AFA1 The Big Picture

Australian Foreign Affairs; Issue 1

Jonathan Pearlman, Jonathan Pearlman

• Publisher: Australian Foreign Affairs
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781743820117
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

'We need to determine a foreign policy of our own – one that looks after Australia's interest in the new order; an order which will have China as its centre of gravity.' —Paul KeatingAustralia's top thinkers on foreign affairs address the most significant foreign affairs dynamics affecting Australia today, including the rise of China and the election of Donald Trump. The world is changing, and so is Australia's place in it. What do we need to know? What do we need to think about? Paul Keating discusses changes occurring in the United States, Europe and Asia and how Australia should respond. Allan Gyngell looks at the collapse of long-held beliefs underlying Australian foreign policy and the need to prepare for growing uncertainty. George Megalogenis analyses Australia's changing demographics and the rapid increase in migrants from China and India – a development that comes with both challenges and benefits. Linda Jakobson examines China's evolving reach and ambitions under Xi Jinping and what this could mean for Australia and the region. The Big Picture is an essential exploration of Australia's position in the world today.'There has never been a more critical time for Australia to contemplate its place in the world. My intention is that Australian Foreign Affairs will serve as a forum for our most adventurous and deepest strategic thinkers to interrogate foreign policy' —Morry Schwartz, Publisher, Australian Foreign Affairs'Australia is increasingly affected by events beyond its borders, especially as global power and wealth shifts towards Asia. The challenges facing Australia and the region are varied and complex, but they are also fascinating. There is a strong need and appetite for a publication that explores these challenges and debates the ways Australia should respond.'—Jonathan Pearlman, Editor, Australian Foreign Affairs

THE CHANGING FACE OF AUSTRALIA

Completing the shift
to a Eurasian nation

George Megalogenis

The new China migrant

One of the intriguing chores of newspaper journalism involves finding a case study to accompany a broader story about who we are as a nation. The family or individual selected to illustrate the piece carries a heavy burden: to embody a social trend.

When the 2011 census revealed that our national identity was evolving from Anglo-European to Eurasian, I had little trouble convincing my editors at the Australian to illustrate that shift with a Chinese family. I thought – wrongly – that it didn’t really matter when our avatars migrated to Australia. The key point to my mind was that they lived in Sydney, where the data showed the Chinese-born were poised to replace the English-born as the city’s largest migrant community. Nationally, Mandarin had already overtaken Italian as the second-most common language spoken after English. Our front page scoop, published in 2012, featured a Chinese Australian family from Epping, in Sydney’s north-west. It was a gorgeous image: the Chinese parents and their Australian-born children getting ready for their day. The two girls, in their private-school uniforms, were finishing breakfast as Mum and Dad shared a joke with them. This family’s journey from China to Australia’s cosmopolitan heartland seemed to reaffirm the essential virtue of our migration program. “The Sydney couple moved from China to Australia in 1990 with little money to start with, and for the next four years both worked up to 90 hours a week in various jobs until they had saved enough to buy their own business,” the article read. “More than two decades later, the couple run a successful chain of health food stores across the city, and employ 23 Australian workers.”

After the release of the 2016 census, I reread this article and kicked myself. The case study was misleading. Our Chinese-Australian family represented the twentieth-century story of migration, not the twenty-first. They had followed the familiar two-generation path from outsiders to middle class. The parents left a damaged nation and put down roots in Australia through home ownership and small business, while their children outperformed their peers at school and then in the professions. The continuity with previous waves of migrants from southern Europe and Asia was easy to see.

When the couple moved to Australia in 1990, China was a poor nation in transition. Its economy was only 30 per cent the size of Italy’s and 12 per cent the size of Japan’s. The mistake I made was to assume continuity between the Chinese migrants of the 1980s and ’90s and those who have arrived since 2001, after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. That was the pivotal event which transformed the global economy in China’s favour. It marks the dividing line between old and new China. In 1990, China was the eleventh-largest economy in the world; two decades later, it was the second-largest.

The typical twenty-first-century migrant from China skips the first generation of struggle. They land between the middle class and the richest either as a tertiary student or a skilled worker. Their wealth and power come from who they were in China, not what they become in Australia. And this presents a dilemma for policymakers in Australia, because Beijing views its twenty-first-century emigrants as an extension of their state. As departing Secretary of Defence Dennis Richardson explained in his farewell address in May this year, “It is no secret that the Chinese government keeps a watchful eye inside Australian Chinese communities and effectively controls some Chinese language media in Australia.”

An Australia with two big Eurasian capitals cannot continue to behave as a white outpost in Asia

As a migration optimist, I suspect that Beijing’s monitoring will be counterproductive, driving the new arrivals into the arms of Australia’s extended multicultural family. But policymakers should not underestimate the unique circumstances at play. This is the first time in Australia’s 229-year settler history that the elites of a rising nation have come here with their mother country keeping a “watchful eye” on them.

The numbers involved are significant. Australia had settled 143,000 migrants from old China by 2001. In just fifteen years, the migrants from new China have trebled that total to more than 500,000.

The migrants of new China are not the only group that differ from previous waves from the same country. The Indian migrants of the twenty-first century also carry the elevated expectations of a rising nation, although without the baggage of one-party state surveillance. Like the Chinese, the Indians are younger and better educated than their compatriots who migrated in the 1980s and ’90s.

These Chinese and Indian migrants are the vanguard of a migration boom that is unleashing the most profound changes to Australian society since the gold rushes of the 1850s. Every aspect of policy will be affected.

Australia’s economic fortunes have been tied to Asia since 1966–67, when Japan replaced the United Kingdom as the number one destination for our exports. But our demography had been a decade behind this engagement. The first substantial wave of Asian migration did not arrive until the Vietnamese refugees were received in large numbers in the late 1970s.

China’s rise has fused trade and demography. China replaced Japan as our biggest customer in 2009–10, and the Chinese-born replaced the English-born as the largest migrant community in Sydney in 2011.

To paraphrase Paul Keating, our future is not only in Asia, it is Eurasian.

Australia’s outlook on the region, and the world, will inevitably adapt with its ethnic mix. This will require a new compact to address the mismatch between our demography and our political institutions. Our parliament remains much whiter than the nation it serves. Our businesses happily trade with Asia, while locking the boardroom door to Asian Australians. And our foreign policy remains rooted in an Anglo past, with the default question being to ask the Americans, “How can we help?”

This essay is a call to arms to elevate migration to a first-order concern for foreign affairs to help us complete the transition to a Eurasian nation that is bound neither to the aspirations of our largest trading partner, China, nor to the anxieties of our ally, the United States. The first step is to understand who we are.

Australia divided

Australia’s identity is undergoing an epic transformation. In seventy short years, we have shifted from being the most insular rich nation on Earth to being a global role model for diversity. It took fifty years to get from white to Anglo-European, but only another twenty to cross the threshold to Eurasian.

When the door was first opened to mass migration, in 1947, nine out of ten Australians were born locally, and of those who were migrants, the English accounted for half. The last time the English represented the majority of the migrants living in Australia was in December 1788, when Indigenous Australians numbered as many as 1 million, while the settler population was 859.

By 1976, 20 per cent of the Australian population had been born overseas, and almost half were from Europe (8 per cent of the total population). That year, the Asian-born were the new minority, at 1 per cent of the total population.

The initial Asian wave, led by Vietnam in the late 1970s and then by China and the Philippines in the 1980s, was not as big as the postwar wave from Europe. But it laid the foundation for Australia’s population to shift to a more Eurasian composition, as migration from the region accelerated with the rise of China and India in the twenty-first century.

People born overseas now make up more than 28 per cent of the total Australian population – a level not seen since the 1890s. More than a third of these are from Asia. Add the local-born with at least one parent who was a migrant, and just under half the total population is either first- or second-generation Australian.

Now, the rub. This national snapshot conceals dramatic variations between the states. The affluent south-east corner of the continent and the west can be counted as majority new Australian: in Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT, the first and second generations combine to form more than half the population. But in the rest of the country, old Australia dominates. In Tasmania, the first and second generations are just 25.6 per cent of the state’s population; in the Northern Territory, they are 37.9 per cent; Queensland, 41 per cent; and South Australia, 44.5 per cent. Each capital city has a particular ethnic make-up that bears only passing resemblance to that of the nation at large. It is in these differences that the multiple oppo...