Bold study-abroad plan also opens door to soft diplomacy

The New Colombo Plan is ambitious but informed, and has generated remarkable goodwill from the usually suspicious.

WHAT'S the most interesting higher education policy of the campaign so far? Trick question. The Coalition's New Colombo Plan will send students abroad but it is also a foreign affairs policy. In its broad outline, it is not even the work of politicians. And if its ambition is taken seriously, it looks far beyond the next electoral cycle.

The expert report "accepted" by Tony Abbott on Friday is supposed to guide the lead agency, the Department of Foreign Affairs, if it gets the Coalition order to set up a trial allowing the first undergraduates to study in countries of the region such as Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong.

For diplomats, this is "soft diplomacy" - an attempt to thicken the weave of relationships between people of sometimes starkly different cultures. As for universities, if study with an internship in the Asia-Pacific does become "a rite of passage" for undergraduates their much talked about connections to business and the region should take on real weight.

From the outset, the Coalition has wanted Indonesia to be one of the first countries to receive New Colombo students. This is a courageous decision, in the Humphrey Appleby sense.

Getting visas may be a real headache, students have so far shown little interest in Indonesia as a study destination and Indonesian language in our education system is very weak.

The Coalition has been told all this, chapter and verse, but presses on because if anything can benefit from soft diplomacy it's the Australia-Indonesia relationship.

The New Colombo Plan is an ambitious exercise but an informed one. By contrast, the Coalition's promise that it can lift the percentage of school leavers taking a foreign language from 12 per cent to 40 per cent within a decade seems light-headed.

If it doesn't come to pass, don't expect soul-searching or anguish. The New Colombo Plan is different. It has generated remarkable goodwill from people often wary of Coalition forays into education.

The reason is the unusual and open policy process presided over by the opposition spokeswoman for foreign affairs Julie Bishop.

She has guided the process, expressed preferences, but drawn in a large number of people from universities and business with expertise in study abroad. The result, the report of the New Colombo steering group released last week, reads like the thoughtful, balanced and informed document that it was allowed to be.

The Opposition Leader and even more so Bishop have invested a lot of capital in this. If they win power, it is their administration that will be accountable for the money spent on the New Colombo Plan, just as they as politicians will happily associate themselves with the scheme if it demonstrably serves long-term national interests. Hence the great interest in what they might do with the broad aspirations of the steering group's report.

This also explains some of the consternation caused by Friday's press release from the Coalition which said that "once operative (the New Colombo Plan) will provide financial support for up to 300 young Australians studying in the region every year".

Little sign there of the scale of the plan as has been discussed and refined by experts since March. Asked about this, Bishop said 300 was simply the target for the proposed 2014 trial, after which the number of students going abroad would be determined by demand as various countries of the region opted in to the plan.

The Coalition would set aside $100 million over five years "and as demand grows we will revisit funding levels in future".

Although Abbott last year had said the plan would be funded from "existing resources," on Friday Bishop insisted it was "new money; I can be very persuasive". New money is a sore point in study abroad. Last year, with some fanfare, Labor announced its new AsiaBound scholarships, then quietly cut funding for similar, existing schemes that send students into the region.

One recommendation of the New Colombo steering group is for a rationalisation of the myriad overlapping schemes in study abroad. A sensible idea, but until it's known how much funding is in the system it's hard to separate and calculate the effect of any new money. Even so, as one expert put it, any administration can throw money at scholarships. What the New Colombo Plan has the potential to do is to elevate study abroad to such a scale that over a generation it transforms campus life and our relations with countries of the region.

A parting shot. Whatever happened to the Asian Century? Krishna Sen, arts dean and member of the New Colombo steering group, has seen little sign of it in Labor's campaign. It's there at the heart of the New Colombo Plan.