The back-the-front approach to Australia’s Asia literacy

A parliamentary inquiry examining the chance to rebuild Australia’s Asia capability has, in its own recommendation, repeated the error it was convened to correct.

On 30 June, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education tabled “Security and Prosperity in Asia: Building Australia’s Asia Capability (Opens in new window)”, a 200-page report providing 34 recommendations on how to re-prioritise Asia within the Australian education system and build Asia capability amongst Australians.

While the report provides a serious and overdue diagnosis of a broken pipeline, its focus remains wholly misdirected. For more than a decade, Australia’s Asia-capability agenda has faced outwards – including the 2012 “Australia in the Asian Century” White Paper, which framed language learning as a tool to deepen ties with regional neighbours.

Australia recognises that Asia capability is essential to advancing Australia’s international interests, yet there are almost no conversations about how Asia capability among Australians serves domestic interests and communities.

With 17% of Australians identifying as having Asian heritage and a highly diverse Asian community already living here, the national strategy is still directed toward communicating with neighbours rather than communities at home.

In 2024, Ambulance Victoria Advanced Life Support paramedic Warren Crittle was able to provide critical care to an eight-month-old boy through utilising his Mandarin language skills (Opens in new window). The young boy was in the care of his grandmother when he developed breathing difficulties. Crittle, who had previously lived and studied in China, was able to communicate with the boy’s mum and aunty in Mandarin throughout the process of transferring him to the ICU at Monash Children’s Hospital. This small story captures something Australia’s conversations about “Asia capability” are missing. Asia capability in Australia serves better to bridge to multicultural communities than it is used for international strategic advantage.

There is a widening mismatch between the languages kids speak at home and the languages they learn at school. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (Opens in new window), the top five languages used at home, other than English, were Mandarin (2.7%), Arabic (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.3%), Cantonese (1.2%) and Punjabi (0.9%) in 2021. Yet the most widely taught languages in Australian schools are Japanese, French and German – none of which rank high among the languages Australian households actually speak.

This mismatch is unfolding against a backdrop of cooling public sentiment towards multiculturalism. In 2025, 75% of Australians agreed that it is good for society to be made up of different cultures. This represents a steady decline from 85% in 2020 and 81% in 2019 (according to ABS 2025 (Opens in new window)). Lowy Institute polling also indicates a fall in support for cultural diversity in Australia.

If public appetite for multiculturalism is softening, an Asia capability strategy that ignores the communities already here amounts to a major missed opportunity to invest in social cohesion when it is needed most. Australia’s current Asia capability strategies are not taking advantage of its own Asian diasporas.

Other nations have deeply embedded language and cultural learning within their education system. With only 36% of Australian students studying a second language in 2018, Australia ranked second last among 64 countries surveyed of school students learning a foreign language at school by the OECD (Opens in new window).

In the United States, Spanish remains the most widely taught and requested non-English language in schools (Opens in new window), accounting for more than 70% of all secondary foreign language enrolments. This is in keeping with the United States being home to the second-largest population of Spanish speakers in the world. The US gets both outcomes with the same investment: teaching Spanish because of the community already speaking it at home has also strengthened the country’s ties with Latin America. Engagement with the neighbourhood is a byproduct of engagement with its own people.

Australia’s approach inverts this. Mandarin is taught to open doors in Beijing and Shanghai, not to build relationships with the Chinese–Australian communities already here. The secondary language policies in the United States reflect bridging its local communities and focusing on its current demographics, while Australia’s policies are focused on its neighbourhood instead.

The parliamentary inquiry report clearly acknowledges that the Asia-Australia diaspora is an underutilised asset. But it advocates for an Asia-capable workforce for the purpose of “long-term business resilience and performance” within the Asia region. It should also emphasise the purpose of Asia capability among non-Asian heritage students. Australians of non-Asian heritage should be aiming to strengthen their Asia capabilities to build relationships with the local communities in Australia, rather than only finding an international advantage.

Asia literacy and language capability among police officers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, and Australians from all walks of life does more for Australia’s relationship with Asia, and with its own citizens, than a capability strategy aimed only at advancing Canberra’s trade objectives. Australia’s focus on Asia capability needs to shift focus from its neighbours to communities at home.