Nicolle Flint (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House

(1) acknowledges the success of the New Colombo Plan (Plan);

(2) recognises that the Plan will have supported more than 30,000 Australian undergraduates to live, study and undertake internships in the Indo-Pacific by the end of 2018;

(3) welcomes the establishment of the Plan’s alumni ambassadors program, which will support the Plan’s alumnus from across the country to promote the value of engaging with the Indo-Pacific region;

(4) notes that numerous prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers of the lndo-Pacific region have lauded the Plan as evidence of Australia’s commitment to building enduring relationships across the region; and

(5) recognises that the Plan is enhancing Asian literacy amongst Australian undergraduates, deepening Australia’s engagement in the region and strengthening Australia’s international education sector, which is one of our largest services export industries.

I am delighted to move this motion today to recognise the extraordinary success of the New Colombo Plan. I would like to start by paying tribute to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who devised and implemented the plan. Not only does the plan partner with our neighbours in the region; it provides incredible educational and life experiences for our university students and builds relationships in countries from India to Indonesia, Bangladesh to Burma and Pakistan to Papua New Guinea.

Now, more than ever, our nation must strengthen its relationships with our neighbours in the Indo-Pacific. The emerging prominence of these economies and their growing middle class demands that Australia builds a thorough understanding of our region. This knowledge must permeate all of our institutions, from government to business and throughout the public. The New Colombo Plan, devised and executed by our foreign minister, is a signature and forward-thinking initiative of the coalition government that works towards these aims and, while doing so, provides life-changing educational experiences for some of our best and brightest young minds.

The immense success of the plan can be seen in its uptake among students. By the end of 2018 the New Colombo Plan will have supported more than 30,000 students from around Australia to undertake experiences in 40 locations across the Indo-Pacific. In just four years, by the end of 2018, the New Colombo Plan will have supported 770 students from Flinders University, which is in the heart of my electorate and from where, I'm proud to say, I graduated. Sadly, we didn't have the New Colombo Plan when I was going through. In this time, across South Australia, the plan will have supported more than 2,327 students, giving each of them a unique and highly useful understanding of their host nations, which will no doubt be of use in their professional life but also to us as a nation overall.

The New Colombo Plan also boasts significant private sector engagement, with 19 champions and over 240 registered businesses as part of the plan's internship and mentoring network. Again, the substantial private sector interest is testament to the plan's potential over the long term, as our regional neighbours continue to reach new economic milestones.

On Friday, 6 October I was delighted to join the foreign minister as she launched another important aspect of the New Colombo Plan, the South Australian alumni program. At the launch we heard from two incredibly inspirational young students who have participated in the plan: Charlie Hamra from the University of Adelaide and Michelle Howie from the University of South Australia. Michelle studied engineering and Korean at Chung Ang University in Seoul and undertook a research work placement at KAIST, a public research university in Daejon, and she interned at Telstra in Hong Kong. Charlie studied Indian politics and culture at Jamia Millia Islamia and interned at the Centre for Escalation of Peace in New Delhi, where he organised a second-track dialogue between India and Bhutan.

I met Farwaaz Karim from Flinders University. He is Flinders' alumni ambassador and is undertaking bachelor's degrees in law, accounting and economics. In 2015 he undertook a commerce exchange program in Singapore through a New Colombo Plan mobility grant. Since the completion of his exchange he has worked with Spire Research and Consulting, Infrastructure Finance Australia, BankSA and, most recently, the government of South Australia. It's a very impressive list of experiences, which I'm sure were in part inspired by what he learnt overseas.

The mobility grants are an important part of the NCP—the plan—and Flinders uni has made good use of them. At the alumni launch I had the pleasure of meeting Mr Sebastian Raneskold, Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (International). We heard that Flinders University had sent students to Malaysia and Hong Kong and that 12 nursing and midwifery students will undertake a four-week clinical placement in hospital and community health services in 2018 in Indonesia, our largest and closest neighbour.

In closing, I'd like to remark on two factors that stood out for me at the alumni launch. First was the diplomatic value of the New Colombo Plan and what it delivers for Australia. The foreign minister shared with us the genuine goodwill the plan generates with leaders across our region, from presidents to prime ministers to foreign ministers. Second was the energy and enthusiasm our Australian students now have for the country in which they've studied, the culture they've learnt so much about and the new friendships they've formed. This is a truly great program for Australians and our neighbours alike and I can't wait to see us achieve over 30,000 New Colombo Plan graduates by the end of 2018.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member. Is the motion seconded?

Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Overall I support the New Colombo Plan's aims and acknowledge progress in its delivery. I said in my first speech that the Australian people expect us to seek compromise and agreement across parties, and we should acknowledge when something's a good initiative. We shouldn't just bag and throw out things because they're someone else's idea and, of course, we should interrogate to see what's working and how things can be improved. Overall, in my view, the New Colombo Plan is a positive step which builds on Australia's decades-long tradition in public diplomacy in our region. It's too early to meaningfully assess the longer term benefits and outcomes, but we should expect tangible and intangible benefits from people-to-people contact over years and decades. The tangible are trade, economic and academic links, but the intangible, which can be as valuable or more valuable, fundamentally boil down to mutual understanding.

Improvements are possible. I've heard legitimate criticisms of the NCP, things like: a persistent criticism that it's too focused on elites—the wealthiest—and we need to address the equity issues; suggestions that there would be merit in extending the program to provide some focus on vocational qualifications; and scepticism from some about the value of the relatively short sojourns, in that this is a very different program from the original Colombo Plan, where study was generally for extended periods. There are concerns that there's a lack of focus on meaningful or substantive language acquisition and that the program's funded in part by cuts to the Australia Awards programs, which bring to Australia the best and brightest minds from Asia. These remain critically important, in my view, and it cannot be either-or.

The context is important, however. As always with this government, you've got to have a look at what's not said to really understand. Australia's future is inextricably linked to Asia. Geography is not destiny, but it is reality. We must do much more to deepen our relations with Asia, to seek, in the words of Paul Keating, 'Security in Asia, not from Asia'. This should be bipartisan and it should be sustained. Shame on you, government, for not having the generosity we're showing to the New Colombo Plan—you digitally burnt the Australia in the Asian century white paper. Slogans like 'more Jakarta and less Geneva' are not a substitute for foreign policy.

Penny Wong has made some wonderful, substantial speeches in recent months, laying the foundations for what will be a brilliant tenure as foreign minister. One point she makes powerfully is the need to understand the cultures of Asia and the mindsets of its people—the communitarian approach. Visiting alone, a bit of study and a few friends are not enough. The main window into culture is language, and our dismal record at learning Asian languages is an enormous problem. So, shame on this government for walking away from Labor's efforts to boost Asian language literacy. Those things have to be maintained for decades to have any meaningful impact.

As we have heard, the New Colombo Plan is being lauded as a signature initiative of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, central to her legacy—no doubt she's focused on that now! And, while worthy, if this is her signature, the height of her ambitions for Australian diplomacy, then it's pretty sad when compared to the work of some of her predecessors of real calibre. It's not even a new idea, really—it's a resuscitation of an old idea from a Menzies era student exchange program. They are not that interested in picking up Menzies's ideas about homeownership though—being focused on us becoming a nation of landlords and renters.

Minister Bishop is a generally competent transactional minister, it's fair to say. She engages, she charms and she reads her DFAT prepared lines beautifully. She generally responds well to events—putting aside the meltdown on New Zealand, when she was trying to influence domestic politics with her little tantrum that New Zealand Labour may win government. It was actually a bit sad for those opposite who support her—I know she has some support—to watch her leadership ambitions go up in smoke that week in the House, as the true extent of her glass jaw and her lack of judgement when she goes off script without DFAT dot points was revealed. I almost wondered whether she was setting us on a path to war, but then she was reined in.

Fundamentally, she lacks ambition and big strategic goals for Australia. I was reminded of this last week when we hosted Gareth Evans. What a contrast. He has an incredible intellect, strategic nous and achievements that this minister could only dream of: the chemical weapons treaty, where the US called him and asked for help; the Cambodia-Paris peace accords—Bishop kowtowed last week to Cambodia; progress on denuclearisation; the Canberra commission; creation of the regional architecture that we live off today with APEC and the ASEAN ARF, laying the foundations for his later work on peace building and the responsibility to protect doctrine; the anti-apartheid movement; and the Antarctic commission. In this context, 'modest' is really an overstatement for the New Colombo Plan, compared to Gareth's achievements. Then again, it's a lot more than can be said for their previous foreign minister, that sad sack Downer. His only achievement that anyone can think of is lasting longer than Gareth. While we welcome the New Colombo Plan, it is not a substitute for substantive policy.

Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for Boothby for raising this very important motion. When the coalition government took office, one of its first great announcements and actions was to establish this New Colombo Plan. It is a signature policy in the coalition's foreign policy platform. As a middle power, Australia naturally invests significant thought and effort regarding its role and its place in this world. How we interact with countries in the Asia-Pacific region, and further abroad, has a significant impact on our own future and on the future of the planet. If we want to interact meaningfully, if we want to trade more, build ties, achieve international goals, foster relationships and, indeed, build friendships, we need Australians to be as literate as possible when it comes to the cultures, the languages, the practices and the business practices of our neighbours.

The New Colombo Plan continues to be a crucial element of this government's long-term plans to build closer relations for Australia in our region, including at the grassroots level. By building these networks and strengthening Australia's connections in our region, economic growth, prosperity and stability may continue to grow, hopefully for many years to come. In its first five years, the New Colombo Plan will have supported more than 30,000 young Australians—undergraduates from 40 Australian universities—to undertake study and work based placements in 35 different locations across our region. We are on track to meet that 30,000 target. Not only is this expanding the horizons of some of our best and brightest future leaders, it's creating more opportunities and links for Australians at large.

I had the huge privilege earlier this year to meet some of the New Colombo Plan recipients from around my electorate of Brisbane. I met with them both in Brisbane and here in Canberra, when some of them visited. Their placements stretch right across the Asia-Pacific region. What struck me most was their eagerness to learn about the countries they were travelling to, and their hope to be fully immersed into the languages and the cultures they would experience. They did really recognise that huge and rare opportunity before them. I was really confident that they would make both Brisbane and Australia very, very proud.

Thousands of Australian undergraduates are returning to Australia now with new skills and networks from their experiences across the region. They enhance Australia's capacity to engage with our neighbours into the future. I was really taken earlier—I think it was earlier this year when the Singaporean Prime Minister visited—by that story of how the Singaporean Prime Minister's wife had previously spent a significant amount of time in Australia under a similar program many decades ago, and how that had fostered that great relationship we now have with Singapore. In particular, I want to give a shout-out to some QUT students, like Alexandra Tran, who have become New Colombo Plan alumni ambassadors after their very successful stints overseas. Alexandra did a three-month internship with QBE in Hong Kong and now she studies with the New Colombo Plan scholarship in Korea.

New Colombo Plan recipients have been working on a range of projects, from entrepreneurship in Fiji, to humanitarian engineering and work in India, to Mandarin language immersion in China, to industrial design projects to support people with disabilities in Singapore. That's a great and broad array of backgrounds. Equally, this program supports students from Australia with a broad array of backgrounds. We're talking of Indigenous students, students with disabilities, students from regional and remote areas, students who began their life in a refugee camp, students who are the first in their families ever to attend university, as I was, or indeed the first in their family even to have a passport and travel overseas.

Over 60 per cent of New Colombo Plan mobility grant recipients are female; 15 per cent were born overseas; and over 20 per cent speak a language at home other than English. A full 10 per cent have never travelled overseas before. Around 240 private sector organisations have signed up to support the program, offering those internships and mentorships to these scholars. Nineteen Australian business leaders have joined the New Colombo Plan as business champions. They'll be promoting the program across their networks to emphasise the real value of this. Many of the businesses involved are providing transformational opportunities for all of these new Australian future leaders so that they gain real-life experience in the workplace.

So, the New Colombo Plan is going from strength to strength. It has broad support from right across the parliament, the university sector, business, the broader community and, importantly, our region. I commend it.

Julia Banks (Chisholm, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm proud to speak to this motion today and acknowledge the success of the New Colombo Plan, an inspired initiative of our foreign minister, the Hon. Julie Bishop, and constructively implemented by the Turnbull government. My electorate of Chisholm is home to two of Australia's biggest and best universities—Monash University in Clayton, where I studied arts and law, and Deakin University in Burwood. These are two fantastic tertiary institutions where thousands of Chisholm residents are pursuing further education. I'm thrilled also that both Monash and Deakin are participant universities in our government's New Colombo Plan.

The New Colombo Plan continues to be a crucial element of the government's long-term plans to build closer relations in our region. In its first five years, the New Colombo Plan has supported more than 30,000 Australian undergraduates undertaking study and work based placements across the Indo-Pacific region, including some 22 scholarship recipients and 2,151 mobility grant recipients studying in my electorate of Chisholm. These undergraduates are returning to Australia with new skills and networks from their experiences in the region, enhancing Australia's capacity to engage with our neighbours and, of course, having gained wonderful insight into the cultures and professional settings of our regional neighbours.

The New Colombo Plan is mobilising young Australians who are bright, inquisitive and wonderful ambassadors for our nation. Indeed, the Minister for Foreign Affairs recently launched the New Colombo Plan Alumni Ambassador Program, which, in its first year, will support students from across Australia to promote the New Colombo Plan and the value of Indo-Pacific study and work placements. Some young people from Chisholm's Monash and Deakin universities are included in this cohort of ambassadors and are representative of the diversity of students participating in the New Colombo Plan and of the depth and breadth of study and internship opportunities available in the Indo-Pacific. Included among these students is William Rathgeber from Deakin University, who this year is completing his Bachelor of Design, majoring in architecture. In 2015, he completed a study tour in India. In 2016, he attended Seoul National University in South Korea on exchange via a New Colombo Plan mobility grant. Finally, in 2017, he attended CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India, on his third international study trip. These opportunities have provided William with integral skills as well as professional and academic experience, and I am pleased to hear about William's ongoing successes.

Likewise, Sam Williams completed a Bachelor of Arts with honours from Monash University last year. For his honours year, he studied anthropology in Nepal, before conducting research in-country about Nepali ethno-politics through a New Colombo Plan scholarship. Sam interned for three years at the Australian Embassy in Nepal and is now working at the University of Melbourne. Also from Monash University, Alexander McLeish, who is studying arts/law, was the New Colombo Plan Japan Fellow in 2016, where he completed a semester of study at the University of Tokyo. Supported by his New Colombo Plan scholarship, Alex had the opportunity to intern for a law firm in Tokyo and with a leading Japanese company. Finally, Christopher Williams, whom I have met, is a Bachelor of Computer Science student at Deakin University. He is currently studying at the University of Hong Kong as the 2017 New Colombo Plan Fellow and plans to intern in the technology sector in Hong Kong in early 2018. These young Australians living and studying in Chisholm are just some of the wonderful examples of the thousands of Australians who are being mobilised in our region, and I commend them on their wonderful ongoing endeavours.

The New Colombo Plan thrives not only from government funding but from private sector sponsorship, including new sponsorship this year from aged care provider Arcare. Arcare's funding of $500,000 over five years will be directed to support New Colombo Plan mobility programs. Next year, it will fund 14 Deakin University School of Nursing and Midwifery students to travel to Bhutan to undertake practicums in primary health care, midwifery and aged care study. It is just one example of the fantastic mobility programs being undertaken by Chisholm students. The plan's mobility program would not have been possible without this additional support, and it is a great example of how the Turnbull government is partnering with the private sector to deliver new opportunities for young Australians. The New Colombo Plan is a wonderful initiative that is enhancing relationships in our region. I encourage all undergraduate students to apply to participate and explore the wonderful opportunities available in our region.

Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to 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.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for the debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.