Asia, Paul Keating once observed, is 'the place you fly over' on your way to the real cultural centres of the world ... in Europe. He's changed his mind since.
But for the person who did a great deal to develop APEC — the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation organisation — it was a steep learning curve because for Keating most of his reference points were Atlantic: European and north American.
The report that Ross Garnaut produced in 1989 helped break down the enduring focus on Europe and the US. Garnaut went a long way to describing how Australia could avail itself of the opportunity in Asia in business terms, something that the mining industry had been doing with Japan through its immense growth period.
The Australian Government's white paper Australia in the Asian Century isn't exactly breaking news when it tells us the fastest growing economies and the greatest opportunities for Australia are at our doorstep. But like kids at a birthday party, we seem to focus more on the cupcakes than the host and guest of honour. And there's not a lot of a practical nature that suggests ways the reports content's will become more than aspirations.
Why do we need to be reminded of something we already know? And what does this white paper say about how politics work Australia, where Australia really is in relation to the opportunities and, if it's been so obvious for so long, why do we need rousing exhortations from the Prime Minister to try harder?
Politically, you might appreciate ASEAN nations' judgement that they don't want Australia any closer. From the Asian perspective, Australian approaches to the region are fickle and opportunistic — we're in things where there's something in it for us (like the reduction of trade barriers); then we're not, like when we push back boats of asylum seekers, a policy devoid of multilateral considerations. We engage with the region when it suits us.
This fickle, ambiguous and opportunistic approach leaves Australia with neither the credibility nor the relationships to deliver a better outcome for all parties.
But the real problem is at a cultural level — inside Australia. For a country whose second most spoken language is Chinese, whose immigration quota had more Chinese than English migrants two years ago, you only have to press a few sensitive buttons and all the fears emerge.
Not just fear of the relatively few asylum seekers who reach Australia by boat, or the fear that allows Alan Jones and Barnaby Joyce to talk about 'selling the farm to Asians' and be believed. It a broader culture of fear, which bubbles to the surface any time a politician or shock jock wants a ratings hit. The fear is deep in Australia.
The only antidote to fear in any area of life is engagement and experience which take a person away from abstractions, stereotypes and self-protective generalisations. But despite lots of travel to Asia, Australians don't seem to have the sort of experience that defuses the fear.
How do Australians find out what's happening in Asia? Who's letting Australians be informed about their region?
How many Australians know India's growth has been in decline for almost 18 months? That China is a place of widespread civil disturbance as the uneven wealth distribution in the country makes for constant social unrest? Do Australians know that the rising stars of Asia are not China, Korea and India but Indonesia and Vietnam?
If not, why not? Our myopic media, of course. Our televisions are full of live coverage of familiar scenes — the US primaries and the stump speeches in the US presidential election, news of the fading economies of Europe, and the tedious repartee that comes with minority government.
It doesn't have to be that way. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and CNN do more for their audiences than Australian media services could ever dream of.
Without an informed view, fear wins.
It is easy to be cynical about this white paper, which states the obvious at great length. Governments habitually welcome the 'fresh insights' and 'bold proposals' of white papers only to dismantle them for immediate political ends. Just look at how the Henry Tax Review was picked at and scratched until it bled to death.
Considering how long this latest paper took to see daylight, and the fact that the committee assigned to develop it had its efforts reworked by the Department of Foreign Affairs, makes you wonder what function it serves. Does it provide a map to the future, as it boasts? Or are its objectives of a more short-term nature, allowing the ALP to steal a march as it prepares for the upcoming election?
Commendable and well informed as the claims about opportunities are, where is the enablement to see the opportunities become achievement? The paper looks just like another exercise in political window dressing when, in reality, the same old practices that have left the opportunity unrealised for so long will be allowed to prosper.
Fr Michael Kelly SJ, founding publisher of Eureka Street, is the Bangkok based executive director of UCA News and was, in the 1980s, executive director of the Jesuits' Asian Bureau Australia.