First, Singapore's founder, the late Lee Kuan Yew, said in the 1980s that Australians were destined to become the "poor white trash" of Asia. Then Malaysia's long-time prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, permanently ruled Australia out of participation in Asia: "Actually they are Europeans, they cannot be Asians."
These comments from two of the elder statesmen of south-east Asia, and others like them, sent Australia into decades of hand-wringing, self-doubt, even identity crisis. Australia was fated to be overtaken economically, overlooked culturally, snubbed politically, forever alone, trapped below a continent we could never join. "If you don't behave yourself, you may get invaded," Mahathir said in 2004.
Mahathir Mohamad, in Bangkok for ASEAN and East Asia summit meetings, says Australia will be more Asian than European one day.Credit:James Massola
Driving the point home, in the 1990s a Chinese scholar drew on an Aesop's fable to illustrate Australia's plight. In the old fable, the two animal kingdoms, the birds and the beasts, prepare to go to war with each other. The bat hesitates to choose sides. He has some bird characteristics but also some beast characteristics. He decides to commit to neither side. Battle is averted at the last moment. The bat is despised by both sides. Rejected by both kingdoms, the lonely bat delivers the moral of the tale: "Ah, I see now. He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends." Australia, said Tang Guanghui, writing in a journal of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, was the bat, never truly East or West, destined to forever flit between the two worlds, at home in neither.
A minor industry of hand-wringers and self-flagellators sprang up in Australian academia and business in the 1980s and 1990s to tell us that we had to be more "Asian". Lee and Mahathir were happy to play to this. They'd even created a school of thought called the "Asian Way" practising "Asian values". They claimed this to be a more consensual way of doing things, less confrontational than Western democracy.
Of course, there is no such thing as "Asianness". The very word "Asia" was a European invention. It never occurred to the peoples living in it that they constituted a single entity.
Donald Horne in 1995 tried to speak sense amid the nonsense: "Anyone who thinks there is a cultural unity in 'Asia' of any kind at all should try imagining Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucianists, Christians, Jews and Shamanists getting together in a religious service."
As for "Asian values", it was merely a cover story to excuse the authoritarian tendencies of Lee and Mahathir. The story fell apart as the number of successful Asian democracies grew to include South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia, as well as Japan.
And the "poor white trash of Asia"? Two decades after Lee issued this famous augury, Australia's treasurer, Peter Costello, entertained him at a private dinner. He asked Lee for an update. "You have changed," he replied. "Your country is a different place now."
And now Mahathir, too, is recanting. In an interview with my colleague James Massola on the weekend, the once and once again prime minister of Malaysia said: "Australia has been undergoing many changes, there was a White Australian policy where they don’t allow Asians to settle down there. That was discarded and now they allow a lot Asians who stay in Australia, who become Australian citizens, taking part in politics for example.
"The number, of course, at the time when I was talking before was quite small, but now the number has become very big."
Illustration: Andrew DysonCredit:
So Australia is part of Asia, Massola asked? "Now I think it is moving in that direction by force of circumstance," said Mahathir, now 94.
"Whatever white Australians might think of it, the fact is geographically they are more in the Asian region than in Europe. They can try and sustain their culture, their language, but the inflow of Asians into Australia will certainly change the character and distribution of population in Australia. And in the future, they are going to be more Asian than European."
Three elements stand out. First, he has changed his position. Second, there is sophistry in his implication that Australia's geography has changed somehow since his comments in the 90s.
Third is the flat-out misrepresentation that the inflow of Asian people is occurring against Australia's will. Who's he kidding? It's a deliberate decision under Australia's immigration policy. And each new generation of immigrants enriches Australia but also becomes Australian.
The sad fact is that Mahathir cannot conceive of a non-discriminatory immigration policy like Australia's. Because Mahathir is a racist who can only see the world in racial terms.
In his first long iteration as prime minister he created a system of economic apartheid – his bumiputera policy – that reserved a range of privileges for Malays over the Chinese and Indian populations of Malaysia.
And he told Massola that the failure of this policy was his greatest regret: "I spent a lot of time trying to bring up the Malaysians so that they can catch up so at least they’re not too far behind the Chinese. But I failed." Racial engineering doesn't work, it turns out.
Indonesia's President Joko Widodo has said that Australia should be admitted to join the 10-member Association of South-East Asian Nations, ASEAN. Now Mahathir says he thinks that "it will happen" eventually.
The international adviser to prime minister Paul Keating at the time of the biggest bust-up between Australia and Malaysia was Allan Gyngell: "The substance of Australia's earlier dispute with him was that we wanted to be embedded in the regional institutions and he didn't want us.
"In the 1990s Mahathir was trying to achieve a balance then against the overwhelming dominance of the US, and it was easier if you put all the Asians onto one side of it. But the balance of power has changed." Now countries are seeking to balance against the "overwhelmingly powerful force" that China has become, says Gyngell, and everyone is repositioning.
As for the "Asian Way", Gyngell observes that "there are Asian ways – not one Asian Way". And Australia has its own way. Indeed, the metaphor for Australia today, prosperous and multicultural and enjoying the best of all possible worlds, is not the misfit bat.
If anything it's more like the platypus. A unique creature, with features of a mammal and a bird, combining features of each, and perfectly adapted to its ecology.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.
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