Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to celebrate the recently designated International Mother Language Day. Languages are a key to culture, and without your home language, or your mother language, you cannot be fully functional in a particular culture. We recognise that Australia is multicultural. We are multilingual, we are multicultural, we have religious diversity and the Australian government is committed to maintaining and building a prosperous and cohesive multicultural Australia. I am very pleased that one of the pilots of a new program to teach different languages is going to occur at the Arthur Dickmann childcare and preschool centre in Shepparton. This will be an attempt to teach children from a very young age—the age of four—second and even third languages or to polish up on their home languages through specially developed IT software packages. I commend that initiative of this government.

In particular I want to focus on the loss of Australia's Indigenous languages. That is a tragedy because, as I said before, language is an integral part of a culture, but in Australia there is severe discrimination and disadvantage when it comes to Indigenous people, particularly from rural and remote parts of Australia, trying to be best represented in courts, where the language spoken is not their home language, or perhaps when they are presenting for medical treatments or are trying to gain employment or even attempting something as fundamental as getting a drivers licence, without being able to speak English properly or perhaps speaking a Kriol which is not known beyond a very small population or community. These individuals are being disadvantaged in not being able to access the opportunities that other Australians take for granted.

I am very pleased to have been part of a special study of language learning in Indigenous communities in Australia. The study was part of an inquiry into language learning in Indigenous communities by the Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, which I now chair. The report from the inquiry was called Our land, our languages. Amongst the recommendations made in the report, now several years old, was one that said it should be mandatory that every teacher who has Indigenous Australians in their classroom, particularly in rural and remote areas, be trained in teaching English as a second language. No child in Australia who attends school speaking a mother language should be discriminated against by being forced to learn from their very first day in a language other than their own. The inquiry recommended also that there be literacy and numeracy alternatives as an assessment tool. The difficulty experienced by children learning English as an additional language or dialect when sitting for the standardised NAPLAN tests should be understood. We recommended that the minister for education that work with COAG to develop this national assessment program, which would reflect the different languages spoken by students across Australia.

We also wanted to make sure that we have protocols for mandatory first-language assessment of Aboriginal and Islander children entering into early childhood education. Too often during the inquiry we found that a preschool teacher suspected that amongst her new flock of bright eyed little boys and girls were many who did not speak English. But they had no idea, and there was no assessment process available to them to find out, just what language the children spoke and how they could best facilitate the children's learning, perhaps using native speakers. We also recommended very strongly a national Indigenous languages policy that would include qualifying Indigenous language speakers to work in schools, particularly with the youngest members of the school population. We wanted to see such people trained to be not only teachers' assistants but fully qualified teachers who could use their home language skills throughout the classroom both to ensure that Indigenous students were not disadvantaged and that non-Indigenous students could also learn Indigenous languages as part of their Australian heritage and learning experience.

I endorse this motion. I think it is of critical importance. We should make sure that Australia, which is rich in cultural and linguistic diversity, is not left behind when it comes to having adequate protocols and efforts to maintain those languages.

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