australia, as Kevin Rudd found when he <a href="http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/05/31/rudds-asia-pacific-plan-lost-at-sea/">suddenly and unsuccessfully</a> proposed an Asia Pacific Community in 2008. As a result, Australia lost its one chance of renting a room in an all-Asian house: allowed to mount the front steps, as it were, were two new guests, the United States and Russia. An American presence lurking inside Rudd’s Australian Trojan horse had been widely suspected, and the compromise was to offset that by inviting the Russians as well.</p>
<p>In the discourse, whenever something is called “Asia-Pacific”, that means it includes the United States, legitimised by their Hawaiian islands and Pacific West coast. The founders of APEC, remember – who originally conceived a forum for Australia and free-market economies in Asia – were pressured in 1979 to include the Americans, and then Canada and most of Latin America as well. And it was Robert Gates, as Defense Secretary, who declared in 2010 that any Asian regional organisation had to include the United States, which he said was “an Asian power”, “a resident power in Asia”. </p>
<p>What then are we to read into the omission of “Pacific” from the title of the Gillard government’s <a href="http://asiancentury.dpmc.gov.au/about">2012 White Paper</a> on the Asian Century? Does it distance itself from the United States? The Prime Minister has cultivated the United States and supported the alliance even more assiduously than her predecessor, and nothing she’s done suggests she is seeking defence or foreign policy independence: quite the opposite. </p>
<p>The idea for the Asian Century study was clearly a retirement brainchild of Ken Henry, and its terms of reference have economics all over them, with only passing references to defence, culture, or Australia’s national reputation, or even to our place in the regional architecture. There appears no acknowledgement at all of the fact that the discussion began in the late 1900s about an Asian Century, continued through the 20th century, and culminated in a <a href="http://www.mahbubani.net/book3.html">Singaporean author’s advocacy</a> in 2008 of the “new Asian hemisphere”. No doubt submissions to the committee will remind them of all that, and point out as well that our region is not solely about trade and investment.</p>
<p>The White Paper presents an opportunity for the Prime Minister to consider a new Australian way of thinking about Asia, one that draws on the past, but whose terms should now change radically. It requires rethinking of what Australia is for. There can be no better time to free ourselves of anachronistic clichés, put an end to peaks and troughs of Asia-enthusiasm, make the most of the rich variety of cultures that make Australia unique, and ensure that our society evolves in harmony with our neighbours. If this reconsideration results in Australia being seen in our region and around the world as an interesting, relevant, useful, independent country, and in our becoming the best informed people in the world about the affairs of Asia, it will have been worth doing.</p>
<p><em>Read more provocations at <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/what-is-australia-for">The Conversation</a> and at <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/7172/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison Broinowski receives funding from two ARC grants.</span></em></p>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks…Alison Broinowski, Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71712012-06-13T04:24:32Z2012-06-13T04:24:32ZThinking for money: moral questions for Australian research<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11252/original/65z3f4mb-1338440972.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Allocating research grants based on past projects and potential profits is immoral – it skews research and damages the academic psyche.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">URBAN ARTefakte</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks The Conversation, in conjunction with <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>, is publishing a series of provocations. Our authors are asking the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.</strong></p>
<p>The highest hopes for Australia are based on our intellectual capacity. We already have a substantial profile in education and research, underpinned by a vigorous culture of independent debate which promotes original scientific ideas, as well as theory and analytical narrative in the humanities. </p>
<p>So Australia is good for thinking. But I wonder: is it good for research? When it comes to how we do research – which perhaps represents the pinnacle of thinking – what moral, creative and cultural leadership does Australian research management offer?</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.arc.gov.au/applicants/certification.htm">criteria</a> that the <a href="http://www.arc.gov.au/">Australian Research Council</a> uses for evaluating applications (itself mirrored in numerous other research selection and evaluation processes) presents a potential moral deficiency. A very large proportion of the ARC’s judgement is attributed to the applicant’s track record, prompting the question: is it fair?</p>
<p>Imagine an undergraduate marking rubric where 40% of the grade is attributed to the marks that you got in your previous essays. Throughout secondary and tertiary education, we scrupulously hold to the principle that the work of the student is judged without prejudice on the basis of the quality of the work. The idea that we might be influenced by the student’s grade point average is preposterous.</p>
<p>Research managers would argue that grant processes are not about assessing research but assessing a proposal for future research. Proposals are funded on the basis of past research – which is reckoned to be predictive – as well as ideas for new work; and this prospective element makes it more analogous to a scholarship, which is decided on the basis of past scores in undergraduate performance. </p>
<p>But the problem with this logic is that each of those past scores from school to honours is established on the basis of fully independent evaluations (where at no stage is past performance counted), whereas many of the metrics used in research have a dirty component of past evaluations contaminating fresh judgements. </p>
<p>Another angle might be to compare research grants with employment. As with a selection process for appointing applicants to an academic post, we are happy to aggregate the judgement of others in previous evaluations; we assiduously examine the CV and we assume that previous judgements were independent in the first place. </p>
<p>But a good selection panel will take the track record with due scepticism; after all, dull and uncreative souls could walk through the door with a great track record. If the selection panel is earnest about employing the best applicant, its members will read the papers or books or musical scores or whatever the applicant claims to have done, irrespective of where they are published, on the principle that you cannot judge a book by its cover. </p>
<p>The only reason that research panels attribute 40% weighting to track record is so as not to have to make a fully independent evaluation and take responsibility for it. But if, as an art critic, I relied on track record for even 10% of my judgement, I would be considered incompetent and ineligible for the job. It would be professionally derelict to stand in front of an artwork and allow my perception to be swayed by the artist’s CV. My judgement must absolutely not defer to anyone else’s, even to a small percentage. </p>
<p>My concern is not with the ARC, which is no worse than other funding bodies. My concern is with research management as an arbitrary code across Australian institutions, which is less than creative and open to moral questions. The fortune of institutions is understandably tied to their research. But how do we know what research is encouraged or discouraged?</p>
<p>How do we count research – which has been the subject of <a href="http://www.arc.gov.au/era/">Excellence in Research for Australia</a> (ERA) – when the measure is likely to dictate research production and promote research in its image? Sadly, while the ERA had the potential to realise an unprejudiced and independent evaluation exercise, it adopted the prior evaluation dependency which characterises most processes in research management. In 2010 and 2012, the <a href="http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_2010/outcomes_2010.htm">ERA evaluations</a> were informed, among other things, by “Indicators of research quality” and “Indicators of research volume and activity”. Amazingly, research income featured in both of these measures. Even volume and activity are measured by income.</p>
<p>Research income is the major driver for institutional funding and is a key indicator in various league tables. Research income is also used to determine all kinds of benefits, such as <a href="http://www.innovation.gov.au/RESEARCH/RESEARCHBLOCKGRANTS/Pages/ResearchTrainingScheme.aspx">Research Training Scheme</a> places and scholarships for research graduates. So here is the same problem again. We judge merit by a deferred evaluation, in this case according to the grants that the research has been able to attract. It entrenches past judgement on criteria which may be fair or relatively arbitrary.</p>
<p>The grant metric is applied in various contexts with little inflection beyond benchmarking according to disciplines. In any given field, academics are routinely berated for not attracting research funding, even when they do not need it. They are reproached for not pursuing aggressively whatever funds might be available in the discipline and which their competitors have secured instead. As a result, their research, however prolific or original in its output, is deemed to be less competitive than the work of scholars who have gained grants. So their chances at promotion (or even, sometimes, job retention) are slimmer. Such scholars live, effectively, in a long research shadow, punished for their failure to get funding, even when the intellectual incentives to do so are absent.</p>
<p>Directing a scholar’s research by these measures might be suspected of being not only somewhat illogical but immoral. On average, the institution already directs more than a third of the salary of a teaching-and-research appointment toward research. That percentage should be enough to write learned articles and books, if that is the kind of research that a scholar does. </p>
<p>In certain fields, the only reason one might want a grant would be to avoid teaching or administration. But most good researchers enjoy teaching and think of it as immensely rewarding, a nexus which, in any other circumstance, we should be trying to cultivate.</p>
<p>To get out of administrative duties may be more admirable; however, even a $30,000 grant entails considerable administration, and with larger grants there is more employment, and thus more administrative work. You end up with more paperwork, not less, if you win a grant. The incentives to gain a grant are much less conspicuous than the agonies of preparing the applications, which tie the researcher into a manipulative game with little intrinsic reward and a great likelihood of failure and even humiliation by cantankerous competitive peers.</p>
<p>Because the natural incentives are absent, the unwilling academic has to be compelled by targets put into some managerial performance development instrument, where the need for achieving a grant is officially established and the scholar’s progress toward gaining it is monitored.</p>
<p>As a means of wasting time, this process has few equivalents; but if it were only wasteful, we could dismiss it as merely a clumsy bureaucratic incumbency that arises in any institution that has policies. But after a long period of witnessing the consequences (formerly as one of those academic managers) I suspect this wasteful system may also be morally dubious, because its inefficiencies are so institutionalised as to disadvantage researchers who are honourably efficient.</p>
<p>As a measure of the prowess of research, research income has a corrosive effect on the confidence of whole areas and academics who, for one reason or another, are unlikely to score grants. Research income is a fetishised figure – it is a number without a denominator. If I want to judge a heater, I do not just measure the energy that it consumes but the output that it generates as well; because these two figures stand in a telling relationship to one another: the one figure can become the denominator of the other to yield a further figure representing its efficiency.</p>
<p>To pursue this analogy, research management examines the heater by adding (or possibly multiplying) the input and the output. In search of a denominator, it then asks how many people own the heater and bask in its warmth. Similarly, we find out how many people generated the aggregated income and output. Sure enough, we attribute the research to people. But the figure is structurally proportional to income and therefore does not measure efficiency.</p>
<p>I question the moral basis of this wilful disregard for efficiency. Research management does not want to reward research efficiency and refuses to recognise this concept throughout the system. For instance, the scholar who produces a learned book or several articles every two years using nothing but salary is more efficient than another scholar who produces similar output with the aid of a grant. </p>
<p>If, suddenly, research efficiency became a factor in the formula – do not hold your breath – institutions would instantly scramble to revise all their performance management instruments. Not because it is right but because there seems to be no moral dimension to research management, only a reflex response to any arbitrary metric set by a capricious king. Individual cells of research management will do not what is right for research and knowledge and the betterment of the human or planetary condition but whatever achieves a higher ranking for their host institutions. </p>
<p>It is commonly believed that research income as an indicator of quality is at least an economical metric, if not always fair. We tend to view such matters in a pragmatic spirit because we cannot see them in an ethical spirit. On the quality of funded research, I am personally agnostic because, when all is said and done, there is no basis for faith. There may be a strong link between research income and research quality, or there may be a weak or even inverse link, depending on the discipline and, above all, how we judge it. </p>
<p>Perhaps, being circumspect, one could say research management is not immoral, so much as amoral, in the sense that it may be free of ethical judgement. But any argument to unburden the field from moral judgement is not persuasive. Research management is never in a position where it can be amoral, because it concerns the distribution of assets that favour and yield advantages, and being outside the sphere of moral judgement is not an option.</p>
<p>It is good that we have research grants, because they allow research – especially expensive research – to prosper more than it otherwise would; but the terms of managing research, which rely so heavily on a chain of deferred judgements and which yield invidious and illogical rankings, involve processes of dubious moral assumptions. We can accept that research management is inexact and messy. None of that makes it ugly or immoral, just patchy and occasionally wrong. But the structural problems with research management go further; they skew research and damage the academic psyche.</p>
<p>Lecturers commence their academic career as researchers and, from early days, are researchers at heart. They love research: they become staff by virtue of doing a research degree and are cultivated thanks to their research potential and enthusiasm. Bit by bit, and with many ups and downs, they divide into winners and losers: a small proportion of researchers who achieve prestigious grants and a larger proportion who resolve to continue with their research plans on the basis of salary, perhaps with participation in other workers’ funded projects and perhaps with a feeling of inadequacy, in spite of their publications, sometimes promoted by pressure from their supervisor. </p>
<p>Within this stressful scenario, even the successful suffer anxiety; and for the demographic as a whole, the dead hand of research management makes them anxious about their performance. In relatively few years, academics become scared of research and see it as more threatening than joyful; they pursue it with an oppressive sense of their shortcomings, where their progress is measured by artificial criteria devised to make them unsettled and hungry.</p>
<p>Though we dress up this negotiation in the language of encouragement, it is structurally an abusive power relationship that demoralises too many good souls in too little time. It is not as if we do not know about this attrition of spirit, that many academics get exhausted and opt out of research with compound frustration for good reasons.</p>
<p>Research management, which governs the innovative thinking of science and the humanities, is neither scientific nor humane nor innovative; and my question, putting all of this together, is whether or not it can be considered moral or in any way progressive to match the hopes that we have in research itself. A system of grants, however arbitrary, is not immoral on its own, provided that it is not coupled to other conditions that affect a scholar’s career. </p>
<p>This process of uncoupling research evaluation from grant income on the one hand and future intellectual opportunities on the other seems necessary to its moral probity. Is it ethically proper to continue rating researchers by their grant income simply because it is convenient in yielding a metric for research evaluation? The crusade to evaluate research has been conducted on a peremptory basis, either heedless of its damaging consequences or smug in the bossy persuasion that greater hunger will make Australian research more internationally competitive.</p>
<p>Is such a system, so ingeniously contrived to spoil the spirits of so many researchers, likely to enhance Australia’s competitiveness? We were told at the beginning of the research evaluation exercise that the public has a right to know that the research it funds is excellent. But after so many formerly noble institutions have debased themselves by manipulating their data sets toward a flattering figure, we have no more assurance of quality than we did before evaluating it. </p>
<p>The conspicuous public attitude to research is respect and admiration, bordering on deference. So I wonder if there is any justifiable basis for research evaluation other than to provide the illusion of managerialism, or perhaps a misguided ideology that identifies hunger and anxiety as promoting productivity? I see massive disadvantages in our systems of evaluation but fail to see any advantages.</p>
<p>To maintain this disenfranchising system in the knowledge of its withering effect strikes me as morally unhappy and spiritually destructive. It would take a diabolical imagination to come up with a system better contrived to wreck the spirits of so many good researchers and dishearten them with their own achievement</p>
<p>The system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up and on the principle that dignifies the generosity and efficiency of researchers. I look forward to a time when the faith that the public has in our research is matched by the faith that researchers themselves have in the structures that manage them.</p>
<p><em>Read more provocations at <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/what-is-australia-for">The Conversation</a> and at <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/7171/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Nelson has on occasion received funding from research bodies.</span></em></p>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks…Robert Nelson, Associate Director Student Experience, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71732012-06-12T00:25:01Z2012-06-12T00:25:01ZNot beyond imagining: songlines for a new world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11230/original/vktjpvw5-1338421999.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In the groundhog daze of globalising suburbia, the idea of a new beginning sounds infernally remote.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Melissa Gray</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks The Conversation, in conjunction with <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>, is publishing a series of provocations. Our authors are asking the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.</strong></p>
<p>Historian <a href="http://arts.monash.edu.au/history/staff/gdavison.php">Graeme Davison</a> asked if Australia was the first suburban nation. He knew the scientific answer didn’t matter. We were, whatever the carbon date, among the most enthusiastic of peoples to embrace the suburban promise. Despite the mythic outback imagery that Australia has vigorously exported and exploited, the record shows we like suburbs more than any other way of living. We enjoy living together more than we care to admit – but not too closely. The suburb struck the perfect balance between collective security and individual possibility. The great quilt of this human accord hugs the continental coastline. Sea change and tree change means no change, really – more suburbia, only in new places.</p>
<p>In Ireland, where I now live, I relate these mysterious truths to the large group of undergraduate students taking my urban geography subject. The course’s popularity has little to do with me. I suspect that a lot of the students in the crowded lecture theatre are boning up on Ireland’s favourite current emigrant destination. Many of these young people will journey as their forebears did to a distant continent, where they will probably prosper and improve themselves. </p>
<p>But unlike their earlier predecessors they will embrace a land and lifestyle that is not so strange and which looks rather like their Irish way of life, only with nicer weather, poorer beer and better job prospects. Many who stay on will stumble through party years in backpacker neighbourhoods, towards a suburban settlement of some description. That end point is probably already filed away in their consciousness. Television and the net have already joined their minds to the Australian psyche and its predilection for settlement over surprise. They can’t wait to come to a new land they already know. How different to my own ancestor, Martin Gleeson, who made the epic voyage from the small rural town of Gowran in Kilkenny to the moonscape of Ballarat in the early 1850s.</p>
<p>As comforting as this new cinemascoped world might be, it speaks also of a narrowing of vision and ambition in an age when humanity will need every ounce of its resources to confront and survive the storms that are about to break upon us. The German-American political theorist <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/">Hannah Arendt</a> spent a lot of time considering our capacity for malfeasance and self-harm, most notably the Holocaust. Nonetheless, she believed that we are “in a most miraculous and mysterious way … endowed with the gift of performing miracles”.</p>
<p>In the near future we will need to recover and redeploy this gift as never before, for unprecedented peril lies in our path. We have almost certainly condemned ourselves to a dangerous climate change regime. Most of our resource stocks are in free fall, and their collapse will escalate the scale and intensity of war and morbid migration. Through globalisation and “financialisation” the capitalist system has developed a large and lethal underbelly. Much of humanity languishes in the fetid, violent slums that have grown convulsively in the developing world in the past 50 years.</p>
<p>The age of endangerment is also the urban epoch. Most humans now live in cities or towns: we have redefined ourselves as <em>homo urbanis</em>. This has brought our long love affair with the city to a new height. The affair will only intensify. By 2050 it is expected that three out of every four people will live in an urban setting. Australia got there early, settling in suburbia before most other nations.</p>
<p>The urban age defines what some scientists call the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human ambition dominated, reshaped and injured the planetary natural order. We now face the consequences of unbridled species ambition, in a set of global perils that may end the Anthropocene and the project of endless material expansion that defined it. Cities, the new human homelands, will carry us through this transition and into what the British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Vanishing_Face_of_Gaia.html?id=pgaKp7wzNIQC&redir_esc=y">describes as</a> “The Next World” – an era much less propitious to human flourishing.</p>
<p>The scale and complexity of threat opens radically before us, just as the human imagination is closing down. The stalling of species ambition is captured in the universal urban lifestyle that has hypnotised our collective mind’s eye. We now view human possibility solely through the lens of the market economy. Consumptive suburban and city landscapes franchise and confine the human conversation about development and self-realisation. </p>
<p>It is a model of urbanism dependent upon resource and human exploitation, largely in the developing world. The earth could never afford the model’s universal extension, which in any case is prevented by its need for subordinate regions – repositories of resources and depositories for waste and failure. No amount of technical refinement will resolve this contradiction. The “green city” of Western progressive intention is a rushed sketch of something that will never be built. The desired urban model is opposed to, but also dependent upon, the shifting, boiling hinterlands that constitute the alternative and larger human reality – what the American urban theorist <a href="http://www.rudi.net/node/16660">Mike Davis calls</a> the “planet of slums”.</p>
<p>The sociologist <a href="http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/michael-pusey-107.html">Michael Pusey</a> talks about the withering of the Australian political imagination since the rise of economic rationalism in the late 1970s. Elsewhere politicians like Margaret Thatcher proclaimed the TINA mantra – apparently “there is no alternative” to a society based on economic reason. This withered imagination was not always the case and indeed it misuses the idea of reason, which is meant to liberate human thought, not bind it. Through the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Western thinking was opened to a contest of new and often starkly opposed possibilities based on different values and interpretations, insights and priorities. These played out roughly and spectacularly in the rapidly growing, often festering cities of the modern industrial era. This drove urbanisation, the greatest material project of innovation and improvement in our species’ history. But we live now in the sharp light of its manifest limits and contradictions. It was riveted to the cause of industrial capitalism; alternative models could not compete or were swept aside.</p>
<p>The contemporary path of “development” is urbanisation with visceral not imaginative intent, concerned with filling the belly, not the mind or the heart. The early moderns broke with the heavenly city, wanting the good life now. The grounding of human ambition opened the cause of human philosophy and social imagination, as the “good city” was debated and experimented with. Reduction of that cause to a city which embodied the accumulative impulse of the market was the ultimate contradiction of modernity, a journey of human liberation that created its own new bonds of thought and possibility. The great stirring of human doubt that we know as the Enlightenment was eventually anaesthetised by the ever grander claims of reason and certitude. The German sociologist <a href="http://www2.lse.ac.uk/sociology/whoswho/academic/beck.aspx">Ulrich Beck</a> now considers modernity to have been overshadowed by “excessive reason” and the death of imagination. Human sensibility is “no longer defined by religion, tradition or the superior power of nature but has even lost its faith in the redemptive powers of utopias”.</p>
<p>Within its Western heartlands the enlightening contest of ideas has dimmed in recent decades. Politics has narrowed on the liberal-democratic consensus and a constricted sense of liberty – freedom to do things (consume, develop), not freedom from things (poverty, environmental harm, alienation). Economics has been redefined from the pursuit of human welfare to the rule of profit and accumulation. It has also promulgated the idea that free markets define democracy, and thus the prospects for human freedom and fulfilment. </p>
<p>Discussion about the environment rests on the narrow assumption that ecological crisis must be fixed through “adjustments” to the status quo, not profound social or economic change. Despite the agonies that attended its birth, Australia’s carbon tax is a child of the system, not its antithesis. It reinforces the authority of technocratic and econocratic thinking, which holds that solving the crisis means perfecting rather than usurping markets. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/26/slavoj-zizek-living-end-times">Living in the End Times</a>, speaks of a central paradox in human sensibility: a will to “normalise” endangerment that strengthens as the precipice of catastrophe is approached. The political humdrum around climate and resource “challenges” seems to bear out his claim.</p>
<p>Consensus is normally taken to be a good thing, but we can have too much of it. Commentators of various ideological persuasions have detected in our public life a lack of “imaginative argument”, of deep debate about alternative futures. Australia’s government lacks a guiding vision, or is at least very poor at communicating one, it is said; its Opposition is opportunistic, not led by coherent values. <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2011/s3358472.htm">Paul Keating argues</a> that the Labor Party has not presented (or more pointedly, sold) its “story” to the Australian people. This presumes there is a story to be told, a vision to behold, apart from the daily reproduction of a settled and consumptive suburban lifestyle, or its newest sibling, the urban village. By contrast, the conservative side of politics seems less troubled by the missing big picture – it’s not so keen on galleries, anyway.</p>
<p>There is ever more criticism about the oppressive consensus that has narrowed the Western outlook to the point where we seem locked into the structures and habits that are exposing us all to harm: economic crisis, environmental degradation, terror and insecurity. The British sociologist <a href="http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/profiles/John-Urry/">John Urry</a> believes that the escape hatch to new structures and ways of living is through a reopened human imagination, through a new contest of ideas about our basic values and priorities. If the project of closure continues we risk, as Ulrich Beck points out, a confluence of crisis and incompetence that will “justify an authoritarian state”. This would be a horrid twisting of our miraculous capacity for healing and improvement. We could survive the crises we have generated, but our greatest social creation, democracy, might perish in the process.</p>
<p>Tonight I’m an expat Australian feeling homesick for the wrong reasons. This is not yearning for a comfortably different past. The Maynooth streets I make my way along feel a lot like the suburban Melbourne I grew up in, especially its wintriest days. The familiarity of the thing makes you yearn for family and friends in an especially poignant way. Surely, however, this blankets the special possibilities for miraculous thought that Australia might offer an endangered, cynical world? In the past we opened up sharp arguments about egalitarianism and fair treatment, before we seemed to tire of our successes. This lethargy looks lethal when set against the dangers breaking upon us. Salvation from self-harm will necessitate new creativity, and a profound questioning of verities and interests. To liberate this energy Australia will have to set aside the scorn for free thinking it has lately cultivated.</p>
<p>In the 1890s, in the midst of a plague of droughts, recession and systemic failures, Australians drew bold diagrams of possibilities for their continent and the world. Our forebears were not as transfixed by the task of making and remaking everyday life as we imagine. They had no Tesco or Harvey Norman, and for most the daily grind was just that. But many of them still made time and space for the larger work of imagination. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_legend_of_the_nineties.html?id=tV1AAAAAIAAJ">The Legend of the Nineties</a> (1954), the critic Vance Palmer wrote that people of the time had “some vision of the just and perfect State at the back of their minds”. Everyday life was hard yakka, but “it was the prospect of writing, on a virgin page, a new chapter in the history of humanity that touched their feelings and quickened their imaginations”. This is not to sanctify. They missed much, including the miraculous history of the Indigenous peoples of their land. The historian Bill Gammage observes, in his book of <a href="http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=94&book=9781742377483">the same name</a>, that the pre-settlement Aboriginal order managed “<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-biggest-estate-on-earth-how-aborigines-made-australia-3787">the biggest estate on earth</a>”. “A few Europeans recognised this … <em>but for most it was beyond imagining</em>.” (Emphasis added.) The Indigenous peoples survived the imposition of a brutal new world upon them, the theft and despoliation of the estate they had managed for millennia.</p>
<p>We are walking backwards into a Next World of natural despoliation, and probably much violence and dispossession. It is nearly here. To have any hope of forestalling and managing its most destructive possibilities we must acknowledge and ponder its arrival. Our resources may have run down, our imagination may be ebbing low, but the human capacity for “performing miracles” that Hannah Arendt identified remains our last resort – and our greatest. The scale of endangerment is dire but we haven’t yet deployed our miraculous powers. And we will not do so until we give free play again to the imaginative energies we possess, which must first be directed at clearing out the sclerotic consensus of liberal democracy, to restore liberty, the central discovery and legacy of modernity. For Arendt, “the miracle of freedom resides in the ability to make new beginnings”.</p>
<p>In the groundhog daze of globalising suburbia, the idea of a new beginning sounds infernally remote. Beneath my wind-whipped hood I wonder what Australia might have to offer. The British social theorist <a href="http://staffprofiles.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/Profile.aspx?Id=Erik.Swyngedouw">Erik Swyngedouw</a> thinks we must end the fiction of neo-liberalism, with its fantasies of sustainable growth. Surprisingly, this requires “an urgent need for different stories and fictions that can be mobilized for realization”. Songlines for a new world?</p>
<p>The bitter cold here always makes me think of my homeland, its extremities of heat, and the desert peoples who thrived in that hotter estate. I’m a suburban kid from Melbourne and – regrettably, if predictably – I know almost nothing about them. But I suspect their “stories and fictions” might be a good place to start in seeking a new Australian imagination. They changed and managed their land. We changed and mismanaged ours – and theirs. The original Australians survived with culture in the new world we thrust upon them. This is worth contemplating with humility and openness as we drift inexorably into the storms of change. We have a great testimony of human survival that is sung, danced and wept all around us. There will be a way out of, or at least beyond, this crisis. Australians should be the first to assert that this is not beyond imagining.</p>
<p><em>Read more provocations at <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/what-is-australia-for">The Conversation</a> and at <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/7173/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brendan Gleeson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks…Brendan Gleeson, Professor in Urban Policy Studies, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71892012-06-10T20:12:10Z2012-06-10T20:12:10ZFinding a place on the Asian stage<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11214/original/9fbnc5mb-1338358570.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Australia has to take the initiative if we want to build a relationship with Asia based on the arts.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks The Conversation, in conjunction with <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>, is publishing a series of provocations. Our authors are asking the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.</strong></p>
<p>Australian jobs and security depend on the health of our relationship with Asia, a reality made even more apparent by the current Euro-American financial meltdown. Such relationships need to be built on more than the profit-driven, transactional nature of commerce or the diplomatic balancing acts of political calculation, important as these are. It is the “people-to-people” links that give a relationship resilience, depth and understanding, and allow it to weather the inevitable and usually unpredictable setbacks of business and politics. Cultural engagement is at the heart of this.</p>
<p>It is not easy for people in Asia to access our arts by themselves: distance and expense get in the way. And what reason do people from Asia have to search out our arts when we can be perceived as having a largely derivative culture? We have to take the initiative, to invite and encourage, to knock on doors and “be out there”. We are fortunate that we have the capacity to do so: a robust economy and a vibrant arts sector strongly supported by government. Yes, it is.</p>
<p>Some of the lessons drawn from those who do work with Asia are clear: the commitment to developing real partnerships; the exciting and often unpredictable outcomes of shared creative inputs across cultural difference; and the value of long-term commitments in order to build real legacies.</p>
<p>Let us look at the public record and see what some real numbers can teach us. How have government agencies managed our cultural policy on Asia since the Keating Government took the initiative in 1991?</p>
<p>The Australia Council is the key organisation for anyone working in the arts in Australia. The major focus of our attention is on the percentage of funds spent across two decades for performing arts projects to or in Asian destinations, as compared to expenditure directed towards the “Rest of the World” (this is mostly Western Europe, including the United Kingdom, and North America, with only a tiny sum spent in other places like South America and Eastern Europe).</p>
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<p>The first thing that strikes us about these figures is that broad policy decisions can have very specific outcomes. Following the Australia Council’s decision in 1990-1 to apply at least 50% of their international funding towards Asia, this is what actually happened. Indeed for most of the early 1990s it was well above that. As the Council itself said:</p>
<p><em>Since the Australia Council announced a shift in its international cultural relations policy three years ago, in recognition of Australia’s place in the Asia Pacific region, there has been a 250 per cent increase in funding for projects focused on the region.</em></p>
<p>Prime Minister Keating announced the major cultural policy document, Creative Nation, in 1995, reconfirming the 50% of international funding allocated to Asia. In the decades since 1996 (when Keating left office) the proportion of funds “for Asia” sank to and has remained at 10–30% of the Council’s total international expenditure (details are available in our full paper). Analysis shows the general downward trend of funding to Asia versus funding to the rest of the world and the areas of Asia which caught the Australia Council’s attention.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The Australia Council’s own policies and, more broadly, the Federal Government’s stated and unstated priorities, have had a direct bearing on the Council’s commitment to Asia.</p></li>
<li><p>Funding for the countries of South East Asia have fallen away over the last ten years. Only Singapore has coasted along in a small way through the two decades.</p></li>
<li><p>The countries of North Asia have almost always received the lion’s share of funding. Japan was the standout over the two decades though support there has declined in the last few years as spending in Korea has risen.</p></li>
<li><p>Activity in South Asia was restricted to the New Horizons promotion in India in 1995–6.</p></li>
<li><p>Expenditure on China has been fairly constant but low.</p></li>
</ul>
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<p>So what might these conclusions mean?</p>
<p>Public funding has clearly leant towards those countries that might offer at least a partial box office return: Singapore, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. This has become particularly clear since the Audience and Market Development division of the Australia Council came into being.</p>
<p>While a focus on financial viability is part of choosing where to tour and perform, it has a downside. We are losing access to, and creative engagement with, many dynamic and exciting cultures of Asia, including India and Indonesia. Both of these countries are of high strategic importance to Australia, both have wonderfully rich and diverse cultures, so it is certainly Australia’s loss to pull back from cultural engagement with them.</p>
<p>The key point is that leadership really matters. After Keating there has been no political leadership endorsing broad cultural links with Asia. Government agencies, as well as the majority of people in the cultural and educational sector, have responded accordingly. Is cultural engagement with Asia such a low priority because politicians think there are no votes in the arts, let alone in artistic engagement with Asia? Or is it because the arts community itself is too uninterested to use their potentially powerful voice to tell them otherwise?</p>
<p>A key part of the Asia agenda ought to be what we learn about Asian culture, especially as part of our secondary and tertiary education, and in particular, in specialist arts areas.</p>
<p>Australia’s tertiary performing arts courses can and do include small elements on Asian performing arts in their programs, but in none is it core curriculum. The Australian university funding model has pushed our tertiary institutions to chase high-fee-paying students from Asia to sustain their core operations; isn’t it extraordinary and depressing that no Australian tertiary institution has made any serious effort to develop core curricula offerings around the arts of Asia?</p>
<p>We need action — action backed with sticks and carrots — or we shall continue to undermine our collective and creative interests.</p>
<p>We therefore put forward a ten-point plan to redress the focus over the next ten years. We need specific policy, specific money allocated against targets, and a specific body to realise this agenda.</p>
<p><strong>1. Funding quotas</strong>: Funding is crucial. So is its intelligent application. Of the Australia Council’s and DFAT’s Cultural Relations budget, we advocate 60% of international funding be allocated for Asian engagement over the next ten years. As noted today the Australia Council’s international funding for Asia is around 20%. </p>
<p><strong>2. Spread of focus</strong>: As a broad guideline that reflects relevance and opportunity, we propose expending this 60% as follows:</p>
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<p><strong>3.The middle way</strong>: The open stage between individual engagement (such as residencies) and the big tours by major companies is where the creative collaborations happen. Collaborations between Australian artists and colleagues in the region should be supported to develop new projects and present them to audiences in the participating countries and beyond. This should be established as a new program with new funding, a minimum of $3 million per annum to be administered by a new Australian International Cultural Agency (AICA)(see Point 8).</p>
<p><strong>4. In-country Australian cultural centres</strong>: These should be established in key places, especially in priority countries and where existing local infrastructure is minimal. Start with India and Indonesia. The new centres should be established as independent NGOs at arm’s length from government but with advance funding commitment on a rolling triennial basis for their ongoing operation and programs.</p>
<p><strong>5. Arts management capacity building in Asia</strong>: AusAID should establish a program of support to bring arts managers and students from developing countries to Australia to participate in tertiary level arts management programs. An evaluation should also be made of the potential to deliver short-term arts management programs and materials in the region.</p>
<p><strong>6.Cultural directors in key embassies</strong>: Australian-based cultural directors drawn from the ranks of professional arts and cultural managers should be reappointed to key Australian diplomatic posts.</p>
<p><strong>7. Major events</strong>: The currently favoured model is the year-long Australian cultural promotion program in another country. The funding can be co-ordinated through one agency (see Point 8). It is our view that the very big companies such as the Australian Ballet and the symphony orchestras should only be included in these promotional years when and if they have already built real, long-term creative relationships in the host country, and if they are touring a repertoire that is distinctively Australian.</p>
<p><strong>8. A new Australian International Cultural Agency</strong>: Within three years, all related Federal Government funding should be brought together into one new body, provisionally named here as the Australian International Cultural Agency (AICA). The AICA should have government representation but operate at arm’s length from government. Its functions would include:</p>
<ul>
<li>strategic overview</li>
<li>linking programs to national priorities and national interest</li>
<li>establishing funding priorities</li>
<li>developing programs</li>
<li>funding major national profiling years</li>
<li>promoting a positive international image for Australia, especially in Asia, through many channels including programs that nurture rich cultural exchange, wide people-to-people diplomacy, and the development of Australian Studies abroad</li>
<li>recruiting cultural directors to be posted to the major Australian diplomatic missions (see Point 6).</li>
</ul>
<p>What is the appropriate level of funding for this new cultural agency? A strong starting point would be the funding currently spent by the Australia Council’s international programs, DFAT’s Cultural Relations budget and the budgets of DFAT bilateral councils and the Australian International Cultural Council. More could obviously be achieved with more, but we don’t just need new resources, we need the to be well applied through a strategic framework and coordinated program delivery.</p>
<p>The common arguments against such a body are these:</p>
<p><em>Cost</em> - but surely the virtues of a clear strategy, co-ordination of resources and forward planning is as valid here as in any other area of activity? Surely it might even save some ineffective expenditure?</p>
<p><em>Our small population</em> - some say the other countries that have such bodies - Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Korea, China, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Scandinavia - have a much bigger population and GDP than Australia. In many cases this patently untrue. Britain has three times our population, but we would be much better resourced than we are now if we could allocate just a third of the British Council’s budget to AICA.</p>
<p><em>Unnecessary change</em> - people and organisations always defend their patch. It’s natural. So the most commonly used argument against change is that it won’t be the same. Exactly.</p>
<p>Frankly, even if you accepted the points against change, we would argue that we need such a body more than other countries do. Apart from our geographic proximity to, and our economic dependence on, Asia, we are huge within our own borders and difficult to access externally and internally. We are “confusing” to people in Asia because of our indigenous/British/immigrant/transitional culture. As a nation we aren’t easy to understand, which often tells against us, as do our regular political swings and roundabouts. And then, we criticise ourselves too much. We are not good natural promoters of ourselves. A new body would work to counter these negatives more effectively.</p>
<p><strong>9. Tertiary education:</strong> As a prerequisite for funding, all tertiary education programs for arts practitioners must include at least 20% Asian content in their core curricula. This should include Asian histories, cultures and art forms, as well as practical sessions with visiting Asian artists and teachers, and collaborative projects with Asian creative colleagues. This matter should be monitored and coordinated by each education provider’s Academic Board.</p>
<p><strong>10. A major review:</strong> A first step towards establishing a new Australian International Cultural Agency could be for the Government to initiate a major review or inquiry into the delivery of our overseas cultural engagement and especially with Asia. It could appoint a small, senior review panel backed by staff and resources. The panel’s terms of reference should include a review of the current situation, a comparative examination of how other countries conduct and resource their cultural engagement programs, and recommendations to government on how things could be improved for Australia’s benefit.</p>
<p>As Mao Zedong said, we learn from the past to serve the future. Let us learn and act.</p>
<p><em>A longer version of this article is available at <a href="http://www.currencyhouse.org.au/publications/papers">Currency House</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>Read more provocations at <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a> or at <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/what-is-australia-for">The Conversation</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/7189/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison Carroll has received funding from the Australia Council and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carrillo Gantner is affiliated with
Melbourne Festival - President
Australia Korea Foundation - Director</span></em></p>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks…Alison Carroll, Founding Director (1990-2010), AsiaLink Arts, The University of MelbourneCarrillo Gantner, Former Chairman, Asialink, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71752012-06-07T20:10:34Z2012-06-07T20:10:34ZChoose your Australian vision: an independent economic leader, or a hole in the ground?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/11253/original/r7vhzt3v-1338440988.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We've got it lucky right now, but if we want to stay lucky we need to be realistic about our economic fortunes.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks The Conversation, in conjunction with <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a>, is publishing a series of provocations. Our authors are asking the big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.</strong></p>
<p>Is Australia really the “lucky country”? Not according to most Australians, who will tell you about the rising cost of living, the strain the new carbon tax will put on their household budgets, and the need to “Stop the Boats”. Not according to industry, who frequently complain to the media that such-and-such a new law will drive them into bankruptcy if the government doesn’t heed their demands. And certainly not according to any of our politicians, who instead focus their energy on short-term political manoeuvring calculated to gain a few Newspoll points against their opposition.</p>
<p>Australia’s current political discourse is characterised by a denial of the economic prosperity we now experience. This curious myopia in Australia’s social and political discourse, perhaps caused by an ingrained cultural refusal to acknowledge our achievements – the “tall poppy syndrome” – is fast becoming one of the [biggest threats to Australia’s future](http://www.economist.com/node/18744197](http://www.economist.com/node/18744197). The longer we Australians refuse to see our country and our economy for what it really is, the more we risk forfeiting future opportunities. Instead of perpetuating the cultural myth that Australia is but a distant colonial outpost of Mother Britain, populated only by Steve Irwins and Baywatch babes, we need to face the reality of Australia’s economic prosperity and power that exists quite independently of nostalgic political alliances with the failing economies of the United States and Europe.</p>
<p>Consider the United Nations’ <a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/">Human Development Index</a>. Australia held the top spot from the 1980s, until we were knocked down to second place by Norway at the beginning of the 21st century. Consider the <a href="http://www.oecd.org/document/18/0,3746,en_2649_37443_20347538_1_1_1_37443,00.html">OECD’s latest economic outlook</a>, which shows that, despite the debt crises in Europe and the United States, Australia’s economy remains one of the best performing in the developed world, with growth well above, and unemployment well below, the OECD average. Over the last 25 years, Australia experienced the highest growth in the developed world, and this growth <a href="http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2011/12/08/australian-exceptionalism/">predates the resources boom</a>. Perhaps we should start seeing Australia for the global economic leader it really is, and not as the poor cousin of the Western world.</p>
<p>The good news for Australia doesn’t stop there. This economic prosperity has made Australians some of the wealthiest people in the world: we have the highest median income and the second highest average wealth in the world, <a href="https://www.credit-suisse.com/responsibility/en/banking/csri/index.jsp">second only to Switzerland</a>. Our poorest 10% of households alone have experienced faster income growth than the income growth of the rich in almost any other country, while no other country has been able to top the income growth of our richest households. All of the above and we still have the third-lowest debt and the sixth-lowest taxes <a href="http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2011/12/08/australian-exceptionalism/">in the OECD</a>. A low-tax nation with high quality, state-funded institutions, good infrastructure, and a welfare system that ensures a minimum standard of living and healthcare for all – sounds like a model economy.</p>
<p>Yet no recognition of our global economic leadership can be found in our politics. Instead we have introverted political leaders, media scaremongering, and a curious colonial paralysis that prevents us from taking leadership on international issues. Why, when Australia is an economic leader in the developed world, should it refuse for ten years to ratify the Kyoto Protocol – because the United States also refused? Why could Prime Minister Julia Gillard admit to having <a href="http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/punch-its-no-biggie-if-julia-doesnt-like-foreign-affairs/">no interest in foreign affairs</a>, just when the waning of the West and the rising of the East presents new opportunities for Australia, a country ideally situated between the two? Never before has a country been so ignorant of its own successes and so reluctant to build on them. Australia’s cultural and political myopia has birthed a lack of vision for the future.</p>
<p>It is vision, not luck, required to secure Australia’s future. Calling Australia the “lucky country” is a misnomer: it ignores that our prosperity predates the resources boom. Although digging minerals out of the ground and shipping them to India and China has certainly been <a href="http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/stats-pubs/composition_trade.html">great for the economy</a> in the last few years, our prosperity can be traced to the policy reforms undertaken between 1983 and 2003 that saw Australia move away from protectionism to become one of the most flexible economies in the world. The Productivity Commission found that these policy reforms <a href="http://www.pc.gov.au/research/submission/productivity-growth">caused huge growth</a> in Australia’s productivity, which is slowing again because of the very mining boom we seek to nurture. </p>
<p>What can be learned from Australia’s past experience is that far-sighted policy reforms are necessary for future prosperity. The Economist <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/18744197">warns</a> that Australians must now decide what sort of country we want our children to live in: we can enjoy our prosperity and squander our wealth, or actively set about creating the sort of society that other nations want to emulate. But vision and self-belief are something that current Australians, and their politicians, seem to lack.</p>
<p>This failure of vision was shown by one of Australia’s most shameful recent political events: the mining tax debacle, a missed opportunity if there ever was one. Australia has some of the richest natural resource deposits in the world, profiting from the historically high commodity prices and booming demand from China and India. The value of Australia’s commodity exports in 2011 hit $179 billion in 2011 (a 29% increase from 2010) and are forecast to reach a record $206 billion in 2012. Iron ore, coal and gold alone made up <a href="http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/stats-pubs/composition_trade.html">over a third</a> of Australia’s total exports in 2011.</p>
<p>Booming commodity prices may benefit mining companies and their direct employees, but surrounding communities, businesses, and non-mining industries <a href="http://www.rba.gov.au/publications/smp/">often suffer</a>. Natural resource deposits won’t last forever, and one day Australia will have to rely on an industry other than mining to drive its economic growth. A far-sighted politician would keep back and invest some of the wealth from mining so that Australia will continue to grow when the mining boom ends. In 2010, Kevin Rudd and Ken Henry proposed to do just that, with their Resources Super Profits Tax (RSPT) that would place a 40% tax on the profits of mining companies above the 6% rate of return. The revenue from the tax was to be used to fund increased superannuation and cut company tax: this would provide for the ageing population and help other sectors that are <a href="http://www.deewr.gov.au/Department/Documents/Files/Announcement%20document.pdf">hurt by mining</a>.</p>
<p>The media hype created by the mining companies and Tony Abbott against the RSPT proposal should go down in Australia’s history as a period of national shame. Instead of reasoned political debate, a panicked maelstrom erupted. Fears that Australia’s mining industry would be halted and economic growth would cease <a href="http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/05/25/ask-the-economists-what-impact-will-the-rspt-have-on-the-australian-economy/">were widespread</a>
. Advertising campaigns were launched, urging Australians to support the mining industry and, by extension, Australia’s future – Kevin Rudd was painted as threatening the core of Australia’s economy and countless jobs. </p>
<p>Calm was only restored when Rudd was knifed and a Prime Minister more accommodating to the mining companies was installed. The new watered-down Minerals Resource Rent Tax, negotiated between Julia Gillard and the three biggest mining companies (BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata), was <a>criticised by economists</a> as actually being more inefficient than the royalty charges it replaced. Keep in mind that BHP Billiton reported record profits of $23 billion in 2011. Keep in mind that the commodity price boom is likely to continue into the future, but natural resource deposits are finite and that other Australian <a href="http://www.rba.gov.au/publications/smp/">industries are struggling</a> because of the mining boom. How did we somehow end up confusing the interests of multinational mining companies with our own national interests?</p>
<p>Australia may be one of the luckiest countries in the world, but this came from good economic management and sound policies. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, the benefits we now reap from Australia’s current prosperity are the results of economic foresight decades ago. To ensure that future generations experience the same economic prosperity we do, we need to exercise the same economic foresight now. If Australia is to continue its prosperity, we need economically sound policies that focus on achieving long-run growth. The recent mining tax debacle shows how Australia’s political discourse has become dominated by self-seeking short-termism. We need to reverse this trend. The luckiest country in the world needs a government that can work out how to stay lucky in the long term. Political short-termism does nothing to secure a future for tomorrow’s Australia, nor the future of generations to come.</p>
<p>Economic prosperity does not happen by chance, but by design. We need to restore a vision for the future to our politics and political debate, and policies focused on securing Australia’s long-term economic prosperity. We need to focus on long-term productivity, not short-term profit, considering future generations by designing policies that secure the living standards of our children’s children,<a href="http://www.une.edu.au/febl/EconStud/wps.htm">not just our own</a>.</p>
<p>Mining is a cyclical industry, and to avoid irreversible harm to our natural environment and achieve sustainable economic growth we must implement policies that ensure Australia’s prosperity continues when our natural resource deposits have been exhausted. We need to secure Australia’s tomorrow through implementing sound, future-focused policies today.</p>
<p>Natural resources are becoming ever scarcer, and wise management of these resource deposits is an <a href="http://www.trademarksa.org/news/mozambique-mineral-scan-report">area of strategic interest</a> around the world. Rather than using natural resource depletion simply to increase Australia’s export figures, we need to consider how to use this wealth to ensure the long-term prosperity of all Australians. Investment in human capital, long-term community development, and redistributing the benefits from mining to ensure inclusive development can alleviate the symptoms of “<a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutchdisease.asp#axzz1wQ7NT0Pa">Dutch disease</a>” in the manufacturing sector and combat the social exclusion, inequality and underdevelopment that often flows from resource extraction activities, to ensure Australia’s long-term economic future.</p>
<p>Australia is a world economic leader: the challenge now is to ensure that our economic policies reflect our economic reality, not deny it.</p>
<p><em>Read more provocations at <a href="http://griffithreview.com/provocations">Griffith REVIEW</a> or at <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/what-is-australia-for">The Conversation</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/7175/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr Tapan Sarker consults to the World Bank, Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG), and governments of a number of resource rich developing countries in Asia and Africa. He owns shares in Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton. Dr Sarker received research funding from DFAT/ The Australia-Malaysia Institute to conduct research in improving corporate social responsibility standards in the oil and gas sector in Australia and Malaysia. Dr Sarker is affiliated to the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation (IBFD), The Netherlands, and Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).</span></em></p>WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks…Tapan Sarker, Lecturer, Griffith Business School, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.