Professor David T Hill reports back after his attendance at the 2020 Summit

There were 100 participants in this stream and more than a dozen sub-themes were pursued during the course of the weekend, with only a small number proceeding to final incorporation into the interim report.

The stream strongly supported the importance of Asia and Asia literacy to Australia’s future. In the 38-page report, produced at the close of the Summit and handed to the PM in the final session (to be made public through the Summit website), the stream report included three ambitions for 2020, two of which were:

• To reinvigorate & deepen our engagement with Asia and the Pacific.
• To ensure that the major languages and cultures of our region are no longer foreign to Australians but are familiar and mainstreamed into Australian society.

These elements were elaborated upon in various of the Priority Themes, included specifically:

A campaign to develop regional literacy:

• A comprehensive, cross-agency, national strategic plan for a major reinvigoration of Asia literacy in Australia, to enhance our global engagement in trade, security and people to people exchanges.
• Commence a more focussed effort to recruit foreign language teachers from local communities and overseas, and to enhance Australia’s foreign language teaching skills.
• Link thousands of young Australians to Asian communities through support for school twinning, exchange programs, mentoring, in-country and community-based learning programs.

Given the numbers of participants involved in the stream who focussed on this particular theme  – fluctuating from about half a dozen to more than two dozen in different sessions -- and the variety of perspectives drawn together, the wording was a collaborative broad-brush outcome, incorporating general directions, and avoiding splitting a general agreement with unproductive details.

I want to record my personal appreciation particularly to Dr George Quinn (ANU), who prior to the Summit had convened a meeting of several Asianist participants and prepared a ‘discussion starter’ document, and to Prof. Tim Lindsey (U.Melb.) whose work distilling general discussion into a core draft, and whose chairing of the final tight group discussions enabled a consensual document to go forward. That working document, ‘Australia’s 2020 Asia Vision’ is appended.

Among the challenges we faced in framing our document (and our ideas) were the exhortations by the Summit convenors that the ideas forthcoming be ‘big’ (resulting in lots of strategic detail being omitted) and ‘new’. For many of us, the challenge of Asia literacy did not seem ‘new’, yet remained a glaring and unaddressed need, central to Australia’s future, and something which we felt it was imperative to advance to the Summit report.

Personally, I left the Summit exhausted, delighted that ‘Asia literacy’ had made it into the Report, optimistic still that the Rudd government is sympathetic to our cause. However, I remain wary as to what concrete policies will ultimately flow from this very stimulating weekend, and when we might see the sea-change we need in funding Asian studies at all levels.

Professor David T. Hill
Chair of Southeast Asian Studies
School of Social Sciences and Humanities

Faculty of Arts & Education

MURDOCH UNIVERSITY WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Sunday, 20 April 2008

Australia’s 2020 Asia Vision

Australia needs a platform in place to be a sustainable high performance community through 2050 and beyond.

Asia is rapidly rising. By 2020 Asia will have grown to 43% of world GDP and Asia’s economy will be larger than the US and Europe combined. Australia is uniquely positioned geographically to benefit.  A first order priority is a rigorous refocus on enmeshing ourselves in our neighborhood.

However, falling Asia literacy is letting us down. The rhetoric of our improved engagement in the Asia Pacific remains unmatched by performance. More people studied Asia in 1960 than they do today. We are the lowest ranked OECD country for second language skills.

Drawing on ideas generated by the 2020 Youth Summit we need to harness Australia’s youthful curiosity and sense of adventure to renew our nation’s engagement with Asia if we are to maximize our potential to engage globally. Australia’s Asia 2020 vision is based on the urgent need to mainstream Asia literacy to secure our future.

GOAL

By 2020 for Australians the major languages and cultures of our region are no longer foreign but familiar and mainstreamed into Australian society.

By 2020, 60 per cent of all Australians will speak a second language, as a means of securing our prosperity and identity into the future.

A comprehensive, cross-agency, national strategic plan for a major reinvigoration of Australia’s fast diminishing Asia literacy, to build the software for our global engagement in trade, security and culture.  Education at all levels is the key to re-skilling our nation for the ‘Asian century’ and is needed now.

STRATEGY

A national strategy:

·         by 2020 a comprehensive national Asia literacy strategy at all levels of the education system, backed by funding at least equivalent to the former NALSSAS plan, will have re-skilled Australia to capitalize on opportunities in Asia.

·         By 2020 Australia will no longer be the worst-ranked OECD country for second language skills.  It will be positioned to benefit from the economic reality of an increasingly Asia-centric world. 

Australians directly experiencing Asia:

·         by 2020 tens of thousands of young Australians will be linked to Asian communities through support for school twinning, exchange programs, mentoring, in-country and community-based learning programs.

·         Barriers to Australians studying in Asia will have been removed, including a review of travel advisories.

Mainstreaming language education:

·         by 2020, learning a second language (Asian and others), integrating regional world views and ways of knowing, will be compulsory in our education system. This would strengthen the work of the United Nations by promoting interfaith and intercultural dialogue between the communities of our region.

·         This will be supported by re-invigorated professional teacher training, including for native speakers and our ethnic communities. Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian will be priority languages but a wide range of other languages will be available

·         By 2020 structural incentives including course bonus points, University fee exemptions (eg. HECS) and other financial incentives will have rebuilt Asian studies in our universities to be global leaders, by creating renewed institutional expertise and increasing student numbers.