Changing Face Of Australia—the Economics Of Numbers

Anthony Paul, Straits Times, May 10

QUESTION: Is Australia part of our region?

Answer: Depends on whom you ask.

To some Australian prime ministers and foreign ministers, Australia is, in the words of former leader Paul Keating, a country whose ’security and prosperity… will be best found, and most easily negotiated, in the region around us’.

But Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad sees things differently. Malaysia’s former prime minister saves some of his fiercest put-downs for the place. Shortly before his resignation from office, he dismissed the country as ’some sort of transplant from another region’.

What Australia is at the moment can generate a highly complex—and to Asians (I suspect) only mildly interesting—discussion. Far more interesting and relevant, especially to younger Asians, is what Australia is becoming. Some time this century, a very high percentage, possibly a majority, of Australians, will become Eurasian. Once that happens, Australia’s Asianness should be beyond dispute.

In the past week or so, two developments have offered me insights into Australia’s destiny: My first has been personal: Last Friday, my wife and I became grandparents of an Asian. My Australian son, Bruce Paul, a Singapore Airlines pilot, and his Indonesian wife, Tiara Effendie, presented us with Tari Jasmine Paul at Mount Elizabeth Hospital.

The second event was somewhat weightier (certainly than Tari Jasmine’s 2.47kg): The Business Council of Australia (BCA), whose members are chief executive officers of the largest corporations, issued a position paper that favours an immigration programme that would lift the country’s population from its current 20 million to 30 million or more by 2050.

The call for more people has come in the wake of a disturbing development: Australia’s low fertility rate of 1.7 births per woman is falling even further. On current trends and in the absence of increased immigration, says the BCA paper, the population would ’peak at just under 21 million by 2030 and decline quickly thereafter’.

Australia would pay a high price in living standards. Security is another consideration. As Sir Roderick Carnegie, an influential Melbourne businessman, colourfully puts it, ’Australia has 5.5 per cent of the world’s land mass and 0.3 per cent of its population. No group in history has ever had that much living space without having to fight for it every 25 years or so’.

Europe, the historical source of most migrations to Australia, is (as the BCA report noted) itself in need of immigrants to stop its population levels and thus economies from shrinking. The corollary: Most of this century’s immigrants to Australia will come from Asia.

For much of the past century, Asians found Australia a very difficult place to emigrate to. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, drafted at a time when Australian workers feared importation of low-cost labour from China and the Pacific islands, kept them out. In 1947, Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell used an offensive quip to underline his Labor Party’s refusal to reunite an Asian family: ’Two Wongs don’t make a white.’

Such casual racism has long been out of fashion Down Under. In 1973, Canberra expunged the last traces of it from its immigration policy. Voters have recently been repudiating One Nation, a redneck anti-Asian political party which emerged in 1997 at a time of some anti-globalisation discontent.

The BCA paper calls for the creation of a council devoted to establishing a national population policy. Australian political parties don’t yet have coherent attitudes to the problem, so a debate is under way.

The debate’s poles are currently far apart. Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser has been advocating a population of 50 million. Biologist Tim Flannery, pointing to the continent’s sandy soils and lack of water, says 6-9 million ’would give Australians enormous flexibility in dealing with environmental and other problems’.

Conservatives like Sir Roderick and Mr Fraser incongruously join former Labor opposition leader Kim Beazley in arguing for a much bigger Australia. Labor’s current shadow immigration minister Stephen Smith is much more cautious. He says: ’We think that current immigration levels are about right. But Labor wants to put the immigration programme on a sustainable long-term basis by devising a population policy.’

Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative, has cautiously modest ambitions. ’About 22 or 23 million seems about right,’ he told me in a 1997 interview. ’The country couldn’t stand any more.’

The number that Australians finally decide upon will have profound economic implications by mid-century. The BCA forecasts riveting comparisons between Australia and Singapore in 2050.

If Australia were to implement the Fraser Plan (50 million by 2050), Australia would have a 23 per cent share of total GDP for the region (South-east Asia), and Singapore, despite a much lower population, 24 per cent. The Flannery Plan (6-9 million) would give Australia just 5 per cent to Singapore’s 30 per cent.

Any young Singaporean thinking of emigrating Down Under would be wise to watch Australia’s emerging population figure and perhaps think twice before moving to what could be a much smaller economy.

But if Australians do indeed opt for more people, most 21st century new settlers seem likely to come this time from Asia. Asian-Australian lobbies, increasingly well-organised, would ensure that politicians suffered for any effort to restrict Asian immigration.

Sydney’s latest telephone directory offers perhaps the best glimpse at just how much the nation has changed since that immigration minister uttered his infamous one-liner.

The last time I counted, the directory listed 2,019 Wongs. Other Asians have a similar stake in their new home: Five years ago, Nguyen became the directory’s eighth most common name, having overtaken Johnson and Martin.

Two Wongs might still not make a white. A Paul and an Effendie haven’t made one either. But these days, I’m happy to say, a lot of them, the Paul family now included, are busy making Australians Asians.