Why Are Southeast Asian Languages Disappearing From Australian Universities?

If asked to choose which Asian nation is the most important to Australia’s future security and prosperity, one could mount a serious case for Indonesia. The nation’s proximity, obvious strategic significance, and growing demographic and economic weight – to say nothing of the current souring of ties with Australia’s leading trade partner, China – all suggest that Indonesia should occupy a prominent place in Canberra’s foreign policy.

The same thing has been said for years by a number of Australian politicians, who have harped on the importance of forging business, political, and cultural ties with Indonesia, a nation of 270 million. Over the past decade, the two governments have signed a number of bilateral deals on trade, investment, and security, the latest of which was 2020’s Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement.

But despite all of this rhetorical lip service, the building block of engagement with Indonesia – Indonesian language education – remains in a desperate state. In November, Victoria’s La Trobe University announced plans to close the Indonesian program it has run since 1989, in addition to its program for Hindi, a language spoken by 550 million people that is now only taught at one Australian university. Early in December, Murdoch University in Western Australia announced that it would do the same, after having taught the Indonesian language since the 1970s.

Under COVID-19-induced pressures, university administrators are identifying low-enrollment courses to axe, and Southeast Asian languages seem to be among the first candidates for the chopping block.

Other universities seem set to follow. Flinders University in Adelaide has “paused” teaching first-year Indonesian this year due to COVID-19, while the language is reportedly hanging in the balance at other Australian universities. 

As Edward Aspinall, the president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA), and a specialist on Indonesia, wrote recently, “It’s possible that in a year or so only a handful of Australian universities will teach the language, taking us back to the early 1970s, when Australia was just emerging from the White Australia policy.”

It hasn’t always been this way. In the 1980s and 1990s, Aspinall notes, the Hawke and Keating governments, seeking to reinforce Australia’s ties with Asia, introduced a major program to teach Asian languages in schools, among them Indonesian. This soon fed through to rising university enrollments in the language. 

But according to a recent report by Professor David Hill of Murdoch University, the director and founder of the Australian Consortium of In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS), the number of Australian universities teaching Indonesian has dropped from 22 in 1994 to just 14 in 2019. At the same time, student numbers are less than half what they were 1992, despite total student enrollments in Australian higher education having more than tripled from approximately 440,000 in 1989 to 1.56 million in 2018. 

While Hill found that the decline in Indonesian language enrollments had begun to slow in 2010, COVID-19 now seems set to terminate any gains that were made.

Indonesian was already in trouble before the coronavirus, the victim of a broader shift toward a market-oriented model of higher education that has brought increasing pressure to bear on the humanities, including languages. As successive federal governments have slashed public funding for higher education, universities have come to rely more heavily on student fees, incentivizing a faddish push into high-earning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects. Recently, Swinburne University in Victoria announced it plans to close all of its language programs, including Chinese and Japanese, in exchange for STEM subjects.

As Kanishka Jayasuriya of Murdoch University wrote recently, this new neoliberal shift in higher education represents “a deliberate ideological and political strategy to reshape the sector.”

The cuts to Indonesian language programs conflict with years of rhetorical commitments to boost Australia’s engagement with Indonesia, and Asian countries more generally. In 2012, the Gillard government released the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper, which outlined the need to improve Australia's Asian language literacy in order to maintain long-term political and economic relationships in the region. The Gillard government’s white paper suggested prioritizing the study of Indonesian, alongside Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi.

The current Morrison government frequently refers to its commitment to the region, and has recently made significant aid commitments to Southeast Asia, after years of declining attention. But as Aspinall writes, while successive governments have rightly claimed that Australia’s relationship with Indonesia — and Asia more broadly — is central to its future security and prosperity, “there hasn’t been significant national investment in teaching Asian languages at Australian schools for more than two decades.” As a result, “the stream of language students being supplied to universities through the school system is drying up.” 

In a statement in late November, the ASAA urged the government to step in once again, in recognition that falling enrollments are not a simple matter of declining student “demand” in the market, but a byproduct of government neglect.

“The current moment of crisis should not be a time for Australia, or for Australian universities, to divest from Asia knowledge,” the ASAA stated. “On the contrary, it is a time for a clear-sighted recognition of the ever closer ties that bind us to our region, and for renewed commitment for the long term.”

That the year 2020 has been an annus horribilis in all kinds of ways should not blind us to the long-term impact of the loss of these Indonesian language programs. “The more students studying Indonesian language, the greater chance we have of building strong relationships with our most important neighbor,” Melissa Crouch, an associate professor of UNSW Law and incoming vice president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, wrote recently in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Our economic, diplomatic and cultural ties remain hollow without a basic appreciation for the language.”

Shortly before press time, Murdoch University announced that it would retain its courses in Bahasa Indonesia for 2021. But despite that welcome news, much work remains to ensure that the language has a future at Australia’s universities – and in the future of Australia’s relations with Indonesia.