Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Two-thirds of the world's middle class will be living in Asia within the next 20 years. This, of course, presents enormous opportunities for Australia, but one of the greatest opportunities and challenges for us is to build closer and more mutually beneficial relationships within our neighbourhoods of the Indo-Pacific region. Now, that's easier said than done. Difficulties in this area include language barriers as well as cultural and, of course, geographic obstacles that hinder progress in developing greater ties within the region. But, as the world's economic, political and strategic focus continues to shift towards Asia, it's clear that opportunities of engagement far outweigh the problems that thwart greater connectivity and regional cooperation.

As a former parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs, I've got a great passion for improving relations with the Asian region, particularly in developing a greater Asian understanding through both cultural and linguistic awareness in Australian society. Unfortunately, at the moment, we're going backwards when it comes to learning languages of Asian background in Australia. The number of students studying Mandarin at the HSC level in New South Wales has actually fallen over recent decades. In 2015, there were only 61 non-background students studying Mandarin in year 12—a fall of 76 per cent since 1997. More students studied Indonesian in school in 1974 than do today in modern-day Australia. When it comes to Asian languages in schools, globally across Australia the rate of penetration was 24 per cent in 2000 and it has fallen to 18.6 per cent in modern-day Australia. Quite simply, we're going backwards when it comes to teaching Asian languages in our schools.

Building relationships is going to be a very important part of Asian cultural understanding. It is often the key to successful dealings at government and business levels. Gaining greater understanding of Asian languages and cultures and how to build relationships can be of great benefit to Australian businesses seeking to expand in Asia. The New Colombo Plan has been quite successful in building some of those links. From the electorate of Kingsford Smith, which I represent, there have been a total of five New Colombo Plan scholars: one in 2015, three in 2016 and one in 2017. The scholar from 2017, Daniel Tam, is a student of UNSW currently studying engineering at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University. New Colombo Plan Mobility Program grants have supported a total of 710 UNSW students to undertake short-term projects in the Indo-Pacific region from 2014 to 2017, and a further 794 UNSW students will be supported under the grants program in 2018.

The current New Colombo Plan alumni ambassador for UNSW is Sonia Parulekar. Sonia is currently in her final year of a bachelor of commerce degree at the University of New South Wales. In 2015 she studied business and information systems at the University of Malaya in Malaysia through a New Colombo Plan scholarship. She has also interned with PricewaterhouseCoopers in their management consulting practice in Singapore. In 2017 she intends to join CK Hutchison's group technology service division in Hong Kong. In Australia she has worked for the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Westpac group and AT Kearney.

Labor are committed to strengthening Australia's place within the Indo-Pacific region. We remain committed to ensuring that we increase connectivity. We are concerned about this government's approach to building Asian language literacy in this country. There have been two goes at national plans to build Asian language literacy—one by the Keating government and the other by the Rudd government—and both were cancelled by Liberal governments when they came to power. In the era when Pauline Hanson was saying we were being swamped by Asians, unfortunately, as a sop to Pauline Hanson's One Nation, the Howard government cancelled the program. Then the Abbott government cancelled the government program that was put in place by the Rudd government. They cancelled the Asian Century white paper, which was a road map to deeper engagement with Asia. So, although the New Colombo Plan has been good at building relations with Asia, there is much more that we can do at a government level, including having a nationally consistent approach to ensuring that we're improving exposure to languages at both school and tertiary levels in Australia.

See this speech in context