How I wish there were more like this

Mike Carlton
Saturday May 12, 2007

Up in Central Java last week, shooting a documentary for SBS television, I ran into a group of Australian students. They are doing a year at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Jogjakarta, one of Indonesia's top universities.

What a terrific bunch of kids they were, six of them in their teens or early 20s, bright-eyed and keen, a credit to themselves and our country. We ate in the canteen at the social sciences faculty and nattered away in Bahasa Indonesia, which they spoke rather better than I do. They told me they were having a fabulous time, making friends, immersing themselves in everyday Javanese life. Their year in Jogja will count to their communications or political science degrees here at home.

The pity is that there are so few Australian kids doing this. A handful, that's all. In 2002 the Howard Government ended federal funding for Asian studies in our schools, a stupidly shortsighted decision if there ever was one.

Kevin Rudd, I am delighted to see, plans to reverse that. In his reply to the federal budget this week, he promised a Labour government would stump up $70 million for a program "to help foster a generation of Asia-literate Australians increasingly comfortable with the languages and cultures of the region".

Rudd sees this, rightly, as a sound investment for our economic and cultural future.

This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday 12 May 2007.