Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I reject the assertions made in Senator Milne's question. The Prime Minister made it very clear yesterday when releasing the Asian century white paper that one of the key areas of engagement needs to be the question of improving Australians' Asian literacy—be that cultural understanding, be it familiarity with business systems—and of course a key component of that is improving Australia's appalling record at development of second languages.

It is the case that Australia for many years has struggled to see students take up second languages, be it French, German or Asian languages, and I think it is a deep-seated cultural issue for us. Successive programs have struggled to have a big impact on second language proficiency among Australian students. But the Prime Minister quite rightly pointed to Asian language literacy as being one of the key things that we have to improve our performance on.

It is the case that a current program is coming to an end, but the Prime Minister has made it clear that the Asian languages identified in the white paper will become a focus. It is a focus of my work in the tertiary education portfolio as well, and some recent signs of activity in that area and increased enrolments are encouraging. But we have a lot of work to do to try and provide not only courses but the sort of cultural change and the broad community acceptance of the need and value of Asian languages, because it will be critical to our future engagement in Asia.