Australia alone!...And illiterate

The emerging reality again is that Confucian economies like Japan and China, out of necessity and utilising highly educated human resources, are most likely to identify viable ways to discipline our energy indulgences.

Certainly, a first step should be to follow their example and avoid the escalating wars that pollute our global environment in so many unmeasured ways. Unfortunately, our ill-informed and unreflective Prime Minister sees no incongruity in hyping her carbon tax while offering a type of blank cheque for Australian support in the Afghanistan war and allowing her Foreign Minister to urge on NATO activity wherever the ruling regime does not win the favour of failing Western interests.

Both sides of parliament are lost. While the Liberal Victorian premier Ted Baillieu has been seeking to set an admirable example in his state in preparing for the future outlined above, his party colleague and national Shadow Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne, is, according to a report in The Age on the 9^th of August 2011, in London highlighting his own illiteracy by cautioning the British about ''naive'' backers of the rise of China.

He has also warned that aspects of its political and economic model are ''deeply troubling'', dwelled on ''managing the darker side of China's rise'' and called for a more tough-minded attitude towards it.

Is he following Mr Rudd's example in spruiking up NATO to come to Australia's rescue as it has in Afghanistan and Libya? Or is he planning to further dumb Australia's already failing education system so we all fall faithfully in line behind the Defence Department's follies?

Of course, it is rather poor form for dark and Communist China to be better managed financially than free and Capitalist America.

Modern western democracy often seems to have been designed to neglect underlying, long-term strategic issues and to focus on issues that produce snappy sound bites and pander to shallow fashions and hidden vested interests.

The illiteracy of electorates before this sort of politicking is just one more failing that will leave Australia ill-equipped to address the challenges of a rapidly advancing future. It is a dynamic world where no country will prosper that finds itself alone and illiterate.

Having first foreshadowed this sort of concern in the Australian Embassy in Beijing in 1976, written several books on the theme and contributed to On Line Opinion as early as 9 October 2006 under the title American decline and the Australian predicament, as well as more recently on 22 July and 3 August 2011; there is no escaping the sense that there is little, or no, capacity in Australian government and political leadership circles to address these issues with consistent resolution.

Perversely, only China shelters us from the maladies confronting the United Kingdom and the United States.

Power is moving to other cultures and other political orientations. Yet, Australians do little more that rehearse lessons taught us by failing imperial masters who have no interest in mitigating our isolation and ignorance.