Published in the Lowy Interpreter | September 22 2025 

Complacent nation: Australia and the Asian Century

Decades of ambition have left us with a nation still unable to speak the language of our neighbours.

Tim Watts

Australians have long known that our future security and prosperity will be determined in our region – the Indo-Pacific. Forty years of reports to government have warned that if Australia wants to shape our own future, we need to build a greater knowledge of the languages, cultures and histories of our neighbours. Despite this, when it comes to languages in particular, Australia’s Asia capability has been in decline for decades and we’re now rapidly reaching a crisis point. While our region becomes more dynamic, complex and consequential than ever before, decades of complacency have left too many Australians watching regional changes from the sidelines. Unless we choose to make developing Asia capability a priority as a nation, we’re choosing to leave our future security and prosperity to be determined by others.

The next decade will be a time of change for our region. The Indo-Pacific is home to the fastest-growing, most dynamic economies in the world. At the same time, China is seeking to change the balance of power and the Trump administration is pursuing a different role for America in the world. Our neighbours in Southeast Asia are seeking to navigate their own way in these shifting times. Fundamental assumptions of Australian strategic and foreign policy are being challenged.

This decade of change will ask more of our leaders and our institutions. Building greater alignment with regional partners on complex strategic trends will ask more of our diplomats. Negotiating unprecedented security agreements with regional partners will ask more of our defence leaders. Identifying and exploiting the trade and investment opportunities presented by emerging Asian middle classes will ask more of our business executives and board directors. In this context, the range of skills and experiences that our leaders and institutions need to be effective in Asia are a vital sovereign capability for our nation. It’s the foundation of everything we want to do in the region.

Despite this, our Asia capability is going backwards in our schools, universities and workplaces. In 2010, the Australia in the Asian Century white paper set a national objective that by 2025, “all Australian students will have the opportunity, and be encouraged, to undertake a continuous course of study in an Asian language through their years of school”. Since then however, the proportion of Australian high school students enrolled in Chinese, Japanese or Indonesian has fallen 25 per cent to just 3.3 per cent. Extraordinarily, the number of Australian year 12 students studying these languages is lower than it was even in 1989, when the Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy report, commissioned by the Hawke government, began Australia’s Asia capability journey.

These declines have flowed through to our universities. Between 2004 and 2022, there was a 75 per cent decline in enrolments in Southeast Asian languages at Australian universities. Of the more than one million domestic Australian students at Australian universities in 2023, barely 500 students were enrolled in Bahasa Indonesia nationwide. Experts have warned that on the current trajectory, no Australian schools will be left teaching Bahasa Indonesia by 2031.

It’s a confronting reality. In the United States, the most commonly taught language is Spanish, the language of its neighbours. In the United Kingdom, it’s French, again the language of its neighbour. What would it say about our country if our schools and universities no longer taught the language of our biggest neighbour? What would it do to our influence in our region?

There are no shortcuts here. While we’ve made welcome progress in harnessing the expertise of our Asian Australian diaspora communities, the challenge of our new international environment cannot be met by these Australians alone. There’s no technology silver bullet either. We won’t be able to ask AI to build personal relationships, discuss sensitive topics and influence regional partners for us. We need the sovereign capability to do these things for ourselves, across government, business and civil society.

It’s also important to understand that we live in a different world to the 1990s. Our schools and universities operate in a very different context than those of the Hawke–Keating era that saw Australia’s first big Asia capability initiatives. The solutions of the past won’t solve the problems of the present. We need a new approach for our new institutional realities. One lesson that we can take from the past is that building Australia’ Asia capability begins with a choice.

Three-and-a-half decades ago, the Garnaut Report declared that “(t)he most important task” for Australia’s engagement with the region “is to educate a new generation of Australians to confident familiarity with their (East) Asian environment”. When launching the report, Bob Hawke declared his ambition that in its implementation, Australia should aim to “enmesh” itself with Asia and welcomed commentary that if it was successful, it would “represent the most substantial reorientation of Australian attitudes since Curtin turned to the United States in 1941”.

Despite the best intentions of a series of subsequent governments, Australian attitudes have not turned towards Asia in the way Hawke hoped. During the same period, Australia’s international environment has reoriented itself. The future foretold is now. It’s now undeniable that Australia’s prosperity and security rely on our Asia capability. There’s no better time than the present to choose to start work on making Hawke’s ambition a reality.