COMMITTEES

Mr WATTS (Gellibrand) (12:00): On behalf of the Standing Committee on Education, I present the committee's report, incorporating dissenting reports, entitled Security and prosperity in Asia: building Asia capability in Australia through the education system and beyond, together with the minutes of proceedings. Report made a parliamentary paper in accordance with standing order 39(e).

Mr WATTS: by leave—It might surprise members to know that Malay/Indonesian was the first foreign language spoken on Australian soil. For centuries before European settlement, Makassan traders from what is now Indonesia worked our northern coasts, speaking Malay with the Yolngu people. Their words live on in Yolngu languages still: 'jalan', for path; 'rupiah', for money; 'balanda', the word they used to describe the Dutch, and the word that the Yolngu use today to describe white people.

And yet, while this language lives on in the daily conversations of the Yolngu, across the rest of Australia, the teaching of Bahasa Indonesia is dying. Year 12 Indonesian enrolments have fallen from over 1,100 in 2010 to just 486 across the country today. Just four year 12 students studied Indonesian in the whole state of Queensland this year.

Barely 500 of our one million domestic Australian university students studied Bahasa Indonesia—fewer than when Robert Menzies was Prime Minister. Expert witnesses told our inquiry that on this path, Indonesian teaching will be functionally extinct by 2031, within the next term of this parliament. This should be a shock to this parliament.

It is often said that there is no country more important to Australia than Indonesia. If that is true, there is no country that it is more important for Australia to understand than Indonesia. Instead, we are losing the ability to teach its language.

Two Indonesian presidents have stood in this chamber and told us, explicitly, the same thing: that the Australians learning Bahasa Indonesia are a strategic asset in our relationship. When the next Indonesian president addresses this parliament, what will they say about our commitment to this vital relationship? That is up to all of us, in this parliament, to answer.

It's also the challenge at the heart of the report that I table today, Security and prosperity in Asia:building Asia capability in Australia through the education system and beyond. Asia has become more complex and consequential for Australia than ever before. For Australia to find our security in Asia, to find our prosperity in Asia, we are asking more of our leaders and institutions than ever before.

Asia capability—the language skills, the cultural knowledge, the networks and experiences that come with time spent in the region—is now a vital sovereign capability. We need the sovereign capability to understand Asia and to engage with our region on our own terms. It is a prerequisite for an independent Australian foreign policy in the region.

When we invest in Asian language learning at home, we invest in Australia's voice in the region. The Albanese government's statecraft in Asia is more active and effective than ever before, But it is built on a foundation of Asia capability that is the product of investments made generations ago. Take three outstanding examples.

Stephen FitzGerald, our first ambassador to China, studied Asian history at the University of Tasmania. He then learned Chinese Mandarin full-time at the RAAF School of Languages at Point Cook in my electorate in Melbourne's west—eight hours a day, five days a week, for 48 weeks—before he went to a language school at the University of Hong Kong. He later went on to do a PhD at the Australian National University, undertaking further research in Hong Kong.

Penny Williams, our first Australian ambassador to Indonesia to speak the language fluently, began as a high-school exchange student living with an Indonesian family. She then went on to a Bachelor of Asian Studies at ANU. Four decades later, she described returning to Indonesia as ambassador as like 'pulang kampung'—a homecoming.

Rod Brazier, our ambassador to Indonesia today, can trace his career back to an exchange semester in Makassar—where those sea traders came from—and an Asian studies degree at Griffith University. Look at the steps they took in their careers before they presented their credentials. These steps led them to be at the forefront of our engagement with the region and to make an enormous contribution to our nation's security and prosperity in Asia.

School and university language programs, in-country exchange and immersion programs, Asian studies courses at our universities—all of these stages in Australia's Asia capability pipeline are now facing an existential crisis. Australia still has the people and the knowledge to make our own way in Asia today. But the school language programs and university courses that produced them are closing, one by one.

To ensure Australian self-reliance in Asia in challenging and contested times, we need to act to preserve the institutions that build our Asia capability. This report offers a path forward that learns from the failures of the past. Instead of pursuing a broad but shallow approach to the teaching of Asia in our education systems, it seeks to build a deeper, more sustainable pipeline of Asia capability built on the cultivation of intrinsic student interest—a national strategy to coordinate between levels of government, Asia leader schools to act as best-practice hubs for teaching priority languages, a consortium to enable in-country immersive experiences for school students, and an Asia capability compact with our universities to preserve and coordinate Asian language teaching and research about our region.

More than any individual recommendation though, this report emphasises that building Australia's Asia capability starts with a choice—a choice for our nation to prioritise building the capabilities we need to shape our own security and prosperity in Asia, or to allow our future in the region to be shaped for us, by others. I want to thank the members of the committee for signing on to this unanimous report, with some additional comments.

I see the member for Banks in the chamber. The member for Nicholls, the deputy chair, is in the chamber as well. As always, I thank the outstanding staff in the committee secretariat, Joel Bateman and Lisa Deans, whose expertise turned hundreds of contributions on complex areas of policy from passionate Australians who have made this issue the cause of their careers into the report that I table today.

I commend the report to the House and I move: That the House take note of the report. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Georganas ): The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.