New Australian review of Asian ties

Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard has announced a new white paper which will look at the whole range of Australia’s links with Asia and provide recommendations that will shape the country’s engagement with Asia for years to come. Australia’s Prime Minister told an audience in Melbourne that we are now in the ‘Asian century’ and that Australia needs to adapt its way of doing things to take advantage of the new realities.

While the Prime Minister’s speech again focused primarily on China and gave some prominence to India it was nice to see that Indonesia also came in for a number of mentions. She said of Indonesia that this ‘remarkable and too little remarked-upon country, which has the world’s largest Islamic population living in the world’s third largest democracy, continues to disprove the millions of words spent arguing that Islam and democracy are incompatible’.

It’s nice to hear her say something positive about Indonesia. Although it’s a shame that Indonesia is so little remarked upon it’s a big positive that Australia seems to be getting serious about better engaging with its region again. Let’s hope something good comes out of the review. And let’s hope that in the longer term, Australians more generally stop being so indifferent about their neighbours.