from politicoz …..

Every Australian child will have the opportunity to study an Asian language by 2025 and all schools will engage with at least one counterpart in the region, under policies outlined in the government's white paper on Australia in the Asian century. Setting out sweeping economic, educational, business and diplomatic goals for Australia to take advantage of the huge growth in region's middle class, the paper says every Australian student 'will have significant exposure to studies of Asia'.

If merely stating this stuff would make it happen, yesterday’s white paper would not be needed because Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit in 2008 would have worked already, as would the hundreds of previous papers laying out broad policy aspirations. But what none of these things do is include specific goals and a system for measuring and benchmarking between now and the year in question – in this case 2025.

Launched yesterday, the white paper is laced with a big-picture narrative that harks back to Labor's glory days, in particular the reforms of almost 30 years ago made by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. It is Gillard's last and best hope of moving on from the crippling controversies that have dogged her minority government, not least its origins in the removal of Kevin Rudd.

Read the White Paper

from Bernard Keane …..

If you have distinct feeling of deja vu from the Asian century white paper, it’s fine: we've been here before, a lot.

Take one of the 25 objectives (backed by more than 120 "pathways") put forward in the paper, that students will have the opportunity to continuously study an Asian language.

The first politician to promise access to Asian languages was Susan Ryan in the Hawke government, when she unveiled the National Languages Policy. Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian were identified among the priority languages and students were supposed to have access to at least one language as part of their education, "preferably continuously".

Ever since then, Australian politicians have been committing that our students will study Asian languages.

Commitments are one thing, of course; delivery is another. The Howard government axed the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools program a decade ago, making Tony Abbott's call for more students to be studying Asian languages earlier this year somewhat ironic.

Peter Garrett said that funding for the latest commitment on Asian languages would be part of the Gonski funding package. Indeed, the Gonski goals form part of the white paper goals.

For that matter, most of the government's policy agenda is in the white paper. The national disability insurance scheme (under the goal of ensuring "all Australians will be able to benefit from, and participate in, Australia's growing prosperity and engagement in Asia"), the national broadband network, the carbon pricing scheme, food security, the Murray-Darling, budget surpluses.

Even sport is in there. I kid you not. "The Australia in the Asian Century white paper highlights the huge potential to use sport to strengthen Australia's connections in Asia, Minister for Sport Senator Kate Lundy, said today," ran one of the flurry of press releases sent out yesterday bearing the "Asian Century" title.

That’s because the Asian Century white paper is less about Australia's future in the region than about both domestic policy and domestic politics. The Gillard government now has itself an overarching framework within which most of its domestic and international agenda now fits, one the Prime Minister even before yesterday's launch at the (taxpayer-subsidised) Lowy Institute was using to frame the government's policies. Get used to hearing "Asian century" a lot between now and the election.

For a government routinely accused of lacking vision, and for a Prime Minister who has always struggled to get across to voters what her overall agenda for her time in office is, it provides an opportunity to put together a coherent message about Labor's priorities in the run-up to and beyond the next election, even if much of the contents of the strategy have only tangential relevance to Asia.

It's thus a reheat of the Keating years; but whereas Keating, building on the achievements of Bob Hawke (APEC, relationships with China until 1989), had arrived at a complete world view that coherently linked an Asia-centric economic agenda with multiple strands of economic, constitutional, social and cultural policy over the course of decades, this government has produced a similar strategy (guided by one of Keating's key advisers, Ken Henry) as a broad heading under which pretty much anything on its policy agenda can be shoehorned.

That's not to deny the merit of the policy objectives in and of themselves. Henry has used the white paper process to continue to press the same sorts of issues that he long pushed as Treasury secretary - productivity and participation, tax reform. But there's little of the organic politics of conviction that Keating brought to his Asia-focused agenda. History is repeating itself - the first time as passion and belief, the second as rote delivery and press releases about sports.

The other virtue of Keating's agenda - until the very "big picture" essence of his approach to politics began to grate with voters, who preferred the domestic simplicity of John Howard - was the implied contrast with the visionless, backward-looking Coalition, particularly the Howard model, given Howard's criticism of Asian immigration in the 1980s and his monarchism. "Asian leaders won't deal with him," Keating predicted of Howard before the 1996 election, a prediction that turned out to be more than a little askew, although deputy sheriff Howard never quite managed the feat of getting a birthday cake presented by the Singaporean PM as Keating did.

Undoubtedly Labor is working on the same approach this time around, and probably feels in Tony Abbott it can have more luck. Abbott looks even more of a foreign policy neophyte than Gillard, and his bizarre discussion of what passes for foreign policy in Battlelines will doubtless be read with hilarity and puzzlement across the region. Especially in Beijing, given Abbott not-so-subtly suggests China will give way in the longer-term to India because, well, they speak English in India. And then there's the ongoing problem of the National Party's deep xenophobia about foreign investment, which Abbott believes is either politically opportune or is simply too weak to combat in the way Joe Hockey is prepared to.

The other Abbott weak point on this issue is that he has failed to use his extended period of polling strength to articulate a positive agenda, while the government has busied itself putting out the NDIS, Gonski and continuing to roll out the NBN. At the moment Labor, unusually, looks like the party with some vision of where it wants to go. The only thing voters know about the Coalition is where they don’t want to go.

However artificial, the Asian Century white paper won't do anything to harm that.

and from Dean Ashenden ….

The federal government's Asian Century white paper wants more school students, a lot more, learning Asian languages, particularly the "priority languages" of Mandarin, Hindi, Indonesian and Japanese, but also Korean, Vietnamese and Thai. Well, good luck with that.

There is a long a dismal history of people who love languages -- and languages are a wonderful thing to love -- getting politicians and policy wonks to say that schools and kids should to do something that they aren't good at, and don't want to do.

The landmark dud was the Hawke government's National Policy on Languages launched in 1987 to great fanfare by the prime minister himself. The upshot? In 2008, the big four Asian languages managed to get enrolments from just 6% of year 12 students. When you remember that most year 12 students enrol in four or five subjects, that’s probably not much more than 1% of total year 12 subject enrolments. And those numbers are in decline.

The point that the kids get and the policymakers don't is that it's too hard. Most of that tiny proportion of year 12 enrolments comes from students who already speak the language. They don't need the language study, of course, and they're not adding to our stock of language speakers. They're simply cashing their chips. Numbers enrolled in year 12 Mandarin, for example, nearly doubled between 2000 and 2008 -- almost all of the increase coming from native speakers.

What monolingual Australian kid is going to pit themselves against that competition? Indonesian is not so daunting because the vocab and structure are similar to English, and it uses the Roman alphabet and script. But Mandarin? Or, even harder, Korean?

The kids also know there's no real need. If they go to Asian holidays, as so many do, there's always someone around who speaks enough English to get by. That's true of most business travellers too. English is the world's lingua franca, and we've got it for free. Asian people learn English because they have to. We don't learn their language because for the most part we don't have to.

To the extent that we do need Asian-language speakers for business or other purposes, why on earth get schools to produce them? We've already got them.

There can be few if any societies in the world as rich in languages as Australia. Need Mandarin speakers? We've already got more than 330,000 of them. As for the other languages urged on schools by the white paper, we have 111,000 Hindi speakers, 56,000 Indonesian, 44,000 Japanese, 80,000 Korean, 233,000 Vietnamese and 37,000 Thai. And that is without counting hundreds of thousands of Asian international students, many of whom would jump at the chance of employment in Australia if and as needed.

A total 37 languages -- 17 of them Asian -- are spoken as a first language by more than 20,000 people in Australia. Compare that with year 12 enrolments in 2008: 5256 in Mandarin, 4910 in Japanese and just 1311 in Indonesian, most, as noted above, native speakers already.

Schools are very inefficient and expensive places to teach languages, even if you can get the kids to tackle it. Teachers are expensive to train and hard to keep. It is rare for one school to have enough students enrolled in a language to need a full-time teacher, so teachers get shared across schools, which is complicated, and leaves everyone vulnerable to the teacher's resignation, promotion or transfer.

Languages learned in schools don't really stick unless they include periods of in-country language immersion and/or are used as the medium of instruction across the curriculum, the former feasible for those who can afford it, the latter impossible. To the extent that problems are reduced by internet-delivered instruction, as they increasingly will be, the best bet will be to make it available to tertiary students and others for learning on an as-needed basis.

Whoever it is that foisted on Asian century a "policy" that can't, needn't and shouldn't be implemented might do some sums about the cost of what is proposed, and then suggest that governments spend the money instead on sponsoring programs for kids to stay in Asian countries in the vacations following years 10 and 11, and 12. They wouldn't learn much language but they would learn about a culture very different from their own, and they'd jump at it.

*Dean Ashenden has been a consultant to many state & national education agencies and minister.

and finally, a word or three from Richard Farmer …..

'Round we go again.

Australia's "awakened Asia-mindedness" was what the Japanese Prime Minister Kishi called it back in 1957. The Australia-Japan Agreement on Commerce signed on July 6 that year was talked of as a growing realisation that our future prosperity was tied inextricably to the future of the Asia Pacific region.

And 55 years later we still have a government talking as if there is something bold, significant and new about developing relations with the countries to our north.