Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Scholar Robin Jeffrey once wrote:

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Australia's path to Asia is a jungle track paved with reports.

More than a dozen major reports over the past 50 years have called for a greater engagement with Asia. Peter Varghese's An India Economic Strategy to 2035 is the latest, but I must say it is an outstanding one. Each report has edged us closer, true, but the path to transforming this jungle track into a highway lies in changing the way that we think about ourselves as Australians, not the way that we think about Asia.

During the last two decades, our nation has been transformed by immigration. According to the 2016 census, over a quarter of Australians are born overseas and nearly 50 per cent have a parent born overseas. Although four million Australians, or somewhere between 14 and 17 per cent of our population, identify as Asian or as having Asian heritage, our national identity has not evolved to reflect that demographic change. We are no longer an Anglo outpost of empire in the Indo-Pacific fixated on keeping Asians out, but our national symbols and our institutions continue to reflect an outdated representation of Australia. A truly representative national identity would equally recognise the talents and experiences of members of the Asian-Australian diaspora communities and open our eyes to new ways of engaging with Asia.

No relationship illustrates our national identity challenge more clearly than the one with India. Australia is now home to almost 700,000 Australians who claim Indian ancestry, almost 500,000 of whom were born on the subcontinent. The Varghese report sees people-to-people links enabled by these diaspora communities as one of the three pillars for our engagement with India. Indeed, the Varghese report correctly called people-to-people links 'the most significant asset of all in Australia-India relations'. The Varghese report explains the soft value of people-to-people links as going:

… into the nooks and crannies of a relationship where governments cannot. They can shape perceptions in a way governments cannot.

In this realisation, we have come an extraordinarily long way since two men from northern India became the first people to be denied entry into Australia for failing the Immigration Restriction Act's infamous dictation test, yet the knowledge, expertise and connections of our Indian-Australian diaspora remain underutilised. They are not sufficiently represented in our institutions, on our boards, in our C-suites, in our industry bodies, in our business associations, in state and federal politics, in policymaking and in our higher education sector. There are no Indian-Australians in this chamber.

Although Hindi is the third-most spoken language in the world, after English and Mandarin, and the most common Indian language spoken at home in Australia, it is taught in only two schools in Victoria. In 2017, only 252 secondary school students studied Hindi in Victoria, significantly fewer than the 20,000 students who studied French, 18,000 students who studied Italian and 11,000 students who studied German. Given our limited language capabilities and subpar diaspora engagement, it's not surprising that on almost every measure our relationship with India is underdeveloped. India is the second-most populous country in the world, and soon to be the world's third-largest economy, but only 0.4 per cent of Australian foreign direct investment goes to India, a fraction compared to the 21.6 per cent to the United States and 10.8 per cent to New Zealand. Direct Indian investment into Australia only represents 0.1 per cent of total Australian stocks. Australia's two-way trade with India is only 3.5 per cent of total trade.

Labor's FutureAsia policy attempts to address these shortcomings in our relationship with Asia. FutureAsia will designate Hindi as a priority Asian language and seek to increase the number of schools that teach it. FutureAsia will establish an Asian-Australian diaspora program to harness the knowledge and connections of our Indian diaspora to help grow our economic relationship with India. Diaspora programs have been successful overseas, particularly the diaspora programs operated by the United States Department of State, and have been shown to drive economic investment and growth. The Indian diaspora in the Silicon Valley are recognised globally for their contribution to the growth of the IT industry both in the United States and in India. Home to a good proportion of Australia's Indian diaspora, such a program has the potential to transform the economy of Melbourne's west in the area that I represent.

To fully benefit from the opportunities that the demographic changes reflected in the modern Australia now afford us, we have to update our mindset and embrace a new national identity that fully encompasses the modern, diverse migrant nation that Australia has become.

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