Murdoch: Australia to join NATO due to Asia Pacific role

Rupert Murdoch, in a new role as security policy analyst, has made the bold assertion that Australia should be invited to join NATO due to our role in the Asia Pacific region. Murdoch kicked off Australia's bid as part of his address for this year's ABC Boyer Lecture, titled 'A Golden Age of Freedom' at the Sydney Opera House. The address was also picked up by Fora.tv as their lead story. NATO, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asia Summit, the UN...Australia is soon to be in more groups than Murdoch is on company boards.

Woolcott: Asia doesn't want Rudd's new Asia Pacific Community

Richard Woolcott, the PM's Envoy, said on ABC2's News Breakfast that PM Rudd's concept of the Asia Pacific Community has had a lukewarm response after his initial tour of 13 countries in the region. It will be interesting to see whether things will change as the financial crisis deepens, perhaps leaders in the region will see the value of a broader body to deal with issues that cut across political, economic and social divides. Woolcott seems to think that exisiting bodies can adequately deal with these issues.

Woolcott is set to head off again soon to consult and engage leaders and others in the region, including Obama and the new US administration. His report to Rudd is due in mid-December this year.

PM Rudd views Asia Pacific through US lens

On 20 November, our PM gave a speech to the Kokoda Foundation dinner on the Asia Pacific and foreign policy entitled, 'Towards an Asia-Pacific Century". The speech has a lot of useful new information but the choice of a US-Australia forum to reveal detail on the Asia Pacific, with no Asian analysts or government reps on the program seems to indicate that Australia's policy on the Asia Pacific might be seen through the lens of our relationship with the US.

Important issues covered include the emphasis on the G20 as the body with the most potential for resolving global issues, "Its strategic economic weight and its representative nature provide the G20 with potential for real long term authority."

Also he mentioned the importance of engaging our partners in the region, of hearing their insights, "China and India as two emerging economic giants must be part of solutions to global economic and financial challenges, they must be a formal part of the solution, the considered solution to global economic and financial challenges."

However, Rudd's audience was dominated by US interests - Ambassador Richard Armitage, Stanley Roth, former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia in the Clinton Administration, Lieutenant -General Fraser, Deputy Commander US Pacific Command and Ambassador Robert McCallum. Strange that nobody from our region was there at a Kokoda Foundation event focused on the Asia Pacific region. The dinner was part of the Kokoda Foundation's 'Australia-US Strategic Trilogy' but you would have thought the views of analysts or government from the region would be sought.

Rudd provided more detail on his proposed Asia Pacific Community (APC) initiative, "we have started a constructive dialogue on the development of a broad-ranging, effective forum for engagement between regional countries." In response to a question from the audience on whether the APC was in the region's best interests, he said "we in the Australian Government remain completely open." I have heard that the PM's envoy, Richard Woolcott, has provided initial feedback to the PM on his meetings with regional leaders. It seems the cool reception that Rudd's APC idea has received in the region has not dampened the PM's enthusiasm for it. I wonder whether the PM will release Woolcott's report?

Also interesting was Rudd's comments on the US engagement with Asia by Bush, "I think an outstanding success of the Bush Administration has been the way it’s managed the China relationship in what could have gone radically in the wrong direction and I think it speaks well of the outgoing administration in terms of our interests and stability in this region."

Rudd also revealed some of his priorities for discussions with the new Obama administration, which included "what we can do more broadly across the region, hence our proposal for an Asia-Pacific community, and hence why we wish to engage our American friends in due season on that."

RA Connect Asia: Report on Chinese Language Education in Australian Schools

Alert: there will be a live interview on Tuesday 11 November at 10.45am EST on Radio Australia's Connect Asia program, with Dr Jane Orton on the report on Chinese Language Education in Australian Schools.

USyd to train students from the Asia Pacific in human rights

Sydney University has announced that it has won a grant from the EU to train post graduate students from the Asia Pacific region in human rights. Partner universities include Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia, Kathmandu Law School in Nepal, the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka, and Mahidol University in Thailand.

The program includes an initial semester and one week intensive course at USyd followed by study at a partner university. Students will do a combination of electives, research dissertation and an internship. The EU grant will fund 30 students from the region for two years, including travel, fees, and per diems.

This USyd announcement is timely given that ASEAN Secretary General Surin Pitsuwan affirmed ASEAN's push to establish its first human rights body for the 41 year old grouping of Southeast Asian nations. Surin delivered the keynote address at the South East Asian Press Alliance 10 year anniversary dinner on Saturday night in Bangkok.

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Sheridan misses the point on PM Rudd and Asia

Yesterday's Australian Literary Review  has a piece by Greg Sheridan on PM Rudd and Asia. Sheridan has some interesting comments on Rudd's vision for relations with Asia, especially China, and the US but spoils it by waffling on foreign policy analysts which sounds tired and whingeing.

He misses the point in questioning whether Rudd is a "panda hugger". It is not an either/or proposition - the point of speaking Mandarin and learning about China is that you can understand issues and make informed decisions, it doesn't mean you automatically become pro-China. And what does pro-China mean anyway? Does it mean you support the government, or that you have Chinese interests at heart? Asia literacy is about opening up opportunities for understanding and cooperation, not siding with Asian governments. Sheridan's piece has a nice plug for DFAT and Asian languages though.

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PM Rudd announces push for Asia Pacific Community

PM's Rudd's huge announcement at last night's Asia Society dinner of a push for a new Asia Pacific Community (transcript here and video here and here) was met with restrained applause by the audience from the top end of town. I almost fell out of my seat as the lovely Year 7 violinist, Kako Miura, who played at the end received longer and louder applause than the PM.

The coverage of the announcement has been mixed, with some lame opposition from the Liberals along the lines that Rudd has ruined bilateral relations with several countries and so should focus on that first before embarking on anything new. Opposition Spokesperson Andrew Robb chipped in with some lame whines along these lines. Former FM Downer should have his own TV show called 'Cranky Old Men Who Realise Too Late They Did Bugger All When They Had The Chance.'

One thing that doesn't make sense to me is the inclusion of the US in the Asia Pacific Community. The US is important but Australia has to realise that not every alliance/mechanism/treaty/organisation that we form has to include the US. Does the EU or African Union include the US? Does this mean that the APC replaces APEC? Or will Mexico, Chile etc eventually join an enlarged APC? Maybe Rudd and Woolcott will use this is to show the US we still see their value. Then after consulting regional leaders and subsequently dropping US involvement, they will cite a regional preference to keep membership regional.

Here is some of the coverage of the announcement:

Australia
The Interpreter: Kevin Rudd's big idea
The Interpreter: Rudd's grand design
The Interpreter: A quick way to kill off the East Asia Summit?
ABC: Rudd keen for Asia-Pacific alliance
The Age: Rudd pushes for Asia Pacific Community
The Australian: Old warhorse Richard Woolcott back in harness to smooth regional ties
ABC: Rudd's Asia-Pacific bid a stunt: Downer
The Australian: Kevin Rudd to drive Asian union
Ninemsn: Rudd pan-Asian plan gets mixed response

International
Press Trust of India: Rudd proposes an 'Asia-Pacific community'
Gulf Times: Australian PM Rudd moots Europe-style Asia-Pacific union
Xinhua: Australian PM wants to see Asia Pacific Community in 2020

Lowy: Should it all be Chinese to us?

The Lowy Institute's blog The Interpreter had a good post by Scheherazade Rogers on the dangers of too narrow a definition of priority Asian languages and too limited funding plus the importance for students of a wider and deeper understanding of Australia's place in our region.

Budget 08-09: $62.4 million to a National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program

Here is the relevant section of the 2008-09 Budget commitment of $62.4 million to a National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program (NALSSP). Scroll about halfway down to the section titled 'Strengthening regional connections'.

David Hill: AUSTRALIA’S 2020 ASIA VISION

From the Asian Studies Association of Australia's Asian Currents:

by David T. Hill, Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, Murdoch University

With the dust now settled on the Australia 2020 Summit, the question remains ‘what next?’

As a participant in the stream on Australia’s future prosperity and security, I was aware of the extraordinarily challenging task our group faced in trying to distil our multitude of conclusions into final form.

We focussed on some confronting issues: terrorism, security treaties, trade pacts, global warming, and migration flows. But running through almost all was the central need for Australia to be able to communicate and cooperate with the countries of our Asian region.

Whether discussing preventative security, sustainability policy or Australia’s economic future in 2020 when 43 per cent of the global GDP will be generated in Asia, one thing was clear. Until our society becomes Asia literate – that is, informed about, able to communicate with, and relate to, Asia – we will be struggling with one hand tied behind our back.

The report handed to the PM in the final session included our stream’s three ambitions for 2020, two of which related directly to Asia. These were the call to ‘reinvigorate and deepen our engagement with Asia and the Pacific’ and to ‘ensure that the major languages and cultures of our region are no longer foreign to Australians but are familiar and mainstreamed into Australian society’.

The priority was for a comprehensive, cross-agency, national strategic plan for a major reinvigoration of Asia literacy in Australia, to enhance our global engagement in trade, security and people to people exchanges.

The report recommended a more focussed effort to recruit foreign language teachers from local communities and overseas, and to enhance Australia’s foreign language teaching skills.

There was a strong appeal to the spirit of adventure of young Australians, to encourage them in their thousands to link with Asian communities through support for school twinning, exchange programs, mentoring, in-country and community-based learning programs. In drafting the consensus we dubbed it ‘Australia’s 2020 Asia vision’.

I was exhilarated to hear that the previous weekend’s Youth Summit had also called for a ‘national linguistic and cultural platform’ which would ‘enforce mandatory learning of foreign languages in secondary schools and assist businesses with linguistics retraining’.

Since participants were constantly urged to go for ‘big ideas’ we lacked sufficient time to fill in the details.

We talked, for example, about the importance of getting young Australians to study in Asia as part of their education, but left open the precise mechanisms. We exhorted the government to encourage students to study Asian languages at university and mentioned a ‘language bonus’ in the university entrance score and a HECS waiver for languages, but did not have the time to consider other possible stimuli. We recognised the dearth of qualified teachers of Asian languages but did not explore how best to train those required expeditiously.

So there’s much left to do to turn the goals into implementable strategies.

But if the government incorporates Australia’s 2020 Asia Vision into our education system, the prosperous and secure future we glimpsed at the Summit may be ours, and more importantly, our children’s.

Links:

• The Summit website http://www.australia2020.gov.au
  
  
• The Youth Communiqué http://www.australia2020.gov.au/youth/index.cfm#communique

FM Stephen Smith: compulsory foreign languages

From Channel 10's Meet the Press after the 2020 Summit:

STEPHEN SMITH: "I think the big idea for me so far is every Australian student studying a foreign language by 2020. One of the real themes comingout of the session that I've been co-convening is that we need to engage much more effectively in Asia, and the Asia-Pacific in our region, andhaving language skills and sensitivity to cultures within our region is veryimportant. So for me, a big push on foreign languages, particularly Asian,would be a very good thing for us to do for our international relations,foreign policy and standing in the region.