Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026
Mr WATTS (Gellibrand) (18:52): I was very pleased to be able to welcome the recent release of the Albanese government's reforms to the New Colombo Plan— Mr Hogan: Deputy Speaker—very biased. Mr WATTS: which I led consultations— Mr Hogan: Who would have thought the crossbench are biased? Mr WATTS: Pull your head in!
The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Wilkie ): Quite seriously, Member for Page, you should not reflect on the chair. Mr WATTS: I was very pleased to welcome the recent release of the Albanese government's reforms to the New Colombo Plan, which I led consultations on with an external advisory group in the last term of government. More than ever before Australia's future security and prosperity rely on our ability to make our way in our own region.
Today Australia faces some of the most complex and consequential external circumstances at any time since the Second World War. The Indo-Pacific region is a region of opportunity, home to some of the fastest growing, most dynamic economies in the world, but it's also a region of intensifying geostrategic competition in which many of the fundamental assumptions underpinning our foreign policy are being challenged.
This challenging context will demand more of our leaders than ever before. It demands that Australia go deeper in developing our Asia capabilities, the bucket of skills and experience needed to be effective in our region—a useful level of language skills, knowledge of the histories and cultures of our region, and personal networks and practical experience in the region.
This is the context for the review of the New Colombo Plan and the new direction for the NCP that the government has announced. Since its inception a decade ago, the NCP has supported 55,000 Australian undergraduates to study and to undertake language training, internships, research and practicums at more than 2½ thousand institutions across our region. It's a worthy achievement, and, as building Australia's Indo-Pacific capability is a generational challenge, it's important that a program like this is supported by governments on both sides of politics.
But, as it has evolved over the last 10 years, the NCP has lost its strategic focus. The vast majority—over 70 per cent, in fact—of the average 8,000 NCP participants per year have taken part in short-term mobility placements, generally of only two weeks and usually accompanied by Australian lecturer. Despite regular requests, there was no data available to show that the short-term courses translated into students staying in the region longer term.
Indeed, I recall one particular submission that cited a participant who was inspired by her two weeks in India to go on and study in Europe as showing the success of the program. It's not what the NCP was established to do. The NCP was established to serve the foreign policy objectives of the Australian government.
To meet our foreign policy objectives, we need the NCP to support pathways for participants to deepen Indo-Pacific capabilities in the long term. Two-week mobility programs just weren't delivering that. That's why we're shifting the focus of the NCP to enable students to spend more time in the region and to go deeper in developing their capabilities, particularly their language capabilities.
In the new tranche of reforms announced by the Foreign minister, we'll increase the number of NCP scholarships to 500 per year by 2028. We're introducing a new semester stream, leveraging Australian universities' partnership arrangements to support one- or two-semester-length experiences. We're focusing more on developing language skills, with targets for numbers of participants studying priority Asian languages in the NCP.
We're extending funding eligibility to Australian universities to allow them to utilise groundbreaking transnational campuses they've established across the region. We're also encouraging institutions to work together to establish consortiums to give NCP students access to language study regardless of their university. These reforms occur at a time of much larger challenge for our nation.
They come at a critical time to support our universities to teach Asian languages, Asian studies and adjacent subjects, as enrolments in priority languages drop and universities scale down their offerings. Indeed, the decline has been precipitous. South-East Asian language learning fell by 75 per cent in Australian universities between 2004 and 2022.
The NCP reforms announced by the government can only deal with one slice of this national challenge. These reforms have been designed to support universities to keep offering the languages and Asian studies courses needed to build these capabilities by allowing universities to retain NCP funding directly. In this context, the University of Technology Sydney announced in August that it would pause the student intake of hundreds of courses until the second semester of 2026.
This includes 33 combined international studies courses and 33 combined international studies honours courses. The UTS international studies program with a built-in year abroad at a university in the country of the student's major language is exactly the kind of program the reformed NCP is intended to support in the future. In this context, I want to personally appeal to UTS to explore how it could work with a reformed NCP offering in the future to retain this program.
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