The @anu_china Annual Lecture by Professor Louise Edwards is up!

You can find her speech here: https://johnmenadue.com/five-eyes-one-tongue-and-hard-of-hearing-australia-and-asia-in-chinas-century/

Australians are not used to being weaker than, poorer than, less influential than Asians

Many in Australian leadership still seem to imagine themselves doing some trickling down of expertise and superior raw materials into the hands of the grateful, “developing” people up north

Finance and IT are “acceptable” places for Asians in Australia’s institutions. Why? Because it’s assumed they won’t threaten to change the culture of the institutions. They will just do as they are instructed. The direction, strategy, thinking will all come from the Anglo.

Don’t alter the institutional culture, don’t reform the foundations of policy—just get the language “techies” in to do the Interpreting and Translation. It’s just words, right. Slot one in and press “translate” and another one—a weird one—pops out.

At the moment, these young Asian Australians find themselves without a public space in which to pass any critical comment easily. Expressions of discontent about the way Australia’s institutions, workplaces or systems are ignored with ‘how very dare you’ eyebrows’.

The senators doing most of the speaking appeared only interested in diaspora if they were:

1 useful in furthering some race-baiting political advantage – dog whistling to a marginal seat or trashing a premier they don’t like, or

2 advancing their latest foreign policy objective

Chinese diaspora are the ones facing the foreign policy abuse at the moment—but don’t worry, racism is an equal opportunity affair—once your country falls from favour—they’ll be targeting your mob next.

Once their utility has passed, should any HK students or Uyghurs manage to enter Australia and dare to complain about some policy, facility or service that they are entitled to as citizens, they would likely be ignored and derided as ‘pesky migrants with special needs’

That’s why we whiteys of the Anglo Diaspora are never suspected of wanting to ‘interfere’ with Australian politics either. WE ARE the politics, the Five Eyes, One Tongue mob can’t interfere when we run the joint.

Success by Asian students is queried. Somehow working hard, getting extra tutoring, taking studying seriously is seen as “cheating” or at best “illegitimate success”—in ways that extra tennis training or swimming coaching is not.