The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education has launched a new inquiry into building Asia capability in Australia through the education system and beyond.
The announcement came on 22 September 2025, following a referral from the Minister for Education, Jason Clare MP.
Tim Watts MP, Chair of the Committee and Special Envoy for Indian Ocean Affairs, said in a post that Australians have long known that the nation’s future security and prosperity will be shaped by the Indo-Pacific region.
“Forty years of government reports have warned that if Australia wants to shape our own future, we need to build greater knowledge of the languages, cultures and history of our neighbours.”
Watts observed in an oped that despite this, Australia’s Asia capability has been in decline for decades, particularly in language learning.
Since the 2010 Australia in the Asian Century white paper, which aimed for all Australian students to study an Asian language continuously throughout school, enrolments in Chinese, Japanese, and Indonesian have fallen by 25 per cent to just 3.3 per cent. The number of year 12 students studying these languages is now lower than in 1989, when the Hawke government’s Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy report first mapped the country’s Asia capability strategy.
Watts further added that university enrolments have also plummeted. Between 2004 and 2022, Southeast Asian language enrolments fell by 75 per cent, and in 2023, only around 500 of more than one million domestic students studied Bahasa Indonesia nationwide.
Watts warned, “Unless we make developing Asia capability a national priority, we are leaving our future security and prosperity to be determined by others.”
- “As a nation, we must choose Asia and develop this sovereign capability, or risk watching regional changes from the sidelines.”
The Committee is now seeking written submissions addressing the inquiry by Friday, 7 November 2025. Submissions should ideally be no longer than 10 pages. Contributions are reviewed by the Committee Secretariat and may be authorised for publication.
Watt said that the inquiry builds on decades of reports, including the Garnaut Report, which stressed that educating a new generation of Australians with familiarity with East Asia is “the most important task” for regional engagement—a goal first championed by former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who called it the most significant reorientation of Australian attitudes since World War II.
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