23 October, 2025

Leading voices on Asia Capability, including Ross Garnaut AC and Peter Varghese AO, came together to declare that Asia Capability is facing an immediate crisis in Australia.

On 23 October, in partnership with Asialink, I convened a roundtable on the renewed case for Asia Capability in Australia.

Asia Capability underpins the effectiveness of all spheres of our national endeavour, including our statecraft, our industry and civil society.

They argued that Australia must act to save the institutions delivering our Asia Capabilities under immediate threat, while also committing to a long-term strategy to address the challenges of both supply and demand currently impeding the development of our Asia capability.

‘Choose Asia’ Declaration

We, the attendees of the National Roundtable on Asia Capability, declare that:

The case for Asia Capability has never been stronger or more urgent.

Australia’s security and prosperity rely on our ability to make our own way in our region that is more dynamic, complex and consequential than ever before. Asia Capability underpins the effectiveness of all spheres of our national endeavour, including our statecraft, our industry and civil society.

While Asia Capability is a long-term strategic imperative, it has been in decline since the beginning of the 21st Century and faces an immediate crisis.

Deep and multidisciplinary knowledge of the languages, histories, cultures, economic, political and strategic drivers of our region, as well as sustained engagement with the region, is critical.  

Australia must:

• recommit to a whole of nation effort to build Australia’s Asia Capabilities.

• equip our leaders and institutions with the capabilities they need to navigate our path in a region rich in both opportunities and challenges.

• act to save the institutions delivering our Asia Capabilities under immediate threat, while also committing to a long-term strategy to address the challenges of both supply and demand currently impeding the development of our Asia capability.

• utilise Australia’s flourishing diaspora communities and adopt new technologies to build Asia Capability without expecting them to replace structured learning about our region.

Building Australia’s Asia Capability begins with a choice to make this a national priority.

Signed,

• The Hon Tim Watts MP, Special Envoy for Indian Ocean Affairs

• Wesa Chau - Executive Director, Per Capita 

• Melissa Crouch - Professor, University of New South Wales, and Past President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia

• Ross Garnaut AC - Professor Emeritus, the University of Melbourne

• Philipp Ivanov - CEO of GRASP, Former CEO of Asia Society Australia          

• Martine Letts - CEO, Asialink

• Edgar Myer - Asialink Advisory Council

• Sid Myer AM - Former Chairman, Asialink 

• Liam Prince - Director, ACICIS 

• Lydia Santoso – National Vice President, Australia Indonesia Business Council

• Warwick Smith AO - Chairman, Advisory Board – Australian Capital Equity

• Peter Varghese AO - Chancellor, University of Queensland; Chair, Asialink

• Michael Wesley - Deputy Vice Chancellor Global, Culture and Engagement, University of Melbourne

• Penny Williams PSM - Former Australian Ambassador to Indonesia 

• Hayley Winchcombe - Engagement Manager, Mandala

Participants have signed in their personal capacity.

Speech by Tim Watts MP, check against delivery

23 October 2025

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet – the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation - and pay my respects to elders past and present.

It’s particularly appropriate to acknowledge our indigenous elders at a gathering like this.

Long before a word of English was spoken on Australian soil, members of the Yolngu language group in Arnhem land were conversing with Malay/Indonesian speaking traders and fisherman from Makassar who had come to Australia in search of trepang - sea cucumber.

This first exercise in Asian-Australian engagement resulted in the Yolngu language adopting a series of Malay loan words that are still in use today… including the word that the Yolngu people would use to describe British colonists when they were to arrive many years later.  

So Australia’s Asia Capability journey has a long history indeed.

Everyone in the room here today has made a significant contribution to Australia’s Asia Capability along this journey.

Thank you for your contributions to this important cause and thank you for coming today to help kick start the agenda.

Throughout Australia’s long Asia Capability journey, we’ve heard a common refrain: Since Australia’s future security and prosperity would one day be determined in Asia, as a nation, we should set about building the skills and expertise in our leaders and institutions necessary to be effective there.

In 2025, that future is now.

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard launched the “Australia in the Asian Century” White Paper - thirteen years ago to this week – 2025 was the future that then government was planning for.

To this end, the White Paper set “25 objectives for the nation for 2025: A Roadmap to navigate the Asian Century”.

There was nearly unalloyed optimism about this agenda at the time.

As Prime Minister Gillard declared at the White Paper’s launch:

“We will embrace change. Not because we face immediate crisis. Not because we are standing on a burning platform. But because we face unprecedented opportunity.”

To realise this opportunity Prime Minister Gillard declared that “As a nation we .. need to broaden and deepen our understanding of Asian cultures and languages, to become more Asia literate” and she called on all Australians to “play our part in becoming a more.. Asia-capable nation.”

To this end, ‘Building Capabilities’ was identified one of the five priority areas of the White Paper and a series of objectives were choosing addressing issues like languages, Asian studies in the school curriculum, schools partnerships and Board Member and APS Leadership Asia capabilities.

On languages, the White Paper set the 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 throughout their years of schooling. All students will have access to at least one priority Asian language.”

Fast forward to 20205 and the number of Australian high school students studying a priority Asian language has fallen by nearly 30% since the release of the Asian Century White Paper.

In spite of all Australian students being encouraged to do so, according to the latest statistics, just 3.3 per cent of Year 12 students studied a priority Asian language in 2023, down from 4.7 per cent at the time of the release of the report.

It’s a similar story across most of the other Asia Capability objectives.

Marking the report card in 2025, it’s clear that the Asia Capability objectives of the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper have been a comprehensive failure.  

A cynic might say that a White Paper that saw three Prime Ministers in the 12 months after it was released stood little chance of having a long term impact.

Many would be tempted to just dismiss this as more of the same.

We’ve always underperformed on Asian languages. What’s new? Why should we care at this point?

The difference is that today, after decades of decline across multiple governments, we are now approaching a crisis point.

Take Bahasa Indonesia studies.

It’s not just that there are fewer students studying Bahasa Indonesia in Australian high schools today than at the time of the Asian Century White Paper…

…it’s that there are less than half as many studying today (542) than there were when the Garnaut Report started our Asia Capability journey in 1989 (1182).

This is despite the fact that the number of Australian high school students today is around 40 per cent bigger than in 1989. 

In Victoria, the best performing state for Bahasa Indonesia studies at high school level, there has been a 65 per cent decrease in the number of secondary schools offering Year 12 Indonesian between 2005 (116 schools) and 2024 (44 schools).

If anything, things are even worse at the university level.

Between 2004 and 2022, there has been a 75 per cent decline in enrolments in Southeast Asian languages at Australian universities.

Of the more than 1 million Australian domestic students at Australian universities in 2023 barely 500 students were enrolled in Bahasa Indonesia nationwide.

There aren’t just fewer Australian students studying Bahasa Indonesia today than at the time of the Asian Century White Paper…

there are fewer Australians studying Bahasa Indonesia today than in 1965, when John Gorton was the responsible Minister and Robert Menzies was Prime Minister.

This kind of declines cannot continue forever.

Some experts have warned that without action now, we’ll see the end of Bahasa Indonesia teaching in Australia by 2031 – within in the next term of government.

Our burning platform has arrived.

The problem isn’t limited to language studies or to Indonesia.

The mainstreaming of much of what was once referred to as area studies has narrowed the career paths for Asian studies academics at Australian universities.

The Baby Boomer generation of world class Australian Asian studies academics is approaching retirement age, but the career paths for those following them has been much narrower and more disjointed.

Unsurprisingly, their ranks are much thinner and there is little strategic planning of how to sustain this vital national resource across the generations.  

Once lost, rebuilding these institutions from scratch would be a vastly harder challenge for our nation.

Incongruously, this approaching crisis is occurring at a time when the case for building Australia’s Asia Capability has never been stronger.

More than ever before, Australia’s security and prosperity now depends on how effectively we can make our own way in Asia.

Our region is more dynamic, complex and consequential than ever before.

China is seeking to change the regional 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 changing times.

Fundamental assumptions of Australian defence and foreign policy are being challenged by these dynamics.

In response, the Albanese government has lifted our diplomatic, defence, development and economic engagement with our region to unprecedented levels, using all of the tools of statecraft to maximise our influence in the region.

But our current external environment is asking more of our leaders and our institutions than ever before.

The Asia Capability of our leaders and institutions is a vital sovereign capability that underpins the effectiveness of every dimension of our statecraft.

As a nation we feel a sense of urgency in our government’s diplomatic and defence engagement in the region, but this urgency is absent from discussions about building the Asia Capability of leaders and institutions back home in Australia.

New initiatives to build the sovereign capabilities of Australia’s defence forces and our defence industry rightly attract significant public attention.

Initiatives to build our economic sovereignty are subject to significant public debate.

But the long-term decline of the Asia capabilities that are vital to the success of these arms of statecraft has attracted relatively little attention.

We need to change this and start a genuine, whole of nation conversation about how we can build a 21st Century Australian Asia Capability to match the moment our nation faces.

There are some green shoots in this regard.

As Philipp Ivanov has identified there are new dimensions to our Asia Capability today that were inconceivable just a generation ago.

Our Asian-Australian diaspora communities are an extraordinary source of latent Asia Capability.

It’s no small thing that our Foreign Minister was born in Southeast Asia and speaks Bahasa Melayu.

Similarly, the fact that there are now 16 members of the Commonwealth Parliament with Asian heritage was unimaginable at the time of the Asian Century White Paper – which was prepared with the support of an advisory panel that did not include a single Asian-Australian.

But while we’ve made strong progress in increasing the role of Asian-Australians in positions of leadership in our engagement with the region, there’s much more work to be done on this front.  

Asian-Australian families know better than anyone how hard it is to encourage the next generation to speak the language of their parents.

Further, while diaspora communities foster important cultural insights, the Asia Capability of Asian-Australians would be further enhanced by access to structured, formal study of the region.

Similarly, there have been some success stories in policy making.

Government initiatives to promote people to people connections between Australia and the region have grown steadily for decades and programs like the New Colombo Plan and a multitude of youth dialogues and exchanges have connected thousands of young Australians with the people of the region.

It's all good stuff, but it’s hard not to conclude that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

Many of the investments we are currently making in the Asia Capability end up being wasted as individuals confront roadblocks on their development pathways.

A lack of coordination has left primary school students studying languages they can’t continue at high school, university students studying languages they are never able to use professionally.

The need for a whole of nation Asia Capability agenda has been in the too hard basket for too long.

That’s why I drove the establishment of the current Parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s Asia Capability and why we’ve brought all of you together today.

Viewed from 2025, there’s one thing that the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper definitely got right.

The introduction to the White Paper declared that “Australia’s success will be based on choice, not chance.”

This is as true today as it was 13 years ago.

In 2025, we need to say again that Australia’s prosperity and security in our region is too important to be left to chance.

We need to choose to succeed and choose to take control of our own destiny in our region.

Thank you for choosing to be here today to contribute to this national conversation.