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Opinion | Never mind what Lee Kuan Yew said, losing access to China won’t make Australia the ‘poor white trash of Asia’
- Australian incomes and living standards have remained above most of its Asian neighbours since the prediction from Singapore’s former prime minister
- And while ties between Canberra and Beijing have been fraying, losing access to China’s market won’t make Lee’s words any more true
Reading Time:4 minutes
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In another round of the increasingly bitter exchanges between China and Australia, a columnist for China’s Global Times, Yu Lei, suggested that a further decoupling from China would make the famous prediction of Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew a reality: Australia would become the “poor white trash of Asia”.
The “white trash” debate took place 30 to 40 years ago and caused a lot of hand-wringing. Yet, contrary to predictions at the time, Australian incomes and living standards have remained comfortably above most of our Asian neighbours.
That’s not because we have performed spectacularly well. Australia ranked 12th in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ranking in the early 1980s and it now ranks 10th or 11th.
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But growth rates in Asia have slowed as the easy gains from technological progress have been exhausted.
Although the racially charged imagery of white trash attracted attention, much of the angst in the 1980s was about our standing within the group of rich countries. The key talking point was that while Australia was thought to have had the world’s highest income per person in the late 19th century, it had fallen to 12th in the ranking of rich countries. A further decline was widely predicted in books like Australia, The Worst Is Yet To Come.
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