Page 139 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 13 February 2008
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That is done largely through the connection with the Ethnic Schools Association, and I need to congratulate Mrs Emiliana Afeaki, who is the current president of the Ethnic Schools Association, and her predecessor, Joseph Yoon, from the Korean Association. They received an enormous amount of assistance from the person about whom we dare not speak his name, Dr Foskey—Nic Manikis, the Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs. There is nobody, I believe, in a multicultural society that does not have the deepest respect for Nic Manikis, and he has assisted in this process significantly.
The other thing we need to acknowledge in terms of languages and diverse cultures is something which is new in our society in Canberra at the moment—that is, the role of the embassies. When I have been speaking with the ambassadors, I have been speaking about the need to be contemporary in the teaching of languages. It is a pointless exercise to have either the ethnic schools languages or the clubs or associations, such as Alliance Francaise, the Goethe-Institut, the Dante Alighieri Society, to teach languages to people who then visit the country of the language’s origin and cannot understand the people over there because the language has evolved. Where the role of the embassies comes in very significantly is that they are able to expose Canberran society to contemporary literature, contemporary film and contemporary music, and therefore our language is contemporary. This is where the connection comes between the schools in the Ethnic Schools Association and the embassies. We need to thank Ms Porter for putting this on the national stage. I have been speaking about this in ministerial council meetings on multicultural affairs and will continue to do so.
Just as a bit of a heads up, Mr Deputy Speaker—I am glad Dr Foskey has come back, because I wanted her to be here when I was able to announce that we are moving forward—there has been a conversation between my office and Minster Barr’s office around the provision of language education with respect to the Ethnic Schools Association’s groupings and teaching in our schools, whether it be the private school system, the public school system or whatever. We are developing processes where we can have the smaller languages looked after and the bigger languages looked after also. We know that if you want to equip somebody to exist in the corporate world today, they need to have a significant European language and they need to have Chinese. China is Australia’s biggest trading partner. If we are going to have accountants running around this country, they need to be skilled in Chinese. But we also need to make sure that we preserve the Columbian language and those sorts of languages and institutions like the Hebrew school.
We will be having a multicultural summit a little later on, towards the middle of this year, and part of that summit, which will be run by the multicultural community, will be addressing languages. Minister Barr has agreed, by invitation, to give a keynote address as one of the elements of that summit. That was put together through conversations with Minister Barr’s office, my office and Stefan Romaniw, the national president of Community Languages Australia. I am sure Dr Foskey will be most interested to see when we start doing the planning for that, because I know that, with her interest in this, she would be looking forward to participating perhaps in the summit.
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