Opening Statement – Inquiry into Building Asia Capability in Australia through the education system and beyond

Chair, and members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear today. My name is Louise Edwards, representing the Australian Academy of the Humanities. I was a member of the Steering Committee for the Academy’s 2023 Australia’s China Knowledge Capability report; I’m Emeritus Professor of Chinese History at UNSW, and Chair of the Advisory Board for ANU’s Centre for China in the World. I am also an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong, UTS and a Senior Advisor to Asialink at Melbourne University.  

I am joined today by my colleague Emeritus Professor Joe Lo Bianco AM, former President of the Academy of the Humanities, and the author of Australia’s landmark 1987 National Policy on Languages, Australia’s first and only comprehensive national language policy –that was also a world leader at the time. Is it time now to commission a Lo Bianco National Language Policy for the 2030s and beyond?  

The Academy’s Executive Director, Inga Davis, who represented us at an earlier China capability roundtable, hosted by the National Foundation for Australia China Relations (NFACR), is here as well.  

Joe and I benefited from an Australian education system that valued languages, history, and cultural studies, and had clear pathways for students to develop advanced linguistic proficiency and cultural knowledge for serious engagement with the wider world. I spent a year in Taiwan in 1992 supported by a then new initiative, the Commonwealth Government’s National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) scholarship – that was instrumental in building my Chinese language capacity and enriched my networks into the region. 

But the story of Australia’s Asia capability – and of languages and cultural education more broadly – is no longer the Australian success story it once was. Across schools and universities, Asian language enrolments are declining, programs are closing, and the pipeline of teachers and researchers is thinning. 

Our Academy is working on several initiatives to address these challenges and would be happy to follow up on our evidence today.  

In schools, immersive bilingual programs can provide effective pathways to sustained language acquisition, but they require long-term investment and a strong teacher pipeline. Initiatives such as the Asia Leader Schools are a positive step, but we must learn from current and past successes and failures. We table a paper by Professor Lo Bianco today (‘Bilingual Schooling and Language Proficiency’). 

In universities, languages and area studies must be treated as national capability – not discretionary offerings vulnerable to short-term enrolment pressures. The Jobs-Ready Graduates (JRG) package has done significant damage, sending mixed messages to prospective Asia-capable students that the Australian Government does not value cultural expertise – even in the face of evidence that these are the very skills needed to address the complex challenges of our times. 

Most concerning is that there is currently no body actively monitoring the sovereign Asia capabilities developed in Australian universities. Market dynamics that reflect past events are determining the future national training and education trajectory – rather than future sovereign interests. Courses in languages and culture continue to close at an alarming rate, yet there is no mechanism to track what is being lost or to incentivise change.  

The Academy advocates for the new Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) to take a pro-active monitoring role, and be appropriately resourced to do so in the nation’s strategic interest. Our Pre-Budget Submission includes a proposal that the Commonwealth allocate $20 million over four years, through ATEC, to gather the evidence on gaps in sovereign capability. 

The Academy has proposed practical tools to strengthen the pipeline across the education spectrum, including a national Languages Passport recognising language learning across schools, TAFE, universities, and community programs.  We table a paper on this by Professor Lo Bianco for the hearing (‘The Language Passport: Concept, Origins, Potential, Limits’). 

We also propose Asian Studies Institutes in Universities which would bring together research and teaching in support of national capability objectives, and establish and maintain an Asia Capability Observatory providing system wide analysis.  

Rebuilding Australia’s Asia capability requires new action and new thinking across the education system and beyond. The foundations established in the 1990s no longer deliver the energy required for the current conditions.  

Our approach to language and culture education needs to change to suit new times. Nearly one quarter of Australia’s population speaks a language other than English at home and even more either are or have learned an additional language. Australia is firmly in the Asia Pacific as our demography and economy makes plain. No longer are we educating to learn about an Asia ‘out there’ – rather we are learning about ourselves, our communities and our future possibilities as a multilingual Australian society that is in Asia.  

We need to recognise the need for life-long learning so that opportunities for language skill development are not only tasked to children and youth; we need to develop plans that link the myriad parts of our language ecosystem so that our current and growing multilingualism can be seen and celebrated by the broader Australian society, made legible to government and business planners. Linguistic expertise currently operating everyday in Australian workplaces is often unremarked or unrecognised despite its importance for efficiency and productivity. 

For social cohesion, economic growth and national resilience for the 2030s and beyond, we need to build a new model of linked-up, publicly celebrated language and culture education – we cannot expect a flailing 1990s model to be fit for the 2030s world. Australia has changed, the world has changed.