The language of loss: the vital uni subject we need but the one nobody will study

Anthony Albanese, left, welcomes Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto to Kirribilli House in Sydney on November 12, 2025. Picture: NewsWire / Hollie Adams

Indonesia has just signed a security treaty with us, which was ­generous, what with their thinking Australians are not much interested in them.

As the Indonesian embassy puts it, “although Indonesia is one of Australia’s closest and most dynamic neighbours – with deep political, economic and cultural ties – its language continues to receive limited recognition and investment within national education policy.”

It was in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry on “how Australia can build Asia capability across the life course, from early learning through to tertiary education and into the workforce”.

Perhaps Education Minister Jason Clare, who commissioned it, thinks there may be new news to report on why Australians re­solutely refuse to learn Asian ­languages.

There is not – as the four Department of Education officials who appeared at the committee’s first hearing made clear. Their answers to some questions were that school-related issues were matters for the states. They could not answer others because there was neither data nor research. And as for universities, “we as government do not interfere in the offerings that universities choose to make in terms of their courses”. While they did not say it, it appears they are working with what they have got and that is not much.

Yet another inquiry on a problem that has not changed for decades must drive nuts policy experts who have long explained what is needed – a nationally funded policy for a start. Like long-time advocate for learning Bahasa Indo­nesia Liam Prince, who runs a program that sends students from Australian universities to study there.

He warned last year that in the decade to 2023, students learning Indonesian fell by a third to 22,000. There are predictions that the language will be dead in universities by decade-end. The University of Tasmania gave it a shove in May, cancelling its course.

Every few years there is a report and every decade or so a minster decides to do something. In Aug­ust, Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced an update to the Abbott government’s New Columbo Plan, including, doubling long-term scholarships for students at Australian universities to study in Asia and “a stronger focus on ­language learning”.

But if promises and practice over 30 years are any indication, this will not go anywhere and in a few years the problem will be consigned to whatever “too hard basket” translates in Mandarin, Japanese or Indonesian.

Overall, Asian languages are, as committee chair Labor MP Tim Watts concludes, “a mind-meltingly complex area of policy with co-ordination across different levels of government and different stages of education but as it stands … there is not a federal government strategy to build Asia capability at a whole-of-nation level or at different stages along this development pathway.”

If that is what the committee recommends, it will need to be built for speed. Wong says there are a “few hundred” Mandarin speakers in Australia who do not have Chinese origins. And there are fewer people studying Indo­nesian than 50 years ago.

In contrast, there is a pipeline from school to university for Chinese and Japanese, just not a strong one. This year, 1200 people did Japanese for the NSW HSC ahead of French (866) and Chinese (812) out of 75,000 who sat the exams.

Part of the problem is that language lobbies keep coming up with the same solutions, just with more money. There are always calls for properly trained teachers to provide K-12 continuity and to create a supply of students for universities to keep teaching. And there are always warnings that as a nat­ional problem it needs a national approach with a commonwealth-wide policy and funding for state programs.

There are always calls for properly trained teachers to provide K-12 continuity and to create a supply of students for universities to keep teaching

The previous Coalition government tried to do something along these lines by cutting what students pay to study a language at university. And there is sense about submissions to the present inquiry that everything would be way better if the national government just started handing out directives and dollars. Maybe like The Netherlands did in the 1970s, deciding that English would be the prime foreign language people needed to learn in schools. Ever wondered why everybody in Amsterdam speaks better grammatical English than we do?

But there are only 25 million native Dutch speakers in the world while Australians speak the imperial language of worldwide commerce and cultures. Direction will not work here, less because of the failures of federalism than because we stick with supply-side solutions to a demand problem. Australians just are not interested in learning the languages of our neighbours, for a start because we assume that everybody else speaks English and when they don’t, translation apps can make sense of the menu.

Plus, it is just not worth investing the time in learning an Asian language if employers do not value them. And they don’t. Prince points out that Australian business does not hire Asian-language speakers because it is not big on doing business there. There is what industry lobby AI Group calls a “troubling paradox … while global investment flows into Southeast Asia have nearly ­doubled in recent years, Australia’s investment has stagnated”.

Yet government cannot ignore Asia while industry sticks with what it knows. It is insane for defence and diplomacy not to have cadres who speak the languages of the people we trade with and sooner or later will have to fight with, ­either alongside or against. And they will need more than basic conversational ability.

The four-to-nine-week New Colombo Plan tours for students are a start but what we need now is people who can navigate what the Group of Eight universities calls “knowledge trade routes … the exchange of ideas, expertise, and innovation across borders (that) require nuanced cultural understanding that extends well beyond language alone.”

The Australian Technology Network university lobby says government needs to leverage community strengths that 20 per cent of Australians have Asian ancestors. The feds are actually on to that. Officials told Clare’s committee about the Early Language Learning app delivered in class for pre and early year schoolchildren – there were 50,000 participants last year. There are 13, mainly Asian, languages – Chinese and Japanese are the top. The pitch is that it starts kids young and they “learn to respect diversity as they learn about new cultures”.

Good for community langu­ages, which Indonesian is not. Prince argues that for now at least, the feds should “sandbag” university language programs to buy time while demand is built in schools. The risk is that the states will not invest and keep investing in teachers for a decade and this will become a staggering status quo. Beyond the government funding its own programs for defence and trade, nobody appears to have better ideas.

Which is not good: Australia needs to understand our huge neighbour when they tell us what they really think.