“It is not well known but Korea is rapidly changing towards multiculturalism,” says Suh. “To a certain extent Korea wants to benchmark the Australian experience, which it sees as a success despite the bad media reports from time to time.”
In Australia, Suh is encouraged by the rising interest in Korean language study. He says enrolment in Korean language classes at five Australian universities has tripled during the past four years and it is the only language apart from Mandarin showing an increase. In this context, Suh is bemused by the omission of Korean as a priority language in the Asian Century White Paper.
“The White Paper selected Korea as one of five priority partners but Korean language is not there as a priority language,” he says. “We don’t really understand why this is. We are not saying that the other languages are not important, but there seems a mismatch given the White Paper’s focus on Korea elsewhere, and the fact that interest in Korea has been rising in Australia for some time.”
Mack Williams was Australia’s ambassador in Seoul between 1994 and 1998 and has maintained his links as chairman of the KRI advisory committee. He subsequently served as vice president of the Australia Korea Business Council and as a board member of the Australia Korea Foundation. He agrees with Suh that the bilateral relationship has “come a long way” as the two countries have found they have much in common.
“We have people relationships in terms of the Korean community here and we’ve got political relationships because we are both middle powers in the Asian region,” says Williams. “More often than not we find ourselves sitting alongside and talking to Koreans, and there is a lot in common and we are both on the UN Security Council, for example. But there is a long way to go before we have the level of intimacy that we have with countries which are much less important to us than Korea.”
Incremental factors are starting to make a difference. Williams says the increasing number of Korean students studying in Australia – comprising the third-largest group of foreign students – and visiting under working holiday visas is a positive momentum, and Korean Australians are starting to make an impact.
“Australians of Korean extraction can be very helpful if they know the language, but in the case of Koreans not as many of the Korean Australians speak as well and as fluently as they perhaps should, and the Koreans are very choosy about that – they are on to them,” he says. The “main answer” however, is for more Australians to understand “how Korea works”.
“Just having a degree with Korean language is not going to make a big difference in itself,” says Williams. “We should be doing more about having Korean case studies embedded into our normal studies, such as having some series modules in business degrees on the chaebol (industrial conglomerates, often family-owned).
“We need to do a lot more of that because we still depend too heavily on North American and European examples in a lot of the disciplines we have, and the study of Korea is not integrated into the mainstream of how we look at the world.”
Williams sees much of Korea’s potential for Australia in its proximity to China and its potential as a North Asian base. “Korea has forgotten more about China than we will ever learn, and if anyone knows how to work with a strong China it is Korea,” he says.
“We have tended to look at China through Hong Kong, Guangzhou and now Shanghai, but the heartland of Chinese industry is actually north of that with Korea on its doorstep. Korean trade with China is going very well, and until very recently Korea was the largest foreign investor in China, so I think it is quite under-utilised in that respect.”
The potential of North Korea is also largely unrecognised, says Williams. Despite the current standoff between North Korea and the world, he sees its re-opening as inevitable, a process which will create more economic opportunity on the Korean peninsula.
“North Korea is often thought of simply in terms of the dictatorship, but it still represents 23 million people, who are disciplined, speak Korean, and many of whom are quite skilled, and at one stage the economy will open up,” says Williams. “Change will have to take place, and I suggest that when it does you can expect a mini economic miracle.”
