New Delhi, May 04: An Opinion poll by the Lowy Institute, a leading independent think tank based in Sydney, reveals that an overwhelming majority of Australians — 74 per cent — believe that their country’s relationship with India has been damaged following the recent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne.
The opinion poll’s main finding will be presented by the Lowy Institute’s programme director, Rory Medcalf, at a conference here on Tuesday. Is is being interpreted as a sign of a rethinking within Australia against the way racial violence against Indian students has been dealt with by the state government of Victoria, whose capital city is Melbourne.
Two significant developments in the recent past also indicate that the Australian political class has come out of its self-imposed state of denial on the violence against Indian students.
At a recent meeting of the Council of Australian Governments, which is a platform for the federal and state governments to thrash out contentious issues across the table, Victoria Premier John Brumby, who has been to India on a damage control mission, came under attack from both the country’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and his New South Wales counterpart, Kristina Keneally, for mishandling the reaction to the violence. Ironically, all three are members of the ruling Labour Party.
In another related development, the Australian Institute of Criminology has been given the responsibility of establishing whether racial motives were responsible for crimes against Indians in Melbourne. The Victoria Police had stopped maintaining racial crime data more than 10 years ago after such statistics started being misused by racist groups targeting Lebanese immigrants.
On January 20, Victoria’s police chief, Simon Overland, had been quoted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as admitting that “undoubtedly some of these attacks have a racist motive or there’s a racist elements to the attacks, there is no question of that.”
The Lowy Institute opinion poll, meanwhile, is being interpreted as a wake- up call for the Australian government — Rudd, in fact, faces a national election later this year.
“ The fact that three- quarters of Australians see that there has been a real damage in relations underlines the need for Canberra to make exceptional efforts to repair Australia’s reputation in India,” Medcalf said.
He’s one of the invited speakers at Tuesday’s Emerging Leaders Summit, organised by Advance, a global organisation of Australian expatriates.
The opinion poll is based on telephone interviews conducted in March 2010 with 1,001 Australians.
The Lowy Institute, incidentally, has a powerpacked international advisory council that includes media baron Rupert Murdoch and World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn.
“ Canberra needs to clear the air,” Medcalf said. “ It should release as soon as possible the full findings of the criminological study into what actually happened, especially in Victoria, so that we can move on.” The opinion poll, he pointed out, followed more than a year of media attention to the vulnerability of Indian students to criminal violence and the poor quality of the vocational courses attended by them.
Medcalf, who has served at the Australian high commission in New Delhi and now heads the Lowy Institute’s international security programme, emphasised the economic rationale for his argument.
He said: “ Our two- way trade is around A$ 22 billion ( Rs 90,610 crore) a year. It has grown by 50 per cent in the past year. India is on its way to overtaking the United States to become one of Australia’s top three export markets, with China and Japan.”
—Agencies