Political leadership required to overcome Australia’s Asia capability deficit

Australia is a very different place to what it was when Bob Hawke and Paul Keating championed the engagement of Asia. It is far more multicultural – and our diversity is quite rightly a “source of national pride”, as the Foreign Minister Penny Wong observes. Today almost a third of Australians were born overseas and more than a fifth speak a language other than English at home. And that often means an Asian language, whether from China, India, Nepal, the Philippines or Vietnam.

Interest in Asia is growing too. It is widely recognised that Korean pop music has an avid Australian fanbase but less well known that Punjabi singers sell out stadiums in Sydney. Hundreds of thousands regularly visit exhibitions of regional art, including the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art’s pathbreaking Asia-Pacific Triennial. And every year, Australians go to Asia – and not just Bali – in ever-greater numbers. In 2024, a million of us went to Japan, causing local concern about “over-tourism”. Only one European country – the UK – now figures among the top ten destinations for Australian travellers. Six are in Asia.

In other words, ordinary Australians are more engaged with Asia and more knowledgeable than they have ever been. The challenge is no longer how to convince Australians to take Asia seriously. It is how best to harness, channel, and develop the interest that already exists. 

This will be hard, however. The problem is not just that Australia has failed over the past forty years to develop the necessary intellectual infrastructure for real Asia capability. Successive governments, schools and universities have also dismantled much of what existed before Hawke and Keating found Asia. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Australian institutions hosted some of the greatest scholars of Asia – mostly men, but all distinguished – including A. L. Basham, Herb Feith, John Legge, Anthony Low, James Masselos, and Pierre Ryckmans (better known as Simon Leys). A dozen universities offered courses on South Asia alone – at a time when Australia had few economic or diplomatic interests in that part of the world.

Four decades of underfunding and undervaluing the humanities and social sciences (HASS) have left university-level Asian studies a pale shadow of what it was. What remains is continually battered by strident criticism from politicians and opinion writers, pressured by revenue-hungry administrators, deprived of grants, and often used to cross-subsidise teaching and research in STEM. In parallel, school language programs that once provided a pipeline of students keen to pursue Asian studies at university level have disappeared for lack of money.

So, what can and should be done to translate our interest into capability? First, I think we need to be realistic. Transformative language and regional studies programs, like the US National Security Education Program cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And even if such funds were available, there is no obvious political or public support for such investment in university or even school-level Asian studies.

Second, we must remove unnecessary barriers to learning. Providing sustainable funding for school language programs, even at a moderate level, would be a good start. Eliminating student contributions for university-level foreign language courses would add little to the cost and send positive signals to prospective entrants. Encouraging universities to modify degree rules to allow more students to enrol in these courses as electives would help. So would amending the Jobs Ready Graduate package that aims to drive students into STEM by placing most HASS courses – including in Asian studies – in the highest fee band. 

Third, we should ensure that opportunities for students to travel and learn in-country are accessible. Of course, long term programs are the ideal. But families cannot always pay for them, and students often struggle to rearrange work commitments and living arrangements to free up time. If we insist that in-country programs last a month or more, as the New Columbo Plan now does, we risk making the best the enemy of the good for disadvantaged students.

Fourth, we need a comprehensive Asia capability skills audit within the Commonwealth and State governments, leading to a realistic strategic plan to better train the public sector workforce and encourage members of multicultural communities to bring their knowledge into the system, as public servants or stakeholders in the development of public policy.

Finally, we must see government lead the conversation with business and the broader community on Asia capability. This important task cannot be left to universities or think tanks. Their persuasive power is too limited. Rightly or wrongly, universities today lack the necessary social licence, and together with think tanks are susceptible to charges of rent-seeking. If politicians do not pick up the slack and make the case for a whole-of-nation effort that deserves greater private sector investment and broader public support, we run the risk of another forty years of failure. 

Ian Hall is a Professor of International Relations at Griffith University. He is also an Academic Fellow of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne.

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