COMMITTEES

Ms SITOU (Reid) (11:21): When I was younger, with a lot of obligation on my part and no sense of joy, I had to trek off to Chinese school because it was something that my parents felt very strongly about. I hated it and resisted it, and therefore my Mandarin language skills have been stuck at the age of eight. I have now inflicted that same chore on my son.

Every Friday afternoon, after school, I drive him to Chinese school. He is as reluctant a Chinese student as I was. But it was important that I went to Chinese school.

It is important that he goes to Chinese school. We are trying to foster a love of the language with him. It is one of the most frustrating languages to learn and speak, but we're trying.

We try because it is important for our family. It's important that he can speak to his grandparents. But it's also important that he has a strong connection to his heritage.

That is why we will continue to persist every Friday afternoon. A few decades after a very petulant Sally was trying to avoid Chinese school—I lived in Beijing in 2008. And I wish I had paid more attention in Chinese school!

But it was during that time that I really understood the power of having an understanding of the country, its cultures and traditions, the power of that for Australia and the power of the ability to bridge cultures, have a shared understanding of each other and to bring the best of both worlds. It was an incredible time to be living in China. It is a memory that I will always, always treasure.

It is an experience that we hope our son will get an opportunity to have as well. The member for Fenner remarked upon the diversity of our caucus. I am very proud to be part of an extraordinary Labor government which has a female majority, and we have incredible diversity in our caucus.

Sitting alongside my friends and good colleagues the member for Banks, who spoke earlier; the member for Tangney, who speaks an incredible array of languages; the members for Holt, Swan and Menzies; and everyone who comes into this place with different backgrounds and experiences is a real privilege for me—to get to serve alongside them. But of course the original, the OG, is Senator Wong, someone I have looked up to for a really long time and the first Asian-born minister our country has had.

It is wonderful to have her as our foreign minister. And that is in the great Labor tradition. We are a party that has always sought to build close relations with our neighbours, and we have done that for more than half a century now.

It was Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who established diplomatic relations with China in 1972. It was Prime Minister Bob Hawke who drove the creation of APEC. It was Prime Minister Paul Keating who said that our engagement with the region has to be uncompromising, unfailing and tenacious.

It was Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, our first Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister—who puts my Mandarin to shame!—who said that Australia is fundamentally enmeshed in Asia. And it was the Gillard Labor government that produced the 'Asian century' white paper, setting out our national plan for engagement with Asia. With prime ministers from Whitlam to Hawke and Keating to Rudd and Gillard and now to Prime Minister Albanese, ably assisted by foreign minister Penny Wong, you know that this government has invested in our relationships with our region, with our neighbours in Asia, and you have seen the extraordinary amount of effort and time that has been put into those relationships, including a really extraordinary visit that foreign minister Penny Wong made to her hometown in Malaysia.

I think that was a beautiful tribute to her connection to the country she was born in as well as the country she now serves as foreign minister. But those relationships cannot exist only between leaders or diplomats. They have to exist between our people.

We need Australians who understand and love the languages, cultures, histories and societies of the countries that are closest to us. That is what we mean when we talk about Asian capability. Australia's prosperity is interlinked with our neighbours.

It is interlinked with Asia. Trade with our Asian partners is growing, and exporters rely on Asian markets. We rely on Asian markets for the supply chains that stretch across the region.

Some of the fastest-growing economies in the world are right on our doorstep, and that is something Australian businesses can take advantage of. And we are succeeding. We are forming those bonds, we are making those trades and we are opening up those markets.

But it requires people to understand how business is conducted and to understand local institutions and cultures in those countries and the contexts they operate in. That's the only way you can build lasting relationships: if it is done on mutual understanding. And as much as Asia capability is important for Australian businesses, trade, investment and jobs, it is equally important to our national security.

We live in a region that is experiencing profound strategic change. Australia needs more diplomats, defence personnel, public servants, researchers and national security professionals who understand our closest neighbours and who know their political systems, their histories and their languages and who understand how Australia and the world look from their perspective.

That is why this report is so important, because it asks us how we build Australia's Asia capability, not just for the next few years but for generations ahead. When challenges arise, whether they are economic or security related, those skills and relationships cannot simply be switched on; they take years to build and develop. That is why this report describes Asia capability as a vital sovereign capability and recommends a 10-year national capability strategy, bringing together departments of education, foreign affairs and defence and state governments across Australia.

There are a few places in Australia where the potential of that capability is more obvious than in my community. We are home to families from right across Asia. You see that in many of the suburbs, such as Burwood, Strathfield, Homebush and Lidcombe, and you see that in the small businesses, schools and community groups.

People in my community speak Mandarin, Korean, Hindi, Punjabi, Vietnamese, Tamil and Bengali—a whole range of Asian languages—at home. That is an enormous asset and one that we need to nurture. Unfortunately, that hasn't been something that previous governments have focused on.

I was speaking to a professor at the University of Sydney, and he said that because of the way our education system is set up, where we're not supporting the learning of a second language, we are wasting a lot of this incredible talent. Young children are coming into our education system multilingual, having learnt different languages at home, but, by the time they go through our education system and finish, they come out monolingual, not having retained their other languages.

I think that is a real shame, so I really welcome the report and commend the work that the committee has done. I commend the work that the member for Gellibrand has done in chairing this committee. They have identified that we do need to support Asian capability and Asian language learning and that is going to help Australia's national security interests as well as our economic interests.