Teaming up with a bunch of Asians is a very bad idea. We are not Asians, never will be, don't want to be. We have nothing in common with these people. Before you knew it, we would have Asian despots telling our piss-weak politicians what to do. The whole loopy idea smells of Kevin Rudd's mad plot to hang an Asian 'common market around our necks; and we can see how well the EU is NOT working, even with people of similar cultures. We have enough contact with Asia via immigrants who obviously think that Australia is a better place than Asian countries.

'immigrants who obviously think that Australia is a better place than Asian countries.'

Oh puleeze! show me a country offering free money and I'll show you the stampede of people wanting in.

'We are not Asians'
.....ain't that the truth
we are not indigenous either but that shouldn't bother you...
by definition Australia is an accidental Anglo experiment trying to stave off the Asian inevitability by having prior indigenous ownership surface at the appropriate time.

It’s abundantly clear that Australia won’t be joining ASEAN in its present format, not least because, as Duncan Graham notes, every member state has an effective veto on such matters.

Nonetheless, it’s a theoretical question that should be raised now and then, in the interests of all parties to any such future arrangement, and James Massola was right, not naïve as Graham implies, to do so.

It would make more sense, in the future, and in the regional political circumstances that might well arise on the coattails of Chinese instead of American hegemony, than metaphorically sailing Australia round the world and anchoring it in the Atlantic right in the middle of the New Anglosphere, as some Australians apparently would like.

The whole idea of adding ASEAN, yet more Alphabet Soup, to Australia's overbusy international social whirl, would be like...

...pushing a humongous ball of Javan rhino dung up hill.