For decades, Australia was told its future lay in Asia, yet it allowed the teaching of Asian languages to wither.
Now, with warnings the country’s regional fluency is approaching crisis point, the Albanese government is investing in a quiet institution of multicultural Australia — community language schools — in a bid to rebuild a capability that many fear has been lost.
Nine organisations in NSW, Victoria and the ACT will share in $2.5 million under a new Fluency in Asian Languages program, supporting students in years 7 to 12 to build fluency in more than 15 languages, including Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Punjabi and Yue (Cantonese).
The funding, part of the government’s broader $25 million Community Language Schools program, will support curriculum development, improve retention in language study and boost operations in schools often run by volunteers and migrant communities.
Amid mounting alarm over the decline in Australia’s Asia literacy, ministers are casting the initiative as something larger than multicultural policy — part education reform, part strategic repair.
In 2012, then prime minister Julia Gillard launched the Asian Century white paper. Among its goals was that all students could study Mandarin, Hindi, Indonesian or Japanese (the so-called big four).
Since then, the proportion of secondary students studying Chinese, Japanese or Indonesian has fallen 25 per cent, to just 3.3 per cent. University enrolments in South-East Asian languages have dropped 75 per cent since 2004. Of more than 1 million domestic students at universities in 2023, barely 500 were enrolled in Bahasa Indonesia.
On these trends, experts warn, Indonesian could disappear from Australian schools by 2031.
Ministers increasingly describe this erosion as a sovereign capability problem.
Assistant Multicultural Affairs Minister Julian Hill said the government’s separate $5 million fluency initiative – designed to help more students continue Asian languages to year 12 – was aimed at reversing those trends.
“Australia’s future prosperity depends on our ability to engage confidently with our region – the fastest-growing region in the world,” Hill said.
“Having more Australians capable of speaking the languages of our largest trading partners and neighbours is a huge benefit … opening further employment opportunities and career paths for students, and growing economic ties with our friends and neighbours.”
Hill has argued community language schools, often viewed as heritage preservation, should instead be understood as “critical national capability”.
He has also made the case for multilingualism in broader civic terms.
That thinking has been reinforced by strategic voices.
Hugh White, emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, warned a recent parliamentary hearing that Australia would need far greater linguistic and cultural fluency to navigate a region defined by sharper strategic competition.
“You need to be able to go to each of those capitals and talk to them with the kind of linguistic fluency, conceptual fluency and cultural fluency that we regard as automatic and can deploy when we go to London or Washington,” White said. “The stakes are going to be that high for us.”
That argument has broadened the debate beyond education, so that language learning is not simply about heritage or employability, but about diplomacy, intelligence, trade and influence.
Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong says Australia’s interests demand we engage in the region more consistently and more deeply.
“When young Australians learn Asian languages, they can build the trust, relationships and capability to engage in our region more effectively,” she says.
There is symbolism, too, in where the government is placing the bet.
For years, mainstream school systems have struggled with declining demand for second languages, teacher shortages and curriculum pressures. Community language schools – often operating on weekends in borrowed classrooms — have endured largely through migrant communities.
In suburban Melbourne and Sydney, generations of children have spent Saturdays at Greek school, Chinese school, Punjabi classes or Vietnamese language lessons.
For more than a decade, 16-year-old Tenzin Jugney has been learning through the Tibetan Children’s School of Newcastle and Hunter Region. He arrived aged three, and Tibetan classes have become his strongest link to his language, culture and community – especially important in a country where the Tibetan population is small and spread over vast distances.
“I truly believe that Tibetan school is extremely important and helpful,” he said, “an environment for me to be able to socialise with other Tibetans … to learn my culture, language and traditions.”
In Melbourne, Annabel Tang spent three years studying at the RLY Chinese Culture and Language Academy in Nunawading, completing the language through to the VCE. The child of a Vietnamese mother and Chinese father, she grew up speaking English at home, was fluent in Vietnamese, but was determined to understand her father’s language.
In her part-time job at Chemist Warehouse, she uses Chinese to help customers who struggle with English, guiding them through medication instructions and ensuring they feel understood and supported.
“Lots of the patients I interact with are Chinese, so my high school studies definitely are helping me in not only counselling patients in taking medicines but also helping them navigate through the healthcare system if they’re a bit lost,” she said.
Projects backed under the funding round include work through Macquarie University, The University of Sydney, University of Melbourne and Australian National University. The emphasis is on curriculum and resources intended to benefit schools nationally.
Since 2023, the Commonwealth says it has invested $40.6 million in community language schools, including funding for about 90 new schools. Whether it can reverse decades of decline is another question.
In a country repeatedly told its security and prosperity will be shaped in the Indo-Pacific, the government is wagering that rebuilding fluency may begin not in embassies or universities, but in the Saturday classrooms where, quietly, it never entirely disappeared.
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Rob Harris is the national correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Canberra. He is a former Europe correspondent.Connect via email.
