The parliamentary inquiry on the education system’s role in “building Australia’s Asia capability” had its first hearing last week – members are working from the bottom up.
Jason Clare has charged the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education to consider “how Australia can build Asia capability across the life course, from early learning through to tertiary education and into the workforce.”
Perhaps Minister Clare thought there might be new news to report on why Australians resolutely refuse to learn languages other than English, including the ones our neighbours speak.
There is not – as the four Department of Education officials who appeared before the committee made clear. Their answers to some questions were that school-related issues were matters for the states. They could not answer others, because there was neither data nor research. And as for universities, “we as Government do not interfere in the offerings that universities choose to make in terms of their courses.” While they did not say it, it appears they are working with what they have got, which is not much.
That there is another inquiry on a problem that has not changed for decades must drive nuts policy experts who have long warned what is needed, a nationally-funded policy for a start. Like long-time advocate for Indonesian Liam Prince, who runs a program that sends students from Australian universities to study there. He warned last year that in the decade to 2023, students learning Indonesian fell by a third to 22,000. There are predictions that the language will be dead in universities by decade-end. The University of Tasmania gave it a shove, cancelling it in May.
Every decade or so a Minster decides to do something. In August, Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced an update to the-then Abbott Government’s New Columbo Plan, including, doubling long-term scholarships for students at Australian universities to study in Asia” and “a stronger focus on language learning.”
But as officials made clear last week, demand is not where it needs to start, in schools.
Certainly, the committee heard some good news, about the Commonwealth’s Early Language Learning Australia app, delivered in class for pre and early year school children – there were 50,000 participants last year and Chinese and Japanese were the top of 24 languages.
But overall, “this” as committee chair Tim Watts (Labor, Victoria) concluded, “is a mind-meltingly complex area of policy with coordination across different levels of government and different stages of education."
“But, as it stands at the moment, there is not a Federal Government strategy to build Asia capability at a whole-of-nation level or at different stages along this development pathway.
If that is what the Committee recommends, it will need to be built for speed. Minister Wong warns there are a “few hundred” Mandarin speakers in Australia who do not have Chinese origins. And fewer people studying Indonesian than 50 years ago – twice as many high school students take German and five times as many French.