The 'bamboo ceiling' in Australia is real

Published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 12 September 2019

The "bamboo ceiling" in Australia is real. Asian-Australians now comprise up 12 per cent of our total population but hold only around 3 per cent of senior leadership positions in our public institutions and ASX 200 companies. They have been an under-appreciated and under-utilised national resource for far too long.

This first Asian-Australian Leadership Summit brings together corporate, public sector and community leaders of both Asian and non-Asian background from across the county. Its purpose is to highlight the important contribution that Asian-Australians can play, especially in our future engagement with Asia; to identify the obstacles to them making that contribution at leadership level; and to design strategies for overcoming them.

There are multiple obstacles to overcome in making the bamboo ceiling a thing of the past. They include some outright racial discrimination, rather more general stereotyping, some degree of cultural inhibition among Asian-Australians themselves and a lack of the same level of institutional commitment to cultural diversity that we have seen for gender inclusion.

With the kind of energy and commitment this summit is designed to mobilise, I am confident that we can, over time, effectively come to grips with all of these inhibitors. It’s going to be a long process, and a great deal is going to have to be done - not just at the macro but at the micro-level, company by company and institution by institution. But the case for cultural diversity at the top is so compelling I am sure we will get there.

There is, however, one obstacle about which I’m not so sure of, which we have been reminded by saturation coverage in the media this week. It is one that in recent times has become very real indeed for one particular sub-set of our Asian-Australian community: Chinese-Australians.

The current environment of hyper-anxiety in some quarters about baleful Chinese, and particularly Chinese Communist Party, influence is making it harder than it has ever been for Chinese-Australians to aspire to leadership positions, or indeed any position at all in fields that are seen as even remotely security-sensitive, not least in the public service.

It is an environment that bears no relationship to the objective evidence we have that such influence as has been sought, in our universities, politics, public administration and elsewhere, has been of a minimal and marginal nature. And it is one which utterly misrepresents the reality of the overriding loyalty which Chinese-Australians have always had to this country and will continue to have. It’s an environment of anxiety and fear that has to stop, and stop fast, or we will all be diminished by it.

The bamboo ceiling is an issue on which we have ducked and weaved and dithered for too many years. The Asian century is off and running and we have in our midst a fantastic community resource with which to take maximum advantage of all the opportunities it offers.

Gareth Evans is Chancellor of The Australian National University and a former foreign minister of Australia. This is an excerpt from his welcoming address on Thursday to the Asian-Australian Leadership Summit, co-hosted by ANU, Asialink and PwC.