Australia’s ‘monolingual mind’ widens its isolation from Asia

“Languages study has continued to deteriorate at alarming levels”, Australian education experts Louisa Field, Rachel Wilson and Ken Cruickshank revealed in a recent paper. This is in spite of broad recognition that mastering regional tongues is vital for Australia’s economic and geopolitical interests.

The academics’ research, which analysed the take-up of language courses over a two-decade period, found “little to no improvement” since a 1994 national push to prioritise four key Asian languages: Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Indonesian.

This failure to nurture cross-cultural understanding is now drawing scrutiny from Australia’s neighbours.

“For Australia to understand Southeast Asia and vice versa, there needs to be a mutual understanding on both sides,” said ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute senior fellow William Choong at the May forum, organised by the think tank and the Australian High Commission in the city state.

Few Australian universities offer Southeast Asian language programmes, Choong noted, and less than one in five of the 32,000 Australian undergraduates studying abroad under the government’s “New Colombo Plan” educational outreach initiative are learning these languages.

“I think Australia has a slight problem, and that’s understating it,” he said, adding that understanding the region’s languages is vital to grasp the economic nuances and geopolitical undercurrents shaping the Southeast Asian mindset.

Australia’s language-skills deficit is symptomatic of its broader retreat from active regional engagement. The ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s latest “State of Southeast Asia” survey showed the country’s economic and political influence in the region was now negligible.

But this appears to be less about language gaps, and