Comments

Arthurson – 31

More to the point, why are you referring to Da Torpedo in the past tense? She is still alive, and many of us harbour hopes that she will some day be released from her unjust imprisonment. I know that she has had health problems. Are you writing her off as someone doomed to die behind bars?

Not intentionally Arthurson, but she did come across, to me at least, as someone looking for martyrdom. Now I could be well be wrong and she may be in the Gandhi mold rather than the Joan one.

stuart #7 I guess it’s all in the interpretation. I read it as the Thai Embassy not understanding that it was an auction and that they hadn’t yet reached the reserve price. This is the same university which awarded Lee Kwan Yew an honorary doctorate of law. And to those who say Australians don’t understand Asian values, I say look a little closer. I can easily see the ANU swapping out New Mandala for scholarships in fruit carving.

What I have found far more revealing in recent days was the image of the Emperor of Japan kneeling before a number of his people in a refuge centre. It shows a dignified & gracious attitude, and his great respect for his fellow countrymen.

Peter Warr // I am the Executive Director of the National Thai Studies Centre at ANU. I have two critical comments on the content of the Lowy Institute report, commissioned by the Australia Thailand Institute, and one self-serving commercial.

1. It is incredible that such a costly study should devote so much of its attention to a tiny academic centre like us. Most of the undated and anonymous report reads like a transcript of comments from people consulted by the authors. The discussion of the NTSC misses the main point. The word “National” in our name has long been an anachronism. The Centre began its life in 1990 with grand ambitions for outreach to the Australian public. Much of the funding was from the ANU, with significant supplementary funding from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This funding was explicitly called ‘seed money’, meaning that it was intended to be replaced over time with funds raised from business and other government sources having an interest in Thailand. Similar ‘National Centres’, with similar grand ambitions, were set up at universities elsewhere in Australia to study Vietnam, Korea and South Asia. It didn’t work. Private sector funding was very difficult to obtain. As the university and government funding was gradually withdrawn, as was pre-planned, almost nothing replaced it. Of the four original centres, only the Thai centre remains, and only because its ambitions have been pruned radically to match the very low level of funding it currently receives – all from the ANU and roughly $15,000 per year. Imagine running a “National Centre” on anything at all with an annual budget like that. The Centre survives because both the Director and Deputy Director positions are unpaid and we employ no support staff. We both have full time academic positions elsewhere in the university. This is a very familiar situation in academia, and not only in Australia. My point is just that much of the commentary contained in the Lowy report is a mere consequence of the mismatch between our inherited, overly grand name, and our greatly reduced resources. A change of name, to something more modest and not containing the offending word “National”, would make sense and would eliminate much of the report’s content.

2. The NTSC currently receives NO funding from the Royal Thai Embassy or from any other Thai government agency. The Lowy authors should have checked their facts. For many years, the Embassy did make an annual donation to the Centre of $5,000. During all of that time, the Embassy never attempted to interfere in the activities of the Centre. The last such donation was in 2009. Things changed in 2010 when the Embassy wrote to the ANU’s Vice-Chancellor, expressing unhappiness with a certain website, produced by ANU academics not directly associated with the NTSC, and which was said to include anti-monarchist material. You are reading it. The university very rightly declined to take any action against New Mandala. The Embassy’s donations to the NTSC were discontinued and we have not requested that they be resumed. Good relations with the Embassy are important to us, whenever possible, but maintaining freedom of speech is more important.

3. The main activity of the NTSC is the Thailand Update Conference. The next will be in the last week of September of this year. Many outstanding scholars will be presenting. Everyone is welcome.

Let’s not get too carried away with this.

YouGov, one of the top UK polling companies, released the findings of a poll in the days before the wedding saying 56% of British people were largely indifferent to proceedings.

Then there is the purported 24million British citizens who watched the wedding on TV – this means that 37million British citizens didn’t bother to tune in (which is 60%ish – a figure that roughly correlates with YouGov’s figures).

After that 1 in 5 Londoners left the city for the wedding. That comes out at 1.5million people. Or, 500,000 more than the estimated 1million who watched the wedding on London’s streets. How many of that 1million were foreign tourists is up for debate – I would imagine at least 25% – meaning that twice as many British citizens left London than attended the wedding.

All this doesn’t mean the British public are eager for a republic. Far from it – the Queen still retains a lot of genuine affection, that much is certain. And I also don’t think even the most hardcore republican wished either Kate or William personal ill-will on their wedding day.

But what was interesting to myself, having lived through several royal weddings, jubilees and funerals is that this one was greeted with a pretty hefty dose of indifference. The apex of feeling towards a member of the royal family by the British public in my lifetime was by far and away Diana’s death. Her “fairytale” wedding to Charles will always be set against that.

If you really want to gauge the complex feelings the British public have towards the royal family you only need to look at how Charles’ wedding to Camilla was greeted.

Yes, it is a “voluntary affection” but it is not uniform nor does it extend across the entire family.

Talk about priorities:

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=21203

Social divisions are starkly manifest in the Tatmadaw. Proletarianisation of the rank and file has been going on for some time, with the officer class including their wives treating the men as their chattel and serfs. Now it’s the very basis of Burmese life – rice, where IMF style subsidy cuts have chosen to visit upon army families on the ground.

The mainstream Burmese opposition must not waste time and opportunity to cultivate alliances in the regime’s own ranks, as the clock is ticking for the NLD. The day of the so called “three sons” joining hands to topple the generals seems to have got one step closer.

Article 112 plays its role again! This outmoded and inhumane law should have been abolished long time ago. OMG! Lese Majeste in 21st century, I can’t believe that.

Thai Studies in Australia: The Final Report offers useful ideas on how to improve understanding of Thailand and develop education and outreach programs to achieve that end. I thought the analysis of the problem in Items 11 and 12 was astute. Presumably the Australia-Thailand Institute (ATI), which has already assumed responsibility for many activities of the National Thai Studies Centre (NTSC), will use the report as a charter for a new assault on the problem. A glance at the Advisory Board of the ATI shows how it proposes to support programs to promote institutional and people-to-people Australia-Thailand links: through business, government, media, the arts, academia. Its mission is to advise the Australian government through the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Item 33 about the malaise that confronts Asian studies in general in Australia, and the FitzGerald, Ingleson and Garnaut Reports of (Hawke government). It’s too bad this item didn’t come earlier in the Final Report, because these earlier reports provided the rationale for the establishment of the NTSC along with other studies centres, e. g. Korean, South Asian, and, as I recall, Vietnamese. Of these, only the NTSC is not extinct. Following those reports, the Department of Education decreed there should be two tiers of priority Asian languages with funding allocated accordingly: I – Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian; II – Korean, Thai, Vietnamese; South Asia kicked up a fuss, and Hindi was subsequently added. Other Southeast Asian languages – Burmese and Khmer, for example – fared less well and were ignored. Thai is known in the Australian educational jargon as a “language of small enrolments.” The only reason the small languages survive is because they are cross-subsidised by the languages of large enrolments. Not every dean, director or university vice-chancellor will allow this to happen. As things have turned out, Indonesian and Korean have traded places; enrolments in Korean at the ANU are now higher than in Indonesian, I believe.

Item 17. Yes, the teaching staff at the ANU has declined since 1990, but I believe enrolments in Thai have been more or less steady since about 2000. Actually, because of accidents of history, Thailand is lucky compared to Burmese and Khmer for which there is no niche in the Australian tertiary system.

Item 27. “Some of this seems to be the product of the rivalries that are so common within academia.” This unfortunate sentence must be the result of careless editing in the final stages of preparing the Final Report. Really? There are no rivalries “common” in other occupations and industries? Politics? Sport? The Australian public service? What about stoushes in corporate boardrooms? Are these workplaces seas of tranquillity compared to the nest of squabbling academics at the ANU? It would be surprising if the economistic language of competition and comparative advantage that has infected all Australian workplaces in the recent past did not encourage rivalries. Rivalries are inevitable, and often productive. I once had an amiable luncheon conversation with a former Thai foreign minister about a Thai proverb. Translation: “There is no such thing as true friends or everlasting enemies.” We were discussing why the Chinese classic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with its ruthless tricks and strategems, was so popular in Thailand. I told this story to an eminent European scholar- friend who remarked wryly, “sounds like my foreign office.”

Item 28 about the NTSC not being a national institution. Absolutely correct. For many years before the NTSC was born, I taught at the University of Sydney. I felt the relevant expertise and the all-important language program were unfairly concentrated in Canberra, and I resented it. In the early years of the NTSC we tried very hard to meet our national obligation, and we held Thailand Updates in Sydney and Melbourne. Canberra is the hometown of the national government; business, the performing arts, and cinema production are in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, so it’s natural for the ATI to look to the other capital cities for its outreach activities.

Item 34(b) and 36 on the option of “building and sustaining a world-class centre of expertise on Thailand within one or more of Australia’s universities.” I don’t understand the discussion at this point. The tail end of Item 36 suggests that what is envisioned is a think tank. Is there a crying need for better advice when things go wrong in Thailand? Or does the last statement mean “when things go wrong with the Australian relationship with Thailand?” And if that, is the advice presently not good enough? Was anyone or any institution abroad asked if Australia had centres of world-class expertise on Thailand? Presumably not, because these people or institutions aren’t “stakeholders.” Before the ATI or the Commonwealth or the Thai embassy spends money on a new initiative it might be helpful if experts elsewhere in the world were asked what they thought of Australian expertise on Thailand, where it was located, and if it was “world-class.”