Why we should think more like an Australian

Opinion: I recently spent a few days at the Institute of Australian Geographers’ annual conference in Newcastle. In these straitened times, academics are increasingly (and quite rightly) asked to justify such travel, but I learned a lot from four days listening to Australian academics. Though thinking like an Australian is not something I have ever considered, save maybe as a curse endured by Aussies, it turns out there might be more to it than meets the eye.

Edgy Aussie scholarship

New Zealand’s small contingent of academic and student geographers held their own in Newcastle, but in a shrinking number of fields and often with a less edgy scholarliness than their Australian counterparts.

New Zealanders addressed some of the changes in our places and brought matters of care, concern, and Indigenous rights and perspectives to bear on local and national political debates. Many explored initiatives to strengthen participatory management and collaborative governance within and beyond the state.

Australia’s geographers introduced similar research to do with changing places and environments in Australia, and some also asked sharply critical questions about worlds near and far. There were papers, for example, on climate-driven economic and social collapse, detailed analyses of the geography of industrial and labour market change, the intergenerational trauma of warfare, and the border-bending effects of airborne policing of migrant boats in the Mediterranean.

What all this told me is that I should harden my resolve to struggle against initiatives within and beyond my own university that I believe put universities’ scholarly traditions at risk. These must be safeguarded as we pursue ways of weaving scholarship more effectively into public service.

We owe this to the scholars, intellectuals, artists, discoverers, global diplomats, prophets of peace and so on – the products of our universities whose intellectual achievements we all celebrate as core to our nation. As they do in Australia.

Economic powerhouse

Just being in Australia was a reminder that we live 3.5 hours away from a global economic powerhouse. Our size, resource base, history, and distance from other places limits our capacity to be more like Australia. Nor can we model ourselves on Denmark, Singapore, Israel, Ireland, or Finland (the Government’s comparator-du-jour). However, thinking more deeply as a geographer, making more of our proximity to Australia is a no-brainer.

Despite celebrating and reaffirming our ties to Australia every 10 years on the anniversary of the Closer Economic Relations agreement, there is little evidence between those celebrations of us making any strategic leveraging of our closeness to Australia. It rarely surfaces in either mundane political debates or longer-term strategic policy. Being in Australia brought that home to me.

Futures made in Australia

I attended a session at the conference in which economic geographers debated the ‘Future Made in Australia’ policy, a 10-year, A$23 billion green transitions programme. The session celebrated a return to industrial policy in Australia after 35 years of neoliberalism, but it also asked some serious questions about contradictory objectives.

For instance, panellists asked whether in its implementation the policy’s transitions objectives were already being compromised by infrastructural investment to underpin a new round of resource industries. They asked how big infrastructural projects would boost an industrial ecosystem dominated by small to medium-sized firms. They asked how the policy would deal with the problems of transitioning regional workforces to the skills required of digital industries, and whether the policy would arrest the drift of regional populations to the cities, and even whether this was a desirable or appropriate goal.

Australia’s geographers plotted the research-led investigations necessary to address these questions – before the futures to be made turn into the mistakes of a past relived.

These are precisely the questions that animated economic geography as a sub-discipline before economic policy was captured by the failed imaginaries of decades of neoliberal globalisation. Don’t worry, people are mobile labour units, and their lives will be resolved and their potential maximised by competitive markets. Wrong and wrong – as geographers knew then and the Trumpian moment illustrates now, in so many ways.

One long-term collaborator asked me what the debate was like across the Tasman. “We don’t have these debates,” I said with some embarrassment. “The best we have in terms of industrial policy is ‘Grow, baby, grow’.” In the interest of national pride, I omitted to add, “as for a transitions agenda, regions, or labour-force skills, the current policy appears to be replacing regional government with a squadron of space police”.

Universities as infrastructure

In another session, urban geographer Kristian Ruming laid out a framework for assessing the crucial part played by universities in urban and national economy and society. He described universities as crucial resources of urban and national infrastructure – physical and cultural hubs that shape, provide, and deliver diverse social, cultural, economic, informational, educational, and knowledge foundations for cities and nations.

As with other infrastructure, universities facilitate flows of, and access to, utilities, goods, people, and ideas. They are essential to sustaining contemporary social life, and they create opportunities to imagine, produce and enjoy better futures.

Ruming also argued that universities were rarely understood in these terms. Instead, universities were being reinterpreted as solvers of state problems, as unnecessarily expensive government-funded industry training establishments, or centres for the cultivation of privileged discontent that must be squashed. Universities deliver so much more.

Governments are right to demand public accountability from universities, but this demand should begin by recognising the full breadth of universities’ infrastructural value.

What I learned in Newcastle will enhance my teaching, research and institutional service. I’m confident it will yield more than the cost of a few hours’ advice from a Big Four consultant on what to do with our universities or our country.

The point is not that we must be like Australia, but that there is value in thinking like Australia, at least for a moment. We cannot be big, brash, and part of crucial global circuits of finance, resources, and geopolitical concern. But we can support our universities to debate and confront who we are and who we are not, how we should build our economy, and how we might imagine ourselves into creative and self-assured economic, cultural and political subjects.

Our policy suite is more constrained than Australia’s, but it ought to build on remembering who we have been and what we have done and celebrating what we have become, to imagine and invest in unfolding futures. This need not mean rejecting growth or embracing without question global tech entrepreneurs, but it should mean some thinking and must mean something more than ‘growth’ for its own sake, exporting resources, or scrambling for spittle from the slavering jaws of the tech bros.

Matariki is the season for this kind of thinking. A time to task our universities with leading us on a journey of ‘Future Made in Aotearoa’.