Planet Erland

JUST four years ago, when the Lowy Institute asked Australians to rate the most important foreign policy goals, ”tackling climate change” topped the list. In the Sydney think tank’s poll this year, climate change has dropped to 10th place. Topping this year’s table of what Australian foreign policy should be trying to achieve, 81 per cent nominated ”protecting the jobs of Australian workers”. It seems we have started to cut ourselves off and turn inwards.

At 4.9 per cent, an unemployment rate most other rich countries would envy, Australia is far from having a job crisis. Yet this focus on ourselves in a world racked by far greater worries is part of a wider trend. Coincidentally with the Lowy poll Michael Wesley, the institute’s head, has just published There Goes the Neighbourhood, a book about Australia’s response to the rise of Asia. He finds a disturbing paradox. Thanks partly to two decades of economic prosperity, Australians have never been more widely travelled. Yet we have become a country of insular internationalists, complacent and incurious about the big changes reshaping the world and how they will affect us.

Our political leaders offer scant inspiration to raise our sights. Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister, and Tony Abbott, the Opposition Leader, barely register interest in foreign policy. Instead, they brawl about issues such as asylum seekers in a way that corrodes the national debate. The results show. Despite Australia’s relatively small number of boat people (an average of 1300 a year over the past 34 years), the Lowy poll found 72 per cent of Australians concerned about boat people, with 85 per cent of those thinking too much money was spent processing them. If the main parties ditched their wildly expensive offshore processing policies, perhaps voters would be more open-minded than they think.

Most Australians think China’s becoming an economic giant has been good for the country: hardly surprising when our own well-being is now linked ineluctably to China’s. And there has been a marked rise since the George W. Bush years in rating the US alliance important for Australia’s security. Wesley, though, argues that our complacency masks some brutal truths here, chiefly that America will pay the alliance less attention as it faces a rising China.

Australians grappled with tough challenges to change our economic ways. If we have, indeed, become a selfish nation on the back of the prosperity that followed, Australia’s political leaders could cast off their own insularity and steer the country on a debate about the challenges we now face in adapting to a rapidly changing world.
Advertisement: Story continues below Our political leaders offer scant inspiration to raise our sights. Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister, and Tony Abbott, the Opposition Leader, barely register interest in foreign policy. Instead, they brawl about issues such as asylum seekers in a way that corrodes the national debate. The results show. Despite Australia’s relatively small number of boat people (an average of 1300 a year over the past 34 years), the Lowy poll found 72 per cent of Australians concerned about boat people, with 85 per cent of those thinking too much money was spent processing them. If the main parties ditched their wildly expensive offshore processing policies, perhaps voters would be more open-minded than they think. Most Australians think China’s becoming an economic giant has been good for the country: hardly surprising when our own well-being is now linked ineluctably to China’s. And there has been a marked rise since the George W. Bush years in rating the US alliance important for Australia’s security. Wesley, though, argues that our complacency masks some brutal truths here, chiefly that America will pay the alliance less attention as it faces a rising China. Australians grappled with tough challenges to change our economic ways. If we have, indeed, become a selfish nation on the back of the prosperity that followed, Australia’s political leaders could cast off their own insularity and steer the country on a debate about the challenges we now face in adapting to a rapidly changing world.