Keating's blunder: three lessons

Abstract

Author's Note: The above title is the English version of the title of the following article written in Bahasa Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur in December 1993 in the days immediately following Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad's announcement of his cabinet's decision that his country's latest dispute with Australia was at an end. This commentary upon the recent disturbance in Australia/Malaysia relations was written for the February/March 1994 issue of the journal Negarawan, published by the Institute for Strategic and International Studies, Kuala Lumpur. The argument offered here follows upon and complements that which was presented in my earlier essay on tensions in Australia/Malaysia relations entitled “Negotiating Cultural Difference: On Seeking, Not Always Successfully, to Share the World with Others –– Or, In Defence of Embassy” (ASAA Asian Studies Review 15, 2 (November 1991), 57–73). In particular, the argument of the final section of that essay, “The Negotiation of Difference: Where to from Here?”, remains germane. On that previous occasion I argued that Australians and Malaysians were confronted by the challenge of a common endeavour: to find a way of sharing the world on the basis of their complicated differences, not by denying them. In their often appalling disingenuousness and vaunted but quite insensitive “honesty” or directness, (I remarked), Australians often forget that the reach of their own assumptions and values is only as far as the limits of our own cultural world; something similar, perhaps, applies to the ensemble of assumptions and motives that many Malays bring to bear as they seek, from within their own familiar cultural matrix, to make sense of their own social experience and to move through their own social world. Each side, possibly, needs to remind itself of the cultural limits of its own culture–specific assumptions, and to be ever aware of the great possibilities of misunderstanding and also of giving offence that may follow from any insufficiently considered extension of those assumptions to the interpretation of behaviour, or the attribution of meaning, beyond the immediate context and broader cultural world in which they are grounded. On and between both sides, I argued, that would remain an important topic for some continuing “negotiation of difference” bridging the divergent cultural realities of Australians and Malaysians. The lesson seems worth repeating, now that its importance has again been highlighted by the APEC aftermath.