Australia’s parochial company boards are failing to equip themselves for Asia. This is a major barrier to developing our potential in the region and improving productivity.

Our ASX 300 directors club retreat from Asia has become a rout.

The 2012 Henry report, Australia in the Asian Century, provided a national blueprint for Australia to navigate and capitalise on the rapid economic growth of Asia. The report recommended that a third of board directors should have deep knowledge of Asia.

That report was ignored and expunged from the Prime Minister and Cabinet website by Tony Abbott. What a relief for ASX directors!

We now have, not 33 per cent, but only 6 per cent of ASX-300 directors from non-Anglo Celtic backgrounds. Anglo-Celtic directors now make up over 90 per cent of ASX 300 board seats. The Governance Institute of Australia has also noted that when companies replace culturally diverse board members, they primarily recruit directors from the US, Canada and New Zealand rather than the Asian region.

Boards have improved their representation of females but their performance in recruiting directors and senior executives with interest and skills for Asian business has worsened. The bamboo ceiling and the old boys club is still very much in operation in our top 300 companies.

This seems counter-intuitive when one considers the Asian presence here – students, visitors and trade. But we are probably less Asia-ready than we were 50 years ago. In the 1980s and early 1990s, at the time of the Garnaut report, we were making progress in such areas as Asian language learning, media interest in Asia and cultural exchanges, but since then we have been ‘on smoko’. The national policy on Asian languages adopted by the Hawke government and COAG has run into the sand. Most Asian language learning is in........

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