Colombo Plan

Volume 4 Number, 4: December 2003

Crispin Hull talks with Dr Daniel Oakman about how his examination of the Colombo Plan reveals the changing nature of Australia's identity in the Asian region.

Water pipes supplied by Australia under the Colombo Plan being National Archives of Australia: A1768 CPT7

One could describe the Colombo Plan as the right deed for the wrong reason.

The plan was a paradox. It was set up primarily as a bulwark against the march of communism. Those setting it up were working from an insular, defensive perspective that saw Asia in a stereotypical way as poor and backward. Yet the very activity of the plan caused an opening of relationships with Asia and the breaking down of those stereotypical views.

From an Australian perspective the plan provided a greater paradox and irony. Australia wanted to stop communism in Asia, but it also saw the plan as a vehicle to explain to Asian leaders the need for the continuation of the White Australia Policy in the hope that they would understand the Australian perspective and lessen their criticism of the policy. The result was the exact opposite.

Dr Daniel Oakman of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies will publish a book next year on the Colombo Plan from an Australian perspective — the programs Australia funded and the impact of the plan on Australia generally from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the Vietnam War.

He explains that most Australians think the Colombo Plan was only an education program under which Asian students came to Australia on scholarships. That was an important part of the plan and it had a profound affect on Australia, but it did involve a lot of other activities.

Between 1950 and the early 1980s about 20,000 Colombo Plan students came to Australia.

'However, during the 1950s privately funded Asian students outnumbered Colombo Plan students by about five to one,' Oakman says. 'The impact of the Colombo Plan was greatly magnified because when any Australian saw an Asian student they assumed that the student was funded under the Colombo Plan ... The Colombo Plan had a momentum that the Government had not banked on. Many of the privately funded students came because of word-of-mouth and good things that they had heard from earlier Colombo Plan students. The returning Colombo Plan students acted as a sort of advertisement that Australia was a good place to come to for education. It was cheaper for them to come here than to go to the United Kingdom or America and Australian education institutions had a good reputation.'

The Colombo Plan meant that Australia received a very large number of Asia students.

Oakman says those students in Australia turned on their head the stereotypical assumptions upon which the Colombo Plan had been based.

'The Asians who were coming to Australia did not conform to that 1950s stereotypical view that they previously had of Asians,' he said. 'The students could speak acceptable English. They came from middle-class backgrounds. Eventually their academic performance exceeded that of Australians. This would have been quite confronting. These were not rabid communists, poor or disease-ridden Asian hordes. In fact they were perfect examples of assimilation because they came into Australia with very few problems of integrating into an Australian society.

'It was something that the Government did not expect to happen. They expected the Colombo students to offset criticism of the White Australia Policy. The Government expected them to return to Asia and say we understand why the Australian Government does not let Asians come into the country to settle permanently. But what in fact happened is that the Government introduced a group of people who fitted in very well with Australians. They in fact removed a lot of the fear about Asian people. Then it became just a matter of time before the White Australia Policy lost its momentum because the popular fear was no longer there.

'The Government was still receiving a lot of pressure from Asian leaders to change the White Australia Policy but obviously thought there would be electoral repercussions. However, the Colombo Plan helped show there was nothing to fear. Australians had seen that the Asians who would be likely to come to settle — the educated Asians — were not a threat to the social fabric, Australian jobs, or the Australian way of life.

'My surveys show that the students went back and said that they as individuals were not discriminated against during their stay in Australia. Australians were not racist themselves but the Government of the day was. This was horrifying for the Government. Because the students were saying that the Australian people were OK but it was the Government that was at fault. So that was a public-relations disaster.

'These students were puzzled as to why the Government would not change the White Australia Policy if Australia was a democracy and the people had welcomed them without any racism.

'Asian political elites ran the argument that if the students could fit in so easily in Australia for the time that they were there why could not there be permanent emigration of Asians into Australia. They argued that, apart from the fact it was simply unjust to discriminate on a racial basis, there was no practical reason for Australians to resist this change. Asian leaders were not asking for Australia to remove the quota system. They just wanted to be treated equally.'

It was not a politically feasible option anymore to leave the White Australia Policy as it was. The pressures to change it were just too great. The Colombo Plan, therefore, far from being a vehicle through which the White Australia Policy would become more acceptable in Asia, was a significant catalyst in its demise.

'The changes to attitudes about the White Australia Policy and immigration policy was one of the most profound things to come out of the Colombo Plan,' Oakman says.

The entire conception and motivation behind the Colombo Plan was political. Policy makers in the Department of External Affairs thought it would create political stability through funding economic development.

The over-arching principle was that this was an anti-communist scheme.

'One of the things that I explore in the book is the paradox that the program was really predicated on a stereotypical perception of Asia and Asians — that Asia was weak and vulnerable and exposed to foreign political ideology,' Oakman says. 'The Colombo Plan, which was building greater awareness of Asia, was itself based upon the false premise that Asia was weak and on a stereotypical and erroneous view of Asia.'

In order to generate interest and money from Cabinet, External Affairs Minister Richard Casey had to perpetuate that stereotypical view.

'Casey was shrewd enough to know that his more conservative colleagues needed this strategic military push if they were to support the scheme,' Oakman says. 'Casey's own strategy was to tack on the cultural and the educational aspects to it to satisfy his own belief in the expression of Australia's neighbourly humanitarian intent. The people who shared Casey's passion for it were not in the majority and were not very persuasive in the Cabinet. So the level of funding remained quite stable throughout the 1950s.'

In the 1960s when events in Indo-China made communism seem more of a threat, funding doubled. External Affairs Minister Paul Hasluck was able to argue for the money.

'They really did believe that this was a cure for communism — to arrest the need for poor people to embrace communist ideology,' Oakman says, 'It all sounds fanciful now, but I think we forget that in the context of decolonisation and the rise of communism it makes sense. We tend to underestimate how profound that change was immediately after the Second World War.'

There was a downside. Because the emphasis was on delivering short-term political dividends, it meant a lot of programs did not have the benefits that would have flowed from a long-term perspective.

'There was no long-term economic planning in Asia,' Oakman says. 'There were a lot of short-term programs that they could put labels on which would have an immediate publicity impact. Not enough effort was put into evaluation. Money was thrown at programs and once the immediate publicity value had been achieved a lot of those programs tended to languish and become corrupt.'

The Government knew this and sent a well-known journalist Osmar White on a six-month

14-nation evaluation trip. Casey hoped that White would write articles to be published in Australia to prove that the program was worthwhile. But White found a litany of disasters.

'White was quite upset about this because he really believed in the Colombo Plan,' Oakman says. 'But he found things like tractors that had been sent to Pakistan were not heavy enough for the task that they had had in mind. So he found 200 tractors abandoned in fields or on the side of roads.'

The short-sighted approach was compounded by the fact that foreign aid was all new.

'There were not any development programs before the Colombo Plan,' Oakman says. 'Before the Second World War the idea of giving aid to Asia would have been abhorrent. It was only through the political rationale that this was going to protect Australia's interest that this foreign-aid program got off the ground.'

The Australian Government was not listening to what Asian governments wanted. Aid was not distributed on a needs basis. It was distributed according to which countries would provide the best strategic and economic advantage to Australia. For example, in the early years India got a lot of aid because it was seen to be vulnerable to China. But as that vulnerability receded so did the aid. The emphasis was shifted to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. They were seen as the route for an invasion of Australia. But Singapore and Malaysia were among the wealthiest countries in Asia at that time.

'One of the main ideas driving foreign aid at this time was the idea of catalytic aid,' Oakman says. 'You really just had to prime the pump of economic development and you would get take-off. There was an enormous faith in Western technology and take-off theory. They thought that Western technology would simply revolutionise agriculture and industrialisation. Of course, it was a fantasy. But at the time that was the dominant economic model.

'There was not enough attention to the detail of how a project would run, to management and good governance and in taking into account cultural factors as well. Cultural elements were seen to be separate from the economic framework.'

But by the 1960s there could be no illusions that trying to encourage economic development in Asia was an immense task.

'The lessons are that the short-term politically inspired approach of the Colombo Plan would not really serve the long-term needs of the countries that you are intending to help,' Oakman says. 'And it is a lesson that organisations like AusAID would agree with. It was not a matter of giving more but a question of being more rigorous with what was given, in the way the aid was given and the way it was managed.

'One of the things that the Colombo Plan taught the Australian Government was that the aid-giving process was not easy. Originally it was managed by the Department of External Affairs but within 15 years they were utterly swamped with the problems and the logistics of running these programs. The embassies throughout Asia were just overwhelmed. External Affairs was pretty keen to off-load some of that responsibility to a separate agency. That is how the forebears of AusAID came about.'

On the upside, the Colombo Plan was a great diplomatic icebreaker. One of the few contacts Australia had with some Asian countries was through the Colombo Plan. So there was a connection for diplomats to work with. It was a constant feature of their conversation and diplomacy. It would enhance the level of engagement that was going on. And that built relationships and helped negotiate conflicts.