There are only a few hundred Mandarin speakers in Australia who do not have Chinese origins, Foreign Minister Penny Wong warns, And there are fewer people studying Indonesian than 50 years ago – twice as many high school students take German and five times as many, French.
“Yet we know Australia’s interests demand we engage in the region more consistently and more deeply,” Senator Wong said in a speech this week to the Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership. And that means more Australians engaging with Asia, in Asian languages
To help this happen, she announced changes to the New Colombo Plan, created by the Abbott Coalition government in 2012 and named for the original 1950s multi-nation programme to connect Asian nations. The plan was best known in Australia for bringing thousands of Asian students to study here. Its successor sends Australians to Asia.
Senator Wong said the NCP will now have:
- double the long-term scholarships for student at Australian universities to study in Asia “and introduce a stronger focus on language learning”
- intensive short language courses and longer immersive programmes
- short-term mobility grants doubled to a month.
“These changes won’t solve our Asia literacy challenge on their own – they are just one piece of the puzzle, one step in the process, and one signal to the education sector,” the Foreign Minister said.
But universities may not hear the signal – with no apparent commitment to defending, let alone extending Asian language study by dropping Euro languages in declining demand .
La Trobe dropped Indonesian in 2021, keeping Greek and Hindi after community protest. Flinders U similarly kept Italian – and in June the SA Government kicked in $1m to keep courses going.
Making Senator Wong’s point, Louisa Field and colleagues found 111 enrolments in NSW HSC Indonesian courses in 2021 and predict, on current trends its’ “extinction” in Australian universities by 2031. It’s the worst, but study of other major Asian languages in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean is stable, on tiny bases, at best.
“Australia is a fiercely English-speaking nation and notions of English exceptionalism have shaped attitudes towards language learning, allowing it to become a dispensable part of students’ education,” they write.
