Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I want to talk about second language learning in Australia. Frankly, learning to sing 'brilla brilla piccola stella' or to count to ju in Japanese is really not going to cut the mustard in the global marketplace of the 21st century. We keep bleating on about the importance of a second language and many worthy statements are made, but the fact is, with a few notable exceptions, we are going backwards in the fight against monolingualism.

Last weekend, I was in Indonesia in Yogyakarta, a university town, and I had been asked to speak specifically on the topic of Indonesian learning at the ACICIS conference, which is in Yogyakarta. ACICIS is the Australian Consortium for 'In-Country' Indonesian Studies. It is celebrating its 20th anniversary—obviously, an enormous achievement. I will, at a subsequent occasion, talk about the specific issue of learning Indonesian, which has been of some concern to me for some time, but, as for today, in the course of preparing for that I was quite appalled with the figures that I discovered in terms of second language learning generally in Australia and, indeed, how it is going backwards.

Only 13 per cent of year 12 students nationally take a second language. Thirty years ago, that was 40 per cent. So we have gone from where we were 30 years ago, when we were less involved in the global marketplace and had 40 per cent of year 12 students taking a second language, to now, when we are down to 13 per cent. I have to say that in my home state of Western Australia we have a particularly shameful performance. We are scraping the bottom of the barrel; we are, in fact, at only six per cent. Six per cent of year 12 students are studying a second language.

If we start looking at primary schools, we see that there has been a steady decline over the last five years in language learning. If we just compare the 2010 and 2013 figures—and this was included in a recent WA government report—we see that six per cent fewer students are studying a language in Catholic primary schools and 15 per cent fewer are studying a language in government primary schools over that four-year period.

In fact, it is actually getting worse in Western Australia. We have changed the funding model and, from this year on, primary and district high schools will no longer actually receive any LOTE staff allowance for the study of a second language. So what we have seen over the last year is quite a number of schools dropping out, with quite a number of government schools taking the decline even further. I understand from my discussions with primary school principals that we are going to see this deteriorate even further next year, as fewer of them are finding that they can afford the cost and overcome the difficulty in finding teachers in this area. Fundamentally, it is all getting just too hard and primary schools are electing to move out of this space altogether.

Of course, this is compounded bizarrely in Western Australia, as this is one language learning area that the state government does not require schools to report on. Schools are, in terms of their performance, measured against a number of criteria, but there is not one on the learning of a second language, so you can see that there is a very clear message going out to schools in Western Australia that this is not an important area of learning. That is quite terrible.

I want to contrast this with what we are seeing in Victoria, which had also been seeing a decline, but they have really got behind this project. Since 2013 they have seen a considerable increase in the number of students studying language at a primary level. We see a greater emphasis on that going right through the schools in Victoria. As many as 19 per cent of their year 12 secondary-school students are still learning a language. It is not an internationally stellar figure but, by Australian standards, it is good.

I want to stress how bad this is—what a dreadful thing we are doing to the next generation. We are moving into a world that is globally competitive. We are entering into free trade agreements, bringing down barriers, seeing jobs moved offshore and people having to compete for jobs internationally. If you are an engineer in Australia it is very likely that the project you are competing for will be in an international market. We have relied on the fact that we are English speakers. We think that is okay: 'The international language of the world is English so we as native speakers of English do not have to bother about that.'

I will quote the Languages in crisisreport,prepared by the Group of Eight Australian universities. It is completely correct and I see this happening, very clearly, as I travel around the world. It says:

Monolingual English native speakers are already losing the advantage in their own language because English language skills are becoming a basic skill around the world.

We all know that because we travel around and see it. It states:

With English now part of the school curriculum in many countries from Europe to Asia, Australians are increasingly competing for jobs with people who are just as competent in English as they are in their own native language and possibly one or two more. It has been observed that the London business world prefers graduates from European universities rather than British institutions because they speak English as well as at least one other language, and often two or three.

It continues:

Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world and English merely competes with Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese Wu and Portuguese for second to eighth place …

Indeed:

The dominance of English on the internet is also decreasing. The proportion of internet users with English as a native language has declined from 51.3 per cent in 2000 to 32 per cent in 2005 …

We are being overtaken by the rest of the world. Let us look at what is happening in Finland, a high performing country in this area. Every student studies a second language right through their high-school education. Thirty-four per cent of students studying a third language and around 11 per cent study a fourth language.

In our performance, we are not getting this right. We have had numerous stop-starts at a policy level, and we can criticise both sides of politics on this. We had the Nelson strategy, in place from 1994 to 2002, that was very successful. Language specialists across Australia will tell you that was a game changer—until Brendan Nelson, for some reason, abandoned it in 2002, saying that it was no longer necessary and that we already had this right. Then we had the Rudd government committed, in 2008 to 2009, to a new project, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program. That was apparently very successful but, I will have to say, it was the Labor government that did not continue that funding beyond 2012.

We have had a series of policy stops and starts but, at the end of the day, I put this proposition to you: we are short-changing the future generation. We are living in a fool's paradise. We have to get on top of this issue if our kids and grandkids are going to have any chance of taking their rightful place in the globally competitive world market.